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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> And it has been paying more attention to mobile browsing. In late 2015, it finally brought out Firefox for iOS, after years of refusing to do so because Apple requires all iPhone and iPad browsers to use its own Safari engine under the hood.

Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage.

> In my experience, Firefox today is still only a meh product.

I wouldn't say that, but I do admit that Firefox on Linux is moving pretty slowly. Since it's not the highest priority for Mozilla in general I assume, it feels like it lags behind development wise.

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> Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage.

IANAL but couldn't the MS case be relevant/provide precedent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

From a legal standpoint Apple don't have a monopoly in the phone market comparable to what Ms had on the desktop.

It causes enough damage to browsers market however, which shows that their influence is sufficient to hinder competition. This should be a subject to Sherman Act or something similar. But I'm NAL either.

On the other hand Microsoft wasn't preventing people from installing an alternative browser, Apple is.

Apple lets you install alternatives, you just can't set them as default for opening links from other apps.

The browsers on iOS are little more than skins over Apples browser stack.

True, but in some ways this is Apple doing a favor for competing browsers. Imagine how loudly people would complain if Apple did the opposite — provided no support to other browsers, and left them to compete without Apple's inside knowledge of its OS and hardware. No other browser could come close, and we'd all be on Safari all the time. While it's not ideal to be forced to use Apple's rendering engine, at least we can access the many other features that alternative browsers offer.

Depends on perspective. For MS I'm pretty sure we weren't counting servers, mainframes, etc. And them replying "just buy a Mac if you don't like it" wouldn't have been acceptable.

Apple has a complete iOS / iTunes monopoly in the iPhone/iPad market, which is pretty big. And Microsoft wasn't preventing the existence of alternative browser engines or banning apps competing with them, whereas Apple does.

It's true that Apple does not have — even in the US — the amount of market share necessary to be deemed a monopolist and subject to anti-tying laws for its browser. Android is a strong alternative, and as long as it remains so Apple will be effectively immune from challenge. The reason Microsoft was vulnerable to this is that its market share was much higher.

There is one thing that Apple does that Microsoft did not do: it prevents the user from designating a non-Safari default browser. Every link you open will open in Safari, unless you copy it and open paste it into another browser. Microsoft let users install other browsers and designate them as the default (I don't know if this was always the case, but it has been for a very long time.) I'm not sure if Apple has a technical argument for why this is necessary, but it probably won't ever need it because of the market share threshold.

FWIW, I am a recovering lawyer, and I spent a summer in antitrust law. So I'm not an expert, but I do know how to calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for the purpose of determining market concentration...

> It's true that Apple does not have — even in the US — the amount of market share necessary to be deemed a monopolist and subject to anti-tying laws for its browser. Android is a strong alternative, and as long as it remains so Apple will be effectively immune from challenge.

How does a strong alternative help solving the following problem. Let's say you are a video service provider, and want to offer MPEG-DASH[1] based service which relies on browsers supporting Media Source Extensions[2].

Soon enough, you discover, that iOS users can't use your service, not only because iOS default browser doesn't support MSE, but because they can't even install any alternative that does (Apple doesn't let them).

You are literally forced to implement something[3] in addition to MPEG-DASH to address a substantial amount of Apple users and in the process potentially pay Apple and Co. for implementing it because they own related patents, or you need to agree to ignore them (which means a loss of money for you).

TL;DR: Apple stifled adoption of MPEG-DASH, and forced you to do double work and in theory can force you to pay them money too. This is just one example, there can be many like that, another big one is video codecs and etc., but you get the idea. All that bottlenecks on the same restriction - ban on competing browsers.

Shouldn't this be a subject of anti-trust regulation? If they managed to do it, they have enough control over the market. But again, may be anti-trust law simply isn't equipped to address this? I see it as a major problem.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Source_Extensions

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

You make an excellent argument as to why an OS that limits software's ability to access device hardware, run native code, do raw networking, or implement JIT VMs and thus doesn't allow things like alternative browser engines is a bad idea.

Which is why I'm glad FirefoxOS failed.

I never bought into idea of the Webby OS, that Mozilla were pushing for. But at the same time, no one stopped Mozilla from allowing transforming Firefox OS into normal Linux, with Web runtime as one of the options, rather than a strict requirement. It didn't evolve far to judge really, what it could have been.

It's just a threshold issue — if they don't have enough market share, then they can't be sued for tying/bundling. The questions about video standards may be legit, but the assumption of antitrust law is that if there are strong enough competitors in the market, then competitive forces will pressure things in a consumer-favorable direction.

This doesn't hold true always, and certainly not in the short-run, but it's better than having every company with moderate market share being sued by any other company that wishes they had different features in their products.

I don't mean for this to sound harsh, and I wish iOS were more open in various ways that would make things easier for my startup, but I recognize that companies need to have autonomy to build products as they wish — except in rare cases.

I don't think anyone stops Apple from building products. But it's about banning competition, not about their products. And their influence on the industry is way too big to ignore it. So I'm pretty convinced, that what they are doing with excluding competition, shouldn't be happening. It's not about demanding features from them - let them produce bad browsers that are behind modern ones. It's about allowing better ones to be actually used by their users. I.e. choice.

The competition isn't another browser, it's Android. If you don't like Safari, use Android. As long as iPhones are a minority device in the market, regulators won't care what they do.

I already explained above, how Android doesn't solve the problem. The damage Apple are causing is real.

> From a legal standpoint Apple don't have a monopoly in the phone market comparable to what Ms had on the desktop.

Microsoft didn't restrict what software you could install on Windows. That creates a different market.

Someone who is buying a phone can reasonably choose between iOS and Android. Someone who already has a phone and is buying an app can't reasonably choose between the iOS App Store and Google Play. And someone selling an app can't reach iOS customers via Google's or Amazon's store. They're different markets.

Microsoft didn't restrict what software you could install on Windows. That creates a different market.

That's not the legal distinction. What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer. This was troublesome because, at the time, Windows had a 99% marketshare of PC operating systems, which was judged by the courts to be a monopoly.

Apple has nowhere near the same marketshare in phones. Therefore, Apple is free to do whatever it wants with regards to its OS, as consumers are free to switch to Android.

Why is this reverting to marketshare of phones? It's secondary to the problem. It's about influence on the market of browsers, which also affects tons of other things in result, because so many services today are Web based.

(INAL so take this with the appropriate amount of salt)

Because it's illegal to use a dominant position in one market (desktop operating system in Microsft's case) to gain an unfair advantage in another market (browsers). Since Apple does not have a dominant position in any market so they're free to do as they please.

Note that the question what constitutes a market is not always easily defined. Apple obviously has a monopoly on iPhones or smartphones running iOS but I doubt you'll find a judge that sees that as a market distinct of the wider smartphone market.

Well, Apple's ability to stifle the progress of the browser market, demonstrates that their position is mobile market (which is causing the above) is dominant enough. Not sure how you quantify that influence from perspective of the law though, but practically their current influence is very damaging for the whole Web.

> That's not the legal distinction.

Market definition in antitrust?

> What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer.

What got Microsoft in trouble is that they had a monopoly in PC operating systems and tried to leverage it into a monopoly in browsers.

Apple doesn't have a monopoly in PC operating systems. They have a monopoly in iOS app stores. It's like having a retail monopoly for washing machines in the state of California. It doesn't matter how many retailers there are in Florida when nobody in California is going to drive to Florida to buy a washing machine.

It doesn't matter how many Android app stores there are when you can't buy an iOS app from them and you can't use Android apps on iOS.

What about the tablet market?

I was thinking that myself. Personally I think the entire App Store model they have is terrible. Let's take something really good about Linux (package management), now we'll make all the packages monolithic (eh, guess it avoids dependency hell at the expense of space) and also you can only use our one and only tightly controlled package repository (da fuck?!) oh and you don't get admin rights and you can't install 3rd party signing keys (?!?!)

You market it to the general public of non-tech people and no one cares. It looks fancy and shiny and you no longer need a stylus .. and doesn't crash twice a day like PalmOS.

In my few CLJS benchmarks that I did because I had to optimize something FF regularly beats Chrome by about a factor of 2.

Agreed.

I work for a large corporation and FF performs far and away better than Chrome. And I'm comparing Chrome Canary to FF stable build. You can probably say its not a fair comparison, but I do notice the performance difference when I'm testing our apps.

> Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage.

mo·nop·o·ly məˈnäpəlē noun 1. the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.

What's the iPhone's marketshare compared to Android again? You can't just decide to define a monopoly as something that's inconvenient or even abhorrent to you - words (and the laws that use them) have real meanings.

Anti-trust laws should be more complex than that. Having a disproportionate control over the market is already a problem. And Apple have control over which features in HTML gain adoption, and which not, by refusing to implement ones they don't like, and refusing other browsers on iOS. This has negative influence on the whole browser market, way beyond iOS itself.

Then don't buy an iPhone. Apple doesn't have a "monopoly", it's just defining the specs of its own product. If you don't like those specs, buy a similar product with specs you do like.

As for it going beyond iOs, well, it's still not a monopoly, since those other options exist. They aren't buying out/shutting down competition, people are simply choosing to not use the competition. And you can't hold that against Apple.

Literal monopoly is just one extreme example. Anti trust laws regulate more than theoretical extremes. As I said, Apple have enough damaging effect on browsers market, that even if I don't buy any iPhones, I can be affected by that damage. So your suggestion is missing the point. I explained it above, in the comment you answered to.

It's not about market share of phones, its about market share of browser engines. Apple controls 100% of the market on web browser engines on the iphone.

Well they do own the iPhone. Whether or not the "iPhone browser engine market" itself is a thing within the greater "mobile browser engine" market is kind of a grey area.

That's legally immaterial. Microsoft controls 100% of the OS APIs on Windows. The legal distinction is whether the consumer has an alternative. Microsoft got in trouble because Windows was literally 99% of the PC market. Apple has something like a 30% share of the smartphone market - not even close to a monopoly.

I agree with you, but Apple doesn't control the entire cell phone market. Also, if you make them allow 3rd party browsers, why not then allow 3rd party OS's and app stores on the iPhone as well - I can see how Apple would have a problem with that.

Apple is a hardware company. Theoretically.

The "theoretically" qualifier is unnecessary. The majority of Apple's revenue and profit is from hardware sales.

My point being, it doesn't necessarily follow that a hardware company would need to control the software on the phone to the extent that they do.

Also, the money from software proportionately, but even as a software only company (services, $5 billion) they make enough money to be a Fortune 500 company in its own right. I don't think it's evident at all that their motives are straightforwardly devoted to hardware.

Apple understands that the experience of using the hardware is incredibly important, particularly when they want to be able to command premium prices. This drives their control over software. The software is in service of selling the hardware. You could argue that they're selling the overall experience, but that similarly supports their relatively tight control over software.

Side note: services ≠ software

Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage.

Apple isn't even close* to a monopoly in phones. Regulators could come down on Microsoft for doing the same thing, because, at the time, Microsoft had a 99% share of the desktop OS market. Regulators said that Microsoft could not use this monopoly to suppress competition in a legally separate domain (market for browsers).

The difference is that Apple has, what, a 30% share of the phone market? All Apple has to say is that if a consumer wants a choice of browsers, they're free to switch to Android.

But that doesn't change the fact that there are now millions of people pretty well locked into a platform (through iCloud, iMessage, proprietary integration with Mac, etc.) which are limited to a single browser and are forbidden to use another one.

A situation that is much worse than the IE6 one - switching browsers on Windows of 2000s was significantly easier and cheaper than switching out of the Apple ecosystem.

Monopoly can be defined as however you fudge the numbers. Your way of counting is like we'd say "Hey, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly, there's loads of Linux routers and servers out there, so it's fine!". It ignores important properties on how Apples actions hinder free market.

    But that doesn't change the fact that there are now millions of people 
    pretty well locked into a platform (through iCloud, iMessage, proprietary 
    integration with Mac, etc.) which are limited to a single browser and are 
    forbidden to use another one.

Yes, but unlike Windows in the 2000s, there is a clear alternative to Apple. In the 2000s, if you wanted to buy a computer that didn't run Windows, you were out of luck. But you can totally buy a smartphone that doesn't run iOS.

But what does that matter? On Windows in 2000s switching away from IE meant a few minutes of time to install another browser. In 2017, switching away from Apple means >500$ of monetary expenses and significantly reduced integration of other devices around until you replace more of them. What use is that "clear alternative" there?

Malarkey. Apple has excellent security reasons to keep third party apps (Chrome, Firefox, ...) from using JITs on iOS. They've only recently allowed them to use the Apple JIT.

It's not a restriction on JITs that's the problem (though certainly it would be a limitation), it's this: “Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.”

A bit more elaborate than this. They don't allow using iOS SDK for building applications which download and execute dynamic code. I was thinking about a legal workaround for it. What if someone has a non Apple SDK for iOS? Then building will become legal. Though they probabaly can put in a restriction, that they accept only usage of official SDK for their store. Either way, it's a very slimy anti-competitive restriction masked under pretense of security concerns.

> They don't allow using iOS SDK for building applications which download and execute dynamic code

While this is true, it's also explicitly that "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

Regarding a non-apple iOS SDK: "Apps may only use public APIs". this forbids anybody from making an alternative SDK.

> Regarding a non-apple iOS SDK: "Apps may only use public APIs". this forbids anybody from making an alternative SDK.

What stops any alternative SDK from being public?

Nothing, but iPhones only load software signed by Apple (on the app store), so said alternative SDK would be useless as Apple won't sign software made with it (and regardless, they won't sign an alternative browser engine as a matter of policy regardless of which SDK with was made with).

Nothing, but you couldn't implement an alternative SDK using the public APIs, since, well, the public APIs are the current SDK.

Not sure what you mean exactly. Let's say someone comes along, and re-implements all same APIs from scratch as open source. They'll be public, right?

But as TD-Linux said, Apple simply will refuse to accept it anyway.

Right, but you can't implement a lot of the APIs without calling into private kernel functions.

Whether the restriction is a problem or not very much depends on your point of view. Apple never comment publicly on these things but I imagine their argument hinges on two points:

1) Performance (and by implication UX)

2) Battery life

These are exactly the points Steve Jobs raised in his "Thoughts on Flash" missive from 2010: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/. And this is the same issue: Flash was a runtime, just like third party JS runtimes.

Frankly, I'm with Apple on this one.

Jeff Atwood's post on Android JS performance might be getting bit long in the tooth ("The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is… poor" - https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-andr...) but, as recently as November 2016, he posted to the discussion indicating that performance still lags.

I can verify this myself. My 3 year old iPhone 5S equals or betters the performance of my one year old OnePlus Two, which I use for testing (and maybe I should blog on this topic). If you dig through Jeff's thread (warning: it's grown really long) you'll see that I wouldn't be having a much better time if I upgraded to a OnePlus Three.

So, do I want Google to be allowed to run a version of Chrome on iOS that uses other than Apple's JS runtime? No, not really.

Do I want Firefox to be allowed to do that? Hell no. There are bound to be data points that contradict this but my experience is that Firefox on the desktop lags Chrome, Safari (OSX, obviously), Internet Explorer 11 and Edge in terms of performance and framerate. (Again, I should post about this, with numbers.) My extremely limited exposure to Firefox OS back in 2013 suggested it was slow as hell and not worth the bother of developing applications for (too many compromises required) - doubtless not helped by low spec hardware.

Apple pour huge resources into making their iOS JIT run like the wind on a hardware platform that they know inside out. Nobody else is going to be able to do that.

IANAL but I don't think the monopoly argument (think it's in the parent post) holds water simply because Apple doesn't, and is never likely to have, a monopoly in the phone market. If people don't like Apple devices, or iOS as a platform, they have a choice: they can buy an Android or Windows Phone device, and run all the apps they need (particularly on the former).

That wasn't the case in the late 1990s with Microsoft and Windows. If you were a nerd you could run Linux, and you could tolerate the limitations of Star Office or KOffice compared with MS Office, and Apple were just getting back off the ropes, so maybe you'd run a Mac at home. But if you were a non-techy and/or you wanted to get serious work done and be able to easily collaborate and cooperate with other people you were probably running windows.

At one point Microsoft's market share was something like 97%. 97%! In Q2 2016 Apple's worldwide smartphone market share had fallen to 12.9% (source: https://9to5mac.com/2016/08/18/android-ios-smartphone-market...). That's not a monopoly. It's not even within hailing distance of a monopoly.

Going back to my original point, iDevices and iOS are Apple's platform, and I do not object to them restricting what can run on those devices in terms of runtimes and JITs because I care about performance, UX, and having a decent battery life. Some people aren't going to like, but then they can choose one of the alternatives.

Sounds like your justifying it by saying nobody else could ever make an application better than Apple?

What I'm really saying is (I think) that's what Apple thinks and, thus far, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest otherwise. Of course somebody else could build a better browser for iOS, but how likely is that to happen?

I suppose the flipside to this argument is that you can at least offer users the option of alternative browsers without forcing them to take it, and then does it matter so much whether they're better or not?

> Of course somebody else could build a better browser for iOS, but how likely is that to happen?

This question can't be asked, when they forbid making one. So it doesn't even start.

It highlights the core of the problem. Anti-trust laws are supposed to preserve competition, because monopolies stifle progress and cause many other problems. This is exactly the case here. No one would make a better browser, because they are forbidden to.

I totally see where you're coming from, but I'm not quite buying into it.

The reason is that other manufacturers - Google, Samsung, LG, OnePlus, heck, even Microsoft, and a few others I've missed - are free to build, and have been investing heavily in building, better devices and OSs. Sooner or later they're going to start winning - Apple can't be top dog forever. Arguably they already are: Apple's share of the Smartphone market fell to 12.9% in Q2 2016, remember. Consumers have a lot of freedom of choice in the smartphone market and, again, it's arguable they're exercising it.

I just don't think there's an anti-trust or anti-competition argument to be had here. Now you may not like or agree with the way Apple are operating here but that doesn't mean there's a case to be answered.

> Apple doesn't, and is never likely to have, a monopoly in the phone market.

I addressed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13484860

It's not about "monopoly in the phone market". It's about controlling the browser market (more precisely, development and adoption of HTML features) through monopolistic ban of competing browsers on iOS.

I understand that argument, but I don't buy it, because Android has 80%+ of the smartphone market. If Apple actively tried to block the adoption of features that were good for users and developers it would blow up in their faces(1). How well did that work out for Microsoft with IE6?

That's not to say Apple don't have influence, but do they have the kind of strong-arm leverage you seem to be implying?

What would help is: can you explain to us what HTML (CSS, JS, browser API) features you're talking about?

(1) I suppose some might argue they did that with Flash, and it turned out quite nicely for them. But was Flash, as closed, proprietary tech, really a good thing for the web? For users? For developers? For the web?

> That's not to say Apple don't have influence, but do they have the kind of strong-arm leverage you seem to be implying?

Enough of an influence to force many video providers to use non-free codecs and HLS. I find such influence to be very damaging for the whole Web.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13486246

I don't know enough about it to know why they're not supporting MPEG-DASH on iOS (although, weirdly, desktop Safari does support it), beyond the obvious, "it's not Apple's HLS," answer. If it is just that - Apple don't want to support it because it's not their standard - then I'd be inclined to agree with you. Is there some technical disadvantage to MPEG-DASH vs HLS, or impact on the user, battery life, bandwidth usage, or whatever?

I actually don't consider their intentions to make any difference here. But the damage they are causing is real, and it spans many areas way beyond iOS itself. So IMHO there should be some way to prevent it legally. But again, may be current law doesn't address such situation. Then it should be fixed.

HLS is just one example. I brought it, to demonstrate how such ban on competing browsers can cause bad effects to everyone else, even to those who have nothing to do with Apple and its products.

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