I was (if not sympathetic, at least) understanding until this.
At what point do all these restrictions start becoming truly anti-competitive? Locking out 3rd party tools and services in favor of in-house products, and this one now including the actual revenue-generating ones.
If you start to view the App Store as a collection of markets (e.g. for development tools, application niches, ancillary services like ads, analytics, web services, etc), rather than just a vendor-specific platform, where Apple's own products compete with other vendors', the analogies to Microsoft are becoming clearer:
- iPhone OS/App Store => Windows
Markets analogous to Internet Explorer vs. Opera/Firefox:
- iAd vs AdMob
- iBooks vs Kindle (an example where they're actually allowing competition!)
- Phone.app vs Google Voice
- MobileSafari vs Opera/FF
- ObjC runtime vs Flash runtime (this one stretches it a bit, but not that far)
Whereas MS's anti-competitive actions involved threatening OEMs, Apple is exercising actual contractual control over what Apps/services can participate in the market, Period. That should certainly qualify as anti-competitive behavior.
At what point do all these restrictions start becoming truly anti-competitive? Locking out 3rd party tools and services in favor of in-house products, and this one now including the actual revenue-generating ones.
If you start to view the App Store as a collection of markets (e.g. for development tools, application niches, ancillary services like ads, analytics, web services, etc), rather than just a vendor-specific platform, where Apple's own products compete with other vendors', the analogies to Microsoft are becoming clearer:
- iPhone OS/App Store => Windows
Markets analogous to Internet Explorer vs. Opera/Firefox:
- iAd vs AdMob
- iBooks vs Kindle (an example where they're actually allowing competition!)
- Phone.app vs Google Voice
- MobileSafari vs Opera/FF
- ObjC runtime vs Flash runtime (this one stretches it a bit, but not that far)
Whereas MS's anti-competitive actions involved threatening OEMs, Apple is exercising actual contractual control over what Apps/services can participate in the market, Period. That should certainly qualify as anti-competitive behavior.