Comment by ggreer
1 day ago
Similar policies and pricing? You can get Android phones for much cheaper than iPhones. And many smartphone manufacturers let you run whatever you want on their devices. The largest smartphone manufacturer in the world (Samsung) ships most of their phones with two app stores, and lets customers enable side loading with a few taps.
If you're talking about policies and pricing for developers, then why not apply that argument to app stores owned by Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo? Those are much more restrictive than anything in the smartphone world. Heck, even Steam takes a 30% cut.
I'm talking from the point of view of app developers.
Sure I'm open to the idea that there's fierce competition on the hardware, on the software though, there's absolutely zero signs of it.
> then why not apply that argument to app stores owned by Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo?
We do have signs that there's competition in the console world, if you want to make that parallel, when was the last time Google or Apple paid for an app exclusive similarly to game exclusives?
Apple and Google make apps exclusive all the time. They just do it by acquiring the company that developed the app, then integrating the app's functionality into their OS. Examples for iOS include Siri, Dark Sky, Shazam, and Workflow. Google did it with Waze, and failed with Sparrow, Quickoffice, and a bunch of others. Samsung did it with LoopPay (which became Samsung Pay) and Viv (from the developers of Siri), which they turned into Bixby.
I wouldn't consider most of those exclusives but company titles. They also exist on the console world but are a different concept (like Halo for example)
I'm unaware of a single contract where Google or Apple paid some money to a company to keep the exclusivity like what happens on console.