> The App Store continues to promote competition, drive innovation, and expand opportunity, and we’re proud of its profound contributions to both users and developers around the world.
How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS? (I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about)
UPDATE: The comments seem to imply I am giving my opinion on this case. I am not. I am commenting on the PR-speak given here. The app store does not, IMO, "promote" competition...it may arguably not hinder it, but given what the case is about, it is, I think, more competitive if others could use different methods of selling apps on iOS. That doesn't mean it is better, right, more fair, or anything else... just more "competitive" IMO. In short, I'm commenting on the wording in their press release only.
> How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS?
The court did not decide that the relevant market was iOS only, as Epic wanted.
> A threshold issue in any antitrust case is defining the “relevant market.” Here, Epic argued that the relevant market is Apple’s iOS system. Apple argued that the relevant market is the market for all digital video games, where it is one of many players. The court disagreed with both sides, and it instead defined the relevant market as “digital mobile gaming transactions.” Under this formulation, the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market. But this was not enough for the court to conclude Apple has monopoly power.
And this should be the first question almost anyone asks themselves in a discussion about an anti-trust/monopoly case - defining "the market" is the lynchpin upon which much of antitrust law works both in Europe and the United States.
Also be wary of comments in this thread that don't weigh this most important element of the entire process well.
All too often these discussions on anti-trust issues become meaningless on this site because everyone involved is using a personal definition for "the marketplace".
Step one of any attempt to claim Apple holds a monopoly will require you to define exactly what the market is, in quite specific terms, and have the court agree. That didn't happen for Epic here.
If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android, since they have a large library of apps on iOS and significant other platform lock-in (messages, photos, subscriptions etc). So according to this test, the relevant product market would be "providing apps for iOS devices", which apple clearly has a monopoly on at the moment. I wonder if this argument came up.
Epic did raise this argument during the original trial however since they failed to establish a single-brand aftermarket they never got to the point where the SSNIP analysis would have been performed.
> If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android
It's actually not that clear and would need to be backed by actual evidence in court.
It's not clear that the SSNIP test would actually meaningfully show any significant distinction between the possible market definitions in this case. It seems likely that none of them would pass this test.
Thank you for your helpful response selectodude! In that case perhaps I should apply there, can I list you as my reference?
That answers my question, thanks for supplying the case reference.
EDIT: Actually I don't understand how this case applies... The key passage seems to be:
"We conclude that cellophane's interchangeability with the other materials mentioned suffices to make it a part of this flexible packaging material market."
My point is that there is no interchangeability between ios apps and android apps. Customers tend to have either ios or android and aren't able to freely choose between the two. What am I missing?
>If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android, since they have a large library of apps on iOS and significant other platform lock-in
It's not just that; most Apple users actively dislike Android, or think that only Apple makes smartphones (really, I've met people who said this).
Apple could easily raise their prices for apps by 100% and not have a significant number of users jump to Android. Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see. For the people who don't fit that description, the lock-ins you mention will keep them in line.
> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see. For the people who don't fit that description, the lock-ins you mention will keep them in line.
Or maybe we just like the OS, build quality, or available iOS only applications? Maybe we like the battery life or the quality or the apple ecosystem. Maybe we like prompt, regular, and long term supported security updates.
No *durable* (i.e. doesn't expire in a week and need to be refreshed) sideloading is the no.2 thing keeping me off iOS. The no.1 thing is that I find the entire user experience frustrating, inflexible, and frankly condescending. 3 would be that I can get 2-3 decent Android devices for the cost of an iPhone, so my phone-having-time per € works out about same-- plus I still get to upgrade every couple of years.
I get that people like their iPhones. My wife is one of them. I'm not. People are different. Choice is good. Some folks choose to cede control in favor of simplicity. Go off.
Yeah righty, that’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hands. You know that 99.999% of users will have several applications or gadgets forcing them — and eventually you, if you want to remain socially functional — to install an unrestricted alt-store.
Eg: anecdote: mother-on-law was gifted a cheap smartwatch (Samsung I think). Installing its companion software required downloading and registering to a whole new store on her Android smartphone. Weirdly enough I think it was also a Samsung, already had 2 stores (the Samsung and Play ones), yet she (we) had to dump yet another one on that sorry mess.
Problem here is: you can get astonishingly good phones today at the 300$ range or below that are comparable to premium phones (including the iPhone) from just few years ago.
I am a long time multi OS users, and I just don't find Apple phones priced in any way to merit that plus in price.
E.g. The cheaper Google Pixel 6a offers more or less what the iPhone 12 Pro or 13 base offers in terms of battery life, performance, screen, camera, so it all comes down to what? OS?
Why would I spend such crazy $ for a brand new iPhone 14, even the base one, when I can get a comparatively as good phone for less than half the price and change it again next year or two when I will get at similar prices a phone much better than the iPhone (not that it matters, I honestly believe all this tech and GHz on phones have no use in most people's lives and how I see them using their devices).
May I just say that despite the Apple hype it's an ecosystem full of problems and cons as well, especially for more tech-inclined people?
It certainly doesn't offer the performance, and Android phones never have. If I look at the 6a, it offers marginally better performance than the iPhone X, and that came out in 2018.
> I am a long time multi OS users, and I just don't find Apple phones priced in any way to merit that plus in price. E.g. The cheaper Google Pixel 6a offers more or less what the iPhone 12 Pro or 13 base offers in terms of battery life, performance, screen, camera, so it all comes down to what? OS?
Depends on what you care about. For instance, I am paying the premium simply to make sure Google didn't have its fat fingers inside my phone.
Simple, really. Google is an ad company, while Apple isn't. I have no idea how Google analyses behavioural patterns etc, but it pleases me to think that perhaps I somewhat reduce the number of times I become a data point for them (same reason why I don't use their search).
c) Why don't you de-google an Android phone, plenty of OSs to choose from?
My bank app and national e-id won't work, or so I heard. Plus, I do enough tinkering with my xmonad config, emacs init file, and all that. Simply no energy or interest left to spend on mobile, which to me is relatively unimportant.
> Why would I spend such crazy $ for a brand new iPhone
Some people care about getting software support after the sale.
The $399 OG iPhone SE from back in 2016 just got another security update a few weeks ago. The OG Google Pixel was also released in 2016 and has been completely abandoned for several years now.
I don't think that ordinary non-programmer people care about OS or even understand what it is. And programmers probably would prefer Linux over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
> build quality
I don't understand what this means. It is not like Android smartphones are breaking apart immediately after purchase.
I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices. And maybe because of a good camera.
> over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
Developers can side load apps on IOS that are under development work have a limited distribution.
Also, most developers don’t like or use Linux as their desktop OS.
> It is not like Android smartphones are breaking apart immediately after purchase.
Some of them are that bad, yes.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices.
Back with the incredibly condescending view that Apple users clearly don’t know what they’re doing. In spite of so many comments explaining the reasons: hardware and software design, hardware build quality, accessibility features, handoff features, multi-device ecosystem integration, privacy and security, there is a long list of rational reasons.
> I don't think that ordinary non-programmer people care about OS or even understand what it is.
They might not now what an OS is, but they surely do care about the UI, speed and general handling.
> And programmers probably would prefer Linux over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
Yet most do not. I say this as an mostly exclusive Linux user.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices. And maybe because of a good camera.
Yet this is true. Apple has a very good build quality and, for the most part, great support. It's true that high-quality Android phones do match that, but they are not priced that differently compared to modern iPhones.
Of course there's also some marketing involved, as well as Apple being a status symbol, but it's not like Apple is producing inferior products.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices.
I've always seen the same thing:
user buys some low-mid end Android phone once or twice since the 2010s.
Phones are okay, not exceptional. Build and overall quality, speed, performance, camera, battery on such low-mid end phones 10 years ago was years away the best phones.
Then they see their friends/family iPhone, and they are like "wow, this is so much better" and they instantly see that striking distance.
This won people's minds at the core of the smartphone revolution which Apple vastly led as well and it's here to stick.
It never mattered to anyone when someone produced Android phones better on most aspects that costed 25% less, sales have always been much higher for Apple.
But now? Now in all honesty we can easily compare 300 or even sub 300$ phones to just the previous year's iPhone. The cheaper Pixel 6a is absolutely comparable to the iPhone 13, let alone with the 12 from 2021.
Also, I see more people leaving the Apple ecosystem right now for the inverse reason. Their aging and highly expensive iPhones 8/9/10s they are just so behind even the today's midrange that they are "why would I spend so much again for an iPhone"?
I think the best selling point of modern Apple it's is top of the notch integration between multiple devices. You get one, you kind of snowball in benefits in getting more and staying in the ecosystem.
The previous main daily driver Android I owned was a Nexus 5 which lost OS updates in less than 3 years after purchasing it new. That’s one important aspect of quality Android is seriously missing on and where iPhones are exceptional compared to the competition.
EDIT: Actually it lost OS updates in three years after being introduced as a flagship product, so I guess I bought it and it stopped receiving updates after a year or so, worse than I remembered. Stuff like that ruins the brand reputation, quality-wise.
Yes, this is normal for iPhones. But Apple users either deny it or excuse it. An older iPhone isn't really useful for anything besides very basic functions because of this.
The build quality of Apple software is horrible. Really terrible. That's why I avoid their phones.
Their laptops on the the other hand have a sleep state that works and the battery lasts >8 hrs even when heavily used. Mine is giving the service warning but still lasts longer than any Windows or Linux machine I've ever used (and it doesn't empty itself when the shell is closed).
> Their laptops on the the other hand have a sleep state that works
Mostly & sometimes. I'm unable wake up M1 MBP when docked in clamshell mode to a TB dock, once it blanked the screen, but didn't go to full sleep yet. Either put it into full sleep (=> turn off the monitor, it will notice and go to sleep) and then wake it up, or undock it and wake it up undocked. In both cases, it will lose all peripherals attached to dock (like ethernet) while doing the exercise. Pretty annoying actually, and it didn't happen with Intel Macs.
I've had two Macbooks (2012 MBP, M1 Air) with no issues. I've had Lenovo laptops going back to 2005 with most of those machines running great --almost as great as the Apple machines do.
Got a coffee spill on my 2012 MBP and Apple didn't really want to fix it. I was quoted nearly a new machine. I bought parts myself, fixed it for $150 and some (intense) labor. Apple really doesn't want me doing that. Had it happen again a few years later. Parts were HARD to get, and so... yeah, that one is in a box now.
Lenovo doesn't seem to care. Parts are inexpensive, I've had to do a few more repairs, but they were not hard. I can still get parts for my Lenovo machines.
For a lot of reasons my daily driver remains Lenovo. I do use my Apple a lot more than I used to now however...
Homd[k
Lenovo takes a beating better than Apple does. Apple is very petty
Which Lenovo models / lines? I'd very much like to move away from Apple for my make work horse, I've been waiting for Framework to provide a good AMD option and fix the sleep (so I can close the kid on Friday and continue on Monday with little battery loss).
I've also repaired my MBA - it's an Apple so obviously something is designed to break after 18 months. In this case it's the USB-C adapter. Thankfully they're cheap and easy to replace. The experience is shocking though.
Similar, my MBP 14 takes a long time to wake up when connected to a studio display and I need it to wake up quickly, then wakes up every time I just walk past the desk when I want it to stay off.
My work HP Chromebook also takes a long time to wake up in the morning, so they all feel very familiar to me, I'm no different.
I am blind. I use Apple. Because Google slacks off with Android accessibility since they decided to play copy-cat with what Apple did. Even after 15 years of trying to catch up, the Android accessibility is still subpar compared to what iOS does.
You can argue that Apple users are just Apple users because of the logo and the coolness and the hype and whatever, but I can tell you that users like me have a real reason for staying with Apple: quality!
> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see.
Or maybe they just don’t like paying for an Android device that actively spies on literally every moment of their life so other companies can buy the marketing data.
I think people actually value some of the side effects of privacy on iOS though… one of them is that app developers just can’t be quite as appalling in their abuse of users.
Why does anyone think that apple is not spying on its users? They have a massively growing advertising business, that should tell you everything already. The only difference is that they don't want anyone else spying on their users, but that's simply to protect their business, not for the privacy of customers.
> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see.
One thing Apple has done masterfully is exploiting the status circuit in the human brain. Apple users often claim they pay more because the product is superior in some or many ways, or even argue that it is, in fact, cheaper when considering everything. However, in reality, they pay more because they can. They want to display their Apple products and they want others to see them.
> Apple could easily raise their prices for apps by 100% and not have a significant number of users jump to Android.
Apple doesn't charge for most of its apps. How would this work?
Are you arguing that Apple could raise the prices of apps sold through their App Store? Isn't that the developers' choice? To me, that doesn't seem to change the market argument (IANAL, obviously).
(I know Apple provides banding and international support so perhaps you're suggesting Apple might shift the bands?)
I used to spend money on apps, back when it was possible to buy them. Unfortunately, that's very rare these days.
I'm not paying exorbitant subscription fees for relatively trivial apps, let alone falling for the manipulative and often-basically-gambling nonsense of F2P games.
Apple are somewhat to blame for these trends though. Unlike 'real software for a real OS', mobile apps tend to need constant ongoing maintenance just to keep them working with OS updates and new devices. You can't just release a finished game/app and expect it to continue to be usable for decades, like the over-20-years-old Paint Shop Pro 7 that I still use almost daily on Windows.
Define the market as mobile OS and it would be pretty hard to argue that Google and Apple aren't a duopoly. And they both are definitely abusing that market power, often in very similar ways, including using that duopoly to favor their app store products, which includes a large commission for them.
The argument there for Apple is whether the App Store is a product, or a feature of their product. In Google's case they have chosen to offer their store un-bundled from the base OS. Apple does not, for them it's just a feature of their phone in the same way that the stores on games consoles are features.
Yep. It really feels like a bunch of kids read up on ‘90s Microsoft, internalised a third-hand wildly simplified definition of ‘antitrust’, and used it to add a moral high-ground angle to what is essentially an iOS power user feature request.
It’s often the first step in a whole lot of doublespeak. “This will set everybody free”, but at the same time, “this doesn’t present a security issue because nobody will use it”.
To be clear, I think that the government should storm Apple Park with buns glazing and force them to do a more reasonable degree of rent-seeking. I’m not going to pretend that this is for any reason other than “I think that 30% is a dick move”.
You don’t just get to pretend that Android doesn’t exist, or that the vast majority of ways that people communicate aren’t cross-platform, or that IOS has any material network effect whatsoever.
So you really end up with two camps, one camp who always stop short of saying “iOS is just better in my eyes, and I want to be able to do more with my phone.” And the other camp is…let’s be honest…Android users. And the mere fact that there’s so many people in this camp I think directly contradicts any assertion that there’s a monopoly in the first place.
you're not exactly agreeing with GP, you are going overboard, the court said these types of cases are covered by antitrust, but that Epic had failed to make its case. (like, murder is still illegal even if a particular case is not made)
But it said ... that Epic, regardless, had “failed to establish, as a factual matter, its proposed market definition and the existence of any substantially less restrictive alternative means for Apple to accomplish the procompetitive justifications supporting iOS’s walled-garden ecosystem.”
In other words, while these types of contracts can be within the scope of a Sherman Act claim, that wasn’t relevant to the court’s decision in this case.
I love how autocorrect mistakes sometimes just come out sounding like rhyming slang… a less obtuse version than most real dialects of rhyming slang, more understandable by most people.
There was an AI thread a few days ago about how Open AI could not come up with a catchy slogan for selling hot cross buns in the UK. Could be a reference to the thread, or the actual slogan used in the UK.
It’s an interesting shortcoming of the large language models that they struggle to “play” with the rules of the language very much. I’ve tried to get GPT 3, 3.5, and 4 to generate business names and other names for things and it’s not particularly good at it. It frequently “runs out of creativity, and starts to repeat the same combination of basing building blocks. The worst example I came up with had moderately specific business names with a particular theme like an “1890s” or “1970s” or “late 1990s computer startup” style of name.. it would frequently run out and start repeating the same building blocks in under 50 examples, the absolute worst started repeating itself at about item 20 and the list gets increasingly repetitive from that point.
I built a modified name generator based on some existing open source code that’s been around for several years now based on GPT2 and sure I couldn’t ask to go give me something with a specific theme… but damn it was way more creative at generating new words that could be names and it was t hard to filter the output to be useful since I could get it locally in batches of thousands overnight.
You’ve been much more proscriptive, and given it a larger task than I was trying to highlight, and I can see GPT4 doing well at the kind of task I’ve personally experienced it doing well at.
What I was trying to highlight is the sort of “small task” not, very short essay and feel free to make up specific words using specific linguistics as some guidance.
I’ve seen it make up words in this way too, even without prompting it to allow it to make up a word. I was more trying to highlight that its not particularly good at prompts like “please give me a list of 50 names for a hypersonic aircraft company for my science fiction novel”, counterintuitively it requires significant additional prompt text to expand its creativity in response to prompts like this, and not repeat itself if you ask it for a list of another 50 names.
I agree with you in that there is no Apple monopoly. What people are seeing may be something monopoly like because Apple is able to attract an affluent user base and then keep most of it over very long periods of time.
In some ways, from Apple's point of view, Android does not exist! Android is not the same thing Apple is, and most computer manufacturers are not doing what Apple is doing with the Mac either. Sure, a computer is a computer and a phone is a phone, but Apple has a far greater control over it's product than it's competition does, except perhaps Google.
Apple likes to sell products to people who will value them in the same way Apple does. A big part of that is Apple makes awful nice stuff! And unlike many other manufacturers, Apple asks for some money on every last bit of that value and Apple gets that money because it is all real value.
I'm typing this on an M1 Air that I got for a song. It's a sweet machine! I said the same thing about the last Mac I owned and used regularly too. Got that one for a song as well. From Apple's point of view, I might as well not exist!
I only value some of the things Apple does and that means I'm unwilling to pay what Apple asks for it's products, despite being a fan of said products.
We get along just fine too. I'm not paying what Apple wants and I almost never use the app store either. I have the software running on the machine that I want to run, and I can write the programs I want to write, use the peripherals I want to use enjoy media I want to enjoy, on the machine I want to enjoy them on. No worries.
Unlike many who disagree with Apple on value, I strongly support what Apple does and how they do it. It doesn't impact me one bit, or if it does and let's be real --it probably does, then I don't really notice. From there, it's a hop and a skip to who cares? I sure don't.
Most of the time when I see someone saying Apple is a problem, it boils down to a few great features, or how sexy the hardware is, or some other similar thing, and how that thing just should not cost as much as Apple wants to charge for it. Or I see someone point out how the BOM doesn't seem to add up in their view, and how that means over the top margins that "the market" does not support meaning something has got to be wrong, rent seeking, monopoly, SOMETHING!!!
The truth is so much more simple and I've already said it:
Apple puts value into it's products as fully as they can and Apple charges for all of that value and the fact is there are plenty of people out there who see that value and pay up.
They didn't get ripped off.
They didn't get abused.
They are not the victim in any way really.
Apple made a nice, high value product and people saw that value and paid Apple for that value.
Personally, I see it all break down this way when we look at prospective users and value:
The top isn't worried about money and they like nice stuff which makes an easy, high profit sale for Apple. Many of these people will buy all Apple.
Upper percentiles are also not worried about money, but are more practical. "nice stuff" isn't an easy sale to them. These people may buy all Apple, but are also pickers and choosers, maybe skipping Mac computers and buying iPhones. These are the most vocal complainers.
Middle of the road prospects can be worried about money, with more worried now than we may have seen in a long time. They generally do not buy products because they are nice, though attractive to them. They do buy products because they find them useful and are always looking for deals.
Lower percentiles will not typically buy Apple products new and do worry about money.
While it's more complex than that, I find the rough brackets of people useful.
Notice one last observation made possible by looking at this through the simple lens I just made:
Apple sells most of it's products to the body of people who are willing and able to pay the most, no worries! These are the most profitable customers. Others may do twice the work Apple does to put a similar amount of money in the bank!
This can look like some sort of monopoly or aberration in the market.
I'm not passing judgement on this case and this comment has no relation to its facts, but generally speaking a single company controlling ~51 percent of the market is not the definition of a monopoly, at least not for anti-trust purposes. Indeed a company can have market share well beyond this and not fall foul of anti-trust law, depending on facts of the case.
It's much harder to unfairly distort an open marketplace with 51% share than say 90%, most of the time. Again, this is why the marketplace definition step of this process matters so much!
I'd hardly call it open. Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
Moreover, Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.) And the craziest part is, our so-called antitrust laws allow Google to pay Apple $billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. The duopolists openly conspiring.
> Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
What do you suggest we do over this ? Forbid some people to search on Google ? Or give each user X queries / day then say "please use another search engine; here are some alternatives ...".
The laws are against monopolies abusing their power. As long as it's trivial to change provider we are in the clear; but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage. For example if Google says "You have to un-index you site from bing otherwise we will apply a ranking penalty on your search results".
But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.
Break it up! That's what you do with monopolies. That's what they did with Standard Oil. That's what they did with AT&T. That's what they talked about doing and should have done with Microsoft.
> but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage
Google has leveraged its search dominance to gain dominance in a number of other areas too. For example, whenever I do a Google Search in Safari (without my content blocking extensions running), I see a big popup that says "Google recommends using Chrome". That's an abuse of power. (And naturally, Google is the default search engine of Google Chrome).
Google AMP is an abuse of power, forcing websites to redesign themselves specifically for Google, on penalty of lower search ranking.
I've already mentioned how the two duopolists colluding is an abuse of power.
Google has been accused by Mozilla of systematically sabotaging Firefox in various ways, for example on YouTube.
MS is still "the best" in this case. Searching for Firefox on a fresh Windows install (with Edge) will show Chrome and Opera as first two options (keyword ads), then Firefox. And then, when you download the Firefox installer, you are announced that it could harm your device.
Defaults matter. Making Google the default everywhere will cause people to stick with Google, for the most part.
Why is it legal for the monopolist to pay other companies to help it keep its monopoly? If Google couldn't pay Apple or Mozilla to make Google Search the default on their respective browsers, perhaps we'd see other, better defaults, and maybe people would continue using those defaults, eroding Google's market dominance.
> But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.
The ease of switching isn't all that matters. I suspect if you polled a representative sample of people, they would tell you they believed that Google is the only option for web search. At best, some might admit they've heard of Bing, and then only because it's been the default for IE/Edge for years.
It's not "web search", it's 'web search ADVERTISING'. There's definitely NOT a trivial way to switch to another provider, there isn't one (of equivalent scale, of course.)
I'm immediately reminded of how Google refused to port their YouTube app to Windows Phone back in the day, and when Microsoft cobbled one together itself, Google claimed that doing so violated its ToS.
A duopoly isn't a monopoly. Uber and Lyft coexisting is extremely different than just Uber existing, for example. Luckily, it's not even a duopoly since there are other mobile gaming options like the extremely popular Nintendo Switch.
>(I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
Because using an alternative, of which there are many, is as easy as typing in a different URL. They're all just inferior products and the market knows it.
>The duopolists openly conspiring.
Making a deal is not a conspiracy. It would be of concern if part of the deal was prohibiting switching to other search engines but nothing is stopping you from switching to Bing and having Google waste a few dollars of that deal.
Between Uber and Lyft you can make your choice every day. And at least here in this country taxis are still a realistic choice, not sure whether that applies to the US.
Between Apple and Android you have the choice only every couple of years. The rest of the time there is zero competition.
It maybe that the antitrust law is not well-written for this case. But nobody can claim their is a functional app market at the moment. Market meaning choice for the customer where to buy.
The issue is the definition of that market is fictional, and the nuances are in people’s heads. As soon as you write it down in legal terms, it becomes clear that it’s a very difficult thing to circumscribe without enormous government mandated regulations.
Like to me, the market IS functional - people can choose their mobile platform and get the apps available for that platform. More than that and we are legislating software distribution as a publicly regulated utility. Which to me is an overreaction to current market dynamics. Like we’ve not even had 20 years of smartphones and app stores out there and people act as if they’ve been around for a century.
> Between Apple and Android you have the choice only every couple of years. The rest of the time there is zero competition.
This is incorrect in two ways:
a) any particular individual (e.g. you) can switch between alternatives at any time. Nothing forces you to wait years…
b) there are new first time mobile users all the time and they can choose between these two alternatives (or smaller, much less successful platforms), and in the case of Android, between different device manufacturers
Seems like lots of freedom to me. If you’re thinking is that even given that there are only two reasonable options to choose from from a software point of view (Android and iOS), I’d be curious to know your solution. Is it to force some company to create a third alternative? Is it for the government to subsidize Microsoft to make Windows phones?
The Switch is not a substitute for an iPhone or Android phone, and I think this perhaps illustrates a problem with how we think about this issue.
Sure, if I have an iPhone or an Android phone, and I don't like the gaming landscape on either of those, I can get a Switch. But the Switch doesn't replace my phone. I can't toss the phone and now carry a Switch with me everywhere. (I also wouldn't want to carry a Switch everywhere; it's nowhere near as portable and doesn't fit in a pocket.)
So is it ok for a company to abuse their market position, if a consumer has the option to buy an additional device made by a competitor, and then have to lug around two devices, since the other device doesn't actually replace all the functionality of the original one? I would say no, it's not ok.
There was multilingual topic talking about some research not showing advantages. One advantage is that one has to learn how to describe something when you cant think of the word for it.
Fitting the definition of a monopoly is probably a lot harder than to ask what is undesirable about monopolies. If google or apple hold a monopoly isn't very interesting. We can easily agree that the motivation to innovate is not there if there is no real competitor. We are kinda blessed by there being 2 platforms but that they are like prisons for developers is not beneficial.
We are also blessed with the www in how incredibly open it is. With the phones we got entities that dictates the rules of the game. In stead of domain names the www could have been what these mobile application stores are: a web directory with enormous fees.
Before the www I tried to create a teletext page. We had countless TV channels each with their own text pages. Even the smallest TV stations wanted me to pay for hardware and charge an enormous monthly fee. They made it into a completely useless offer. It didn't have to be a monopoly to get there.
In the US rent-seeking percentage fees on transactions are quite normal, in the EU many just pay for the transaction. How large it is is quite irrelevant?
We are also blessed with a relatively open Android OS. For a new OS it is hard to get any of the other popular prison builders onthere.
Government should regulate where companies try to own and control things that are non of their business or clearly not theirs to own.
For example chat history or email is important for the legal process. People need to prove conversations happened. I just send a whatsapp screenshot to my boss where my previous manager approved my day off. I could easily doctor such an image. We have the technology to grant someone access to part of a conversation in a legally binding way, technology just didn't mature enough, its to childish to do those things.
To have corporate platform owners decide which company lives or dies is simply undesirable. They [may] do it without dialog and without explanation. A company should not be forced to put it self in that position.
People purchase mobile computer. Companies desire to offer software for their mobile computer. The manufacturer then gets to decide if they approve?
I buy a toaster, you make bread, the manufacturer disapproves of the bread? Or they desire 30% of the money?
Manufacturers can't stipulate which cartridges you have to use in your printer. They may have a preference (using their own brand) but they can't force you to. Car makers can't make you use a certain brand of fuel. Dishwasher manufacturer may not force you to use a specific brand of tablet. Coffee machines may not lock you into their preferred brand of coffee.
It's not a position that arises from logic, it is just that making the hardware created the possibility. It is quite unusual to force customers to not just buy specific coffee but also buy it from a specific store.
If we are going to allow that other manufacturers should be allowed to do the same. We should allow MS to force users to use Edge for everything. If you want to use libreoffice you can install a linux?
> For example chat history or email is important for the legal process. People need to prove conversations happened. I just send a whatsapp screenshot to my boss where my previous manager approved my day off. I could easily doctor such an image. We have the technology to grant someone access to part of a conversation in a legally binding way, technology just didn't mature enough, its to childish to do those things.
For whatsapp, they actually use the Signal protocol for messaging, which has built in deniability, so you can't use the cryptography it uses to prove a conversation happened, since any participant is able to falsify messages after the fact.
Messages should be the property of the sender and recipient. When we want or need it they should be on the record. The technology is almost 500 years old.
> Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
You seem to be under the misconception that it is illegal for Google to possess a monopoly over web search. This is not the case. It is only illegal if such a monopoly was obtained or maintained via anticompetitive means. If the monopoly was obtained via "growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident", then it is entirely legal.
Moreover, the government has done something about it when Google tried to use their monopoly over web search to obtain a monopoly in other markets via anticompetitive means.
> You seem to be under the misconception that it is illegal for Google to possess a monopoly over web search. This is not the case. It is only illegal if such a monopoly was obtained or maintained via anticompetitive means.
I said, "And the craziest part is, our so-called antitrust laws allow Google to pay Apple $billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. The duopolists openly conspiring." But you chose to completely ignore that and accuse me of misconception.
> Moreover, the government has done something about it when Google tried to use their monopoly over web search to obtain a monopoly in other markets via anticompetitive means.
You said: "I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this."
But nothing you've described is necessarily illegal so I think my point about your misconception stands. It might be anticompetitive (in your opinion) but that does not mean it is actually a violation of the law.
> "necessarily illegal"? So... it might be illegal?
That will depend on the outcome of the several current ongoing lawsuits and has not been established at this stage. I mean, just look at this case. A lot of people decided what Apple was doing was illegal after Epic filed suit and it turned out they were wrong.
> You didn't answer my question: "What have they done?"
I don't think there's much "right and wrong" in the court system. There's so much arbitrariness and even politicalization among judges. Just look at the Supreme Court.
The judge in the Epic trial, YGR, invented a whole new market concept out of thin air, "digital mobile gaming transactions", a market that neither side in the case argued for. I thought that was complete crap and a bad decision. What's the legal basis for a judge inventing a market? This seems like a classic case of judicial overreach.
One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)
I also thought, to be honest, that Epic's lawyers in the case were not great and seemed not fully prepared or technically knowledgeable. And some of the toughest questions for Apple were asked by YGR rather than by Epic.
"Entering into long-term agreements with Apple that require Google to be the default – and de facto exclusive – general search engine on Apple’s popular Safari browser and other Apple search tools."
That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.
> The judge in the Epic trial, YGR, invented a whole new market concept out of thin air, "digital mobile gaming transactions", a market that neither side in the case argued for. I thought that was complete crap and a bad decision. What's the legal basis for a judge inventing a market? This seems like a classic case of judicial overreach.
This actually happens all the times in antitrust cases. Almost always the plaintiff argues for a very narrow market and the defendant argues for a very wide market. Then the judge has to come in and look at actual consumer behavior to decide what the relevant market actually is.
> One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)
I agree that the relevant market probably should have included all app transactions and not just gaming transactions but frankly it would not have changed the outcome of the case.
> That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.
The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means. It remains to be seen whether such browser payments will be considered anticompetitive in the eyes of the courts.
> This actually happens all the times in antitrust cases. Almost always the plaintiff argues for a very narrow market and the defendant argues for a very wide market. Then the judge has to come in and look at actual consumer behavior to decide what the relevant market actually is.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the judge invented a market that nobody considered to be a market before the trial. The judge didn't refer to any other market analysis or economic literature but simply pulled "digital mobile gaming transactions" out of her ass.
> The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means.
> The issue is that the judge invented a market that nobody considered to be a market before the trial.
Not true. I'll just quote from the ruling:
"Epic proposed two single-brand markets: the aftermarkets for iOS app distribution and iOS in-app payment solutions, derived from a foremarket for smartphone operating systems. Apple, by contrast, proposed the market for all video game transactions, whether those transactions occur on a smartphone, a gaming console, or elsewhere. The district court ultimately found a market between those the parties proposed: mobile-game transactions—i.e., game transactions on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets."
I mean you said the judge made up a market out of thin air but what actually happened was she agreed with Apple's market definition minus gaming consoles.
>I'd hardly call it open. Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
Why is that relevant? That was not the question before the court. However, to prove an illegal duopoly you have to show collusion. IANAL, but I think it is unlikely anyone could show enough collusion between Apple and Google to reach the threshold of an illegal duopoly.
With a duopoly you don't need direct collusion, you can exercise monopoly power just by watching what your "competitor" is doing. You don't have to meet behind closed doors to fix prices, you just set your prices to be exactly equal to your competitor. Or if the market is segmented in some way, and one competitor enters a specific segment, the other one can focus on other segments. Like say Lyft focusing on cities that don't already have Uber, and vice versa, to reference another comment.
> you can exercise monopoly power just by watching what your "competitor" is doing
That is not a monopoly, which implies that the market is controlled by only one company. Not two. “Monopoly” is not just something you say when you don’t like a company. Also, a monopoly in itself is not necessarily illegal or problematic. The real issue is a company abusing its market power, which does not require anything like a monopoly.
> You don't have to meet behind closed doors to fix prices, you just set your prices to be exactly equal to your competitor.
Then it is not collusion. It’s just a poorly functioning market, or something that cannot work as a free market (some natural monopolies are like that).
> Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
In mobile gaming, Apple and Google are the largest participants, but not the only participants. We have the Switch, the Steam Deck, and other smaller companies as well.
Neither my switch nor my steam deck fits inside of my pants pocket. They are also not the device that dominates almost every human beings life. Cellphones and their evolution of smartphones is probably the single biggest technology revolution we had in a very long time. It's bigger than the invention of computers and the PC. While PCs changed work life for a huge population, smartphones are owned by 86% of humans.
Having a huge market share by itself is not a problem. If you just make a hugely popular product that more people buy without coercion or exploitation, that's fine. It's just people making that choice, and they are free to do so.
What that does do is create an increased onus on the company holding that position not to abuse it. So that kicks the can down the road to disagreements about what constitutes abuse, but just being popular isn't a crime. You'd need to demonstrate actual harm to consumers.
In the case of search, the web search market and the mobile phone market are two different markets. You can't constrain Google from doing commercial deals with other companies in different markets, just because it's search product is hugely popular. Again you'd have to demonstrate harm to consumers.
I'm not saying there isn't any harm, just this is the situation. Only once we have the issue properly framed can we discuss whether there's harm.
>Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
A duopoly is not a monopoly. Unfortunately, anti-trust law seems to only be concerned with monopolies, and totally ignores duopolies and oligopolies.
>The duopolists openly conspiring.
Exactly.
>Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
This isn't quite a monopoly (Bing does exist, you know), plus it's free (or "free").
It doesn't help when the competition is so awful, though. See yesterday's article and discussion about DDG. Many times, monopolies (or near-monopolies, or duopolies) arise because the competition is so inept and incompetent.
A monopoly is where there is a single player that has enough power to manipulate the market. Despite Bing existing, Google can manipulate traffic by altering its search results and due to it having 93% of the search share, it can manipulate it's position to direct people to one site over another or kill a site by no longer including it in results.
That would be Googles solution so that it could show meaningful competition and Bing would be a credible alternative.
My solution would be to fine them 25% of their total revenue every time we see market manipulation due to Google altering search results.
If we have no evidence of that, then I don't see a problem with the current situation.
As for Epic, they have plenty of alternative platforms to use. The fact that they don't target the Steam Deck because Tim Sweeney is petty makes me have very little sympathy for their argument.
It genuinely sounds like you are generally not aware of the common definitions of the words you’re using. You seem to just be…intuiting them, and using that as the basis for some sort of legal argument.
> Moreover, Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
There are other free search engines. Also Google makes money as an advertiser, not as a search service. Search itself has always been free, even before Google existed.
I can’t tell if you are trolling or not. Both of those are alive and well. Since at least the early 1990s, there have been free search engines. eg: Archie, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, etc…
If your social game is not on iOS you won't lose out on that 50% of the market, you lose period. Even single player apps that need to go viral must be on iOS, because network effects are intrinsically social.
It doesn't matter whether your product is Facebook, Whatsapp, Trello, Angry Birds, or Uber. If you're not on iOS you're done. Game over.
If that isn't monopoly power, I don't know what is.
The same can be said for Android (given that that’s the other 50%), no? Would you then say that both Apple and Google are monopolists of the same market?
I don't believe this. There are plenty of huge apps that are only on one platform or another. As an example third party Reddit apps largely are single platform.
» As an example third party Reddit apps largely are single platform.
I don't have skin in this conversation
but I just want to call out your fallacy here.
It is kind of cheating a little to give reddit apps as an example here because as long as you can get on reddit somehow, you are a part of the network. You don't have to use the same app as the other guy...
If I recall correctly, needing to have a majority market share is not even srictly a requirement to have monopoly power. I have looked up the actual law before, and it's just that majority market share is the more common way to obtain monopoly power but not the only way. If I understood what I read correctly.
You don’t recall correctly. There is no such a thing as “monopoly power”. A monopoly is a situation in which a market is controlled by a single company. It is a purely descriptive term, unrelated to whether that companies abuses that situation or not.
What you are saying seems closer to “abuse of dominant position”, which is the cornerstone in EU antitrust law, but not so clear in US law where the bar to prove abuse is higher. This does not require a monopoly, just a market share large enough to steer the market. It’s hard to allege this when a company has a minority market share, though.
Where I was off a little was in mixing market power and monopoly power. As the article explains and corrects my statement to a degree, courts have found it difficult to assign monopoly power when market share is below 50%. However, it does seem possible that a monopoly power can still exist without historical levels of market share. I believe the historical cases do not necessarily apply to technology companies, because these companies throw their power around and enforce it via software and not materialized objects like railroads or commodities. I think being overly preferential to market share is a mistake, particularly for global companies where the market share will vary drastically. In addition, these technology markets are massive. Abuses and competition stiflingly can be very disruptive. They are also very easy to hide behind the complexities of software.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
A literal monopoly is 100% market share. So all this quote is saying is that 100% market share is not required before antitrust law applies, which doesn't really tell us anything meaningful.
They don't control more than half of the entire market. Come on, you know that. It's trivially easy to show that Android has greater "market share" than iOS.
Now... do buyers of third-world shitphones buy a bunch of expensive (or any) applications? Hell no. But they still count as Android "market share."
> How is a single company controlling more than half of the entire market not monopoly power?
AppStore is merely a package manager for iDevices. It is not it's own market any more than YUM is for RHEL or FreeBSD Ports is for FreeBSD. The market is software. Apple does not control half the entire software market.
The difference is: on both all Linux distros I know and from as far as I know all BSD derivitives (except PS' BSD) you can compile and use software that doesn't need to blessed by Tim Apple, be it either through the AppStore or via you forking over money to compile on other Apple hardware with an Apple certified license.
Law is predicated on conditions. If you're going to argue that someone used "monopoly power", then you have to show discriminatory practices. A lot of people keep bringing up Standard Oil, and completely overlook the court's consideration of discrimination in rendering its verdict. It is a necessary condition.
So it has neither a monopoly market share, (~27% globally and ~50% locally), nor does it discriminate in favor of wholly owned sham companies in the fashion of Standard Oil's practices.
Guys, we can't go into courts of law and make poop up. Judges will toss you out.
My own opinion is that the laws themselves have to change. A company like Apple will very likely never meet the legal definition of a monopoly. The digital age has outstripped these definitions, and laws need to change to reflect that fact.
> Would you mind explaining how a company could hold monopoly power while not actually holding a monopoly?
Quite arguably, you can’t, but monopoly power (particularly, its expression as pricing power) can be observable (and itself proves an actual monopoly) when monopoly would not be clear by other means.
The ability to price without sales going to a competitor demonstrates the absence of actual competition, regardless of the superficial apparent competition in a described market.
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power."
The perversity of this can be seen by the thought experiment of Android not existing. What would happen? Apple would ironically have less power to abuse their platform because regulators would gain authority to police many of the abuses.
Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.
As much as so many hate how Apple acts, they’ve gotten better since day 1.
They let developers choose more price points. They offer only a 15% cut of subscriptions in a number of circumstances instead of always taking 30%. IAPs and subscriptions have given developers more choices of how to monetize their apps.
At no point did they ever use their position to squeeze more money from developers. Even the yearly developer fee is still $99 despite the HUGE increase in App Store revenue.
It’s understandable people want Apple’s cut to shrink, but that doesn’t appear to be legally required. They didn’t make things worse so it seems they’re in the clear.
(They still lost on the alternate payment method thing)
I had never thought about it but I wonder if this is why they’ve never tried to raise rates.
It would certainly be a PR nightmare. But would it also immediately open them up to the “iOS monopoly abuse” case so many think this case was/wanted it to be?
Nope, on J2ME and Symbian phones, unless you had a developer kit, you would run what the telecom provider made available on their stores, reachable via WAP or SMS download links.
If Android didn’t exist, some other OS would take its place. Samsung would have developed its own most likely, which would at this stage probably resemble something very similar to what we have today. Only difference is that Google would have been in a position more similar to the one it faces with Apple.
I agree also the point you are making. If Apple somehow commanded 90+% of the smartphone market then they would likely face much regulation.
>the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market.
This seems surprising low, and I suspect there is some kind of nuance being left out or an oversight in the methods of the study that found that number.
What you're doing is assuming "the relevant market" is very narrow. In antitrust law, they say the case is won or lost on how broadly the relevant market is defined. Does Amazon compete against every brick and mortar store, or just other online merchants? The subsequent legal analysis looks very different depending on the answer to that question.
> every plaintiff could just define a market a certain way, they would never lose a single anti-trust case
This goes both ways. My corner bodega has a monopoly over its intersection.
In practice, we need legislation defining anti-competitive behavior for platforms and Thompsonian aggregators [1]. I haven't seen anyone propose a sensible, predictable framework.
> You've probably heard about the pathetic sums that creators earn from Spotify streaming, often blamed on the tech industry's unwillingness to pay creators what they're worth. Maybe you've also heard the rebuttal – that Spotify pays plenty to entertainment companies, but they intercept this money before it can get into creators' pockets.
> That right there is the false binary – either Spotify is cheap, or the Big Three record labels are greedy. But what if – and hear me out here – Spotify is cheap and the Big Three are greedy? What if Spotify and the labels are actually colluding to rip off the "talent"? What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
The search results are filled with adverts for Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's book, but Cory Doctorow hasn't tagged many of those adverts "chokepoint capitalism": his website lists examples, instead. https://pluralistic.net/tag/chokepoint-capitalism/
> Chokepoint capitalism is where one party becomes both a monopoly and a monopsony: a gatekeeper, or "chokepoint". This gives it more leverage than any single other party, which it uses to extract and exploit with impunity. ⸻ While it may once have added value, once an entity becomes a chokepoint, it can cease to add value, and even start making people's lives actively worse ("enshittification"), without losing its position of power.
> What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
I agree with all the examples. I just struggle to see a framework. How has he defined the monopoly? That’s what we are looking for. A new definition for antitrust, ideally separate from the definition of monopoly and its market-definition magic variable.
If argue it's when one has "more leverage than any single other party", either on the buying or selling side. And it could be based on a raw percentage of units or market revenue, whichever portion is bigger.
Say one buyer/seller with 51+% of a market by unit or revenue would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Perhaps another tier requiring more drastic measures, such as breaking them up.
Leverage isn't about "the market", either. It's about the individual people, and their situations. The iOS App Store doesn't give Apple much leverage over iPhone users, but iCloud does – and, to a lesser extent, iMessage¹ and FaceTime do. (The flipside of the iPhone's many planned obsolescence strategies is that you have to choose whether to remain within Apple's ecosystem every three-to-five years, and iPhones are expensive.)
The iOS App Store does give Apple significant power over the authors of apps. Even if the App Store doesn't provide a chokepoint by itself, the iPhone “ecosystem” as a whole does. It's a different thing to antitrust, though the more egregious offenders might also constitute monopolies for antitrust purposes.
On Cory Doctorow's "competitive compatibility" / "adversarial interoperability" theme, a company called Sunbird Messaging claims to have made an iMessage clone for Android. It's proprietary, and might turn out to be vapourware, but I'm hopeful.
This returns us to the problem of defining the market, however. Platforms, specifically, exploit this ambiguity by escaping straightforward definitions of market share.
I'm not Cory Doctorow, and I don't read him enough to know his arguments, but my artist acquaintances all say that Spotify is a terrible deal. This article is a collection of such anecdotes: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...
> Documenting the group’s last show before the coronavirus hit, the pay-what-you-want release generated $4,200 from nearly 700 buyers in just two days. That’s more than 75 Dollar Bill have made through streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube over the last six years. “Streaming is a joke,” Chen tells me. “We might make $100 a year from streaming. On a recent statement of mine, the royalties for one track that had 580 plays on Spotify was zero dollars and 20 cents.”
> Unlike Bandcamp, Spotify’s royalty rate is difficult to ascertain, using a model which pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed – which benefits the Ed Sheerans and Taylor Swifts of the world far more than it does any struggling artist or independent creator.
> Per stream royalty rates on the platform have been gradually declining for years. One recent estimate suggested the figure averaged around $.00348 per stream, or $3,300 – $3,500 per million plays.
If anyone can explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me, I'd appreciate it. I've heard that claim a lot, but I don't really understand how the pricing model is bad. (It feels like the kind of pricing model that admits sleight-of-hand, but that's all.)
Spotify is a terrible deal, but even the "good ones" like Apple Music and Bandcamp aren't much better. My artist acquaintances all agree, but it's not like they're making bank on YouTube music or anything. All digital music distribution sucks now. Spotify is just one of the more desperate moochers.
> explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me
It's not uncommon, especially in scenarios where distributors can strongarm artists into signing their agreements. In the world of gaming, progressive distribution models are very common, where Steam/Epic/Sony takes a smaller cut as you get sell more units.
The unfortunate fact is that boiling down digital music sales gets you two things - file distribution and payment processing. And the payment processing costs money.
> What you're doing is assuming "the relevant market" is very narrow.
Within the last few years, I've noticed a trend where questions are now interpreted as statements. I can't say I understand it. I don't think it's fair to say they were assuming anything. They were asking for help in understanding.
There is a question, but the part about the monopoly was in the setup, not the part being inquired about. It asked "how can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS?"
The second part of the question is assumed. To question that part, one would ask "how can the app store promote competition if it is a monopoly on iOS?"
Maybe it's my locale (California, USA), but where I'm from, "What you're doing is assuming" is a very condescending response to someone asking a genuine question, and can only be found on the internet. But, perhaps my locale is why I perceive this as odd, rather than it being odd.
I'm a CA native myself, and I don't talk the same way I write. In person, I probably would have said something like "but you're assuming away the key legal test, which is 'what is the "relevant market?"'". I tend to not go back and edit my comments for style, just for clarity. Could it be more polite? I guess, but it also seems pretty consistent with the logical/syllogistic style that is common on HN.
I thought the question was not entirely in good faith, since it would be pretty obvious that there's no such thing as "monopoly on X" — otherwise it would make Sony a monopolist on Playstation, Microsoft a monopolist on XBox, etc.
Apple is a monopoly... on their own platform. Which by itself is not convincing, legally, at all. Sony has a monopoly on PlayStation games, Xbox has a monopoly on Xbox games, Nintendo has a monopoly on Nintendo games, Apple has a monopoly on iOS apps. What's to separate Apple from the game consoles? Legally, there is no such thing as a "general purpose computing device" despite the myths - they are legally in the exact same bucket. Just because a device can do more or less than another device (a game console versus a phone), or just because a device is subsidized by the apps (a game console, whereas iOS doesn't have that), doesn't change the status of it legally.
Would you say that PlayStation is a monopoly? Probably not - you know they are competing with Xbox and Nintendo. Apple makes the same argument and legally it has held up - they are competing with Android and Windows and Amazon. You don't have to like the competition from Android or Amazon, but legally, there's competition and that's all that matters. At least for right now.
It has happened before. The Hollywood Antitrust Case of 1948 changed how movies were sold. None of them had a monopoly, but it was a case of vertical integration very similar to Apple's App Store.
Agreed but there are some important differences that make this a harder sell to the court:
1. No one is stopping developers from selling their apps in Android markets.
2. Apple hasn't attempted to prevent android app markets from existing.
3. Apple can make the argument that they own the market on merit, therefore their monopoly on selling iOS apps is legal.
4. It has to be proven this is bad for consumers. Apple is claiming their control benefits consumers, which again justifies their monopoly.
And as mentioned elsewhere, Apple may be forced to allow side-loading, but still require their 30% on all transactions. And nothing stops Apple from enforcing security policies on things like private apis on side-loaded apps.
Unfortunately I think the likely result is going to be a partial victory no one is happy with. :(
True, legal court cases can happen, but I can only address what the situation on the ground is right now. Also, the DOJ announced that rule is no longer-binding as of last year.
If you were, however, to penalize Apple; you would need to come up with a legal differentiation between a smartphone and a game console, as well as why the game console business model is moral and legal, but the locked-in smartphone market should be immoral and illegal. Considering there's no such thing as a "general purpose computing device" in the law; you would also need to come up with a pretty good explanation why Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft get to keep their exclusivity privileges but Apple loses theirs.
And that's a tricky nut to solve. Because you might say, "well, a smartphone can do way more than a game console." Well, that's only because the game console is so locked down - but a game console remains theoretically capable of anything a PC could do otherwise. If it wasn't for a lockout, you could install Windows on it and use it as a node in a supercomputer. Does that mean Apple would be legally fine if the smartphone was more locked down then? It's tricky.
>you would need to come up with a legal differentiation between a smartphone and a game console
Not really, they can just leave it up to the court's interpretation. "I know it when I see it" has been used in a court before. Just define it as a smartphone: No one is going to call a gaming console a smartphone, nor vice versa.
And applying a ruling to a specific industry isn't new either: see that Hollywood anti-trust case again. It was never applied to TV shows. Otherwise Netflix Exclusives wouldn't be a thing. Or any other "Only on Disney Channel/Cartoon Network/etc" show.
> “I know it when I see it” has been used in a court before.
It’s been used in a court, but not too much effect; the popular source of that is a discussion of “hardcore pornography” in a concurrence to a Supreme Court decision in an obscenity case which was notable for having a majority on the ruling in the case, but no consensus by any more than two justices on either a rationale for the ruling, or (among the dissenters) on the reasons for rejecting the ruling.
> Sony has a monopoly on PlayStation games, Xbox has a monopoly on Xbox games, Nintendo has a monopoly on Nintendo games, Apple has a monopoly on iOS apps. What's to separate Apple from the game consoles?
This is a very important point because Epic doesn’t like that either. There was very reasonable speculation that if they won this lawsuit they would immediately turn around and use it to sue the console makers.
"In the space of privacy-friendly phones, Apple has a monopoly."
A. There's no legally recognized market for "privacy-friendly phones."
B. "Privacy-friendly phones" is an ill-defined category, with "privacy" meaning different things to different people. Does a phone that blocks trackers qualify? Or does it have to protect me from rogue governments? There's no legal standard for what makes a device "privacy-friendly." Because of that, you are complaining that Apple has a monopoly in a market you just made up, which would be laughed out of court. You might as well claim Apple has a monopoly on phones with Lightning ports.
C. There's always GrapheneOS, which is free for anyone who wants it. There's also CalyxOS. You might claim they don't serve your purpose, but the law doesn't care an ounce about your specific purpose. There's generally-recognized competition in the vague category.
D. Having a monopoly is not illegal in the US. It's abusing your monopoly that's illegal. You would have to show Apple intentionally and specifically suppressed the development of alternative privacy-friendly phones by actively abusing their market power, which nobody is alleging.
> This is probably because when phones were first introduced in the previous century, people assumed that nobody would listen in on their conversations.
In the 80s, I could literally pick up my phone and hear neighbor’s conversations sometimes.
Also during the analog cell phone era, anyone could buy a receiver from Radio Shack and bypass the frequency block and listen to cell phone conversations.
> By the way, who decides what a legally recognized market is?
Primarily, the legal system, courts do. However, they always draw in expertise and considering that privacy experts don't agree on what a "privacy phone" should be, good luck defining that market when the market can't define itself. (Does it need secure boot or not? Hardened malloc? Tracker blocking? Sideloading or no sideloading? Allow background processes or not? Hardware Microphone disable switches or not? Some or all of the above? Hardware-based assertions for auditing? Built-in YubiKey? Completely open source firmware? Completely open source modem? Fuzzing required? No C, only Rust?)
But then, even if there was a standard for a "privacy-preserving phone," is that market large enough to legally matter? Currently, judging by how many people are using GrapheneOS... No. Again, Apple has a monopoly on smartphones with Lightning Ports, but I don't think anybody cares about the "Smartphones with Lightning Ports" market. And if you brought a lawsuit complaining about the Lightning Port monopoly, it would be dismissed immediately.
Way to drill that category all the way down to IOS to ensure that you're able to use that "monopoly" keyword.
The deli that's in my complex has a monopoly on buying and obtaining wine if i don't want to drive anywhere or use a phone to order some via some delivery app.
Relevant market is not a vague rhetorical definition as you such described. US FTC has not attempted to define a relevant market for digital apps, but EU clearly considers iOS alone as a relevant market and thus regulates it with DMA.
To give you an idea of hypothetical regulation scenario: You want to move to an Android app. Sure you gotta need to change your phone as well. This is likely much more expensive than the app itself, thus it may make Android/iOS apps non-interchangeable. If FTC finds that this is expensive enough so most people won't make such move even if Apple decides to considerably increase the app store tax, then the App Store itself is a relevant market thus monopoly.
We don't know the legal conclusion since FTC hasn't done such study (this is a very complex process that takes several years with huge uncertainties, this is why politicians prefer direct regulation via legislation), but many experts believe that Apple is not in a very safe position.
If I move off iOS I lose stuff I bought on iOS. Software licenses aren't portable across platforms, and there's lots of iOS software that doesn't even have an Android version (or vice versa). The software industry has fought tooth and nail to criminalize any attempt by users to resist this. Emulation software is legal, copying software you own to run it on different hardware is legal, but the digital locks designed to keep you from pirating apps make it illegal to migrate your apps even though it would otherwise be legal to do so.
If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. We know this because of Microsoft and Amazon's failed attempts at making phone OSes. In Amazon's case, they actually used the same OS Google did, but Google refused to support it. And you can't legally port licenses over from Google Play to get Google's apps running on Fire OS. So the Fire Phone - a phone running Google's OS with Amazon's tweaks - could not use any Google apps. Anything on a Google service had to be used through the web browser. Windows Mobile was even worse: nobody wanted to support it natively. And again, you can't sell something that isn't an iPhone or Google-blessed Android that lets you buy App Store or Google Play apps and run them.
This is the same situation for everything else, too. Amazon has a monopoly on books because Kindle and Audible books cannot be copied onto non-Amazon devices or reader apps. So nobody wants to buy books outside of Amazon's platform, because it'll split their collections. Nintendo spends extraordinary amounts of time and effort legally harassing anyone who publicly uses their games on non-Nintendo hardware. Same for Sony and Microsoft.
To bring this back to your deli thing, imagine if you weren't allowed to have your deli's wine and other wine in the same apartment. There's chips in the wine bottles that will poison the wine if you do that, and there's a federal law prohibiting you from removing the chip, and prohibiting even discussing how to remove the chip. So you can switch wine stores, but you have to throw out all your wine that you already have. That is the current situation of software distribution as a consumer in 2023.
> If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail.
but apple wasn't the one preventing these from succeeding. they failed on their own. On the other hand, it is reasonable to conclude that Netscape didn't fail on their own, but that Microsoft _prevented_ netscape from gaining marketshare by preloading a competing browser; such a preloading can only have occurred with a monopoly on operating systems.
Therefore, the monopoly abuse was to leverage its monopoly position in one market, to prevent competition a different market.
So despite the fact that I also hate the appstore and walled gardens, apple _did not_ use their apple device dominance to _prevent_ android versions of an app from existing/competing.
The complaint about walled gardens from people is that of lack of open access - not that of monopoly.
I suspect that new laws needs to be introduced to break open walled gardens - i want to call these "interoperability" laws. It's in the interest of society for systems to be interoperable.
This will not only concern apple devices, but things like EV charging networks, computer networks, and data interchange apis, and digital ownership of data. Imagine if by purchasing a CD or DVD, you are only allowed to play that disk on an authorized device! Now imagine instead of a physical disk, you buy a digital "disk" - a game, or music - but you're locked into the vendor's platform!
It depends what the definition of monopoly is. What Apple does with first party vs third party apps on iOS is pretty much exactly the same as what Microsoft did to Netscape. For example Apple Music is pre-installed and enjoys special features (via Siri for example) that other music apps do not. Apple even advertises free trials for Apple Music, Apple News, etc. inside of the settings app. No other apps have the ability to do this. All browsers are just reskinned Safari since iOS doesn't allow different browser engines.
Is Apple a monopoly by the same definition that Windows was a monopoly? The answer is definitely no. Android has a larger global market share and it's far more accessible than iPhones in terms of pricing. Apple's US market share is in the 55-60% range depending on the source. Windows market share in 1988 when the suit began was about 90% so it's much clearer.
> The complaint about walled gardens from people is that of lack of open access - not that of monopoly.
100% this. People are just using the monopoly label because they're looking for some excuse why this shouldn't be allowed. But the reality is that probably >99% of Apple users do not care about any of this.
That is how DVDs and BluRay’s work though! You’re only allowed to play on authorized devices, and manufacturers must pay royalties. The company that created Blu-Ray (Sony) gets a cut. There was a battle with HD-DVD (Microsoft backed) and Blu-Ray won. And HD-DVDs became coasters.
“Interoperability” laws are dangerous because they require lawyers to legislate how code works, and they’re not engineers. It’s in the interest of society to be interoperable , but at what costs and tradeoffs? Do I have to register my new network protocol with the Bureau of Interop Standards? If I make too much money on my platform, must I eventually cede control of that platform to a government-led utility commission? These would be nightmares and the unintended consequences of forcing laws to over-regulate how our technology platforms work and would dramatically hurt innovation.
You mention EV networks but this is a great example of the benefits of not forcing interop too soon: by far the most reliable EV charging network is Tesla’s, which has forced competition to up their game and forced competitive car brands to invest in networks. On the other hand, The CCS fast DC charging standard is a bulky design by committee standard that extended the old J1772 standard from 20 years ago. It’s inferior to Tesla’s NACS in terms of communications speeds, ease of use (NACS is far less bulky) and performance in cold weather. But we’ll have to live with it. It was a premature standard but has only minor deficiencies, luckily. EV networks themselves don’t have forced interop on the billing level and we have a handful of apps with different payment methods, some with plug and charge, some not, it’s not very intuitive. But unless you force a utility experience prematurely this is life in an evolving market.
This is the perfect definition of a strawman argument.
There are 2 dominating app stores:
- Google/Android app store
- IOS app store
They have a duopoly in the mobile market, and they each have a monopoly on their platform. The deli comparison is asinine since there are millions of delis vs 2.
>They have a duopoly in the mobile market, and they each have a monopoly on their platform. The deli comparison is asinine since there are millions of delis vs 2.
No, Apple is literally hard coded to be the only app store on iOS. You can not install apps not from the app store, and you cannot install other app stores. Installing your app every week by paying $99/year to be a developer is not a viable alternative.
On Android you could install another app store within the next 2 minutes if you so desired.
This is the perfect definition of a misleading argument.
You can sideload on both in Europe since it's required by law.
But yes, I agree that Google's strategy is more open, and they allow others to use the Android source code to make their own (Amazon app store, Microsoft, etc).
Apple is more of a walled garden and a strict monopoly on their platform (and hardware).
Eh... Android has turned out to be a bit of a fraud. The great "open-source" OS that would free us all from vendor and telco tyranny has spectacularly failed to do so. Android users still wait months or years or forever for each telco to dribble out a hacked, proprietary version of Android for every phone model, one at a time. I wanted Android to be competitive, because Apple does dick developers and "partners" over. But it's just as much of a shitshow, if not worse.
They'll probably tie it to your icloud region and billing address. Sure, bring your European phone to the US, but you won't be able to access any paid Apple services because it only offers you the European subscriptions and they can't be bought with a US CC. Maybe even Apple Pay will not take your debit cards.
But that's already true right now, irrepective of this coming change, isn't it.
To lure US customers, app developers could offer lower prices to users who sideload, to offset the higher price paid for iPhones in the EU. App developers selling to EU iPhone owners will be able to avoid the 30% Apple tax and can pass on the savings to customers. Developers could offer more features to users who sideload. There are a variety of possible incentives developers could offer to lure users away from Apple App Store. That is assuming developers see the long term benefit of getting people to stop using the App Store and avoiding the Apple tax.
> app developers could offer lower prices to users who sideload, to offset the higher price paid for iPhones in the EU
So app developers should bear the brunt of Apple's hardware price strategy? Seems unfair.
One of the complaints about Apple from app developers is the cost of doing business on the App Store (15% or 30% or whatever it is this week). So you're suggesting app developers charge less for side loaded apps: isn't that just accepting that the apple fees are fair?
The thought I had was get users off the App Store. Once they are off, then developers could raise prices. But also developers would have more freedom to sell stuff as they like, without Apple's rules. Epic has its own audience, its own customers and it should be allowed to do what it wants with its software. Instead Apple has control over what Epic can do, merely because Apple sold the hardware to the customer. When I started using personal computers, the manufacturer of the computer had no say in what software I was allowed to use. Nor did it deliberately set hoops that software authors had to jump through. Microsoft did that of course, but not the manufacturer.
It being required by law does not guarantee that it's possible.
I'm pretty sure I cannot sideload on iOS, unless you count using a free developer account to load self-compiled applications whose certificates are only valid for a few days.
There are several ways to install apps that do not go through the app store.
Your company can have an enterprise certificate that allows in-house apps to be run on company devices without needing to go through the app store approval process or the app store. You are not supposed to use that enterprise certificate to publish apps to the general public, although companies have been caught doing so in the past.
If you have a paid developer account, you can test your own apps on devices owned by your company and your customers.
Anyone can get a free Apple Developer account that allows you to test apps on your own device.
From my understanding, don't you have to reinstall the apps every week since they expire and disappear from your phone? That's an awful experience for daily use.
There could be millions of phone OS makers. Nobody is stopping anyone. But nobody is entitled to have provided for them all the work that Apple has done over several decades to get to where they’re at now.
Better start working today because you’re gonna need to put in like 50 years.
You've described the counterpoint perfectly to your argument.
It would take billions of dollars and 50+ years of development to have a chance. You would also need phone partners, which wouldn't go with a small OS maker. So you'd need to make the phones + the OS + the app store.
A deli can start anywhere with ~$10k and they'll have clients if they're good enough.
It's not feasible to compete with Android + IOS, even Microsoft and Amazon failed.
They therefore have a duopoly of the mobile app store market.
I did state that nobody is entitled to effectively compete with behemoth companies. They’re going to have to put in the work.
Every behemoth company you see today did not start out that way. Apple was a couple guys in a garage. At that time, IBM was almost 100 years old, had revenues in the tens of billions and was sending hardware and software into outer space with government contracts. Guess how that company started out?
It’s also revealing that you think $10K is a low barrier to entry to a risky business with razor thin margins. And it’s also quite hard work, in terms of physical labor and ongoing time commitment. Most of my life that kind of lump sum was unthinkable, and I have to imagine it still is for many. Yet even in the face of that, some people do find a way.
They should do so with smartphones as well, if they feel strongly about it. I think the scales match in terms of barrier to entry to expertise if you want to compare delis and smartphone manufacturing.
I think the problems with your comparison are at least twofold:
1) it’s much much easier, in a technical sense, to start a deli vs manufacture a smartphone. Just in Apple, there have been tens to hundreds of millenia of person-time poured into the company.
and 2) most people with the expertise necessary to do so are happy with the options available today and would rather spend their time solving other as-yet unsolved problems.
You can absolutely make a huge company from barely anything if you're not impeded by a monopoly. Both the examples you listed were companies going for a new, different market than IBM's.
Microsoft actually lost an antitrust lawsuit for doing something extremely similar to what Apple is doing.
> Explorer web browser with the Windows operating system, which made it difficult for other web browsers to gain market share. Additionally, Microsoft was accused of engaging in exclusionary contracts with computer manufacturers to prevent them from pre-installing competing web browsers and of engaging in other anti-competitive practices.
I do think there are important differences between MS and Apple’s behaviors. MS was getting their product out using other companies products, and then constrained the UX of those OEM’s customers. Apple would have to get an app store on some android devices and windows/linux machines and then try to enforce their rules there to be in the same ballpark. The fact that Apple puts rules on companies that use their platform is the inverse of this scenario: this would be like if a bunch of the OEMs were trying to dictate terms to MS.
What Epic wants to do is have their game store on multiple OSes produced by other companies and then call the shots on those. I actually think they are closer to the spirit of what MS was doing, and given the chance they would leverage any advantageous market position they could achieve (or run to the courts) to shape OS customers’ UX in a fashion that is more similar to what MS did.
Apple wants a sandbox in the world; Epic and MS want the world to be their sandbox. If Apple’s sandbox becomes dominant it will be de facto because of people choosing to use a better competing product; Epic’s and MS’ actions are attempts to create a de jure dominant sandbox.
Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. Antitrust is the abuse of monopoly power. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.
That's precisely the point. In order for Apple to have abused their monopoly, you would need to point to a change in their business model which occurred during the period in which they held nominal monopoly status.
Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.
That's how theses cases usually work. Antitrust claimants want to define the market as narrowly as possible for their own benefit. Defendants want to define it as wide as possible for the same reason. It's up to the court to figure out what the actual market is, and not what the (biased) parties want it to be.
You can side load in other app stores in Android. iOS started out with side-loading, but then this was crushed by Apple's exercise of their absolute control of the operating system.
I don't recall sideloading ever being a thing iOS started out with. There was a trivial jailbreak and very easy third party app store install for jailbroken devices, but that was essentially a defect and not something iOS was designed for.
While acknowledging that most users are not a developer?
Compare it with computer (desktop/laptop) market. Users can install any software they found in internet that they trust it is safe.
> While acknowledging that most users are not a developer?
You don't have to be "a developer" to install, for instance, the sort of retro-gaming emulator you use to play classic console games. You just need a free developer account Apple ID.
> Through an app called AltStore, you can install emulators onto your phone through a method called sideloading. If you're unfamiliar with the term, sideloading is installing software without using the App Store.
This is not at all comparable to proper sideloading/allowing third party access. For starters, unless you pay Apple 100 bucks a year for a developer certificate, you're going to need to renew the application every week and you're capped to 3 applications at most. AltStore does some fancy stuff (by which I mean that you need to run a separate application on your PC which can handle the renewal requests - that's what AltServer is) to minimize the difficulty of this as much as possible, but that's still the rules Apple works with.
Secondly, Apple severely limits the capabilities of sideloaded applications - those emulators for example aren't allowed to make use of JIT, or Just-In-Time compilation, which is extremely important for decent emulation. This is also the main reason nobody has even tried to bring over a non-Safari browser using this method - you practically need it to have a browser that's decently usable.
It's practically useless outside of development purposes. AltStore is a pile of (very impressive) hacks to get around a system that's crippled by design.
Compare and contrast to Android, where the only difference between the Play Store and a regular application is that the Play Store doesn't get the regular installation window (something which is set to change in the next version of Android, so that alternate stores can also request this permission).
Either way - this doesn't matter. The Digital Services Act has already been passed in the EU, and Apple is going to have to offer third parties proper access to iOS without being allowed to gatekeep the App Store.
OK, but the usual counter-argument against the claim that there is genuine security benefit in the current situation, is that “nobody will use it”, “hide it several levels deep in settings”, or whatever.
Genuinely, who do you think is convinced by your comment? You aren’t a lawyer making your case to a jury of dopes. You aren’t going to win everyone over with empty emotive language like “crushed”.
To argue that the existence of Cydia means that “Apple started out with side-loading” is intellectually dishonest. I know it, and I know that you know it. If you have a real argument, you shouldn’t need to resort to this.
> Genuinely, who do you think is convinced by your comment?
People like me who aren't programmers, or even power users anymore.
> I know it, and I know that you know it.
A long time ago I used to modify the Windows ME registry, and it genuinely created some features doing so. Then they removed this windows-altering ability from the particular feature I was modding and my mods were useless. Maybe the MS programmers saw this as a bug being fixed, but I saw it as a feature being removed. I basically haven't been a Windows power user since ME because of stuff like this.
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Nothing Apple is doing is materially different from what Microsoft was sued for in the 90s by anti-trust enforcers. In fact, it's a bit more, because it just isn't a default browser, it's control of every app. Apple's share of the US market is just slightly less than Microsoft's was at the time.
The first App Store was Cydia. Technically side-loading with how Apple failed to predict the dedication of breaking the (trivial, at the time) security to add more native apps to the home screen. https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/debian-style-installatio...
The reason people say this is because that argument has been put out there by the other multi-billion dollar corpos trying to take some of Apple's slices of the pie.
> How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS? (I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about)
They’re talking about apps. Before the App Store (and the android store etc) finding, buying and installing apps was an incredibly painful experience that few developers or users bothered with. The app stores have promoted a massive leap in the number of apps available (perhaps too many) giving small app developers the ability to publicise and publish apps competing with bigger developers.
It also gives a relatively (/relatively/) equal footing to all apps, short of editor's picks and sponsored results. If you want a podcast app, you will see Apple's own next to something made by a firm of 50 engineers, next to an option made by a 16 year old on a second-hand MacBook Pro. This is in contrast to trying to get on the shelves of Best Buy or CompUSA or Babbages, or anything analog before it.
That relies on your definition of "relative" being relative to garbage. Apple runs Google-style App Store search ads[0] that get pushed above everything else, pre-installs (and sometimes forces) their clients on the user, and has access to entitlements that others do not.
There are a lot of areas for scrutiny. This ruling feels like the can is being kicked further down the road, and with the European regulation coming in hot I expect there to be more debate here. Separating Apple's business practices from their personal policies will probably be where this discussion ends.
The competition (in Apple’s eyes and I agree with it because of how shady some of these companies are that want to make launchers for all their apps) isn’t about apps in the App Store. It’s the competition of being an App Store in itself compared to Google, Amazon, etc. If you read it with that lens, the line makes a lot more sense.
>How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS?
Maybe they don't mean competition between app stores, but between apps within the store itself? Look at how many apps are clones of other apps. If they didn't promote competition, they would shut down all of the clones. /s
This is the crux of the issue. Pretty much every opinion in the ruling has one opinion or another about how the case would've gone differently if the "market" defined by the district was broader. In this case, the market was "mobile gaming transactions".
The district court analyzed anticompetitive effects
in terms of increases in the cost of mobile gaming
transactions—the court’s relevant market. But the court
could have found greater increases in costs if its analysis
concerned Epic’s markets, and this would change a properly
conducted balancing analysis. In essence, any balancing
done out of the context of a relevant market necessarily
involves putting a thumb on the balancing scale.
From a customers perspective, does the multiple stores approach on Android benefit me in any way?
I now get bombarded with conflicting updates for apps from multiple stores. They all try to get in each others way and it's much harder to figure out what to install and from where.
I greatly prefer the Apple app store, where i can be reasonably sure that i'm not downloading a bunch of malware every time i look for an app.
The absolute king of this mess is the windows store.
There is basically 50 malwares for every possible keyword in that absolute garbage patch of a store.
> How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS? (I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about)
No need to go that far, the couple Google / Apple is a duopoly without any competition, regardless of their marketshare. So you can say that there's no competition on mobile marketplaces at all.
(I'm ignoring irrelevant marketplaces such as Samsung store or Amazon app store which are a rounding error at best)
Just like every other law? The legal definition of a monopoly has been refined over decades of case law, this ruling comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the specific requirements of that definition (which were clearly not met by Epic here).
Well at this point there's only one higher court they could go to (if they'd even take up the case). Frankly the case law on this subject is pretty well established and the judges have just been following existing precedent.
Epic failed spectacularly. They couldn't prove a monopoly, and even if they could, they were not able to point to any instance where Apple abused a monopoly position to turn the screws on customers or developers.
M00x, you mentioned you know folks at Epic that are working on WebGPU. Do you mind sharing who they are? Because last time our team spoke with Epic, they mentioned they are not working on this (our company is a startup from Canada building tools and a platform-as-a-service to enable developers to bring their games to the web, and a large focus of our work has been building out a WebGPU backend and integration for Unreal Engine 5).
That's true of literally every ruling of every case in history. If you're implying that they ruled incorrectly you're gonna have to provide an actual legal basis.
A lot of court rulings are basically come down to, "I don't like the logic but it follows" and you just have to live with them.
lol competition. Anyone ever notice how every single recommendation and app ranking editors choice list on apples AppStore seems to be weaponized against apples competitors?
Their argument would be: the App Store has a home page and search results, both of which do have an advertising model, and competitors to Apple applications appear in both these locations regularly. They promote competition by allowing competition into the app store.
Yes, it is the absolute bare minimum, but you also have to remember that the standards for anti-trust enforcement in the united states are extremely low.
> The comments seem to imply I am giving my opinion on this case. I am not. I am commenting on the PR-speak given here.
You acknowledge that this is PR speak, so what's so hard to understand that the PR line is to say that a market store promotes competition?
> I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about
As you identified it yourself, it's PR speak, PR doesn't have to address the court case specifically, it merely promotes the App Store in its current form by simply stating a simple fact that sounds beneficial to Apple's case.
Overall Apple is right, the App Store promotes competition and has driven a lot of innovation and expanded the opportunities of developers around the world. At the end of the day iOS could not allow third party apps AT ALL. iPhones could just be self contained devices with only the software on them which Apple has developed themselves. It would be like a smart fridge or toaster. You cannot load a different app into your smart fridge and nobody thinks this is anti-competitive. So given that not allowing any third party apps was the status quo in the early days of iPhones, the fact that Apple opened up and created a market place where developers can promote and advertise their own apps to be purchased and loaded onto people's iPhones is a HUGE STEP towards promoting competition, innovation and opportunity.
"Monopoly on iOS" isn't a thing and no one should have ever acted like it was a thing. iOS doesn't have dominant market share, so we aren't even talking about smartphone apps.
I have a monopoly on parking spots at my house, but that's not a relevant market.
I'm for right to repair, I'm agains the 30% markup on the App Store, and I think Apple in general should make it easier for pro users to customize, but you the novel legal theories to consider someone with a smaller market share than a competitor in the relevant market (unless they are colluding with them in an oligopoly) is anarchy. You can't just say something is a market. It would never end the anti-trust litigation out there.
Cherrypicking one quarter to make your point is pretty desperate and still irrelevant. When the case started it was less than 50%. Now what?
A textbook monopoly price antitrust case involves people who are virtually the only player, or a combination of almost all or all of the players.
And the court found that they didn't do anything with whatever marketshare they had and this is obvious to people who were paying attention. What about consoles? They are even more locked down than phones, yet the Internet seems to have a lot less to say about that, even though it's been that way for decades.
You can think Apple is a bad company. You can think they are too big. But you can't just wish the antitrust laws to be completely unworkable to punish them. That's the not the rule of law. That's the rule of "I don't like them."
What you did was the literal definition of cherrypicking. You chose the one frame where the data supported your claim, even on your own terms.
57% is not the kind of market share usually associated with a monopoly or a combination in restraint of trade, so you're wrong either way as others have pointed out.
And if you own 57% of the properties in Monopoly you still might lose. The standard, for better or worse, in the US for "wielding monopoly power" is consumer harm not market share. If you can't convince the courts customers are harmed by the status quo it'll be a uphill climb.
If this case had any legs, someone would've made progress against Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft consoles in the past. They haven't, those are more locked down and much easier to demonstrate the price harm when games are $60 and marketed to children.
You say "for better or worse" and I agree, but people don't want to hear that. They want to hear [company I don't like] should be punished and [company I like] shouldn't.
People need to think very seriously about the market structure of the digital world and creating genuine alternatives in the interest of a healthy, innovative and less risky society.
This is not a niche market and a cute little oligopoly. Tech touches, controls and even disrupts major parts of economy and social life and there is no visible counterbalance. E.g., in other recent news Apple was getting deeper into finance and banking.
Where exactly does the conglomeration stop?
Having let things reach such an advanced metastasized stage its not clear if there is a gentle way to turn things around. Which commercial entity would dare go against such a entrenched and systemically supported duopoly?
Taking the axe and creating by brute force less dominant pieces is the approach that was used in the past.
Another, maybe fanciful, idea is for governments to fund public goods that will undermine the commercial viability of certain business lines currently under the stranglehold of tech oligopolies.
As it stands, reinforcing the concept of TINA, there is no alternative, acts as a millstone around society and effectively robs us from the potential of technology.
I am very sympathetic to your view that these massive companies mustn't be allowed to use their absurd concentration of power to be anti-competitive. But the thing that I've noticed over time with these tech companies is that whilst they are extremely profitable and at points can be extremely powerful, their power is unstable. When you look at other markets the contrast is stark, AT&T and the break up of Bell system - they were a monopoly for decades and acted terribly and were broken up by the government and have basically slowly morphed back into their old shape. Compare that to AOL - they were powerful sure, but that exploded pretty quick. Before Facebook it was Myspace, and after Meta something else will come. These industries just don't seem to form a stable equilibrium they continue to get disrupted. And the problem you have is that if the government is going act thoughtfully, they'll act slowly, and if they act slowly they'll almost certainly be too late.
That may be true for large companies, but a lot of smaller ones get crushed in the process, including those that will never be big enough to find a way to work around the law.
Most businesses fail, and it’s usually a matter of when. A part of not picking winners and losers by fiat is also disregarding that most new businesses will fail but a few will succeed and a very very few more will rise to the level of challenging any of the major tech companies, but they will rise and if it’s not your business, it will be somebody else’s.
Like with Internet Explorer once upon a time, government intervention will prove to be unnecessary. While the two monopolies sit around and push out minor updates each year, rearranging chairs on their decks, alternatives are quietly being developed and from out of nowhere a “TikTokOS” will appear and solve the monopoly issue.
You're pondering the challenges of our digital age and the seemingly unstoppable dominance of tech oligopolies. I'm all about shaking up the status quo and championing underdogs. Like it's literally what I do for a living [0]. (See the About page specifically.)
Obviously this may sound like a marketing stunt, but you should really know there are those of us who want to see a different world.
So here's the paradox: if more open platforms promote innovation that benefits everyone, why is Apple so dominant, and why aren't the more innovative, open platforms running circles around Apple?
So here's the paradox: if smaller oil companies promote innovation that benefits everyone, why is Standard Oil so dominate, and why aren't the more innovative, smaller firms running circles around them?
Repeat ad nasuium for your favorite monopoly/duopoly.
Currently. one of the big dogs needs to make a big misstep in order for a smaller company to come in and win. Like car companies being complacent and Tesla seizing the opportunity. Electric cars had been around for a while, hobbyist putting them together but no capital to compete with Ford/GM. Now that Tesla has shown there is a path forward, look at all the capital that has gone to create new car companies.
Apple is not a phone or computer company. They are a luxury brand that is functional. Trying to compete with Apple is like trying to compete with Disney; you cant just be putting out a cartoon movie, you have to have the theme parks, the toys, the cruises. Maybe you can pull it off, but not very likely.
> if smaller oil companies promote innovation that benefits everyone,
They didn't. Standard Oil was cheaper, faster, easier, higher quality, more consistent.. why use anybody else? They weren't being manipulative, they weren't strongarming competition, they just made the best product and everybody wanted it. What's wrong with that?
I'm not really sure what is wrong with that, but the US Supreme Court seemed a bit troubled by it. There's a reasonably well cited summary on Wikipedia:
More accurately it was the United States government which was troubled by it and prosecuted Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust act. Their case before the Supreme Court would have been Standard Oil’s final appeal (note how the prior is United States vs Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey but it flips when it comes before the Supreme Court).
In an adversarial court system, it’s worth keeping in mind that while the Court is who you need to convince, the Court is not your adversary.
On the off chance you’re not making a joke, the story is fascinating and far more nuanced than that. This is one of my favourite biographies and worth a read if you haven’t already!
Several billion dollars is the minimum initial investment cost to compete in this space, to deal with all the patents and legal and regulatory to make your own phone with its own marketplace. If I don't use an iPhone my non-technical family members can't conveniently share photos with me the only way they know how. My friends can't AirDrop me videos. Apple has ensured its products won't interop well with non-Apple products.
...and it hasn't occurred to you to wonder why all of your friends want Apple devices?
There'a a lot to dislike about Apple. But your friends know that airdrop will always work between each other. If Merlin appeared and made airdrop interoperable with your device... Your friends would leave Apple, because all of those experiences would become as fragmented and unreliable as open ecosystems are.
100% cool to hate Apple and wish regulatory doom on them. But don't think that Apple customers will be thankful. They will move to the next closed ecosystem that offers vertical integration and better UX. Because that's what they want.
KDE Connect works as well as airdrop between iOS and Desktop Linux and Android, and isn't a unintrospectable proprietary protocol. (Which is to say honestly it's spotty, but so is Airdrop. It's the underlying Bluetooth that's at fault with both.)
Even then, Apple could choose to let their protocol be reimplimentable by others but they've chosen very explicitly not to. They've locked it down with Apple signatures that can't be used by competitors. As you pointed out, it's a competitive advantage for them to lock others out, so they have. It's working, but it's gross. We can dream about better, but for now, no buying books on the Kindle/Amazon app on your iphone, or buying video off Google Play on your iphone, or Chromecasting AppleTV to your Chromecast (just buy an Apple TV like you're made of money).
I think it has a lot to do with costly signalling - Apple has focused on being the luxury option. That's what a lot of people really want; the closed ecosystem and UX are secondary concerns.
Luxury is just one of their offerings. They are one of the few companies where the "cheap" version of their products is just last years. This is actually super nice and speaks not only to how they're not purely luxury but how they make stuff that lasts a long time.
I don't mean to imply that's it's all bling and no substance - their build quality is indeed generally very good but that's part of it isn't it? Good build quality is a luxury these days, especially in tech.
How is something a “luxury” that is owned by over 50% of the American market?
Since it is easy to pay for a phone on an installment plan, anyone making $15-$20 a hour can pay for one with two hours a month. Even your typical fast food restaurant has to pay that much these days to attract workers.
If I walk into a store and buy the average Android phone for $300 on a no interest 24 month installment plan from T-mobile , I will be paying $12/month.
If I buy a midrange iPhone 13, it’s $24.95 a month.
That’s not even mentioning an iPhone SE that is still faster than high end Android phones for $429 or $17.95 a month.
And that “luxury” iPhone 8 (circa 2018) will have a better resale value and will get OS update for years still runs the latest OS and the iPhone 5s (circa 2013) has had a security update in the last year.
These are all perceptions of status created by the marketing of these global companies.
Saying Apple is luxury is kinda like saying an Applebee’s is luxury - only because there is a cheaper McDonald’s across the street. Phones are definitely status symbols but their ceiling is relatively low.
That being said, in my country iPhones are a much more of a status symbol because everyone really is poorer. Scoffing at Apple’s pricing is the norm here.
Globally, an interesting question is what happens if you take a date to McDonald's. Living in America, that's gonna be the end of your date. Meanwhile, it depends on where in the rest of the globe you're talking about. There are plenty of places in the world where that's a decent, if not high status place to take a date. (There are also non-America places where it's not, mind you.) (A McDonald's-date index would be a fascinating bit of sociology research.)
So are people going to AppleBees only for “status” and not because the food is actually better than McDonalds?
Not everyone wants a $60 Blu R1 HD for $70 no more than everyone wants to eat off the $1 menu at McDonalds. Many people find the entire Android ecosystem janky.
I don’t know what a “Blu R1” is so I can’t bother to go off with you on that tangent. But my point was only that all of these products are designed and priced for global-scale mass consumption. Apple isn’t a Michelin-star restaurant. They’re about as much better as that difference in price is.
I said "the luxury option", not that owning an iPhone is a luxury. Most people will spend whatever they can to get the look they want. Look at their advertising - it's much more about style than features - or notice how you can often tell when someone owns a pair of AirPods because they never take them off. Apple tech is as much about making a fashion statement as it is about the functionality.
They may now have over 50% US smartphone market share but that's only recently the case; however they've had the lion's share of the money for a long time.
So 50% plus of Americans only buy a phone because of the “look”?
Bluetooth headphones and not taking them off has been a thing since they first became popular. Even before that as far back as the Walkman people have walked around with headphones.
Maybe "premium" would be a better word than "luxury"? Apple are trying to be the premium option and people like showing off the premium items they own (which is referred to in scientific circles as 'costly signalling').
Again have you ever thought that something is “premium” based on its feature set and how well it works - not just to impress people?
The difference is that you can buy an iPhone for $17-$25/month compared to $4-$12/month for an Android phone. It’s like going to McDonalds and choosing not to eat off the value menu.
Over 50% of the market including my 80 year old mom are not buying iPhones to impress people.
What does that advert say? We have the best sound quality? We have the most storage? We have the best value for money? None of those things - it says you should buy this because it will make you look cool.
I didn't say every single person who buys an iPhone is just trying to look cool. But that is first and foremost how they sell their products.
> But your friends know that airdrop will always work between each other
The funny thing is, I've literally heard my friends muttering to each other in the car that their airdrop isn't working. Unfortunately most people aren't quite so understanding if an open source equivalent ever breaks for any reason, even if it's just as reliable on average.
> Your friends would leave Apple, because all of those experiences would become as fragmented and unreliable as open ecosystems are.
The reasons for that are also anticompetitive.
Open standards that are not battlegrounds can simply work and be implemented easily. TCP, SSH, BGP, and thousands more work basically flawlessly no matter who is building the software.
So how’s the consumer UX for BGP? Your parents like it ok?
Ingredients can be standardized and commoditized. Apple uses the standard networking protocols (mostly), normal stainless steel formulations, typical interconnects for their display controllers.
But a product, in the sense of something a person decides to buy and someone sits in front of and uses, cannot be standardized while providing a good user experience. That’s literally the truth under the “better mousetrap” saying: people will throw money at you if you make something better, and therefore different, from what’s in the market today.
Yes, differentiating your products is anti-competitive, in the sense that you’re trying to get people to buy your products instead of someone else’s. But it is also fiercely competitive, in the sense that you are competing for business.
The critical insight here is that purchasers value UX over the benefits of standardized, commoditized, undifferentiated products. You can legislate and regulate to prohibit differentiation, but left to their own devices that is not what people want.
The consumer UX for BGP is awesome. It’s invisible.
To fix your argument, let’s pick one that end-users actually interact with: HTTP.
The UX for raw HTTP is pretty rough, and very few people could even use it without at least a refresher on the commands. However, since HTTP is standardized, anyone can make an application with excellent UX and even applications that have excellent UX for specific markets (devs, visually impaired users, non-technical boomers, non-technical millennials, etc). This is typically what people are arguing for: let companies compete at the application level and keep the underlying technologies as open standards.
It's not abusive to build really good experiences for your customers and it's not a mystery why they don't waste their resources developing for the competition.
So? There are ample ways to share a video that aren't based on single-platform features.
If Apple invents a way to do some thing X between two of its users, that's great. That's a platform advantage. There's no legal or moral standing that allows us to insist that they open that to other platforms.
But the result will suck. Sure you can do it but you'll be competing against Apple and Samsung who have invested billions and have the results to show for it. And you'll also end up as a system integrator because millions doesn't buy you your own chips so you'll be at the whim of the other companies investing billions like Qualcomm.
How much does it take? I’ve pondered this a few times over the years for various business ideas, so yeah, I’m genuinely asking in a non snarky way… what does it cost to do an OEM phone ?
I’m referring to the millions and of course cost per unit go down depending on how many units you commit to.
The hardest part is dealing with manufacturers and suppliers. In the US, building phones this way is not as popular as building vertical market hardware for kiosks and special putouse devices.
You choose your screen size. memory, SOC etc. It’s been awhile. But I spent a few years working in field services during the transition from companies using Windows CE to Android for industrial ruggedized devices.
Still pretty pricy, but it’s a lower bar than most people probably think it is if the comments here are anything to go by.
Does make me wonder if there’s anyone out there playing middleman and doing a white label service at an even lower price point, they eyeball the market for design trends and OEM some generic phone designs and then sell them on to smaller shops like small MVNOs that don’t have a few million to spare doing a complete OEM phone of their own.
There have been white label phone manufactures since the original Windows CE based phones. HTC use to manufacture close to 80% of Windows CE phones sold by different brands.
Well the web is a much more open platform that surely promotes innovation and benefits everyone. In aggregate, the web and it's myriad of open and free protocols is indeed running circles around Apple. So much so, Apple cannot exist without them.
Apple did what they do, but their stuff is locked to their phones.
Google made their OS free for everyone. So now a phone maker can spend a HUGE amount of money building an OS and getting apps, or they can just use Android. Spending the money to not use Android looks like a folly.
Except Google trained everyone Android comes with the Play Store.
So either a phone maker has to contribute to Google’s stranglehold on the non-Apple smartphone market, making themselves a commodity, or skip including Google services and consumers won’t accept it.
So we’re now at a place where even if an alternate OS could get applications somehow, I can’t imagine any company being willing to put the money into developing it. Only a state like China could in an attempt to force Android out of their market.
Huh? Apple is a hardware company that built an OS, Google was a software company, that wanted devices to run its OS.
There is no comparison here with origins, since they formed an alliance to actually bring out the OS to multiple devices.
Because network and chicken / egg effect obviously ?
Because an open platform would need first to convince hundred millions of developper to port their App on their platform just to exist.
And the cost does not justify the benefits of that "an open platform" brings.
Apple and Google knows that very well and abuse of it.
Just as a side note I would add: There were a time where Internet explorer was a de-facto (shitty) Monopoly everywhere with terrible consequences.
Technological Freedom and the ability to have the choice brought us Firefox. It tools 10 years of competition to get there.
And The result was a better web for everybody.
Apple with its App store makes a Firefox style scenario impossible: they do decide of the life and death of everything on their platform. Including, ironically, the Web browser.
You're right, it couldn't possibly be that Apple has a superior product (iPhone/iOS) compared to Android's fragmented, poorly supported, borderline bad implementations.
The original question was "why is Apple so dominant?" and the response was basically "they have a lot of network effects helping them" which, while true, ignores the possibility that they are so dominant because they have great products that people want to use and will pay a large premium to use.
Vertical integration, including hardware production. Apple has the capital to buy Foxconn's and the rest of their supplier's exclusive output on the new process for years. Open source just doesn't have the money to compete in kind with those kind of exclusivity agreements in place. Not enough people want a 3 year old phone with shittier specs that costs more than a new phone, with incomplete software that can't be used as a daily driver.
Android is more dominant across the world, and it turns out that it's just open enough that even more open platforms like mobile Linux have not retained comparable developer mindshare.
In the US however as a result of differing strategy behind text and data costs by telecom providers in the 2000s Apple were lucky that it disincentivised using data for messages, so there wasn't the same internet-based messaging app uptake that took place elsewhere globally and basic SMS remained dominant.
Then when iMessage launched in 2011 telecom providers plans had changed enough so that data wasn't as expensive, so it became seamless to keep using the default iPhone messaging app to talk to everyone.
Not sure what this is arguing besides 'might makes right.' Google's Play Store is more open and more dominant, anyhow. Apple succeeds on the strength of their exclusive hardware.
Apple isn't really dominating outside of the USA. I have no Apple products and have no need for them. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are much harder to avoid.
… yeah exactly. You just named the most valuable companies in the world, after the subject of this article. They do this too, and win way more often than not.
Without the US there wouldn't be anything to regulate. Maybe we wouldn't be in this situation if Europe was capable of producing innovative companies that would compete with Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. Instead, it's all copies of ideas pioneered in the US built for the local market.
Pretty arrogant to assume that if the US wasn't available as the most fertile ground for tech companies, then there would be "anything". That's like saying that without China no electronics would be manufactured.
Profit-seeking companies flocking to the most profitable jurisdiction is natural. If that jurisdiction was not available, most of them would simply go to the next most profitable one.
Pretty embarrassing to admit that the only way Europe can compete is if the US didn’t exist. That’s the whole point, Europe is a hostile place for innovation. Even China found its place in the global market and it was dirt poor just 50 years ago.
The US it's a political and sociological copy of Europe. We created you. You were developed around the industrial revolution from the Brits. Without them, you would be a lesser UK with no prosperity points.
Also, not Brits, but without the European hardware and hard as fuck to build components in the 60's, 70's and the 80's, you would be doing... nothing today. No comms, no teleco hardware, no modern Arpanet and Internet, nothing at all.
Have a look on Siemens, or Ericsson. Or ARM. A lot of low-level teleco and electronics has an European development.
The US was born out of escaping what Europe was and then eclipsed it in a mere 300 years because Europe is stagnant and spends more time passing laws protecting “culture” than developing the future. What political similarity are you referring to?
What has Europe created in the last 30 years during the Internet age and arguably the greatest period of technological advancement? Not much at all compared to the US. For every company of note, the US has a match, plus 50x more with the best in AI, self-driving, space, consumer, cloud, silicon, and so much more.
Your self-driving cars are stilll bad. Very bad, far from being a viable vehicle avoiding actual dangers. The cloud it's just rehashed mainframes, every Unix users in the 90's (and Athena) did that. On space, ok, but China it's getting closer daily. Consumer? Europe's food it's far better and cheaper. Silicon? ARM it's starting to create new chips again.
Intel's design it's really bad, stacking layers and layers over 8086. Ditto with AMD64, a modern design but chained to i386's legacies. At least with Pentium IIII and beyond did it right; but further RISC and OpenPower will put Intel/amd64 aside. Even more with the climate change and ultra low-power ARM based servers.
On AI, China has goverment funded project far ahead of the USA. And scarier for civil rights, OFC. But that's another question.
You trully innovated in the 50's, 60's and 70's. You are very far from the innovation of that era. Even the infamous Crispr technology was build upon the basis started from a Spaniard.
Back in the day you had Unix, VMS, Tops 10, Tops 20, and ITS from MIT with C, LISP... with crazy new and cool features which didn't ever exist in any place in the world. Today you are rehashing 90's tech over and over. Such as Go built upon Plan9/Inferno/Alef and plan9's C compilers.
Where's the new cool stuff? The MIT machine with ITS with Emacs and RMS with GNU looked like alien technology from another dimension.
If you were as revolutionary as the 70's, we would heave cheap, reliable desktop and laptop sized machines with Risc-V chips and free software available for any citizen. No, not a laptop for $1200, but much cheaper, making the ideal STEM/creativity machine.
Huh? We have Waymo and Cruise, both of which operate a taxi service with no driver in the car in a major city, on top of many other smaller players including Tesla. Waymo has a stellar safety record to boot. Bad compared to what exactly? Not human drivers, not anything built anywhere else.
>The cloud it's just rehashed mainframes, every Unix users in the 90's (and Athena) did that.
If everyone was doing it, how come the top 3 players are all in the US? Why is Europe reliant on US cloud instead of having its own? And just like everything else, only "competing" with it by kneecapping it with regulation.
>On space, ok, but China it's getting closer daily.
Not Europe though, is it?
>Consumer? Europe's food it's far better and cheaper.
Consumer technology... which is what this conversation is about.
>On AI, China has goverment funded project far ahead of the USA.
Again, what does this have to do with Europe? Further, what projects exactly? If you can't use them, they don't exist. OpenAI is making entire job functions obsolete today.
Reminder that the population of the US is 350M, EU 450M, Europe 750M, and China 1.5B.
What is the point of antitrust law? Of policing anticompetitive behavior? My naive hope is that it is a service of our government to protect consumers from companies who use their considerable power and influence to otherwise abuse or extort money from them.
The way the App Store and apple’s ecosystem is structured, they are able to extort as much money out of their users as they care to.
Let’s suppose they get crazy and jack their fees up to 100%.
Will people stop buying iPhones? Not likely — many people now have a lot of their life stored on iCloud.
Will they stop buying their apps? I guess they could, but where the hell else are they going to get apps for their phone?
Will developers switch platforms or ignore iOS altogether? Probably not, since really their bottom line wouldn’t be affected. They’d just pass the fees on.
This is yet another big blow to the consumer. And I can’t understand why _populace_ isn’t the primary focus of these decisions. Companies don’t need protection. Epic is not threatening apple’s position in any way and whatever resultant requirement from the court wouldn’t have substantially hurt Apple, only made them work a bit harder. I know, boo hoo for the $3 trillion company.
You don't yield, but neither do you understand antitrust law.
Apple has no monopoly. Apple is not abusing its market dominance. It doesn't have enough of the market to come CLOSE to the kinds of chicanery that has typically generated antitrust interest from DOJ. Think back to Microsoft in the 1990s, or read up on it if it was before your time. They had a stranglehold on computing. You literally couldn't buy a PC without paying for a Windows license, even if you didn't want it.
All this grousing about Apple's closed platform is just grousing. If you want what Apple has built in their garden, work to make YOUR garden better. Most people use something else.
What do you mean their (developers') bottom line wouldn't be affected? Their revenue from iOS would go to 0. They would definitely jump ship, and users would follow.
If you think Apple could do increase their fees to 100% without any consequences why are they not doing it? Do they not like money?
Consider that for an experience to exist _at all_ on iOS, the developer must pay an additional 30% tax to Apple - that's on top of other cost burdens.
It's not simply an advertising premium for the App Store - it's a license to run your software on their platform period (not dissimilar to console games).
If someone wanted to produce a competitor to Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Uber and the like - their startups could never be cost competitive on iOS because they wouldn't operate at the same scale as competitors.
The argument of "what more could you want from your device that the mega corps don't already provide" ignores the fact that you'll never know what you're missing out on because those products never got off the ground.
I'm not saying iOS is bad, it's that Apple isn't incentivised to create a marketplace that encourages competition, instead they actively hinder things that would make their platform richer for the user.
The market has demonstrated that success is contingent on such practices. Without regulators stepping in to change the rules of play, it's unlikely we will see an environment less hostile towards competition in digital products/services.
> If someone wanted to produce a competitor to Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Uber and the like - their startups could never be cost competitive on iOS because they wouldn't operate at the same scale as competitors.
Netflix and Spotify haven’t allowed in app purchases for years and don’t give Apple any “cut”. Uber doesn’t use in app purchases. It gives you the option of using Apple Pay which charges standard credit card rates.
Again, if it’s only Apple, why wouldn’t all of these “innovations” be happening on Android.
> We now turn to Apple’s cross-appeal, beginning with its
arguments concerning the UCL. The district court found that
Epic suffered an injury sufficient to confer Article III
standing, concluded that Apple’s anti-steering provision
violates the UCL’s unfair prong, and entered an injunction
prohibiting Apple from enforcing the anti-steering provision
against any developer. Apple challenges each aspect on
appeal. We affirm.
i.e., the District Court found Apple to be violating CA Unfair Competition Law which Apple had appealed and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concurs with the district court.
Consequence of this ruling is limiting the ability of app developers to communicate the availability of alternative payment options to iOS device users is unlawful. As a result, alternate payment methods can no longer be restricted by Apple.
The question of commission (30%) still remains because the ruling is silent on it except for observing what the district court said.
> Because the district court accepted only a general version of Apple’s IP-compensation rationale (that Apple was entitled to “some compensation”),
Epic at step three needed only to fashion a less-restrictive
alternative calibrated to achieving that general goal, instead
of one achieving the level of compensation that Apple
currently achieves through its 30% commission.
My reading of this is that the 30% commission can come under challenge from another plaintiff. Epic took a different tactic on this specific argument and failed to establish it. However, the Appeals court's observaton seems to indicate there is legal room for a challenger to attack this.
If I read that correctly, does it mean that Epic can now direct you to a website to buy in-game currency outside of the reach of Apple's 30% bullshit tax?
Not so fast. The court affirmed the following-Epic can direct users to a website for alternate payment. But they left it ambiguous on whether Apple is entitled to compensaton at 30% of revenues. The courts (both district and appeals) seem to believe that Apple is entitled to some compensation under IP compensation theory.
So, if the Netherlands dating apps case ruling is any indication (Apple discounted the 30% to 27% for dating apps in Netherlands for using alt payment methods in that suit), Apple is likely to do something similar here in cases where their In-app-payments are not used.
I've heard the Netherlands one mentioned, but I don't get at all how that nor the anti-steering provision here would actually function. Were the dating apps IOS-only? Were the alt-payments embedded in the mobile app?
In this case, anti-steering stops Apple from preventing mobile apps from mentioning the mere _existence_ of other platforms. This doesn't have to be an embedded "pay with Epic" link, it could be a text blurb that says "Save 30% by buying on epic.com", might not even be a link. How could Apple possibly demand a fee in that scenario?
The only possible way to handle this would be to renegotiate terms to split payments by-platform for players regardless of where they make the purchase. But why would Epic ever negotiate terms like that when a court just threw out the anti-steering provisions universally?
The app still has to be distributed to ios devices. The only permitted way for devs to distribute ios apps is through the app store. So, even if the devs now have choice on payment methods (apple in-app payments, 3rd party payment processors like Stripe or pay at website etc.,) after the court ruling, they still need to sign the Apple DPLA to get access to ios distribution through the app store.
The DPLA provides the devs with access to Apple IP.
The courts have ruled that Apple is entitled for some compensation under the IP compensation legal theory. The Appeals court left what some means as ambiguous.
Until some jurisdiction finds the Apple app store as a monopoly and forces Apple to open up ios app distribution to 3rd party app stores, the Netherlands situation is likely to continue where Apple takes the stance that the value of ios distribution for apps is 27% to 30%; 27% for alt payment methods and 30% for using Apple in-app payments. Apple's stance is ios distribution is worth at least 27% of app revenues.
As a very specific case, an app developer targeting the India market could now use the UPI payment method (which is free for up to approx. $1500 per transaction) and pay only 27% or use an alternate payment provider that charges 1.5% transaction fee for a total cost of 28.5% instead of 30% and being forced to use Apple in-app-payments. [This is assuming Apple amends their DPLA with the 27% similar to Netherlands for alternate payment methods around the world].
Everyone talks about sideloading as something to circumvent 30% tax. While maybe true, I'm interested to see if sideloading would allow new browser engines, like gecko or chromium. This will open a ton of possibilities weakening even more the walled garden
Worth noting that side-loading and rooting are not the same thing. Various aspects of the OS (APIs) would still be locked down, whether you can sideload apps or not. So you would not see all the cool tweaks that were (are?) available to jailbreakers.
A simple way to answer that question is – is the only roadblock to building a custom browser in iOS that Apple will reject it during the review process? Or are there some fundamental missing APIs or piece of functionality in the platform itself? The latter gap will not be fixed even if you are able to bypass the App Store.
Varenc below is right. Side loading only bypasses the App Store, all the iOS security controls are still in effect.
That means there is no way to do things current apps can’t. You can’t make a JIT, so no good alternate browsers. You can’t install other apps, so no making your own store. You can’t make background services like a web server that will always run. You can’t make widgets that are more interactive than what exists now. Nor can you get GPS data without or force the microphone on, the user still has to agree.
Side loading gets you side loading. You don’t get expanded privileges without exploits. And expect Apple to be working really hard right now at putting stronger enforcement on private APIs and preventing sandbox escape or limiting access if you do.
> [...]Furthermore, the gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services. - Digital Markets Act
So you’re right about stores. You have to be able to side load and install new spa from your side loaded store.
That seems to be the only restriction being lifted.
Nothing in there seems to say any of the other stuff has to be allowed for side loaded apps. As long as Apple doesn’t let App Store apps do it, they don’t appear to have to allow any new functionality outside that necessary to allow working app stores.
> The gatekeeper shall not require end users to use, or business users to use, to offer, or to interoperate with, an identification service, a web browser engine or a payment service, or technical services that support the provision of payment services, such as payment systems for in-app purchases, of that gatekeeper in the context of services provided by the business users using that gatekeeper’s core platform services.
Section 43 :
> Certain services provided together with, or in support of, relevant core platform services of the gatekeeper, such as identification services, web browser engines, payment services or technical services that support the provision of payment services, such as payment systems for in-app purchases, are crucial for business users to conduct their business and allow them to optimise services. In particular, each browser is built on a web browser engine, which is responsible for key browser functionality such as speed, reliability and web compatibility. When gatekeepers operate and impose web browser engines, they are in a position to determine the functionality and standards that will apply not only to their own web browsers, but also to competing web browsers and, in turn, to web software applications. Gatekeepers should therefore not use their position to require their dependent business users to use any of the services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services by the gatekeeper itself as part of the provision of services or products by those business users. In order to avoid a situation in which gatekeepers indirectly impose on business users their own services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, gatekeepers should also be prohibited from requiring end users to use such services, when that requirement would be imposed in the context of the service provided to end users by the business user using the core platform service of the gatekeeper. That prohibition aims to protect the freedom of the business user to choose alternative services to the ones of the gatekeeper, but should not be construed as obliging the business user to offer such alternatives to its end users.
Disentangling JIT surely hasn't been an easy task, but they have had years to prepare and I don't think Apple will risk a recurring 20% annual global revenue fine.
This is the big one that I think people don’t fully appreciate!
Without using JIT (just-in-time compilation), your browser’s JavaScript will be terribly slow. But allowing JIT compilation (allowing an app to mark memory pages as executable, i.e. turn data into machine code) will also allow an app to introduce arbitrary new behavior after the app review and make it much easier for it to break out of the iOS sandbox.
Stuff like calling private iOS APIs or security sensitivity APIs using machine code downloaded from an external source that an app reviewer will have no way of foreseeing. This isn’t possible otherwise.
Even if the app/browser with JIT permissions isn’t malicious, it still opens up way more attack surface area. (Of course Safari already has the same risk)
That said, I of course really want more genuine browser options on iOS. But there are real security reasons for Apple’s reluctance, though I’m sure this can solved. But alternative browsers come with different security concerns that don’t apply to just allowing app side-loading (since even now side-loaded apps can’t implement JIT compilation)
And there's ways forward - iOS already has a "web-browser" entitlement. Apple could use it, or a similar one, to give approved applications access to JIT. I think it would be fine for just a select few developers (Firefox, Chrome) to get ability to JIT. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...
Which is the reason the JIT runs in its own sandbox connected through IPC IIRC.
Breaking the JIT isn’t supposed to even get you access to the parent process (Safari), let alone anything more, assuming you don’t have a kernel exploit too.
Agreed! I didn't mean for my comment to imply otherwise. (even Apple's refusal to allow other browsers, which would require JIT to be performant, illustrates Apple is aware the risk)
Current browser research suggests you don’t need JIT, as evidenced by the ability to disable it on iOS. Wonder how close you could get to “great” performance with a Firefox port without JIT.
If Google were allowed to publish Chrome, not based on Safari, but without a JIT tomorrow I think they’d get review bombed by normal users complaining about how it suddenly got slower than the current WebKit implementation.
It’s mostly developers who care about the engine, end users are going to care far more about the performance.
In my experience, disabling the JIT on iOS (via Lockdown mode) results in slow performance and greatly increased battery drain on JS heavy websites and web views. The battery drain being the worst part. But of course with a site like HN there’s no noticeable difference.
You also need a JIT entitlement for the application. Otherwise your browser engine will only be able to interpret JavaScript instead of JIT compiling it. Good luck getting any modern JavaScript framework running with only interpretation available.
Some JavaScript frameworks will work, others will randomly break with timeouts and other weird failures. While we'd hope we'd get less JavaScript abuse all that would happen is no one would use that browser.
So theoretically you should be able to grab an .ipa package with a native browser today and load it on your device in developer mode or through your enterprise program. The fact that not a single one actually exists seems more due to a technological limitation than the fact that no one has bothered to build it yet.
there is no roadblock to it besides no developers being interested in doing it, you can sideload anything you want (though you are limited to an absurd degree unless you pay apple $100/yr for a developer license), you can even do things like enable JIT for sideloaded apps so even that limitation doesn't exist for sideloading browsers. several emulators, like dolphin, already have working JITs on ios devices.
it's already competing, and quite successfully (hello battery life and ram usage). but when google.com displays a "better in chrome" message, or when they adopt some proposal instead of waiting on the process, then it's no longer about competition.
It doesn't work _anywhere_, as iPhone does not currently have sideloading. It's been reported that sideloading could come in iOS 17 later this year, in EU, but unannounced so far.
I'd argue that legislation like GDPR had more positive impact on user privacy than any walled garden managed by any for-profit entity. See Uber using the device ID even against App Store policy for years and not getting immediately kicked out after discovery [1]
Apple's clampdown on Facebook came after GDPR and apparently wasn't a problem for years until Apple decided it was beneficial to their marketing and a way to push their own ads better.
Rule of thumb is: when you are big enough, you can do basically anything you want when you don't talk about it.
So it seems like where we're at with this is... Apple can continue to charge a 30% fee on all transactions, but maybe can't prevent apps that direct users to sign up through a web browser to avoid the fees? (Pending further appeals)
My understanding is that Apple can still contractually require developers to hand over the 30% even if developers use a third party service. The judge's ruling was pretty narrow; it essentially allows nothing more than a link to an alternative payment platform. I haven't seen any in-depth analysis of the case to suggest that this is any kind of 'loophole' that could be used to avoid paying apple.
This is why I think it's so misguided when people talk about and push for "alternative payment processors" or "alternative app stores" when what they really mean is "I don't want to pay 30%" and just hope it comes for free with the former.
Okay cool you can have alternative app stores, you still need a business relationship with Apple, have to submit your apps for review to get your app signed, and turn over I guess 27% of all digital goods sold. But you can have your own storefront and downloader. Congrats.
Which really goes to demonstrate how ridiculous this is.
The iPhone is a coin-operated software runtime. You pay for it at the register and buy the right to own the phone, but your ownership of the software is constantly jeopardized. Everything you use for free you take for granted, and everything you pay for is rent-extracted by the world's largest company.
It's a harmful business. You can argue there are benefits, but the surcharge for simply using the Apple runtime is asinine. It should be loathed and shunned from the highest court, rendered unconscionable for any company of any size. Apple and Google can charge a 90% tax on their app stores for all I care. Those stores simply need competition to compel non-harmful practice. Otherwise, they're completely unaccountable. They've already proven this with their non-cooperation in the browser industry.
All I know is iOS/iPadOS have made it possible for my parents and all the non native English literate, mostly uneducated elders in my family able to use modern computing devices without me ever having to worry about malware.
I think it uncontroversial that this experience is so rare that it doesn't justify forbidding sideloading on Android, Windows, and MacOS. Then it also doesn't justify it for iOS.
If it was so rare, then there would have been no need for the plethora of software made to get rid of malware like CCleaner and malwarebytes and ninite.com and so many others.
Not that any of those save you from malware, necessarily. Nor the App Store - NSO has proven that you don't even need to install anything to get your iOS devices compromised. At some point, we have to acknowledge that all cell phones rely on their user to not mess things up. Even on iOS you can respond to the Nigerian Prince on iMessage with an Apple Pay of $300 (to be repaid as $1,000,000 in the Kingsland, of course).
If people want to use only Apple-sanctioned apps, that should be an option. It should not be the impetus for keeping features off the iPhone though.
The alternative is a developer mode switch with a big "Don't Touch This, Grandma!" modal when you press it. People who want to install their own software do not conflict with your parents or the non-native English literate uneducated elders in your family.
The ability for the app store to take a percentage of each in-app purchase blows my mind.
Same for the private copying levy that can take a percentage on each storage device sale.
This is power abuse and it's a shame that the judges let it pass.
In the Netherlands dating apps won their case for third party payment processors but they still have to pay Apple something like 27% (instead of 30%). It's self-reported but you can bet Apple will come after them if it thinks they are fudging the numbers.
Yes because theyre distributed through the app store.
If you distribute via sideloading - Apple cannot claim that they had to incur the costs of vetting each update, distribution, payment processing, security, server maintenance, etc.
I had posted a separate comment on the ruling that discusses this point.
The district court and the appeals court both agree that Apple is well within its rights to charge developers $99 initially and x% of revenues, under the principle of what they are calling IP compensation.
The district court did not completely agree to Apple's argument that 30% is fair (they expressly rejected it) and the appeals court observed that Epic's tactic on this argument was legally flawed and mentioned something to the effect of Epic should have used a different argument (and since they didn't, we are not ruling on this). To me, this looks like a vulnerability for Apple that they could be attacked by a different plaintiff using a different legal theory.
It seems like you're saying that there can exist enforceable revenue-sharing agreements between developers and Apple. But with sideloading, I don't see why a developer would have to enter into any contract with Apple in the first place? And in the absence of any contract, surely Apple would have no right to a developer's revenue?
The court held the Apple DPLA (developer program license agreement) as an adhesion agreement. If you want to develop apps for Apple you need to sign that. I think that is also needed to get their compilers, SDK etc., that provides apps access to their IP (i.e., the device, ios etc.,).
While the contours of how sideloading is going to unravel is unknown at this time, it is possible that Apple may still use some form of app notarization (perhaps an API for 3rd party stores and require that the stores use those APIs -- similar to their stance on webkit).
Then, similar to the Netherlands case where dating apps were allowed alternatives to InAppPayments, but charged 27% commission, Apple might charge a discounted commission (relative to the 30%) for sideloaded apps.
They will look to get their cut.
I don't like it, but that seems to be where this is headed.
It's at least technically possible to build an iOS app without any Apple tools. It seems like there are some guides already (https://vojtastavik.com/2018/10/15/building-ios-app-without-...), and I imagine it will become easier if there's suddenly a lot of interest in avoiding Apple tools.
I agree it's not entirely clear how this will play out, but I don't think a simple policy of sideloading only apps approved by Apple (or someone acting like their proxy) would be compatible with DMA rules like
> The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.
There are some security-related caveats, so perhaps Apple can use those as a pretense for denying sideloaded apps access to a bunch of features, but I don't see how they could block simple games etc.
But they didn’t get past signing. They did the signing steps themselves but still used a developer account. The iPhone will not run unsigned code and you can’t get a signing key without the help of Apple.
Apple has enough security to ensure nothing gets on the phone without their signing, and legally they are in full control over that and can set the terms (within what’s legal for contracts). No court or law has yet said that has to change.
People have speculated that side loading may work by Apple just letting you download the fully signed IPA file, as it would exist in the App Store. That way side loaded apps would pass the security checks but Apple is still in full control.
IANAL, but to me "allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software" sounds like a broad rule. There are a few exceptions mentioned in that provision, but it doesn't seem like a gatekeeper would be able to just come up with their own exceptions where they won't follow the rule, like "except for apps we don't like" or "except if the developer hasn't agreed to pay us".
Apple will be required to "allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications".
IANAL, but I doubt a policy of "sideloading is allowed, but only for apps that we approve and/or developers who pay us" would be considered compliant with that.
They could enforce some sort of signature requirement, but if they tried to force developers into some sort of business relationship before being able to sign, that seems like failing to allow third-party software.
Apple's commission could very well be on the basis that they create and maintain the APIs, libraries, and GPU that enable the developers to distribute on iOS at all.
but if you run on their OS and use apps that take advantage of iCloud or push notifications or any host of apple services, none of that is free. those apps are getting tools and support and features as well as OS APIs to use.
Then charge people for it. Developers are the people enabling and exposing this functionality, not the ones using it. Apple gives away the Apple services and iCloud functionality to all of their users - if these are expensive then it makes no sense to charge the developers for it. By your logic, this "expensive OS" theory should be amortized by an iOS subscription service - but it's not. Apple chooses to develop iOS, it is not democratically compensated somehow by the success of the App Store.
Orwell himself warned of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable", maybe the company that spoofed 1984 should take it to heart. The optics of the world's largest business doubling-down on their right to control what their customers use is a bit dystopian, if I say so myself.
But that assumes that Apple is the marketplace in the first place.
The best way to think about this is in terms of accesories for physical products.
Unofficial aftermarket accesories are considered completely legal to make and sell, without paying a dime to the base product's manufacturer. Such should be the case with iOS. Apps are essentially "digital accesories".
This feels a lot like a case where the EU may have wanted Apple to lose all their controls but they didn’t put it in the law.
Apple can still charge 30% (perhaps minus CC fees). They can still force you to be a developer in good standing. They can still limit what apps can do via their APIs. Heck they might be able to give App Store apps extra privileges because the developer choose the App Store.
If they wanted iOS to look as open as Windows or MacOS they needed to specify that.
The problem is that, at least in Europe, the intent of the law is evaluated just as strongly as the letter of the law.
So, if we got this law that very clearly says it shall be easy to technically and effectively install third-party apps as a user, and also contains provisions that say third-party apps must get the same API access first-party ones get, it would be ridiculous for a court to reach the conclusion that it's acceptable for a developer to still be subjected to Apple's whims, except now they're being screwed inside their own infra!(tm)
I would have said the same thing about allowing third-party payment providers but we will see. I have no doubt Apple could come up with some kind of "justification". Do they start charging for Xcode if you don't distribute through the App Store? "Xcode Pro", only thing that can build for sideloading and it costs $X/yr or "Any app built with it must give X% to Apple"?
Presumably, knowing Apple, sideloading will still require your app be signed by Apple and all the fanfare that comes with it. You're now just allowed to have your own storefront and distribute your app through it.
It's not just a change in the distribution channel; the law makes that clear.
The outcome the law is aiming at is one where a developer can make and distribute an app without entering into any contractual relationship with Apple at all.
I haven’t heard anyone show that in the reporting I’ve seen.
That may have been the intention (I suspect so) but I don’t think the letter of the law made that clear. Which means it will take either an updated law or a court case to clarify that before it happens.
Because Apple is clearly not going to just roll over.
> The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.
That's the user's side. Let's look at the developer's:
> [...]Furthermore, the gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services.
EVERYTHING on iOS is sandboxed. Even Apple’s own software (though some of it gets special carveouts).
There is no reason to believe side loaded apps won’t get the same treatment, and every reason to believe Apple has been doubling down on securing and tightening up the current sandbox implementation.
Their commission is for their intellectual property (SDK, patents, etc). Payment processing was just another service internalized in their commission to facilitate collecting it.
To bypass their commission you'd have to make a web app and not a native iOS app, which is something developers have been able to do since the beginning of the iPhone.
With sideloading there's nothing preventing a developer to write a native app, and provide an in-app input for entering credit card number and handle payments without Apple involved at all.
Definitely less convenient and more risky for sure, but technically no problem at all.
It's not that the apps wouldn't use iOS APIs, it's that the developers wouldn't use Apple tools to develop them.
Presumably every iOS developer has an iDevice to test and debug on. The right to use the iOS APIs on-device is inherent in having legal and physical posession of it.
You still can’t get anything to run without Apple’s signature. And there is no way to get that without a dev account which requires agreeing to their terms.
I agree fully about the user side. I wonder if that’s true about the developer story. I can see a couple of ways that could go depending on how various terms are defined.
I’m willing to bet Apple will go with the most charitable (to them) interpretation they think might hold water and try to defend it in court.
I think the law's Article 13 is worthy of quoting:
> 3. The gatekeeper shall ensure that the obligations of Articles 5, 6 and 7 are fully and effectively complied with.
> 4. The gatekeeper shall not engage in any behaviour that undermines effective compliance with the obligations of Articles 5, 6 and 7 regardless of whether that behaviour is of a contractual, commercial or technical nature, or of any other nature, or consists in the use of behavioural techniques or interface design.
> 6. The gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5, 6 and 7, or make the exercise of those rights or choices unduly difficult, including by offering choices to the end-user in a non-neutral manner, or by subverting end users’ or business users' autonomy, decision-making, or free choice via the structure, design, function or manner of operation of a user interface or a part thereof.
> 7. Where the gatekeeper circumvents or attempts to circumvent any of the obligations in Article 5, 6, or 7 in a manner described in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 of this Article, the Commission may open proceedings pursuant to Article 20 and adopt an implementing act referred to in Article 8(2) in order to specify the measures that the gatekeeper is to implement.
Apple already knows who is installing which apps and when they are executed.
So they can easily tie it back to the developer and simply bill them.
And if they fail to pay the bill, Apple can (a) disable their developer account so they can't sign new apps or (b) add them to the server-side block list that they have been using for spam/malware on OSX for years now.
I don't really understand the commenters complaning here. Both of these two things can be true at the same time: companies operating "app stores" are indeed not monopolies under the Antitrust Act and yet "app stores" are an unacceptable distortion of the market. The solution seems pretty simple and is exactly what Europe did with the DMA: make a new law specifically targeted at digital stores.
Rather than allowing side-loading on iOS. I hope Apple is forced to open up its bootloader on iPhones.
Step 1: Go to the Apple store and ask to unlock the bootloader, they give you a form to void the warranty and Apple Care, they then unlock the bootloader.
Step 2: Wait for the Asahi Linux, Valve/Steam Proton, Google, and the Pinephone teams to showcase their skills.
Why should it void warranty? It must not void warranty unless apple can prove that unlocking/tinkering was the real cause of damange. Don't give up on your rights easily folks
Eh, at this step you might just write your own OS to run on Apple hardware.
I mean, this could be something. Buy Apple phones at discount, rebrand them and have your own OS. Lose Apple warranty but provide your own instead. A niche market but a market nevertheless.
Conversely, one could bring up the literal war in a particular European country, downfall of women's rights and rising LGBT+ intolerance in a certain developed country, rising income inequality and climate change.
We are living in the most peaceful time in history and one war doesn't change that. You are a victim of media. Try reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling and getting off the internet, it will do you some good.
Sure, you can cherry pick bad events that happen throughout history. But the truth is that:
- the war in Ukraine is significantly less deadly / destructive / etc than basically every other major war in the last 100 years.
- not even sure where to start with this one? Downfall of women's rights... where?
- LGBT+ are more accepted globally (and in the US) than they've ever been.
- Income inequality is a silly metric to care about when actual poverty is going down.
- More people and companies care about climate change than at any other point in history.
Are you seeing the trend? Just because some things might be "bad" by your standards doesn't mean they're not the best they've ever been, and doesn't mean they're not getting better.
To be fair not really… other states have been involved in bigger and overall more terrible wars since then. Not USSR/Russia
Chechnya was much shorter and on a smaller scale. Russia has already lost several times more several times more troops in Ukraine than they had during the entire war in Afghanistan (9 years) of course the civilian and Afghan casualties were mich bigger.
Their involvement in other conflicts was indirect, relatively limited or quite short term (Hungary etc.)
Yes, I wasn't really worrying about the indirect/direct distinction, given that the comments I was replying to were trying to make a point about overall global suffering and evil "winning". It doesn't really matter if Russia is invading Ukraine directly or arming insurgents in [insert proxy war here] – the result is still having a hand in creating suffering, and Ukraine is no worse (better in fact by most metrics) than what they've been doing since WWII.
Mind you I don't think the US/UK/whomever has been doing that much better, but Russia is being picked on because that is who menus singled out.
If I understand it correctly, they are reaffirming the decision that Apple has to allow developers to link to other payment options? Which mostly mollifies the issue IMO no? I can just create a link to my site for payment?
Yes, that's the only one they upheld. But it doesn't say that Apple can't still charge a fee for any users that come from the iOS app or otherwise use the iOS app (i.e. this doesn't mean Apple can never implement iOS licensing fees on a per-user basis), so they might still charge 27% of sales initiated/driven by their product, iOS.
My read is you're permitted to link to your site for payments now, which was not permitted before, but this decision didn't force Apple to allow external in-app payments. So it only really impacts companies selling external subscriptions like Netflix. I'm sure the decision will be aggressively dissected over the next couple of hours by actual attorneys, anyway.
It's unclear to me if this only covers "check out mycompany.com for alternative payment options" links, or if your link could be a "Purchase Now" button that goes right to a payment form. If the latter is also allowed, then you could set up a pretty frictionless experiences that completely bypasses paying the 30% Apple tax.
“Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized, and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly—usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition.
Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn’t claim to be a monopoly. But is it one? Well, it depends: a monopoly in what? Let’s say that Google is primarily a search engine. As of May 2014, it owns about 68% of the search market. (Its closest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have about 19% and 10%, respectively.) If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen to Bing.
But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search engine advertising market is $17 billion annually. Online advertising is $37 billion annually.”
“The entire U.S. advertising market is $150 billion. And global advertising is a $495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.”
“What if we frame Google as a multifaceted technology company instead? This seems reasonable enough; in addition to its search engine, Google makes dozens of other software products, not to mention robotic cars, Android phones, and wearable computers. But 95% of Google’s revenue comes from search advertising; its other products generated just $2.35 billion in 2012, and its consumer tech products a mere fraction of that. Since consumer tech is a $964 billion market globally, Google owns less than 0.24% of it—a far cry from relevance, let alone monopoly. Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention.”
Excerpt From
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
>> Even after the Epic v Apple court case, Apple unfortunately still wins. Don't like it?, Maybe use PWAs or failing that build an alternative. Good luck.
A predictable Epic failure and Apple still collects the 30% commission regardless.
Legit pricing vs pure greed(Epic) hiding in a knight in shining armour fighting for all developers. As a dev myself I know the tax is high but Apple does a great job and not gonna say should be arbitrary 8.5% lower or whatever Epic is trying to wring out
In case anyone is interested in the legal background behind this decision I've read through the ruling and here are the key reasons why Epic's appeal failed:
1. The first reason involves Epic's attempt to define the relevant antitrust market as "iOS app distribution".
Courts do not allow you to simply declare an arbitrarily narrow market consisting of a single company in order to claim that company has a monopoly over the distribution of its own product. In antitrust law these are known as "single-brand aftermarkets" and are generally considered the exception rather than the rule. There are very specific criteria that need to be met in order for a "single-brand aftermarket" to be allowed:
> "In sum, to establish a single-brand aftermarket, a plaintiff must show: (1) the challenged aftermarket restrictions are “not generally known” when consumers make their foremarket purchase; (2) “significant” information costs prevent accurate life-cycle pricing; (3) “significant” monetary or non-monetary switching costs exist; and (4) general market-definition principles regarding cross-elasticity of demand do not undermine the proposed single-brand market."
The burden of proof was on Epic to provide evidence for all four criteria, and they failed at step (1). In order for "iOS app distribution" to qualify as a "single-brand aftermarket", Epic would need to prove that consumers were unaware that they would be limited to purchasing apps from the App Store when they originally bought their iPhones. Because if they knew about that restriction ahead of time and bought iPhones anyway, then they did so willingly, despite having the option to purchase smartphones on the marketplace without such restrictions.
2. The second reason involves Epic's failure to prove that Apple's app distribution restrictions were unreasonable.
Courts use a three-step process to analyze whether a competitor's behavior is considered an unreasonable restraint of trade:
Step 1: The plaintiff first has to show that the restraints have an anti-competitive effect.
Step 2: The defendant is then given the opportunity to show a pro-competitive justification for the restraint.
Step 3: The plaintiff then has to show that those pro-competitive justifications could have been achieved via less restrictive alternatives.
In this case, the court agreed with Epic that the constraints were anti-competitive. However, they also agreed with Apple that the restraints were justified because a) Apple is entitled to compensation for the use of their IP, and b) the restraints increase the security and privacy of their platform. At that point the burden is shifted back to Epic to show how (a) and (b) could have been achieved through less restrictive alternatives, which Epic failed to do.
I feel like this is a case of winning the battle but losing the war. Epic started a movement which has resulted in legislative changes all over the world.
EU can’t enforce laws outside their legal jurisdiction. So I guess if you somehow trick Apple into seeing your phone as operating in the EU, then this would work. But I don’t know how you could do so if you use a cellular data connection.
Look at already existing geo blocking systems. It always depends on the implementation.
Can you buy a cheap DVD somewhere in Asia, and play it at home in the US? No, because the DVD has a region, and the player has a region, and so, you also have to buy a player where you buy the DVD.
Netflix has another system, it checks in real time. You get the content of the region your client connects from. If you fire up a VPN, you get the catalogue of the region your VPN server is in (if Netflix lets you connect, that is).
There are a lot of regulatory requirements that change by region. Besides health regulations there are spectrum regulations, privacy and data governance regulations, and heck, in China the entire iCloud infrastructure is completely different.
We don’t know that. If/when Apple allows side loading it might be available globally (eventually anyway) to avoid any public backlash and practical concerns .
WebGPU + WebAssembly is an alternative way around walled gardens, which would enable Epic to distribute Fortnite to iOS users via a client side web-app, enabling them to bypass Apple entirely.
It would certainly be a great thing if UE was to have a second try at this. Nothing on any of the public roadmap (https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/) or references in WIP code that suggests this. Lets hope your friends are correct :P
I got the impression the HTML5 with WebGL platform was removed at least partly to minimize the scope of work with some of the large renderer changes Epic has made between 4.26 and 5. So now does seem like the right time for them to try to tackle the problem again.
That doesn't work if Apple doesn't add support for WebGPU in their Safari, which is the only browser engine on iOS. It barely got push notification support. Hell I can't even play a standard opus audio file from Safari.
I'm not speaking about WebGPU specifically, just about how Apple is generally behind in implementations, especially on iOS. Apple supported push notifications on MacOS Safari for years, and just recently has it only been added to iOS. Even that Safari Technology Preview is only on the MacOS version of Safari, so like push notifications, doesn't mean iOS support until it happens.
"Behind in implementations"—of non-standard "standards" Google loads into Chrome and then pushes devs to include in their web apps, just like Microsoft did with ActiveX back in the day, and for exactly the same reason: so that not only does their stuff only work on Chrome, but people like you see it not working on Safari and think the reason for that is that Apple is somehow working against them for nefarious purposes.
I don't think that works when Apple have implemented notifications on MacOS Safari for years. So it's not that Apple disagree with the standard, but they don't want to bring it to iOS.
Apple are even on the WHATWG standards body that defined notification spec: https://notifications.spec.whatwg.org/ . And WHATWG is the actual standard, not a non-standard standard. W3C ceded to them a few years ago, which is news to me.
If we were talking about other features, like Web Bluetooth or Web HID which are just drafts on W3C but Google decided to implement anyways, I wouldn't disagree with you. I use Firefox myself, so none of these are supported on Firefox either.
Everything makes sense now. I’ve wondered for years why they’ve dragged their feet with Safari and your hypothesis fits. I wonder if MS followed the same line of reasoning in the 00s.
I think they decided to play legal chicken and hoped Apple would blink, and Apple did not. The play wasn't entirely unfounded.
A lot of current law around things like app stores is existing in the liminal space of "Are these restrictions legal? Nobody knows. Do you want to be the one who stakes all your company's money and your investors' money and your entire business model on finding out?"
Epic did the calculus and seemed to conclude they wanted to be the ones to take the hit (possibly because since they also own their own app store, the math was a little win-win: any lock-in the courts find Apple has applies to the way Epic runs their store also). It hasn't worked out the way they'd hoped (though the anti-steering decision was interesting and a little surprising).
The blinking would have been because Apple does make a ton of money in the App Store. So it would have been cheaper for them, hypothetically, to pay off Epic to go away or to make some nonsense carve-out in their TOS that was hyper-focused on allowing Fortnite to work while excluding all other stores-in-stores than to risk the Courts would say "Hmmm..... Y'know..... The way you run your store looks... a lot like a monopoly. Maybe you can't run it like that anymore. In fact... Maybe you can't run it at all. Maybe no company that makes the hardware also gets to dictate the software that runs on that hardware exclusively. How about we give you, oh, six months to divest the App Store into a separate company and re-tool the iPhone OS to allow loading multiple stores?"
Perhaps not a likely scenario, but US law is highly path-dependent and at the end of the day, judges' interpretations of law and precedent are all that matters regarding the correctness of a court decision.
Epic's main mistake was performing the stunt of violating the contract and having a lawsuit ready for as soon as Apple suspended their developer account. Given they explicitly broke it as a means of creating a PR spectacle, the judge punished them by upholding Apple's suspension of their accounts (other than Unreal Engine).
If they had just sued without changing the iOS app to allow in-app purchases without using Apple's IAP, then Apple would likely have been punished if they still suspended Epic's account.
Well, they certainly did that. But how many billions of dollars in mobile revenue did they lose once Apple and Google dropped their game from the app stores? Pretty expensive PR exercise.
On top of getting slapped with a judgment for their own exploitative practices. Lots of poor decision making going on at Epic, well deserved decisions all around.
It's possible that this at least had some influence on the EU's decision to allow sideloading though (it gave publicity to this topic), so from that perspective it's not sunk cost.
I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about Epic here.
They basically are whining and complaining they have to pay the 30% fee for making more than $1 million sales, even though other stores are already doing that.
To me, this was never about consumer freedom. This was about lost revenue to Epic.
And users. Epic was passing a 20% discount on to users, which was still profitable because it was less than the 30% Apple demands.
The big issue is Apple is the only platform that's completely locked down. If Fortnite was kicked off of the Google Play store it'd be no big deal since they could simply tell users how to install it. On PC, it's not even offered on Steam. It's only Apple where getting kicked off the App Store is a death sentence, because they make it practically impossible for their users to install software otherwise.
This is almost certainly why Apple is set to start allowing sideloading. Regardless of how this case turns out, Apple obviously knows they're walking on very thin ice over something really quite silly. I expect on Android > 99% of installs are still driven by the App Store. Sideloading is a liberty very few will take advantage of, so long as your main terms for developers are reasonably fair.
Considering Epic is one of the most exploitative companies that just got slapped with a massive judgment for their dark patterns involving children, of course it was never about consumer freedom for them.
Tons of people here hate Apple, but the GP’s point that Epic is not a very sympathetic defendant is very true.
They’re not some small developer losing 30% that could help feed their family, they’re a huge company that is (arguably) exploiting children. They weren’t hurt by a sudden Apple price hike, they agreed to all the terms fairly then unilaterally said “screw you, my money!” In about the most blatant way possible.
And it’s pretty obvious this isn’t because they want to save 30%, it’s because they want to be the store charging others a big percentage and taking game sales revenue. The moment they win this they would have launched suits against the console makers to try to get their way there too.
Epic clearly only cared about themselves and only wrapped themselves in the cloak of “help all developers” for PR purposes.
I suspect a lot of people don’t care one bit about Epic. They just happen to be the name on the plaintiff’s chair.
My point was that somebody not being sympathetic doesn't mean they are wrong. There are strong arguments to the effect that Apple being able to force (what is effectively) a 30% tax through AppStore exclusivity is misusing their market power. This argument doesn't depend in any way on whether Epic has a clean slate, just as the sky doesn't get any less blue just because Hi...Trump said it was blue.
Everybody talks about the 30% cut... however, I'm almost afraid to say "be careful what you wish for." A device that allows sideloading to avoid a 30% cut, is also a device that allows piracy. (I'm still in favor of sideloading, but I'm very pessimistic about developers recovering that 30% as increased profit.)
It's just that it will move from being taken automatically by the company to a model where third party App Stores/developers will need to pay it back to Apple on an ongoing basis.
Apple already has a system in place that captures which applications are being launched.
On the one hand it’s bad that apple can continue to gatekeep it’s ecosystem, on the other, it does prevent other companies from doing nefarious things.
We need to remember when Epic was engaged is scanning your computer for steam data. Leaving it up to individual companies, they’ll definitely try and do much more damage. And it gets especially worse when the devs are some obscure company in the corner of the world.
To me the bigger thing is having to jump through hoops to cancel subscriptions, as is often the case for subscriptions outside of the App Store.
There should be regulations requiring that cancelling subscriptions be as easy as starting them is, with a readily visible button on each platform the service is available for that cancels with a single click and no further fuss. There should never be a need to hunt down an obscure link or worse.
How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS? (I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about)
UPDATE: The comments seem to imply I am giving my opinion on this case. I am not. I am commenting on the PR-speak given here. The app store does not, IMO, "promote" competition...it may arguably not hinder it, but given what the case is about, it is, I think, more competitive if others could use different methods of selling apps on iOS. That doesn't mean it is better, right, more fair, or anything else... just more "competitive" IMO. In short, I'm commenting on the wording in their press release only.