I don't get why that is a contentious issue, or even a question.
We never had this problem Mac and Windows. Those are also created by companies and providing a platform for all sorts of applications, but anyone can develop for them. You don't need anyone's permission to install apps on your laptop. But for your phone, somehow you do.
Anyway we have always had this on games consoles, and had it on phones for many years before Apple even made a phone. We have it on some embedded platforms too.
There is nothing at all novel or special about this business model, and braking it will kill the business model of a lot of companies, including all the console makers. In fact compared to them iOS is a paradise of openness and market competition for software. Yet for some reason, I never see anyone rolling out this argument against Nintendo.
Open platforms, open standards.
Im all for consumer protection from harmful or misleading, or abusive products but I just don’t see this here. It just seems like you are upset that someone didn’t develop their product the way you want them to, and resent how popular they are. Tough. Develop one that way yourself, or pay someone else to. I don’t get to tell Ford what kinds of car they are or are not allowed to make. As long as they are safe and perform as advertised, that’s up to them.
As fro consoles, even a $100 price difference in the price can kill a product, they are incredibly price sensitive. Trippling or quadruping the price of consoles would almost certainly kill the category, putting them beyond the financial means of huge swathes of consumers that can't afford such a steep up front cost. But apparently that's your decision to make.
Exactly my point.
Yet these companies do want to dictate exactly that.
In comparison, Android allows a lot more flexibility of cost when picking a development machine by allowing you to develop from Linux, Windows, or Mac OS.
- iOS device for testing
=> iPhone hardware
=> iOS
- macOS device for compiling
=> Apple PC hardware
=> macOS
- Apple developer account
- Selling exclusively via the iOS App Store, yielding a 30% cut to Apple
If each aspect sold on its own merits without further restrictions, one could easily imagine (at the very least) building iOS apps using a Linux tool-chain, before uploading them to the App store.
That's not an option. Apple is using the perceived value of reaching iOS customers to 'strengthen' the offering of its mac line. This would tend to indicate that it believes the value of having access to its iOS marketplace is large enough to compel developers to purchase its mac hardware at a premium. Apple is using its market power in iOS to bias PC purchases in its favour.
The open question is whether Apple's use of its acquired market power is harmful to the broader economic ecosystem, and if it is indeed harmful, is it harmful enough that the state should intervene (which is a harmful process in itself).
When you run an iOS app in a simulator on a Mac it’s not like running a virtual machine under VMWare, it substantially uses the native underlying MacOS libraries directly, because they are the same.
To do that on Linux or Windows Apple would have to port almost all of their operating system services, application frameworks and GUI layers and XCode from the Darwin OS core to Linux or Windows. That would be a truly massive undertaking.
All they are asking is that if you want to use their software, as a user or as a developer, is that you buy it.
There is no requirement on Apple to make their code open source or cross platform. It's their code and their choice what they do with it, and what features they pay their employees to develop for it.