Hacker News Reader

Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

What about apple? Yes, they don't have the same market share but their product is completely closed and until recently all other browsers where crippled compared to the build in one.

All apps must come from the Apple App Store. No 3rd party allowed.

View on HN

> Yes, they don't have the same market share

That's the answer, full stop. Like it or not, the rules are different for you when you have the majority of market share, and this has been true in both the EU and the US despite their different approaches to antitrust regulation.

Apple has a market share of 100% of the iOS platform.

Which is like saying that Ford has 100% of the market share for Ford cars. Antitrust regulation cares about product categories, not brands.

But the EU charges are about Google's tactics within the Google run Android market. Google isn't leveraging it's monopoly outside of it's own brand either.

The argument hinges on Google not owning or operating Android. AOSP has been a dead dream for a while now due to carriers locking down phones and Google needing to circle the wagons.

Android is bigger than Google. Other companies make Android devices.

Google can exert a large amount of control over device makers --- Android without Google Play Services and the Google Play Store is pretty useless. (Unless you have Amazon's scale and can clone all that.)

Android without Google Play Services/Store is not useless at all. Ask any Chinese Android user.

In China, apps Chinese citizens want are available in app stores available there. Everywhere else, Android apps people want are solely available through Google's store. And the only reason China has a competitive Android market: Google doesn't operate there. In fact, China proves what's so bad about the Play Store: We can definitively see how much more freedom exists if Google is axed from the equation.

I don't think most of the Chinese app stores are good examples though. Too much piracy, too many repackaged apps and security nightmares.

On the contrary,China proves what's so bad without the Play Store and GCM.Android is a mess there.

iOS is a luxury brand (remember that carrier subsidies are smaller in the EU and are not allowed in some member states). So, realistically for a lot of people there is only one kind of affordable smartphone and that is an Android phone.

As you mention, AOSP alone does not give you much Android and Google is likely to dictate all kinds of terms to use the Play services, Play Store, etc. So, the question is indeed does AOSP give enough to argue that Google does not fully control the Android market.

Personally, I am not sure this is the most problematic aspect of Android though. If we assume for a moment that Android is a near-monopoly in the EU, the more troubling aspect is that people can only choose between having no smartphone (which is becoming harder) or letting Google suck all kinds of data out of them. In other words, only when you are rich enough, you can afford not to let a company suck up a lot of your private data.

the info to root your device is free on the internet

*For certain devices

Can't repeat this enough. My shitty Android tablet from Huawei that I got for free on contract cannot be rooted and is stuck on Android 4.1 forever, even though it has a modern ARM cpu and 1GB of RAM... :(

not sure that the argument that iOS is a luxury brand holds up in most european countries where you can just as well get an iOS or Android device with the same subsidization from the carrier (especially since Apple does not only sell its last generation high end devices).

There are still a couple of european countries where iOS devices sell extremely poorly. I am not sure if this is because of an absence of subsidies or another reason.

Even if Android is the only option, you can always choose to refuse all data sharing from google, you are not forced to create a google account or to use google play.

Admittedly, it makes things harder for a neophyte.

>AOSP has been a dead dream for a while now due to carriers locking down phones

That's only in the US.

Let's be honest here, AOSP is a dead dream because porting and maintaining AOSP for a device is kinda complicated. Many people do it for free, but you can't rely on that.

No, AOSP is a dead dream because Google moved essential code into Google Play Services, which isn't open source.

Essential code such as what? Can't you boot AOSP without installing the Google apps?

Essential code for apps written against the platform's official APIs.

You can but a huge number of apps use Google Play Services and you can't use those. I suppose technically you couldn't get them anyway since you don't have Google Play, but anyway.

GPS includes stuff like location services, Firebase, Chromecast, analytics, Google account authentication, Google Drive APIs, all the game stuff, Android Pay, etc.

You can write plenty of good apps without google play services. Thats hyperbole.

You can. But since almost nobody does, there's no viable use for a phone without it. Bear in mind, even Microsoft, who was part of starting this investigation against Google... Even Microsoft's apps like Outlook and Skype won't run without Play Services installed and enabled.

The point is that given how cars and software work, "ios devices" is a meaningful category while "ford cars" is not.

Or which things can monopolistic companies do that non-monopolistic companies can't do? Can or do Apple do those things?

It's not a meaningful category. They are all mobile phones, or smartphones if need be to distinguish there.

Which practices a monopolistic company can do, but is not allowed to, is written clearly in the article: Forcing/Paying other companies to pre-install its proprietary apps. A non-monopolistic company is allowed to do that.

The same could be said about anything if you draw the 'market' boundaries narrowly enough.

My local corner shop has a market share of 100% of the places I can buy things if I walk 30 seconds but that's hardly relevant when I can drive 10-15 minutes and have 4 different supermarkets at my disposal.

If you bought bread from the corner store then you can still spread butter from the supermarket on it. Your two purchases were independent.

That's not relevant in the phone market, where you're stuck with a specific platform once you've made your initial phone purchase. You can't use it with applications from other platforms, and switching platforms means you need to purchase all the stuff you're using all over again.

So if I write any piece of software, even if only one person uses it, I can be forced by anti-trust regulation to make it compatible with any other software or at least release the source code? Do you really think that's what anti-trust regulation implies?

No. I think it doesn't matter to them until it becomes the majority platform (not that that's any less stupid).

It seems incredibly hard for people to grasp how antitrust law works. It's very simple: Antitrust law only affects those with a massively dominant control over a market.

Exactly. If you're not a monopoly (or otherwise massively dominant in the market you compete in), antitrust law doesn't apply to you. Antitrust law is specifically to guard against the situation where one player in a market is so dominant, that the market itself becomes less competitive.

Although usually when I hear people misuse antitrust concepts on tech forums, they're not trying to understand complicated legal conflicts, rather they're grasping at straws to use as ammunition in dumb flamewars about platforms/companies/etc. that they don't like.

I really don't like it then. So we could theoretically have 4 or 5 totally closed platforms with small market shares for each and that would be totally fine.

I guess that the issue is that I am not as much against Google using Android to distribute its services (I would be using most of them anyway and those that I don't use (newsstand, spaces, ..) can be replaced anyway) but against being unable to distribute/install whatever software I want on a general purpose computing device.

And AFAIK, sadly there is no law governing this.

>Yes, they don't have the same market share but their product is completely closed

There are no laws against closed products per se.

Antitrust regulations apply only for products with dominant market share (Android has 87.6% market share 2016Q2 according to IDC).

Apple isn't forcing OEMs to include their bundled software.

This reads very much like the EU vs. MS for the exact same reasons.

But isn't the deal that you get it for free if you include the software? i.e. there's an exchange of value there?

I suspect the problem is that there's no "I'll pay you, but not include the software" option for Android, but couldn't it be applied to any FLOSS as in "there's no option to pay you, but not contribute back" in the case of the GPL or even "there's not an option to not buy a Mac with MacOS", or something like that?

EDIT: If the problem is using Android's dominant position to bundle Google Search, then I get the similarities to the MS lawsuit, the difference being that people actually want to use it, which is why I think Google should be confident about including a "Bing Search" or "Google Search" option, as 99.99% of people would go with Google, since in Google's case, Search is actually a product people want to use when compared to the alternatives, whereas Explorer wasn't in the MS case.

But couldn't this then also be extended to Chrome and Search on the desktop? i.e. Google used its dominant position in search to push Chrome, (try visiting google.com with Safari or Firefox, notice the top-right Chrome banner?) and once they got to a dominant position with Chrome, they used it to further the dominance of Search, by it being default in Chrome etc.

I don't think the Bing Search option would be sufficient to ward off anti-trust claims, unless you made Bing search the default or did something crazy like make phones flip a coin and then decide which search to default to.

Microsoft never made Google the default search on Windows. Just offered the option.

Additionally, forcing a company to effectively hide, (many users never change the defaults), its own product by making the competing one the default, goes way beyond what a government body should be able to compel a company to do, in my opinion.

In current Windows 10 Bing is the only provider for Cortana, which is enabled by default, both for the conversational interface as well as all shell search features.

Microsoft's case was about Microsoft threatening OEMs to not sell Windows to them if they dared preinstall Netscape. The purpose was to keep a high barrier to entry for competing OS's, as they controlled the Win32 API but not the Java applets API.

Apple simply doesn't allow OEMs on their platform at all. This does not seem like a better approach.

That depends on what your goals are. I think you could argue that Google's Android licensing approach produces inferior products.

..and superior products by the same argument.

In theory, Android should be superior. But like in the Windows ecosystem, promise is often ruined by third party hardware vendors (and carriers).

This from Google's Blog in 2009 against IE/Microsoft. The irony is beautiful.

https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2009/02/browsers-powered...

I thoroughly enjoying reading Google's 2009 blog "The Meaning of Open". This was the company I was a fan of, back then, and it's so easy to see how different of a company it is today.

"To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win."

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

What changed? I thought the other browsers still had to basically be Safari (webkit, the javascript engine, etc) underneath.

I thought they opened it up but maybe I am mistaken. I vaguely recall something about other browsers being slower than the built in one, maybe that was fixed?

I think you're thinking of the fact that WKWebView allows you to use the JIT, whereas UIWebView didn't allow for that.

There are still various ways in which third-party browsers are penalized, such as links from other applications being hardwired to open in Safari.

Do you think it might be because this has nothing to do with apps or installed browsers?

> Yes they don't have the same market share

Problem solved it would seem. Even so, as you mentioned you can get other browsers.

You can only get wrappers on WebKit and it's JavaScript engine. No gecko, no blink.

but you can get other browsers, as I pointed out:

http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iosapps/best-iphone-web-br...

Those are all Safari underneath.

An under that they're all iOS

No, they "aren't" iOS, iOS is the operating system that manages them. You clearly don't know how this tech work, and should avoid commenting as if you do.

Get angry brah!

Easy there, I was being hyperbolic.

There's really no need to make assumptions about my technical capabilities from 6 words and ask me to stop commenting based on those assumptions. That character is unbecoming for this community.

Apple should really consider supporting the use of external email clients when clicking on a mailto: link. Reminding me of a deceitful lawyer, they allowed you to remove default email client, however even if you have Gmail.app installed and tap on a mailto: link it displays a popup telling you to install Mail.app instead of allowing you to choose Gmail or another Email client. Same for http/https links. I prefer to use 1Pasword instead of Safari.

Yeah it would be nice of them to allow that. Personally I don't care since I would never use Gmail but I can understand how that would be frustrating.

What email service do you use? I think Google is secure and they have never deleted or altered an email of mine as far as I know.

I use Gmail but a common (and at the very least reasonable) complaint is that they must do at least some level of data collection to give personalized Gmail ads.

Apple comes with Google Search as the default, and several other options. So it's a moot point.

You may note that Apple only put Google as the default search because Google paid them a billion dollars to do so. And Google's super mad Oracle told everyone, because it shatters the illusion that people use Google because it's better.

People use Google because most people use the default, and Google pays to be the default.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pai...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com