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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

It's long overdue that Apple allows installing software without their approval on iOS devices. It's appalling that there is no alternative to the App Store. The imbalance of power between developers and Apple is unacceptable.

It doesn't look like Apple will change without outside pressure; the time is now ready for government regulation. I really hope that the EU takes on this problem, and forces Apple to allow competing stores, just like they required Microsoft to let users choose alternative browsers.

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Apple has only 25% (and I think that's rounding it up a lot) of marketshare in Europe. It is by no mean a dominant force like Microsoft was, not by a long shot. So it isn't clear under which anti trust rule you would force anything.

It is not because you make a lot of money with less than 1/3 of a market, that you should be forced in anything. That doesn't make any sense.

What I don't understand - or it should be that having anti-apple feelings has an influence in somebody's judgement - that people seem to be confused over this.

25% marketshare defined how? You're probably going by devices sold, but that paints a limited picture of how much of the smartphone economy Apple possesses (which is what market share tries to define.) Then you need to look at more things: 1) sales revenue, 2) services revenue and 3) devices in use at any one time.

Which all skews favourably to iOS.

- iPhones last longer in the wild, higher resale value and bigger second hand market, on average. That means over time, devices-in-use marketshare for iOS exceeds the new-device-sales share. (3) You can see this in e.g. web traffic from iOS/Android devices, it's much closer to 40%/60%

- iPhones are more expensive and more profitable, such that the sales revenue split between Apple/Android phones is much more favourable than the split of units sold. (1)

- Further, and we've also seen numbers that the ARPU on iOS is 4x that of Android, meaning app store sales share is much more favourably than 25% for iOS. (2)

We've probably all seen the news reporting on Apple commanding 90 or 95% of the market's profits. [0] Its real market share, which is not just device units sold, is much more significant than 25%. Is it as dominant as Windows? Surely not, I agree with you there, but you're downplaying them a bit too much. I don't see grounds for an anti trust appeal though.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-indus...

I believe that traditional definition of market share doesn't look at any of the evidence you put forth here. And regulators are going to continue to use their traditional definition.

> the time is now ready for government regulation

Why?

Don't like it as a consumer? Don't buy an iPhone.

Don't like it as a producer? Don't build apps for it.

Nothing is making you use iOS or Apple devices.

Well, don't like Internet Explorer non standards? Don't use IE, use another browser.

> It's appalling that there is no alternative to the App Store.

Apple’s vision from day 1 of the iPhone was that the Web was the alternative. Its lacking device APIs is where outrage resides.

I'm still genuinely confused as to why Apple hasn't been slammed with antitrust on multiple fronts. You can ignore the whole App Store fiasco and still come up with several other anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices: as a paying Winamp customer, I can't access the iPhone. This isn't a silly little issue like a browser and they get away with it consistently.

Unlike the old railroad companies that needed huge capital investments to set up national railroad networks, anyone with a couple million could cobble together a PoC of some phones. So being the biggest phone seller doesn't turn them into some untouchably large company. There's a ton of companies trying to release their own phones; even Ubuntu has their own line[1].

The only industry in all of computing where antitrust seems to me to be directly applicable to a business - only considering itself - is owning and running fabrication plants. I think they cost something like $1 billion to set up. Maybe Comcast or AT&T or similar could also count with their expensive communications infrastructure, and if we didn't otherwise have regulation for those industries.

Of course, Apple colluding with Google to fix the store cut would also count, as would many other similar examples. But those involve multiple companies conspiring together, not a single one like you've mentioned.

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/devices

Apple is not colluding with other companies to be anti-competitive so that aspect of antitrust law doesn't apply. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the phone market so laws about abusing a monopolistic position doesn't apply. Anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices are not inherently illegal (they're arguably inherent to capitalism), they're only potentially illegal when practiced by a business that's potentially a monopoly. It's like you're complaining that Apple has a "monopoly" on deciding what's sold in their store. Every store has that right.

> as a paying Winamp customer, I can't access the iPhone

I don't know what this means. Has a law been broken when a program written for OS X on an x86 processor can't run on an Android phone with an ARM processor?

> as a paying Winamp customer, I can't access the iPhone

Microsoft was accused of anti-competitive behaviour by EU for bundling IE with Windows. Not only is iTunes bundled with iPhone, but alternatives are locked out (unlike IE - which was always the Chrome download app).

But Microsoft could only be anti-competitive because they had an effective monopoly on the PC market. If you don't like iOS's policies, go buy an Android.

There are other music-playing apps in the iTunes store so there are alternatives to iOS's Music app but I'm not familiar with the parameters of what Apple does and does not allow.

I don't like many of Apple's iTunes Store policies, I just don't see how they could be called illegal.

> go buy an Android.

Exactly as I did. That doesn't stop me from sympathising with iPhone users. iTunes is a horrific piece of software, virtually every alternative is better.

Not likely to happen, as unlike Microsoft, Apple makes and sell the whole widget.

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