Apple exists within the same free market as it’ customers and competitors.
The high customer satisfaction is the lock-in. High customer satisfaction can easily explain the success. The idea that lock-in breeds high customer satisfaction needs to be proven to me.
Considering Microsoft’s dominance was cheered on by the Microsoft ecosystem and derided in customer satisfaction is noteworthy to me.
Apple has high customer satisfaction and a vocal group that consider the happy customers lemmings. These vocalists believe if Apple got out of the way they could show the happy customers what good really is.
The app ecosystem is the lock-in, and creates a very high bar to entry for other players outside the Apple-Google duopoly.
Note that Google has created a dependency on proprietary Google Play Services, and owns the Play Store, so even leveraging AOSP is not sufficient to overcome the barrier to entry.
There are two established players. Apple can charge whatever they want, and Google can copy their strategy, because they know users have nowhere else to go (the number of people who will permanently switch to independent degoogled phones is too small to affect the duopolists' business)
The phones do lots of things, and a lot of them well, so overall satisfaction doesn't mean that App Store pricing is satisfactory, nor fair.
Apple forbids developers from itemizing pricing and telling users how much Apple takes, interfering with informed consumer choice.
The cut is well known on HN, but I'm not sure that most users are fully aware that they're overpaying 10x on transaction fees, and the major consequences that it's a cut of revenue and not profit — the developer takes all the risk, and needs to cover all the development costs from their part, and can be even in the red, while Apple has a guaranteed profit with a guaranteed margin from every sale. Apple can be easily making more profit than the developers themselves.
We all know what Apple's take is. People complain about it all the time.
The perforative terms you use to describe customers you can't seem to attain are related.
If you describe your desired customer as a cult than you may hold them in too much disdain to achieve a quality product.
Demonizing Apple does not improve product quality in anyway.
If you're right, what's stopping Apple from providing the same service while also granting fair access to third-parties?
If Apple's main product differentiation is customer satisfaction, then in-theory they won't suffer as much from exposure to competition. As we've seen with the App Store on MacOS and AppleTV though, Apple cannot rely on just their premium profile to push a service. If they don't force people through the App Store a-la iOS, they can't get developers to reliably use it.
The high customer satisfaction is the lock-in. High customer satisfaction can easily explain the success. The idea that lock-in breeds high customer satisfaction needs to be proven to me.
Considering Microsoft’s dominance was cheered on by the Microsoft ecosystem and derided in customer satisfaction is noteworthy to me.
Apple has high customer satisfaction and a vocal group that consider the happy customers lemmings. These vocalists believe if Apple got out of the way they could show the happy customers what good really is.