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Comment by realusername

4 years ago

> First it's network effects, then it's the existing actors preventing you. Make your mind up.

That's two sides of the same coin.

> Then use a Pinephone. That nobody else you know uses it, and nobody develops for it isn't Apple's fault. Apple's 30% appstore cut isn't bringing people from Pinephone to iOS, if anything it should be pushing the other way. I know they have negligible market size - the point is Apple iOS has big market size by being good and your plan to respond to this is to make it bad from sour grapes.

I'm talking about the mobile app market, maybe one day the Pinephone will have enough market share to be considered a competitor, right now it does not so you can't count it.

> Fortnite was not competing with Apple though? Epic gave people a way to buy Fortnite on Steam, and then a way to install Fortnite free on Android, and people didn't want that. So Epic came after Apple and blamed them, irrelevantly, and the judge was leaning to Apple's side.

Fortnite suffered from the duopoly and the app market failure.

> Except you can sideload anyways, as evidenced by the fact that you can. What it tells you is that /people don't want to/.

No, it tells you that the restrictions Google put in place so that users don't sideload (the developer menu being hard to access, scary warnings and the difficulty of update your app) are enough to keep out even the most popular game in the world to use that option.

I’ll just say this one last time. You keep making the argument “for the benefit of developers”. If you want to win me and people like me, Apple’s customers, you need to start making arguments “for the benefit of customers”.

You want Apple to change? Change the hearts and minds of the people who like Apple’s products and pay Apple.

Statements like “the history of the mobile phone market doesn’t matter” or “I don’t care if the iOS interface is any good” or (paraphrased) “I don’t care why customers choose Apple” will just cause you to alienate the people you need on your side.

For your own sake, please find a better argument rather than repeating yourself.

  • I don't bring those arguments because they are irrelevant and outside the topic, there's no clause "unless people like them" in anti trust laws, and there's never going to be one.

    > For your own sake, please find a better argument rather than repeating yourself.

    The arguments are there and can't be refuted, every single market analysis (even superficial) shows antitrust issues and you haven't been able to refute a single point yourself either.

    I can keep adding even more and more evidence if you want. Here's another one:

    There's been some group preparation for an antitrust lawsuit and in order to do that, those groups have been gathering testimony of people affected by those unfair practices. Developers were so afraid of retaliation by Apple and Google by speaking out what they experience that they had to accept anonymous testimonials. That's as bad as that.

    • > "The arguments are there and can't be refuted"

      I've refuted many of your arguments in this thread. For example, when you claimed that "nobody speaks out against apple", "there are no other mobile OS vendors", "the tech industry can't function with the appstore", "you have no choices", "there are no options if you want to sideload apps". All of them demonstrably (and fairly obviously) incorrect.

      That you don't like the alternatives is not the same as them not existing. That they aren't popular is not the same as them not existing. That iOS is "restricted and popular" are not coincidences, nor unfair.