> I like that iOS takes a heavy handed approach to the App Store and controls it completely.
This is fine, even good as you say, but the problem is there are no other options.
Apple can arbitrarily kill an app you rely on as a user, and you have no recourse. It'll stay on your device but you won't get updates or be able to reinstall later.
Any friction and costs applied to devs will flow on to costs for the customer.
So that's the harm to users, which is hard to quantify.
> anti trust law is to protect me as a user not you as a developer.
Are you sure? Standard Oil set good prices for consumers. The issue was they drove other businesses out of business. Restraint of trade was a big part of it.
Ah interesting. I don't think I'd agree with that because if all competition is nuked and prices are nice today, it's still a lot harder to rebuild a healthy ecosystem if/when it gets abused down the line. Whether intentionally or through stagnation.
I'm not saying we should look at just one or the other, but both should be weighed and considered.
In Australia we actually have a bit of a problem with a supermarket duopoly, who have apparently coincidentally both decided to sell house brand milk very cheaply (IIRC $1/L). This has upset a lot of farmers and producers as it decides a large amount of their revenue. I'm not sure what our legal landscape dictates, but it certainly seems unfair and anti-competitive even though it is really good for me personally.
> Apple can arbitrarily kill an app you rely on as a user, and you have no recourse. It'll stay on your device but you won't get updates or be able to reinstall later.
This has happened to me with adblockios and several other apps earlier.
What if a competing app store was "Grandma's App Store" and it had extreme moderation plus a huge cash bond that developers had to put up before being allowed on the store so you could install it as the exclusive store on your grandparents' phones and never have to worry about malware or semi-legit data exfiltration like contacts mining?
Or how about a highly moderated local store for my city where you need to be a resident and provide proof of owning a local business before being allowed on the store? That could be highly moderated and provide a ton of local business discovery with almost no risk of bad actors because being kicked off that store would mean a loss of local patrons.
Why is it automatically assumed competing app stores are going to be trash and why does everyone think Apple / Google are doing such an amazing job right now? Neither seem to be the case IMO.
I think your viewpoint focuses a lot on "what's good for me right now today" rather than "what's good for the long term health of these platforms?" Demand aggregation platforms, especially in industries with only a handful of huge players, are going to be bad for both suppliers and consumers.
You can already see it on every huge platform. The platform (aka distributor / allocator) doesn't care at all about either side. They only care about their share of the market as a distributor. Suppliers become a commodity because losing a supplier is minor churn with no real impact. It doesn't matter which 1 million developers you're dealing with as long as you have 1 million developers, so you might as well optimize for the developers that will accept the smallest profits and the most abuse.
On the consumer side it's the same thing. It doesn't matter which 100 million users you have as long as you have 100 million users. Banning 1 million users isn't a big deal because the platform isn't going to suffer as long as new users are coming in. It might be 1 million users that a specific supplier (aka developer, creator, etc.) relied on for their livelihood, but who cares, right? There's another supplier in line to take their place anyway. And so what if 1000 of those users banned were false positives right? That's only .001% of your user base. Tough luck for them if they lose access to an account they might depend on.
It really worries me to see the number of people that can't see beyond their own convenience to recognize the only winners in the current system are the platform owners. They don't care about you, developers, creators, gig-workers, etc. beyond how many of each they have.
I don't think Epic is trying to force their store to be installed by default or to be able to bypass existing iOS sandbox/security mechanisms? So you can continue using the Apple App Store exclusively and reject apps that don't offer Apple Pay?
> Apples policies probably result in developer harm, but anti trust law is to protect me as a user not you as a developer.
Except that it does only as long as Apple decide to "protect the user", which is why antitrust laws are in place. Monopoly are illegal both for good and bad companies, their standard doesn't change that.
> I do not want developers to hav the option to have their own payments. Apple Pay is so easy and convenient.
> I do not want developers to be able to distribute apps without Apple approval.
I wouldn't be against that the App Store require theses, if there was an alternative for the App Store.
This kind of walled garden in the 80s led to apple losing ground to microsoft and a chant for developers, developers, developers.
Microsoft was forced to provide options for multibrowsers and limit it's paint application from competing with photo editing software.
All of your problems are solved with opt-in to secondary app sources. If you want the apple approved walled garden, don't install the alternative and retain all the benefits of percieved security.
What's wrong with letting people install a different app store, and apps? Was firefox worse than internet explorer?
The entire reason there is a walled garden at all is the pre-iPhone landscape.
Pre-iPhone, the phone software landscape that most consumers interacted with was absolutely awful. Carriers loaded phones with all sorts of pre-installed, uninstallable junk. Most third-party software was also not very good. iPhone uptake was so large in 2007 because Apple put its foot down on all the carrier cruft.
> What's wrong with letting people install a different app store, and apps?
You would end up with something similar to downloading games on Windows: Every big company will force you to use their own app store to download their software which has absolutely no benefit to the end user.
I want to install and use an application, not an app store.
This shows so much of a misunderstanding of history it’s hard to know where to start.
The Macintosh was in no way closed in the 80s. How could it be? There was no memory protection, and you could hack at the system and make it do all sorts of things via extensions.
There were plenty of third party compilers. In the early 90s, developers didn’t even use Apple’s toolchain. For the most part they used MetroWorks.
Under Gassee (founder of Be) they went after margins instead of going after market share. Jobs said that himself when he came back.
Microsoft was also never forced to provide options in the US.
I am an iOS user. I like that iOS takes a heavy handed approach to the App Store and controls it completely.
I do not want developers to hav the option to have their own payments. Apple Pay is so easy and convenient.
I do not want developers to be able to distribute apps without Apple approval.
Apples policies probably result in developer harm, but anti trust law is to protect me as a user not you as a developer.
To be frank, I don’t really care that Apple is a pain to deal with. That is why I, the user, pay you, the developer to deal with them.