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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

> its going to get quite interesting on both the phones and game consoles

A key insight. Many companies sell products that in turn have marketplaces which they wring some control over.

Game consoles is indeed an interesting one, because it parallels so perfectly. If Apple must allow competitor markets within iOS, so must Sony and Microsoft. (Note that physical game sales also require paying a commission to the console maker, so it's a different market but the same business model.)

Or cable TV. Does Comcast have a monopoly on selling additional cable channels and pay-per-view through my Comcast set top box? How is that any different?

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> If Apple must allow competitor markets within iOS, so must Sony and Microsoft.

Because pricing power is the test for market power, there's actually a more complete analysis that needs to be done than this kind of superficial similarity. As it's more common for people to have multiple consoles from different vendors than multiple cellphones from different app ecosystems, it is quite plausible that a console vendor might not have pricing power in games that they sell through their stores whereas Apple might have pricing power in the app store.

In the case of game sales, that's usually part of SDK licensing for the platform... Which may happen if Apple must open up the next series of iThings, the developer program licensing may well change, and prices may go up if you want to publish outside iStore.

For in-app purchases, should anyone be able to sell there too?

I went into McDonald's and I couldn't buy a Whopper. What's up with that? I'm going to sue!

MacD is a manufacturer, they're not obliged, actually cannot manufacture anyone else's products. A closer analogy would be if I opened a mall in your city, got the local council to agree that my mall was the only one allowed for the next 50 years and then allowed only MacD to open up shop, denying space to other burger joints even if they offered the same rent.

Still not true analogy as Apple don't prevent competitions inside the mall.

Anyway finding a physical world analogy will be though so maybe we should resign trying. (Fact that duplicatinga/delivering cost for digital product is close to zero is an example of why physical analogy will often fail)

They do restrict competition in the app store. Especially if it competes with apple itself. They just banned app store app that tracked down lost airpod via realitive (Bluetooth?/WiFi?)signal strength for PR reasons.

Interesting. Is there a website with a database where people can claim which apps have been removed from the App Store just for historical sake, or to reference to?

There is no real world analogy because no brick and mortar company would get away with something like this.

A close analogy would be Apple owning every shopping mall in the world, charging shop owners annual rent AND taking 30% of their revenue. Also as part of their lease agreement, Apple forbids tenants from selling their products out of their own independent shop or even out of their own homes or websites. Could you imagine how much more expensive goods would be if shopping mall landlords took 30% off the top line of every tenant?

Of course you could say there's Google Play, but your Android app is a different product from your iPhone app. Also, Google Play conveniently has the exact same arrangement with the same 30% commission, so it's basically just a parallel universe where people are stuck in one or the other.

I don't know how they have gotten away with this for so long. Imagine if Microsoft took 30% of the revenue of every Windows app developer (of course beginning after their monopoly was already established)! They couldn't even get away with bundling a web browser into their operating system. What Apple is doing is far worse.

Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems and were leveraging that to win the browser wars. Apple does not have a monopoly on smartphones and consequently cannot be using that monopoly as leverage. Monopolies aren’t even a problem in and of themselves, it’s leveraging them that’s generally illegal.

Well if it's the leverage that's the problem, then we have a problem. Google and Apple are exerting the leverage of a monopoly (30% revenue tax) despite each not having a monopoly according to the classic definition, at least. It doesn't matter if each have 45% market or one has 90% if they're allowed to behave as if they each have 100%.

They have a monopoly on distribution of apps for iPhones. You literally aren't allowed to sell anywhere else and they are leveraging it for an outrageous 30%

This is an invalid analogy for multiple reasons but for starters, you don't give an argument that this unnaturally increases the price of hamburgers.

Just cause i like playing with analogies, should mcD have to sell any and all soda?

McDonald's buys soda and resells it to customers. Apple does not buy apps and resell them to customers.

The current situation in the iOS ecosystem would be more like McDonald's forbidding you from bringing your own beverages into their restaurants, even if they don't sell the same beverage (or even a competitor of one they do sell) and you plan to buy their food.

Of course, restaurants can and do frown upon or even outright forbid the above behavior, but they also don't charge multiple hundreds of dollars for you to walk through the door.

Sounds like a bad analogy - Apple does buy the app for 70% of what they sell it.

I wouldn't really call that "buying". If Coca Cola operated by setting up shop inside a McDonald's and selling its soda, but had to give 30% of its earnings to McDonald's, most people wouldn't say that McDonald's buys the soda. I guess it could be interpreted that way, but it'd be a very weird way of doing so, and would be (IMO) an incorrect interpretation of the semantic relationship between the soda manufacturer and the restaurant.

To further demonstrate that semantic disconnect, the app developer is only paid when Apple receives a payment from the user for that app. Modeled in terms of McDonald's selling soda, it would be equivalent to McDonald's not paying Coca Cola until someone orders and pays for a fountain drink. AFAIK, this ain't the case.

In other words:

* McDonald's actually buys soda from Coca Cola, then resells it to customers

* Apple only facilitates the transfer of money (from user to developer) and application (from developer to user)

If anything, Apple is probably closer to an escrow than a retailer (another bad analogy, I know, but certainly better than any notion of Apple buying and reselling apps).

McDonald's is in complete control of the prices inside their restaurant. That sounds like a "monopoly" to me!

I think a closer McDonald's analogy would be if it did not allow Coca-Cola to sell its drinks elsewhere.

If we are trying to play the analogy game[1], I think the closest thing in US law would be automobiles. The manufacture cannot force you to buy gas at a certain place and cannot restrict 3rd parties from making parts, accessories, and tires.

Although I understand the 2600 / Nintendo argument, I think at this point forcing an opening in the stores will probably be the only way for independent software companies to survive long term. It will also lessen the power of Apple or Google to silence app developers.

I am really getting a bit sick of book and music authors being treated better than developers for the purpose of speech.

1) I tend to agree with jliptzin's "There is no real world analogy because no brick and mortar company would get away with something like this." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13398591

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