Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument:
1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
Which one is is?
Apple is like Tesla. They don’t sell more cars than anyone else. They don’t have a stranglehold over vendors. They sell more luxury cars than a bunch of other people. And while you see lots of Teslas on the road, you still see more F-150s.
Their market is insanely profitable, and for many developers, their little market is highly profitable. But how is it their fault that app developers don’t shun them for Android-only, or Windows (do they still make a phone OS?)
Apple make their own devices. They don’t license an OS and then use shenanigans to force vendors not to offer consumers a choice, like Microsoft did.
They make a desirable product, and offer developers a desirable market. But they don't have enough of the market to do whatever they like.
They can’t charge $5,000 for a phone and succeed because of network effects. Android phones can call and text Apple phones.
They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store.
Apple’s current success is exactly what the free market is for. People may grumble about the price of a phone or the keyboards, or the app store cut, but those who pay it do so because the value is there, not because of arbitrary constraints.
They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones.
> They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones.
I have a different perspective.
Many of my different friend groups use the "group messaging" feature on their phones. If everyone is using an iPhone in that group, it defaults to using iMessage.
I switched to Android about 18 months ago, and it broke all of the group text message chains I had because some of their phones continued to use iMessage even though my phone no longer supported it. Sometimes their messages came through to me, sometimes they didn't. I would see half of a conversation, and many of my messages wouldn't reach members of the group. Eventually, people stopped including me in group text messages because it made the chats unreliable.
After 18 months of being increasingly isolated from all my friends, I switched back to an iPhone. I switched only for the reason that it was difficult to keep in touch with people without it.
One-to-one messaging worked fine, but I was left out of group chats, a critical way my friends and I stay in touch.
I've only heard of this happening in the US and Canada. Outside of North America, everyone uses Whatsapp, which supports group messaging on every platform. I'd be curious to know why it hasn't penetrated into those countries.
In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat?
I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.
I once heard my spouse complaining about Signal, and how they only had it loaded on their iPhone so they could talk to me. I asked why Signal was not their default SMS application, like it is on my Android phone. And that's when I discovered that Apple hoards certain core phone features for itself.
Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. This is a significant impediment to adoption of end-to-end encryption, because checking two applications to receive different kinds of messages is inconvenient, and inconvenience is the death of mobile applications.
And here I note that Apple is effectively punishing users for apostasy. If you leave the Apple ecosystem, you are excommunicated from your former chat contacts. I, having never entered the Apple ecosystem, have no problem being included in group chats with iPhone users. (I occasionally have problems receiving media attachments, though.)
This makes me even more wary of ever buying in, knowing that trying to leave later will cause all manner of problems as I try to reclaim functions that Apple will take over. Entering the walled gardens make me afraid of being locked in.
SMS group chats work fine on all platforms I know of. If your friends don’t like you for having an android phone and kick you off for forcing the Green bubble in group chats, the problem is not Apple’s phones or software. It’s something else entirely.
Kinda miss the point of the article, which focused on monopsony -- sole buyer.
If your want to sell on the east coast (Apple), you need to put your product in wooden boxes no larger than X and documentation must be written in French, and you must have 10 employees that speak French.
If you want to sell to the West coast, you put your product in plastic bags, and everything is in Spanish, and your employees need to speak Spanish.
Yes, you have two competitors, but reach had a unique customer pool, and each had the sole power to let you access them. You must build your product and hope they purchase it (and keep it around), otherwise your business doesn't exist... You can't sell your product to anyone!
You have no negotiation power, if you're not promoted in store you can't leverage your power as a seller (they have all power, as long as they do not violate any actual law)
I see no problem here until you also presume the firms are a monopoly (or oligopoly). Otherwise there are still customers served by someone else. There are thousands of stores in the US, maybe millions. As for as I know each may make whatever silly demands they want of me (perhaps aside from some racial/religious/safety constraints)) in order to stick my products on their shelves for their "unique customers". Further I see the prospect of govt regulation of this decision as a bad thing for the customer. Who do you think will end up writing those regulations?
Hi, this is completely off topic but I wanted to reach out. In fact, I'm not even sure if it's within the rules to be doing this, but anyway- you mentioned you were looking for junior help and that you had a lot of side projects on the Senior Meets Junior post.
I am a junior dev looking for experience. I am currently working on building a career in web development. I am already employed, however I do not work as a dev full time (yet).
I'd love to connect if you are still looking for work and to see if we can mutually benefit each other.
Agree on most if not all points but the article didn't argue against any of that. It did point out two things.
Companies don't have to literally be the only buyer in a marketplace to wield "monopsony power." If competition isn't perfect — like when there are only a few companies in a market and they aren't undercutting each other's prices — companies gain some ability to lower the price on the stuff they buy. Sellers don't have a lot of other options.
Apple might be profiting from its monopsony power in the app market. In this argument, the company is effectively the sole buyer of Apple-compatible apps and services, which allows them to set their fee as high as they want.
Both of this are new argument from "monopsony" perspective, which is different to all your listed point above are "monopoly" perspective.
Not saying I agree or disagree with his monopsony thing, since it is completely new word to me.
If I tilt my head just right, we could be discussing the way WalMart purchases products. They sell a product in their store, they decide they want a certain margin, and then they tell suppliers to meet a certain price target if they want their products in WalMart.
> Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument:
> 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
> Which one is is?
Well, these aren't mutually exclusive. Apple can sell less variety, and still exert too much control over their platform--in fact, the first is caused by the second. I'd argue that "monopoly" doesn't really apply to the second situation, so that's sloppy use of the English language, but if you try to actually figure out what people are trying to communicate, rather than being pedantic, you'll have a more interesting conversation with those people.
You cannot install a 3rd-party app store on iPhones without resorting to strange hacks (which are likely outside the scope of the EULA and wouldn't be pursued by average users). Developers and users have no alternative but to pay Apple 30%. If you are an open source project, someone has to pay up each year for the privilege of developing software for Apple devices.
Windows, Linux and Android allow 3rd-party appstores. As evil as Google is, they certainly have that feather in their cap.
Apple likely wouldn't have been facing this lawsuit if they hadn't kept pressing their advantage and tightening the noose on developers.
Apple is not like Tesla; iPhones are often touted as a “luxury brand” but the truth is that they offer products of quality that are roughly in proportion to their pricing, and their high margins are due to better/more efficient operations than their competitors. A phone is such an essential tool in one’s life and priced low enough that it makes sense to invest in a product that is of good quality. Most people can afford iPhones and even poor people can afford used ones. Not many people can afford a Tesla.
Unlike a Tesla, you don’t lose a lifetime of app purchases, movies, songs and books when switching products; you don’t lose a major set of functionality between other Tesla owners which would hamper your ability to use your product. I think the “monopsony” is an excellent way to frame the problem. There should be regulation requiring companies like Apple to allow users to sell the apps and other digital content they’ve purchased to others, to allow people to set their own default apps on their own devices and to not hamper the efforts of others to provide interoperability with other devices. These should be common sense consumer rights issues, although at present the only consumer rights-focused entity strong enough to make any of this actually happen is the EU, and I hope they manage to do so.
Movies - if you buy a music on iTunes from most of the major studios, you can sync your purchases with Amazon Video, Google Play Movies and Vudu using Movies Anywhere. Blame the studios that refuse to cooperate for the ones you can’t.
Music - any music you buy from iTunes has been DRM free for over a decade.
Books - if that’s a concern, buy ebooks from Amazon - like everyone else dies.
As far as buying apps, most money people spend on the App Store is either in app consumables for games or subscriptions that work cross platform.
Do you also feel that Nintendo, Microsoft (XBox) and Sony should be equally regulated for controlling distribution over their digital stores? Yes you can but physical discs but even they are digitally signed and have to be approved.
>you don’t lose a lifetime of app purchases, movies, songs and books when switching products
That's a really alarmist (and counterfactual) way of framing this.
Yes, if you change computing platforms, you generally need to replace software. OH NO. I don't see a need for regulatory intervention based on that.
Deciding to ditch the iPhone for an Android has utterly no bearing on your ability to watch TV or movies purchased from the iTunes store. You can still watch those on an AppleTV, on a Samsung TV, or on your laptop. And obviously on your iPad if you have one of those.
Tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store are yours, period. There's no DRM, so anything that can play AAC will play them fine. You don't lose those if you ditch the iPhone.
However, Apple Music is a distinct thing. It's a subscription service like Spotify. If you stop paying for it, you stop getting access to the music you acquired with it. This is neither nefarious nor exploitative. You need a device supported by Apple Music, but it works on Windows, so not seeing the problem here, either. (Though I should note that I wouldn't see a problem even if Apple Music worked only on Apple devices.)
Apple is a rounding error in digital books, and I know nothing about it (mostly a Kindle guy). However, if I decide to banish Amazon from my life, I'll lose access to Kindle books I "bought" from Amazon. That was part of the bargain at the time.
>There should be regulation requiring companies like Apple to allow users to sell the apps and other digital content they’ve purchased to others, to allow people to set their own default apps on their own devices and to not hamper the efforts of others to provide interoperability with other devices.
How far does that go? Would you insist on the right to do the same to any computer-controlled device you purchase from any vendor?
Clearly the OP doesn't have a teenage daughter. If he did, he'd realize that you have to have an iphone in order to be accepted into the communication clique caused by iMessages / AirDrop.
> 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
> Which one is is?
It's both, because they're two different contexts. There is no monopoly on phones; Android phones are direct competition. But what about app distribution? If you make apps and you want to buy app distribution to reach all customers, who is Apple's real competition for reaching customers on iOS? They haven't any; it's a monopoly. And it's not just like Walmart having a monopoly on shelf space at Walmart, because most Walmart customers will also shop at Target or Amazon, but most iOS customers don't also shop for apps at Google Play or Amazon. Apple is the only path to reach them.
Saying they could just buy an Android phone is like saying that a retailer with a regional monopoly in California doesn't really have a monopoly because all your customers could just move to New York. That's an unreasonable barrier to buy a $1 item, and on top of that it isn't even under the control of the app developer who wants to buy app distribution.
And then you find that people are buying Apple specifically because Apple does all this stuff to control the iOS app marketplace.
The whole point of a walled garden is that it’s walled, and you don’t have to learn about gardening to enjoy it. Your experience with the garden is to simply walk through it chat with friends, and never think more about it.
Allowing side-loading means suddenly you as the customer have to learn how to identify legitimate visitors to the garden apart from miscreants and pickpockets. How do you know who to trust?
Why are people so keen to remove the gatekeeper from the walled garden?
This is only about forcing Apple to provide a backdoors to their Secure Enclave. I am not falling for it.
>They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store.
Apple recently rejected our app submission as we mention our Android version within our app settings. They don't demand you be iOS exclusive, but they damn well try to make it difficult.
That release was just a minor version with some fixes, the text had been in the app for years.
Tangentially :) I have a question as someone trying to get in to the app world (total beginner, old had a c/embedded though). How do you handle features that Apple say are preventing your app from getting approved at Apple? Say it goes through with flying colors at the Google Play store. Is everything modularized to the feature level?
"But how is it their fault that app developers don’t shun them for Android-only, or Windows (do they still make a phone OS?)"
Antitrust enforcement isn't really about "fault". It's not there to punish, it is there to force markets to be more competitive.
Saying that people can develop for Android, so this isn't monopsony/monopoly is sort of like saying Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly because people still could use coal and steam power rather than Standard Oil's petroleum.
While many things about iPhone and Android phones are similar, there are also a huge amount of differences that put huge barriers to going from one to the other.
Network monopolies are complex things, and they aren't about people being able to charge "whatever they like." They are about significantly reduced competition and significant barriers to competitors. Not everything has to be so black and white.
"Apple is like Tesla."
Not really, particularly not in the respects that this article is about. For a consumer, going from a Tesla to another EV is not a big deal. Also, EV's are in their infancy, and antitrust enforcement tends to cut some slack when that is true. Tesla could (very reasonably) end up being forced to separate their car business from their charging network when they get big enough.
"They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones."
This isn't what the article is about. This is about the developer side of things, not the consumer side. Developers spend huge amounts of resources writing code that runs on only Apple devices. A very large number of users have iOS devices, not Android devices, and they only way to make apps for them is via the Apple store. Yes you can choose to develop for Android, but aside from the cost of switching, you are now selling to a completely different set of people.
For another analogy, imagine you're a clothing manufacturer, but if you want to sell clothing to women, you have to sell it through a single retail store chain. Saying "you can always make clothing for men" isn't particularly helpful.
I consider Apple's restrictions on monetizing apps to be shenanigans. It feels normal to me for them to insist on a cut from app sales and in-app purchases.
It feels like shenanigans for them to try to block developers having revenue side-channels. I know this is very uneven, for example, I can download an Amazon Prime app and use it, even though I pay for Amazon prime elsewhere.
But in the Amazon app, there are certain things I can't buy in the app, nor is the app allowed to link me to a web page where I can buy it.
I agree that it's inconvenient for users; it annoys me every time I have to bounce out to the Amazon website to buy Kindle books, for example.
But I don't see the alternative from Apple's perspective. If they allowed revenue side-channels, every app would be free, and useless if you didn't purchase an expansion pack from the developer.
Sure, Apple could run the app store at a loss. They could allow side-loading. They could do a lot of things. But I don't fault them for declining to.
Apple is the smaller company in a duopoly market. There are not enough players in the market that dissatisfied customers can easily up and leave.
The real harm we see Apple doing is that they allow the dominant groups in society to suppress anyone else. This became especially clear during the Hong Kong protests, where they banned apps protestors used after a request from Chinese authorities. Because of the lack of choice in the market, consumers have little choice but to live with whatever is imposed on them.
When you consider "monopoly" or "market unfairness" you have to look at it on the state level. I don't think anyone is complaining about Europe where Apple is in the minority of phones. I would assume we're talking about the USA where Apple does have outsized influence compared to other phone brands. We aren't talking about Apple vs Google. It's Apple vs Samsung/Google Pixel Line/Motorola/Nokia and their abuse of their status as the largest phone seller in the USA. Say iMessage policy being limited to the Apple platform as others have pointed out.
I guess I'm not such a devotee of the free market. Ignoring legal theories for a moment and thinking about what ought to be, it seems clear to me that society at large is not well-served by having the defining artistic medium of our age in control of a single company, and censored to Disney-like levels.
Come up with whatever theory under existing laws or come up with some new laws, but it seems to me like this is a ridiculous situation that should have a legal remedy.
>Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument:
1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
What about 3?
Apple's products are overpriced and underpowered, locked down devices sold as fashion statements or 'lifestyle' accessories that are more like toys for rich people than the miniature computers they're supposed to be.
As for their computers, similar argument, overpriced, underpowered, locked down hardware.
And then there's the whole culture of snobbery surrounding Apple and their products that has existed since at least the mid-late 90's about how superior Apple products are to everything else always that's just kind of grated on me...well since then.
I don't disagree with your opinions on Apple and their products but what in your list of bad things about them is actually illegal?
Apple's products are overpriced and underpowered, locked down devices sold as fashion statements or 'lifestyle' accessories that are more like toys for rich people than the miniature computers they're supposed to be.
There is nothing illegal about selling rich people toys or dumbing down a device to make it appeal to a certain type of customer.
I have never really cared for Apple products in general and also think they are over priced for what you get but for me that just means I don't buy them, I don't really begrudge them making money off a customer base I just don't fit into.
You open with a false-dichotomoy. Apple is not a monopolist in the phone market (your first proposed argument). Apple is a monopolist of the app store (your second proposed argument).
> They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store.
They do force us to build the package on their devices though. Which is a wholly arbitrary demand which is frustrating to map into a build process that is already automated on the cloud. Prior to services that rent out Apple devices its an awkward fit.
They're very aggressive with their posturing and they ruthlessly exploit the power they have. Just reading the dev EULA in full is evidence of that.
And for most of the history of the consoles you had to have overpriced developer machines. Are you proposing that Apple be forced to port XCode to Windows?
> 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
The three positions suggested here (monopoly and monoposony being very different things) aren't actually incompatible. Android can sell more and Apple can be a monopoly (and even more easily, a monoposony) if there is a discernable market of buyers/sellers for whom price adverse changes in what apple is offering to sell or buy do not induce shifts to Android.
They flat out don't allow bloatware from the vendors on their devices. Android doesn't have that kind of pull, and Verizon won't push updates for my phone until they have tested all their bloatware crap that I can't uninstall.
Additionally, Apple has had many other 'requirements' from vendors to keep selling their phone, things like visual voicemail support, allowing them to use iMessage in place of texting (really goes with the part above), requiring ipv6 support, etc.
All Google/Android/?#_next_startup has to do is make a better phone than the iPhone, and people will flock to it. That's how Apple did it.
But currently the alternatives have many problems that cause people to choose iPhones. When those problems are overcome, the market will swing their way.
Apple is not infallible. It will screw up, or go out of fashion, or fall behind eventually. All companies do. People getting all worked up over this need to see the big picture.
Now the only way that Apple is like Tesla is if Tesla was also a utilities company that managed powerplants, which had a different pricing scheme for it's car customers.
At the end of the day it's about a company's abuse of power against users and smaller competitors, and that's what matters. If you get confused when this begins being called "monopoly" because you have a different idea of what a monopoly is, then stop calling it that.
It's about an abuse of power, pure and simple, and the bigger the company and its stranglehold on its users and developers, the more it can abuse that power. Government, the people's representatives (at least in theory), should have every right to deal with that.
I’d agree if iMessages was open platform. It’s beyond ridiculous that Android is limited to SMS (or their messaging app) but iPhone shuts out everyone for a basic utility function.
I wish the US Government and regulators were pushing for this as opposed to trying to break encryption or force backdoors.
While this is certainly true, computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period. While in the US, it becomes a small inconvenience for us that companies like Netflix and Spotify are having their business sidelined by apple, Apples lock on phones becomes a human rights issue in places like
Hong Kong, Russia and Saudi Arabia when Apple complies with local regulation. While consumers with money have the choice to leave iPhone and go with Android, we as a society need to push back on the idea that you as a consumer don’t have the final say of what software can and cannot be run on a device you own.
Plus long term, the technology industry would be healthier to push back against Big Tech keeping an iron grip on these platforms. In the last year that Apple has turned every default app on its phone into a $10 a month optional premium service. This marginal increase in service revenue will starve the news industry, compete unfairly against Netflix and HBO, eviscerate the remaining paid mobile game industry, and scare any fintech start up / vc playing anywhere near apples potential roadmap. And Apple isn’t even doing that good of a job at these new services - they just have the luxury of making the iPhone which is so good that it makes up for them doing everything else mediocrely
>While this is certainly true, computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period.
GOOD LORD NO.
Apple's curation of the iOS environment is a FEATURE for me, not a bug. It leads to drastically increased stability and security, and means I don't have to sysadmin my telephone.
I'll fight whoever suggests this is a good model for the desktop, but on the phone it's EXACTLY what I want.
>While consumers with money have the choice to leave iPhone and go with Android
Uh, no. Android phones are generally CHEAPER, so why does it take "money" to leave iOS?
"computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period."
I should expect to be able to run Windows on my coffee maker?
That's a bit of an exaggeration of course, but I do not think this is an important "need".
It's Utopian garbage. A top down "simple solution" that is appealing on the surface but deeply flawed in the complex interconnected systems of reality.
You can already buy an Android device if you want more flexibility, and you can even get a developer account with Apple and make your own custom software if you really wanted. But telling everyone that they must have what you have decided is important is a garbage idea.
Apple made themselves an exclusive payment provider for all iOS in-app subscriptions and payments for digital products. Merely mentioning anywhere that cheaper payment options exist is an AppStore ToS violation.
If I was a businessman running a store, I definitely would NOT allow anyone that wants to sell in my store any mentions that they could be found cheaper elsewhere or get a discount somehow that could reduce my cut.
The argument here is that if you want to produce an app for iOS you have to provide it through the App Store and thus succumb to the 30% fee. The same applies if you're using Apples payment processing, which you actually have to use if you want to offer any in-app purchases on iOS. In addition Apple is the sole authority on what is and is not allowed on their storefront. If they deem your app is not acceptable, you have no alternative ways to distribute it to users. They can also kick you out if they think it's necessary, again leaving you with no alternatives.
Google does the same thing with Play Store. If you sell an app in Play Store, Google takes 30%. If you use Goolges payment processing, Google takes 30%. They can kick you out, not permit you in the store, etc. The difference is that a developer isn't forced to use the play Store or Googles payment processing.
You can distribute your APK in any way you want to and users can install any APK from any location they want to. You can absolutely sell your Android games on your own website and just provide an APK to a paying user and now you don't have to pay 30% out of every purchase. If you want to provide in-app purchases the user can provide their CC information and you're free to process the payment in any way you want to, again, circumventing Goolges cut.
This is the primary reason you can't get Fortnite from the play store, instead you have to download an install an APK. Epic also uses their own payment processing systems, so they don't need to pay anything to Google for IAPs. They can't do that on their iOS apps, meaning they're losing on some hefty profits simply because no alternative exists.
So it's not that Apple is jacking up the profits, rather you could say that you need to pay a hefty tax to provide your app to iOS users.
>This is the primary reason you can't get Fortnite from the play store, instead you have to download an install an APK. Epic also uses their own payment processing systems, so they don't need to pay anything to Google for IAPs.
One important point on this is that the Play Store does allow some apps distributed within it to do billing themselves [0], but not games, which is why Fortnite is distributed outside the Play store.
There are some other rules, but if you're building a cross-platform app, you should know that many Play Store distributed apps can do billing themselves on the grounds that they have "digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself".
Spotify and Netflix do their own billing on Android, as opposed to iOS, where the Netflix app has a button to call a phone number that plays a voice recording telling you to go to netflix.com (web links to sign-up pages aren't allowed).
People forget that there were phones before the iPhone decided all phones would be rectangles with touchscreens.
Those phones ran apps and games, and you downloaded them from app stores... there was in fact a cambrian explosion of app stores, when you made software you had to publish it to hundreds of them.
I can't remember the %, but it seems unlikely, in the fact of all that competition that it was as high as 30%.
Industry standard compared to what? Certainly not credit card processing, which typically runs 3% to 5%. If you're referring to Google Play, well they just copied Apple. And at least on Android you can side-load.
> If you're referring to Google Play, well they just copied Apple. And at least on Android you can side-load.
It's ironic how some people seem to like saying "well they just copied Apple" and expect Google to be absolved of the actions they think are bad, but for everything else they would vehemently deny Google copying Apple.
Yes, it was a reasonable take way back. But technology moved on and is fact that most of the technology advances accrued with Apple and not with consumers or developers. And this power position is locked by technical and legal means thus there is no possibility for others to wade in.
There is more going on besides price. The review process is also completely arbitrary. I don't like the whole thing that the only place to get apps is the app store. I will never buy any apple device as long as that is in place.
That’s exactly what keeps me buying Apple for my family and I. I credit their locked down App Store with saving me from spending hundreds of hours of my time dealing with malware over the last 10 years.
I don't see it mentioned (at all), but my hypothesis for 30% is that it is because of money laundering. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to provide gift cards, would have to limit spending per app, cap all the prices, monitor whale spenders, etc. Easiest just to make it unprofitable.
* iTunes gift cards regularly go on sale for 60-70% of its value on third party markets, and
* 30% is a reasonable, to cheap, price to pay for money laundering,
Because there was the very real threat of piracy and poor quality control destroying the console industry. The crash of 1983 and the Dreamcast are the industry poster boys of why open consoles are a bad thing™.
As the only buyer of goods sold to me, and the only seller of goods sold by me, I suppose I'm running a monopsony and then some. May as well add me to the list.
On a serious note: would a judgement in this case have immediate impact on other companies, or would it set a precedent? Also, what are the proposed damages? How is Apple supposed to repair the situation?
Honestly, this feels entirely arbitrary (Apple is far from the only one that leverages their position as digital goods market makers). I'm not saying conspiracy or anything, but I wonder if this is related to the POTUS's vendetta against AAPL.
Eh, it doesn't work like that, if I spent a lot of time coding an iOS app, but Apple rejects it, that's my investment gone. Of course I can learn Android development, but I still spent a lot of time learning about iOS without any benefit.
Meanwhile, someone sold you a burger, if you didn't buy it, it doesn't mean someone else couldn't buy it...
It's not arbitrary, the appstore is a de-facto monopsony, the ordinary user doesn't install apps from anywhere.
Most Android phones come with an alternate appstore installed (e.g. Samsung come with their own one as well as google play) and you can easily install others.
To install alternates on the iPhone you have to root it.
I think that is a different to business model. Game consoles are sold at break even or loss leader. That is why EPIC wasn't against the 30% cut from Games on Consoles.
Although it is likely Apple has started to "subsidise" some of its iPhone margin in 2019 with its Services Revenue. And likely continue to do so in 2020 and onwards.
Business model is different but the situation from the consumer and developper point of view is the same.
There was a good interview in the vergecast with a lawyer preparing the case against Apple. The answer to “is it a different case for console ?” was more in the vain of “let’s do this case first”.
While their consoles still support physical media they aren't monopsonies. A monopsony is a single buyer. As a game developer you have the choice to sell on the xbox store or get physical discs printed and sell them either through a retailer e.g. amazon, or directly from your own site if you wanted.
If/when they produce a generation of consoles that don't support physical media things will probably start to get a lot more questionable
The key point I presume is the definition of "market" here; and I'm not convinced the market "software that runs on iOS" is so large that monopwhatever can be declared there and used to justify price control.
Though as a thought experiment Apple is like a wealthy landed gentleman who sets up a well maintained outdoor market for the tradesmen to bring goods and the lower classes to buy them. If Apple owns so much land they are the only ones capable of setting up a large enough market, maybe we should regulate that gentleman's fees to the tradesmen? By virtue of people's need to be fashionable and the enormous cost to develop a smartphone and OS, Apple effectively controls enough "land" to warrant regulation. I don't know...
Finally, this rationale also it seems causes a dilemma with B2B relationships. What if your market is quite specialized? Are you a "monopsony"?
I don't think we need to divide the market into specialized segments (iOS devices, luxury smartphone, etc) to make the case against Apple. They have somewhere around 50% of the global market in terms of smartphone revenue (not devices shipped).
For the App Store, which is what matters to developers, revenue was around $25 billion in the first half of 2019, vs $14 billion for Google Play Store.
It's not literally mono- but as the article notes, just having a significant share of the market (I would say 30% would be enough) allows companies to dictate prices, and iOS has more like 2/3rds of the revenue.
That's not even getting into all the restrictions that Apple puts on third-party developers, including categories of apps that you can't even make if you wanted to -- unless you're willing to sit out half the market, and assuming that Google doesn't do the same thing. As a software guy, I consider that a bigger deal than the % cut (which is not entirely unreasonable given how much of that goes to credit card fees for low-dollar-amount transactions)
The use of monopoly as the primary measure of whether market abuse is happening or not is a flawed presupposition to begin with. There are only two mobile phone platforms, which are easily more dominant general computing platforms than desktop operating systems, and the proprietors of both routinely use their influential positions in various ways to manipulate secondary markets that depend on them. This is no different than Standard Oil and the railroads.
Quite simply, if the legal tools don't exist to deal with this abuse, they need to be created...just like the Sherman Antitrust Act.
"Reasonable" would be to charge a fixed transaction fee plus a percentage that doesn't scream "dysfunctional market!".
Microsoft takes 5% for selling apps in the Windows store. That may be a bit desperate given that these stores aren't just payment services but act as merchants of record, taking care of international taxes, billing and running an actual store.
I wouldn't complain for a second if store fees were in the neighbourhood of 10% plus transaction fee.
But charging 30% irrespective of price is not reasonable by any reasonable definition of reasonable.
Under traditional antitrust regulation, a monopoly is one that has "undue market control." The key terms here are "undue", "market", and "control", which will all be subject to tons of lawyers making a bunch of arguments.
Your point is about the "market": if the market is iOS devices, then there is no question Apple has "control". If "market" is smartphone apps, the argument gets shakier.
Antitrust violations are notoriously difficult to prove in court. Even if Apple were to lose in some iOS app antitrust case, the prospect that it leads to general B2B applications is quite negligible.
The market is too small? Let's try comparing it to a more "conventional" market, like cable TV.
Total iOS app store revenue is somewhere within the neighborhood of $50-100 billion per year. That puts it roughly on par with the US's cable television industry.
There are about 100 million people using iPhones in the US alone. That's about twice the number of cable TV households in the US.
So, it seems like the market for iOS apps is similar to the market for cable TV, and there's also less competition, as I may have other options for getting TV shows, but I don't have any other options for getting apps onto my iPhone.
But you had other smartphone options, and you chose to buy Apple's solution. In making that choice, you were not just buying a piece of general-purpose hand-held computing hardware, you were buying into to a specific, explicitly-curated ecosystem of software and services. Apple's gatekeeping role here was a significant part of the iPhone's value proposition. If that's not what you want, or if you think it is overpriced, why would you choose to buy it? Other devices are available.
(As someone who doesn't use either an iPhone or an Android phone, I don't really have a dog in this fight. Just an observer trying to see various points of view.)
> and I'm not convinced the market "software that runs on iOS" is so large that monopwhatever can be declared there and used to justify price control.
The size of the market is not relevant here. The real question is whether customers have viable alternatives or not. If not, then you're in a "monopwhatever" situation. We don't yet know if DoJ thinks iOS users have alternatives or not though.
So, since Apple is the only company "buying" apps from developers, they could raise their cut as high as they want and developers can do nothing about it.
Could Apple then argue that they aren't the only game in town because of things like subscriptions and web apps? (e.g. I don't pay for Netflix or Spotify through Apple, but the apps work fine)
> So, since Apple is the only company "buying" apps from developers, they could raise their cut as high as they want and developers can do nothing about it.
Basically, when a monopolists or monopsonists tries to abuse their position, they will shift less volume. There's a finite optimal cut that maximizes profits.
So: when Apple increases their cut, they'll get fewer apps developed. Marginal app developers will go work on Wall Street or flip burgers etc.
They could if they didn't strong arm developers into giving them a cut of subscriptions. This is a major point in the Spotify antritrust suit against Apple.
To clarify, Apple takes 30% of in-app subscriptions for customers < 1 year. If you retain a customer for a year, then they take 15% of the revenue after 1 year.
If a customer signs up and setups payment for the service outside the app, then Apple doesn't take a cut. That's why you can't buy books in the Audible iOS app, or subscribe to Netflix via the iOS app. But you can login and watch/listen to content you've already bought or subscribed to.
Also, please omit webapps on iOS Safari as an alternative. Apple gives no explanations on why it cripples Safari's W3C compatibility, especially features around PWA, but everyone knows it's to drive developers, users and hence revenue/profits to the app store.
Someone needs to sue Apple for this, and the truth will be revealed when the case enters discovery mode, when Apple internal communications on this are laid bare
Honestly, they just don't have headcount to pull it off/the manager doesn't care. (hi maciej!) He lionizes it on Twitter as not jumping on the latest fads and gets kudos from Apple fans who conflate "new web API" with "slapdash nonsense Google is rushing to try and make the web beat apps" as if it's 2008 still.
Progressive Web Apps aren't a standard but a Google web strategy term. Different browsers just have different priorities.
For example, Apple prioritized service workers over web app manifests (which BTW are not yet a W3C recommendation). I can only assume this is partly because there have been so many failed attempts at static web app manifests in the past. Them prioritizing other features for earlier release doesn't mean that Web App Manifest support isn't in active development ( https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158205 ).
PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, sega, ... are the same:
You can only sell for those devices with manufacturer licensing (that includes profit sharing and mandatory annoyances like “achievements”), and consumers can only buy games licensed by those manufacturers.
The only difference is that PC developers haven’t experienced that before. It seems like this would have been established in the 80s/90s, so I’m surprised we’re getting to court - is there a change in judicial philosophy?
That said, as far as I can tell every platform charged the same ~30% so I’m sure any company can simply point to the entire market as having established that under fair conditions (after all, if there was a cheaper platform surely they’d prioritize that?)
One of the major difference here is that game platforms have a relatively less power than Apple/Google in their current business practice. It's usually game platforms that tries to attract game developers/publishers into their platform (sometime with strong incentives and even subsidiaries) to win the market and publishers are the decision maker; the same thing doesn't usually happen in the app store case. Game devs don't have much incentives to sue platforms as long as there's competition between consoles. Note that things were different in the NES/SNES era and there actually was a number of antitrust cases for Nintendo.
But honestly, I feel that competition within a single game consoles should be allowed. This doesn't have to take a form of side-loading (which obviously has a significant downside of piracy which hurts game devs/publishers even more than monopoly/monopsony) though.
You're ignoring the fact that communication is critical in the modern world and Apple has too big of a piece of the pie there and is clearly too powerful in dictating what is happening as well as abusing that power. Also video games aren't critical to functioning in the information age, while communication clearly is.
Although things are changing (platforms have app stores), did't gaming systems traditionally decouple the box manufacturer from the distribution? ie sony made the playstation, and publishers made and distributed the disks?
Of course, everything is changing now. I think the apple app store might have led the way starting ~ 2007 or so.
Game consoles are not an important part of almost the entire population. Smartphones are. Hence, they get more visibility. Moreover, smartphones tend to be more critical in our lives. Hence, they get more priority.
Hence, people might not have thought it was worth it / important before, but they do now.
This title is complete bs, and the court ruling (linked in the article) only mentions monopsony very briefly.
The question addressed by the court is regarding who is the cause of any overcharging to the customer. The opinion argues that because Apple is exclusively dealing with the customer, it is able to sell on whatever terms it wants to the customer, so any overcharge is their fault. The dissent argues that because the developer has the power to dictate the price of the app on the store, any overcharge the customer pays is directly caused by the developer, because the developer could have chosen to sell the app at a fair price.
It is true that the ruling mentions that developers may sue apple, but that was never in question. Both the opinion and dissent agree on that fact.
This is an unfair treatment of the decision. The question addressed by the court isn’t “who is the cause of supracompetitive prices?” but rather “if Apple is the cause, can consumers sue?”
Apple’s defense argued that only the app developers could sue under a certain view of the precedent where Apple’s role as a pass through is essentially transparent to the law. Their argument attempted to shift who the customer was ultimately doing business with: Apple or the app developer.
One of the theories underpinning the precedential rule is that not stopping impacted downstream parties from suing may potentially subject Apple to multiple liability. Apple argued that they were already liable to app developers so shouldn’t also be liable to consumers. The Court is saying here that that theory does not hold water because Apple, as a middleman, may be liable to both upstream and downstream parties (damages from app developers and consumers, respectively).
Off topic: I like your nickname. In that vein, here are two variations of the same sequence of keypresses shifted up and down respectivelly: "erweriotuout" and "cvxcv,.bm.mb".
While something like "4694372" is motorically meaningful to a person typing it on the keypad, or to someone watching him do it, it translates to the screen space as gibberish. Another way to put it is that when typed it has an obvious structure, but when read on the screen, the structure is prohibitively difficult to discern. That's interesting, because it's all too easy to forget that the computer as we know it today can interface with only a very small portion of our faculties.
Readit News
1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
Which one is is?
Apple is like Tesla. They don’t sell more cars than anyone else. They don’t have a stranglehold over vendors. They sell more luxury cars than a bunch of other people. And while you see lots of Teslas on the road, you still see more F-150s.
Their market is insanely profitable, and for many developers, their little market is highly profitable. But how is it their fault that app developers don’t shun them for Android-only, or Windows (do they still make a phone OS?)
Apple make their own devices. They don’t license an OS and then use shenanigans to force vendors not to offer consumers a choice, like Microsoft did.
They make a desirable product, and offer developers a desirable market. But they don't have enough of the market to do whatever they like.
They can’t charge $5,000 for a phone and succeed because of network effects. Android phones can call and text Apple phones.
They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store.
Apple’s current success is exactly what the free market is for. People may grumble about the price of a phone or the keyboards, or the app store cut, but those who pay it do so because the value is there, not because of arbitrary constraints.
They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones.
I have a different perspective.
Many of my different friend groups use the "group messaging" feature on their phones. If everyone is using an iPhone in that group, it defaults to using iMessage.
I switched to Android about 18 months ago, and it broke all of the group text message chains I had because some of their phones continued to use iMessage even though my phone no longer supported it. Sometimes their messages came through to me, sometimes they didn't. I would see half of a conversation, and many of my messages wouldn't reach members of the group. Eventually, people stopped including me in group text messages because it made the chats unreliable.
After 18 months of being increasingly isolated from all my friends, I switched back to an iPhone. I switched only for the reason that it was difficult to keep in touch with people without it.
One-to-one messaging worked fine, but I was left out of group chats, a critical way my friends and I stay in touch.
I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.
https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
Should be Job Done.
Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. This is a significant impediment to adoption of end-to-end encryption, because checking two applications to receive different kinds of messages is inconvenient, and inconvenience is the death of mobile applications.
And here I note that Apple is effectively punishing users for apostasy. If you leave the Apple ecosystem, you are excommunicated from your former chat contacts. I, having never entered the Apple ecosystem, have no problem being included in group chats with iPhone users. (I occasionally have problems receiving media attachments, though.)
This makes me even more wary of ever buying in, knowing that trying to leave later will cause all manner of problems as I try to reclaim functions that Apple will take over. Entering the walled gardens make me afraid of being locked in.
If your want to sell on the east coast (Apple), you need to put your product in wooden boxes no larger than X and documentation must be written in French, and you must have 10 employees that speak French.
If you want to sell to the West coast, you put your product in plastic bags, and everything is in Spanish, and your employees need to speak Spanish.
Yes, you have two competitors, but reach had a unique customer pool, and each had the sole power to let you access them. You must build your product and hope they purchase it (and keep it around), otherwise your business doesn't exist... You can't sell your product to anyone!
You have no negotiation power, if you're not promoted in store you can't leverage your power as a seller (they have all power, as long as they do not violate any actual law)
I am a junior dev looking for experience. I am currently working on building a career in web development. I am already employed, however I do not work as a dev full time (yet).
I'd love to connect if you are still looking for work and to see if we can mutually benefit each other.
email: jayjscotto@gmail.com
portfolio: https://jasonscotto.com
Arguably Android is also monopsony.
Companies don't have to literally be the only buyer in a marketplace to wield "monopsony power." If competition isn't perfect — like when there are only a few companies in a market and they aren't undercutting each other's prices — companies gain some ability to lower the price on the stuff they buy. Sellers don't have a lot of other options.
Apple might be profiting from its monopsony power in the app market. In this argument, the company is effectively the sole buyer of Apple-compatible apps and services, which allows them to set their fee as high as they want.
Both of this are new argument from "monopsony" perspective, which is different to all your listed point above are "monopoly" perspective.
Not saying I agree or disagree with his monopsony thing, since it is completely new word to me.
If I tilt my head just right, we could be discussing the way WalMart purchases products. They sell a product in their store, they decide they want a certain margin, and then they tell suppliers to meet a certain price target if they want their products in WalMart.
> 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
> Which one is is?
Well, these aren't mutually exclusive. Apple can sell less variety, and still exert too much control over their platform--in fact, the first is caused by the second. I'd argue that "monopoly" doesn't really apply to the second situation, so that's sloppy use of the English language, but if you try to actually figure out what people are trying to communicate, rather than being pedantic, you'll have a more interesting conversation with those people.
You cannot install a 3rd-party app store on iPhones without resorting to strange hacks (which are likely outside the scope of the EULA and wouldn't be pursued by average users). Developers and users have no alternative but to pay Apple 30%. If you are an open source project, someone has to pay up each year for the privilege of developing software for Apple devices.
Windows, Linux and Android allow 3rd-party appstores. As evil as Google is, they certainly have that feather in their cap.
Apple likely wouldn't have been facing this lawsuit if they hadn't kept pressing their advantage and tightening the noose on developers.
Unlike a Tesla, you don’t lose a lifetime of app purchases, movies, songs and books when switching products; you don’t lose a major set of functionality between other Tesla owners which would hamper your ability to use your product. I think the “monopsony” is an excellent way to frame the problem. There should be regulation requiring companies like Apple to allow users to sell the apps and other digital content they’ve purchased to others, to allow people to set their own default apps on their own devices and to not hamper the efforts of others to provide interoperability with other devices. These should be common sense consumer rights issues, although at present the only consumer rights-focused entity strong enough to make any of this actually happen is the EU, and I hope they manage to do so.
Music - any music you buy from iTunes has been DRM free for over a decade.
Books - if that’s a concern, buy ebooks from Amazon - like everyone else dies.
As far as buying apps, most money people spend on the App Store is either in app consumables for games or subscriptions that work cross platform.
Do you also feel that Nintendo, Microsoft (XBox) and Sony should be equally regulated for controlling distribution over their digital stores? Yes you can but physical discs but even they are digitally signed and have to be approved.
That's a really alarmist (and counterfactual) way of framing this.
Yes, if you change computing platforms, you generally need to replace software. OH NO. I don't see a need for regulatory intervention based on that.
Deciding to ditch the iPhone for an Android has utterly no bearing on your ability to watch TV or movies purchased from the iTunes store. You can still watch those on an AppleTV, on a Samsung TV, or on your laptop. And obviously on your iPad if you have one of those.
Tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store are yours, period. There's no DRM, so anything that can play AAC will play them fine. You don't lose those if you ditch the iPhone.
However, Apple Music is a distinct thing. It's a subscription service like Spotify. If you stop paying for it, you stop getting access to the music you acquired with it. This is neither nefarious nor exploitative. You need a device supported by Apple Music, but it works on Windows, so not seeing the problem here, either. (Though I should note that I wouldn't see a problem even if Apple Music worked only on Apple devices.)
Apple is a rounding error in digital books, and I know nothing about it (mostly a Kindle guy). However, if I decide to banish Amazon from my life, I'll lose access to Kindle books I "bought" from Amazon. That was part of the bargain at the time.
>There should be regulation requiring companies like Apple to allow users to sell the apps and other digital content they’ve purchased to others, to allow people to set their own default apps on their own devices and to not hamper the efforts of others to provide interoperability with other devices.
How far does that go? Would you insist on the right to do the same to any computer-controlled device you purchase from any vendor?
Because that seems bananas.
If an iPhone user has friends that all use Duo on Android, she can install Duo on her iPhone.
If an Android user has friends that all use iMessage or FaceTime, there is no way for her to participate in group chats or group calls.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
> Which one is is?
It's both, because they're two different contexts. There is no monopoly on phones; Android phones are direct competition. But what about app distribution? If you make apps and you want to buy app distribution to reach all customers, who is Apple's real competition for reaching customers on iOS? They haven't any; it's a monopoly. And it's not just like Walmart having a monopoly on shelf space at Walmart, because most Walmart customers will also shop at Target or Amazon, but most iOS customers don't also shop for apps at Google Play or Amazon. Apple is the only path to reach them.
Saying they could just buy an Android phone is like saying that a retailer with a regional monopoly in California doesn't really have a monopoly because all your customers could just move to New York. That's an unreasonable barrier to buy a $1 item, and on top of that it isn't even under the control of the app developer who wants to buy app distribution.
The whole point of a walled garden is that it’s walled, and you don’t have to learn about gardening to enjoy it. Your experience with the garden is to simply walk through it chat with friends, and never think more about it.
Allowing side-loading means suddenly you as the customer have to learn how to identify legitimate visitors to the garden apart from miscreants and pickpockets. How do you know who to trust?
Why are people so keen to remove the gatekeeper from the walled garden?
This is only about forcing Apple to provide a backdoors to their Secure Enclave. I am not falling for it.
Apple recently rejected our app submission as we mention our Android version within our app settings. They don't demand you be iOS exclusive, but they damn well try to make it difficult.
That release was just a minor version with some fixes, the text had been in the app for years.
Antitrust enforcement isn't really about "fault". It's not there to punish, it is there to force markets to be more competitive.
Saying that people can develop for Android, so this isn't monopsony/monopoly is sort of like saying Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly because people still could use coal and steam power rather than Standard Oil's petroleum.
While many things about iPhone and Android phones are similar, there are also a huge amount of differences that put huge barriers to going from one to the other.
Network monopolies are complex things, and they aren't about people being able to charge "whatever they like." They are about significantly reduced competition and significant barriers to competitors. Not everything has to be so black and white.
"Apple is like Tesla."
Not really, particularly not in the respects that this article is about. For a consumer, going from a Tesla to another EV is not a big deal. Also, EV's are in their infancy, and antitrust enforcement tends to cut some slack when that is true. Tesla could (very reasonably) end up being forced to separate their car business from their charging network when they get big enough.
"They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones."
This isn't what the article is about. This is about the developer side of things, not the consumer side. Developers spend huge amounts of resources writing code that runs on only Apple devices. A very large number of users have iOS devices, not Android devices, and they only way to make apps for them is via the Apple store. Yes you can choose to develop for Android, but aside from the cost of switching, you are now selling to a completely different set of people.
For another analogy, imagine you're a clothing manufacturer, but if you want to sell clothing to women, you have to sell it through a single retail store chain. Saying "you can always make clothing for men" isn't particularly helpful.
I consider Apple's restrictions on monetizing apps to be shenanigans. It feels normal to me for them to insist on a cut from app sales and in-app purchases.
It feels like shenanigans for them to try to block developers having revenue side-channels. I know this is very uneven, for example, I can download an Amazon Prime app and use it, even though I pay for Amazon prime elsewhere.
But in the Amazon app, there are certain things I can't buy in the app, nor is the app allowed to link me to a web page where I can buy it.
But I don't see the alternative from Apple's perspective. If they allowed revenue side-channels, every app would be free, and useless if you didn't purchase an expansion pack from the developer.
Sure, Apple could run the app store at a loss. They could allow side-loading. They could do a lot of things. But I don't fault them for declining to.
The real harm we see Apple doing is that they allow the dominant groups in society to suppress anyone else. This became especially clear during the Hong Kong protests, where they banned apps protestors used after a request from Chinese authorities. Because of the lack of choice in the market, consumers have little choice but to live with whatever is imposed on them.
Come up with whatever theory under existing laws or come up with some new laws, but it seems to me like this is a ridiculous situation that should have a legal remedy.
2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
What about 3?
Apple's products are overpriced and underpowered, locked down devices sold as fashion statements or 'lifestyle' accessories that are more like toys for rich people than the miniature computers they're supposed to be.
As for their computers, similar argument, overpriced, underpowered, locked down hardware.
And then there's the whole culture of snobbery surrounding Apple and their products that has existed since at least the mid-late 90's about how superior Apple products are to everything else always that's just kind of grated on me...well since then.
Apple's products are overpriced and underpowered, locked down devices sold as fashion statements or 'lifestyle' accessories that are more like toys for rich people than the miniature computers they're supposed to be.
There is nothing illegal about selling rich people toys or dumbing down a device to make it appeal to a certain type of customer.
I have never really cared for Apple products in general and also think they are over priced for what you get but for me that just means I don't buy them, I don't really begrudge them making money off a customer base I just don't fit into.
Are you positing that someone manufactures a better and faster SOC for mobile devices?
Those 2 positions are not mutually-exclusive.
They do force us to build the package on their devices though. Which is a wholly arbitrary demand which is frustrating to map into a build process that is already automated on the cloud. Prior to services that rent out Apple devices its an awkward fit.
They're very aggressive with their posturing and they ruthlessly exploit the power they have. Just reading the dev EULA in full is evidence of that.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
The three positions suggested here (monopoly and monoposony being very different things) aren't actually incompatible. Android can sell more and Apple can be a monopoly (and even more easily, a monoposony) if there is a discernable market of buyers/sellers for whom price adverse changes in what apple is offering to sell or buy do not induce shifts to Android.
They flat out don't allow bloatware from the vendors on their devices. Android doesn't have that kind of pull, and Verizon won't push updates for my phone until they have tested all their bloatware crap that I can't uninstall.
Additionally, Apple has had many other 'requirements' from vendors to keep selling their phone, things like visual voicemail support, allowing them to use iMessage in place of texting (really goes with the part above), requiring ipv6 support, etc.
But currently the alternatives have many problems that cause people to choose iPhones. When those problems are overcome, the market will swing their way.
Apple is not infallible. It will screw up, or go out of fashion, or fall behind eventually. All companies do. People getting all worked up over this need to see the big picture.
>If you sell too cheaply - antitrust laws break you
>If you sell at the same price as competitors - its a cartel or a deal between vendors
>If you sell at a price too high - its a monopoly
Now the only way that Apple is like Tesla is if Tesla was also a utilities company that managed powerplants, which had a different pricing scheme for it's car customers.
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At the end of the day it's about a company's abuse of power against users and smaller competitors, and that's what matters. If you get confused when this begins being called "monopoly" because you have a different idea of what a monopoly is, then stop calling it that.
It's about an abuse of power, pure and simple, and the bigger the company and its stranglehold on its users and developers, the more it can abuse that power. Government, the people's representatives (at least in theory), should have every right to deal with that.
I wish the US Government and regulators were pushing for this as opposed to trying to break encryption or force backdoors.
I don't, and it means 10 percent of the population can't use my free apps that save people time and money.
I suppose that's the cost of Apple being Evil and people buying from such a company.
Apple uses vendor lock-in for software used by one customer across devices, and for software used by multiple users (iMessage)
Plus long term, the technology industry would be healthier to push back against Big Tech keeping an iron grip on these platforms. In the last year that Apple has turned every default app on its phone into a $10 a month optional premium service. This marginal increase in service revenue will starve the news industry, compete unfairly against Netflix and HBO, eviscerate the remaining paid mobile game industry, and scare any fintech start up / vc playing anywhere near apples potential roadmap. And Apple isn’t even doing that good of a job at these new services - they just have the luxury of making the iPhone which is so good that it makes up for them doing everything else mediocrely
GOOD LORD NO.
Apple's curation of the iOS environment is a FEATURE for me, not a bug. It leads to drastically increased stability and security, and means I don't have to sysadmin my telephone.
I'll fight whoever suggests this is a good model for the desktop, but on the phone it's EXACTLY what I want.
>While consumers with money have the choice to leave iPhone and go with Android
Uh, no. Android phones are generally CHEAPER, so why does it take "money" to leave iOS?
I should expect to be able to run Windows on my coffee maker?
That's a bit of an exaggeration of course, but I do not think this is an important "need".
It's Utopian garbage. A top down "simple solution" that is appealing on the surface but deeply flawed in the complex interconnected systems of reality.
You can already buy an Android device if you want more flexibility, and you can even get a developer account with Apple and make your own custom software if you really wanted. But telling everyone that they must have what you have decided is important is a garbage idea.
If I was a businessman running a store, I definitely would NOT allow anyone that wants to sell in my store any mentions that they could be found cheaper elsewhere or get a discount somehow that could reduce my cut.
Google does the same thing with Play Store. If you sell an app in Play Store, Google takes 30%. If you use Goolges payment processing, Google takes 30%. They can kick you out, not permit you in the store, etc. The difference is that a developer isn't forced to use the play Store or Googles payment processing.
You can distribute your APK in any way you want to and users can install any APK from any location they want to. You can absolutely sell your Android games on your own website and just provide an APK to a paying user and now you don't have to pay 30% out of every purchase. If you want to provide in-app purchases the user can provide their CC information and you're free to process the payment in any way you want to, again, circumventing Goolges cut.
This is the primary reason you can't get Fortnite from the play store, instead you have to download an install an APK. Epic also uses their own payment processing systems, so they don't need to pay anything to Google for IAPs. They can't do that on their iOS apps, meaning they're losing on some hefty profits simply because no alternative exists.
So it's not that Apple is jacking up the profits, rather you could say that you need to pay a hefty tax to provide your app to iOS users.
One important point on this is that the Play Store does allow some apps distributed within it to do billing themselves [0], but not games, which is why Fortnite is distributed outside the Play store.
There are some other rules, but if you're building a cross-platform app, you should know that many Play Store distributed apps can do billing themselves on the grounds that they have "digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself".
Spotify and Netflix do their own billing on Android, as opposed to iOS, where the Netflix app has a button to call a phone number that plays a voice recording telling you to go to netflix.com (web links to sign-up pages aren't allowed).
[0] https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/
People forget that there were phones before the iPhone decided all phones would be rectangles with touchscreens.
Those phones ran apps and games, and you downloaded them from app stores... there was in fact a cambrian explosion of app stores, when you made software you had to publish it to hundreds of them.
I can't remember the %, but it seems unlikely, in the fact of all that competition that it was as high as 30%.
It's ironic how some people seem to like saying "well they just copied Apple" and expect Google to be absolved of the actions they think are bad, but for everything else they would vehemently deny Google copying Apple.
* iTunes gift cards regularly go on sale for 60-70% of its value on third party markets, and * 30% is a reasonable, to cheap, price to pay for money laundering,
I think your theory is unfounded.
On a serious note: would a judgement in this case have immediate impact on other companies, or would it set a precedent? Also, what are the proposed damages? How is Apple supposed to repair the situation?
Honestly, this feels entirely arbitrary (Apple is far from the only one that leverages their position as digital goods market makers). I'm not saying conspiracy or anything, but I wonder if this is related to the POTUS's vendetta against AAPL.
Eh, it doesn't work like that, if I spent a lot of time coding an iOS app, but Apple rejects it, that's my investment gone. Of course I can learn Android development, but I still spent a lot of time learning about iOS without any benefit.
Meanwhile, someone sold you a burger, if you didn't buy it, it doesn't mean someone else couldn't buy it...
Most Android phones come with an alternate appstore installed (e.g. Samsung come with their own one as well as google play) and you can easily install others.
To install alternates on the iPhone you have to root it.
Although it is likely Apple has started to "subsidise" some of its iPhone margin in 2019 with its Services Revenue. And likely continue to do so in 2020 and onwards.
There was a good interview in the vergecast with a lawyer preparing the case against Apple. The answer to “is it a different case for console ?” was more in the vain of “let’s do this case first”.
If/when they produce a generation of consoles that don't support physical media things will probably start to get a lot more questionable
Exactly as is the case with iOS, Nintendo, or PlayStation.
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Though as a thought experiment Apple is like a wealthy landed gentleman who sets up a well maintained outdoor market for the tradesmen to bring goods and the lower classes to buy them. If Apple owns so much land they are the only ones capable of setting up a large enough market, maybe we should regulate that gentleman's fees to the tradesmen? By virtue of people's need to be fashionable and the enormous cost to develop a smartphone and OS, Apple effectively controls enough "land" to warrant regulation. I don't know...
Finally, this rationale also it seems causes a dilemma with B2B relationships. What if your market is quite specialized? Are you a "monopsony"?
For the App Store, which is what matters to developers, revenue was around $25 billion in the first half of 2019, vs $14 billion for Google Play Store.
It's not literally mono- but as the article notes, just having a significant share of the market (I would say 30% would be enough) allows companies to dictate prices, and iOS has more like 2/3rds of the revenue.
That's not even getting into all the restrictions that Apple puts on third-party developers, including categories of apps that you can't even make if you wanted to -- unless you're willing to sit out half the market, and assuming that Google doesn't do the same thing. As a software guy, I consider that a bigger deal than the % cut (which is not entirely unreasonable given how much of that goes to credit card fees for low-dollar-amount transactions)
Quite simply, if the legal tools don't exist to deal with this abuse, they need to be created...just like the Sherman Antitrust Act.
On a monopoly/monopsony theory, devices shipped is the relevant metric, and revenue isn't.
Microsoft takes 5% for selling apps in the Windows store. That may be a bit desperate given that these stores aren't just payment services but act as merchants of record, taking care of international taxes, billing and running an actual store.
I wouldn't complain for a second if store fees were in the neighbourhood of 10% plus transaction fee.
But charging 30% irrespective of price is not reasonable by any reasonable definition of reasonable.
Your point is about the "market": if the market is iOS devices, then there is no question Apple has "control". If "market" is smartphone apps, the argument gets shakier.
Antitrust violations are notoriously difficult to prove in court. Even if Apple were to lose in some iOS app antitrust case, the prospect that it leads to general B2B applications is quite negligible.
Total iOS app store revenue is somewhere within the neighborhood of $50-100 billion per year. That puts it roughly on par with the US's cable television industry.
There are about 100 million people using iPhones in the US alone. That's about twice the number of cable TV households in the US.
So, it seems like the market for iOS apps is similar to the market for cable TV, and there's also less competition, as I may have other options for getting TV shows, but I don't have any other options for getting apps onto my iPhone.
(As someone who doesn't use either an iPhone or an Android phone, I don't really have a dog in this fight. Just an observer trying to see various points of view.)
The size of the market is not relevant here. The real question is whether customers have viable alternatives or not. If not, then you're in a "monopwhatever" situation. We don't yet know if DoJ thinks iOS users have alternatives or not though.
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Could Apple then argue that they aren't the only game in town because of things like subscriptions and web apps? (e.g. I don't pay for Netflix or Spotify through Apple, but the apps work fine)
No. Monopsony and monopoly don't work like that.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_price
Basically, when a monopolists or monopsonists tries to abuse their position, they will shift less volume. There's a finite optimal cut that maximizes profits.
So: when Apple increases their cut, they'll get fewer apps developed. Marginal app developers will go work on Wall Street or flip burgers etc.
If a customer signs up and setups payment for the service outside the app, then Apple doesn't take a cut. That's why you can't buy books in the Audible iOS app, or subscribe to Netflix via the iOS app. But you can login and watch/listen to content you've already bought or subscribed to.
Someone needs to sue Apple for this, and the truth will be revealed when the case enters discovery mode, when Apple internal communications on this are laid bare
For example, Apple prioritized service workers over web app manifests (which BTW are not yet a W3C recommendation). I can only assume this is partly because there have been so many failed attempts at static web app manifests in the past. Them prioritizing other features for earlier release doesn't mean that Web App Manifest support isn't in active development ( https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158205 ).
- monopoly: the only seller
- monopsony: the only buyer
So app store customers can only buy from apple.
And the app developers can only sell to apple.
You can only sell for those devices with manufacturer licensing (that includes profit sharing and mandatory annoyances like “achievements”), and consumers can only buy games licensed by those manufacturers.
The only difference is that PC developers haven’t experienced that before. It seems like this would have been established in the 80s/90s, so I’m surprised we’re getting to court - is there a change in judicial philosophy?
That said, as far as I can tell every platform charged the same ~30% so I’m sure any company can simply point to the entire market as having established that under fair conditions (after all, if there was a cheaper platform surely they’d prioritize that?)
But honestly, I feel that competition within a single game consoles should be allowed. This doesn't have to take a form of side-loading (which obviously has a significant downside of piracy which hurts game devs/publishers even more than monopoly/monopsony) though.
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Of course, everything is changing now. I think the apple app store might have led the way starting ~ 2007 or so.
Hence, people might not have thought it was worth it / important before, but they do now.
The question addressed by the court is regarding who is the cause of any overcharging to the customer. The opinion argues that because Apple is exclusively dealing with the customer, it is able to sell on whatever terms it wants to the customer, so any overcharge is their fault. The dissent argues that because the developer has the power to dictate the price of the app on the store, any overcharge the customer pays is directly caused by the developer, because the developer could have chosen to sell the app at a fair price.
It is true that the ruling mentions that developers may sue apple, but that was never in question. Both the opinion and dissent agree on that fact.
Apple’s defense argued that only the app developers could sue under a certain view of the precedent where Apple’s role as a pass through is essentially transparent to the law. Their argument attempted to shift who the customer was ultimately doing business with: Apple or the app developer.
One of the theories underpinning the precedential rule is that not stopping impacted downstream parties from suing may potentially subject Apple to multiple liability. Apple argued that they were already liable to app developers so shouldn’t also be liable to consumers. The Court is saying here that that theory does not hold water because Apple, as a middleman, may be liable to both upstream and downstream parties (damages from app developers and consumers, respectively).
While something like "4694372" is motorically meaningful to a person typing it on the keypad, or to someone watching him do it, it translates to the screen space as gibberish. Another way to put it is that when typed it has an obvious structure, but when read on the screen, the structure is prohibitively difficult to discern. That's interesting, because it's all too easy to forget that the computer as we know it today can interface with only a very small portion of our faculties.