Comment by boringg

But even in real life this doesn't hold.

> I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut.

Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.

Regular people understand the idea of "I bought a thing, and now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on", see printers.

Apple is no more entitled to a cut of everything I put on my iPhone anymore than Walmart is entitled to a cut of everything I put on my table simply because they made the table.

Arguably phones are becoming less like stores and more like a significant part of life. This is especially true as more and more of modern life demands a smart phone and apps.

And the only options are to take the deal -- modifiable at any time by the platform owner -- or burn down your digital life and start over on the only other practical competitor.

This is a framing issue. I think your comment is a great comment and probably does reflect a popular understanding. A farmer can't just set up shop in a supermarket without first paying and submitting to some vetting by the store owner. The problem here is that Apple doesn't just own the store or the platform for publicity and distribution. They also own the platform on which the software is run. It is analagous to Walmart also owning your house and not allowing you to buy home goods from any store except Walmart. I don't believe an average consumer would find that to be an acceptable business practice.

> I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.

Who is arguing it should be free? Why create a false dichotomy where it's either the status quo (30%) or nothing (0%)?

I'm sure most people would accept a reasonable fee. It's hard to put an exact number on this because it would have emerged organically if Apple actually allowed fair competition in app stores. In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%

And don't forget that Apple receives enormous benefit from these apps being in their store. If not, consider what would have happened had Apple not allowed any apps in their store. Hint: Android would have eaten the world.

> I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal

The App Store was not a business innovation by Apple to set expectations, it's how all cell phone software that preceded it worked. Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.

An iPhone is less like Walmart and more like a computer. We should run whatever we like on our own hardware.

This is a really bizarre viewpoint.

In my view, my phone is MY DEVICE. It is most definitely not "Google/Apple's platform"!

Google is merely manufacturing my phone, and I intend Google to have no rights or control whatsoever regarding my phone, and merely have the obligation (not right, obligation) to manufacture it correctly and provide open-source software for it that works correctly and properly provides Android interfaces (obviously, I don't use an Apple phone since Apple doesn't offer that, while Google does since they provide devices with unlocked bootloaders that run open-source OSes).

It only runs Android because Google with Android happened to win the adoption lottery and it would run PodunkOS by ACME if PodunkOS by ACME had been the one that managed to gain critical mass.

Again it is absolutely not even remotely close to "Google/Apple's platform", and I have no intention for Google to interfere in my use of it and certainly not interfere in any relations I might have with people providing software for my phone like taking a cut of the transaction or deciding how that software should behave.

Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either.. or any of my 'smarttvs' etc.

Would this mean that anyone must be able to load any software into any platform that runs on software, or are we just picking on apple because they are popular. And got popular while doing all these things.. if people didn't want it they wouldn't have bought into it in the first place.

Most consumers are not even aware of how restrictive iOS is - for the same reason why they aren't aware game consoles do the same thing but way worse. All they know is where to buy compatible software.

If you told them "you have to pay 30% to the person who invented books every time you write something" they'd scream censorship and call for an armed revolution.

Walmarts cut is largely based on their costs to stock and sell the item. Appstores costs are not related to the cut they take as they have >80% profit margin.

In my opinion, Apple have a choice. They go down the "just works", tight integration and lower the fees for other developers OR they open up for competition and keep the fees.

At the moment they're double dipping. They're saying they have to be the only app store for security and UX AND then charging high fees. If they're really providing a service for end users, they shouldn't be taking such a large cut from developers.

I’m an Apple user (own iPad, iPhone, Mac Studio, among other devices) since the 90:s and I buy into that. But I _also_ think Apple has grown way too much into a bully and way too much into disallowing third party developers to do things Apple allows themselves to do with competing apps.

The “it just works” should be allowed to extend into the entire ecosystem.

"It just works" except I have to remember to not pay inside the app to get the cheapest price because the app price is 30% higher to pay the Apple tax. I need to open my laptop to buy a Kindle book instead of continuing to use my phone.

Small, minor, annoying issues as a customer that make me think slightly less of Apple while continuing to be in awe of their hardware.

It _used_ to just work. Now each release is full of features no one asked for, and there are more and more issues because of this feature bloat.

My M1 MacBook Pro is probably the second worst computer I've ever bought, and might have been the most expensive I've ever purchased.

That hasn't been the case with Safari in a long time, has it? And of course, users can't switch to a browser they believe works better.

Bear in mind that the article mentions other issues, such as preventing third party banks managing your NFC wallet, degrading interoperability with non-Apple products, etc.

Also, I'm not sure why you favor the App Store. It's not safe. Apple is unable to keep malicious apps off of it, and there is no warranty if you lose money due to a malicious app. People think there is some implied safety in the App Store. There is no such thing.

Safety comes from not giving permissions to apps which don't need them.

Great. The beauty of an open market is that you can continue to solely suck on the teat of Apple if you so choose.

>> I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.

> I’m a heavy and loyal Apple user AND an app developer.

Do you really think you're representative of the average iphone customer? A heavy, loyal user AND an app developer? I don't think so. And even if you were, your personal situation isn't a rebuttal

You don’t need to be a lawyer to see that there’s a duopoly, but duopolies aren’t illegal. The DOJ has to prove illegal conduct, which is harder than just showing a lack of widespread competition.

>In the last ten years, no other vendor has been able to successfully place a new OS on the market.

How much of this is because of evil monopoly forces, and how much of it is because users prefer iOS and Android? It's not like the mobile device market snapped into existence overnight, both Android and iOS beat out Blackberry and managed to fend off Microsoft.

> If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened.

I...don't think that's sufficiently self-evident to stand on its own.

Fundamentally, it's hard to have a world with more than a very small number of operating systems for the major form factors of device—unless those operating systems are mandated to interoperate in significant ways.

Creating a new operating system for phones also requires some things that are not at all easy to get:

1) You need hardware. This means that either you're creating an OS for an existing hardware platform (in this case, Android or iOS) or you're building your own phones. Given the legal frameworks that existed over the past decade and a half (as distinct from the particular dominance of one platform or another), that basically means you're building your own phones. Some people have tried to do that, but it adds hugely to the up-front cost of getting an OS going.

2) You need to get a critical mass of people using it. Until and unless this happens, what you've created has to live or die based on the apps and services that you build for the phone. No one's going to dedicate their own time, effort, and money to creating software for a phone that only 10,000 people have ever bought.

Now, I can see a pretty strong argument for a new legal framework that would make #1 much easier—specifically, requiring all hardware platforms (possible "all hardware platforms over X sales") to provide a fully-open specification for third-party OS makers to use (with appropriate clauses about dogfooding the open API to prevent the hardware maker from just using a bunch of private APIs to preference their OS). This would allow people to create their own OS for the iPhone without Apple's interference.

But that's not what we've had since 2007, so your bold but unsupported statement that the lack of third choices for mobile OSes in and of itself proves that Apple is a monopoly (or at least that Apple/Google together make up an abusive duopoly) does not hold up to scrutiny.

However, there are many unsuccessful mobile OSes. Perhaps dozens, depending on how you'd like to slice the pie.

I don't see how Apple and Android's competitors failing is any sort of fact about Apple or Google, at all.

NVIDIA and CUDA are not comparable. NVIDIA isn't preventing you from running OpenCL or Vulkan.

Very nice take on it, thanks.