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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Apple has < 15% marketshare in EU, so that's low priority for now.

Facebook? Yes.

Amazon? Even more yes.

That is a really naive view of market share. The market for phones is tiered, and Apple dominates the tiers it wants: The profitable ones. It doesn't take 51% market saturation to have monopoly control.

Anybody who wants to get out of Apple's system can easily pick up a different high-end phone[0], with different tradeoffs, with few repercussions beyond how their Apple Watch (if they have one) works and the color of their messages when texting iPhone users.

That's not monopoly power.

[0] as a consumer I care about the phone's features, not its profit margin for the manufacturer. There's still a healthy ecosystem of non-Apple companies making phones.

Please explain how Apple has monopoly control over high end phones.

Apple has 100% market share for Apple users .

By this logic, we should break up BlackBerry.

It was more of a if you own an iPhone you are required to get all your apps through Apple and are charged accordingly so, reducing competition and ultimately being fleeced with pricing.

Yes, and that's an issue, but it's basically irrelevant compared to Google, with over 2 billion users.

Abuse is abuse.

Yes, but it isn't monopolistic abuse. You can always go to another phone and another ecosystem and probably get the very same apps.

Abuse of dominant position requires dominant position.

When you are forced to use their eco-system it makes them the dominant position by default.

But no one is forced to use their eco-system. You can buy an Android and use their ecosystem. You can buy a Blackberry or Microsoft phone (I think) and use theirs.

First things first

So maybe don't buy an iPhone? There are tons of alternatives, and Apple doesn't hold a majority of the market share in any country.

Or maybe instead, we should open up the app market, so as to reduce the monopoly power over that market.

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