Dear Apple: Here’s How to Stop the Antitrust Investigations

> Open up alternate payment mechanisms… without the Apple tax

I don't agree with this, as a developer and a consumer. As a consumer it is extremely nice that I don't have to deal with all sorts of exotic and different payment gateways. Some accept Amex, some don't. Some try to store my card without my consent, some don't. Some make it really obvious that not being charged during a trial period some don't. Some payment gateways are buggy, slow and frustrating and some are really good. As a consumer I bloody hate that and I love iOS and Apple for the fact that I can securely put payment methods behind Apple Pay and then know that I can do any in-app purchases via an already established and well working gateway. No faffing about with some other shite.

From a developer perspective I don't see why anyone should use the AppStore as a distribution channel to a huge market and completely circumvent Apple's cut when clearly they are offering a lot of value by making this possible in the first place?

For example, my VPN I can either buy a license by going to their website and go through a 5 minute checkout process or I can do a 5 second checkout via the iOS app. The first one goes 100% to the VPN developers, the second also means that a cut goes to Apple. Sounds fair to me, because I literally purchased a VPN in a moment where I didn't have the time of going to a website. I was abroad, I was on a mobile and I had limited time to get quickly a subscription so I could use the VPN and I would have not bought it if it wasn't for the ease and speed which the app allowed me to do. This was only the case because Apple does such a diligent job in keeping it so sleek. Without Apple Pay I would have not bought that license and they would have not lost 30% of the sale, but effectively 100%.

I wrote to US Justice Department back in ~2013 to complain that I could not find the protocol documents to connect to my iPhone over USB. Specifically I was not willing to accept iTunes terms of service and wanted a workaround. Microsoft was required by consent decree to document all wire protocols, so I wanted to begin the process for Apple to so the same.

I got a personalized response from the Justice Department. The response said since the iPhone had closed protocols from the beginning, before it was dominant, there is nothing they could do to force opening up. While I didn’t like the outcome, I did understand it, and I was pleasantly surprised to get an actual response.

I suspect there is a similar argument for the App Store model. Apple never allowed side-loading apps. We may need new legislation to change this if we want.

As a consumer of Apple products I am not too keen on any of these suggestions. I agree that developers for Apple's platforms would like these and perhaps there is some trickle-down effect for consumers.

> 1: Enable users to set default app preferences.

Fine, but really Maps and Email is pretty much the only one I care about. This is the best suggestion of the bunch.

> 2: Open up alternate payment mechanisms… without the Apple tax.

Nah. Last thing I want is to have to fill out my credit card information in every app and worry about what's going to happen with it. Apple Pay and IAP work perfectly adequately from the consumer standpoint.

> 3: Allow sideloading of iOS apps.

I don't think we have a problem with lack of iOS apps. In fact I wish App Store Review was stricter and took more issue with quality and dodgy business practices (i.e. excessive and addictive use of IAP).

> 4: Give third-party developers equal access to APIs.

What this is asking for is for Apple to effectively release features later or not at all. Or have some even more draconian App Store rules. I don't want every random app having full hardware access to spy on me as it pleases.

> 5: Stop sherlocking third-party developers.

Right, so Apple is not supposed to give me free access to nice features so I can continue to pay money to someone else. Right.

Congress: "Does Apple restrict, in any way, the ability of competing web browsers to deploy their own web browsing engines when running on Apple’s operating system?"

Apple: "The purpose of this rule is to protect user privacy and security."

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191

Upd: Giving the freedom to users is not the goal of Apple. Quite the opposite.

I disagree with a lot of this list, it this particular item I think deserves so,e attention.

> #4: Give third-party developers equal access to APIs.

AirPods are great. Maybe a little… too great. It is actually impossible for a competitor to make a pair of earbuds that matches with the iPhone as easily as AirPods because that API is private. This strikes me as unfair and anticompetitive; no matter how much better a particular pair of earbuds might be, they cannot work as well as AirPods because Apple doesn’t want them to.

There’s a similar thing happening with the Apple Watch. Google Maps has abilities that Apple Maps doesn’t have, but Apple won’t let you use drop-in replacements for mapping. So instead of a safe bike ride, I’m heading the wrong direction on one-way streets or on freeways thanks to Apple Maps. This just sucks.

Some commenters here say “I don’t want third parties to have access to private information.” There’s a line somewhere, I don’t think anyone sane would demand access to _all_ APIs. But there are some clear examples where the platform maker is giving unfair advantage to their own accessories and services, this is dipping into antitrust territory.

This coming from a company whose primary product has a rent seeking subscription model, seems a bit like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. When Apple released Sidecar, it was a net positive for all the consumers who didn't want to pay a monthly subscription fee for a simple feature like using your iPad as a secondary display for their Mac.

There are a few holdouts from the days when you could pay for software up-front and then pay for major updates if you wished to. Products from Serif (makers of Affinity Photo) come to mind. I wish more software products went back to this simpler and IMHO, better revenue model.

The trouble is that as a tech company - first you want to build a moat around your success and barriers to competitors usurping your hard-won position/user-base.

IF you do this very well you become a "tech giant" - then you want to continue building that moat/pulling away from your competitors BUT now you have to look like you aren't anti-competitive.

So i guess it's useful to think about: what does Apple want to do vs what does apple want to look like its doing? Wherever the internal/external impetus of an organisation are at odds - progress will be painful/prolonged. Then again if you ran Apple would you be quick about ceding the moat?

As someone who bought and paid for their products (including two hardware dongles), I’m glad Apple developed Sidecar. It’s faster, more stable, and generally works better for my use case. If their product was better, I’d definitely still use it, as I sank a lot of money into it, but it’s not to me. If a customer pays around a hundred dollars (I think that’s right, need to check) for your product and then decides to use a free alternative, what’s that say about your product?

Not to be callus, but “when your entire business is adding a feature to a platform that can be added easily by the platform provider, you have no real business” is a saying that’s been around for a long time for a reason.

I think Apple hasn't made payment on the App Stores nearly flexible enough. For instance, why should there be one and only one payment method supported?

I run a small business, and I have to keep a running total of App Store purchases I made for business purposes and write a monthly reimbursement check to myself. This is ridiculous for accounting purposes.

It should be easier to have an Apple ID for business and a separate personal ID.

There should also be an option to choose another payment method whenever you make a purchase.

A great article with some very good points. 1) should be kind of obvious and easy to do, but especially 3) and 4) are extremely important in my eyes.

The biggest restriction on iOS (and on iPadOS, but for simplicity, I will only use the term "iOS") is the requirement to go through the App Store approval process. The justification is the promise of security and curation of app quality. First of all, those are two separate things and shouldn't mixed up. Second, in my eyes, Apple fails at both of them.

Of course, I don't know how many truly horrible apps (from a security point of view) are rejected by the process, but there are enough examples, where dubious apps made it past the review process. But the elephant in the room - no its actually a diploducus - is the so-called curation. On the one side, there are tons of very useful apps which cannot be submitted, just think of Termux, by the app store rules. On the other side, Apple does have zero restraint approving all those games which only are a vehicle of selling in-app purchases. Furthermore, they sell the prices for amounts which should be considered fraudulent. If you buy a AAA-title for your computer or console, at most you pay $50-$100. How can it be allowed that even the most basic games sell in-app purchases which can amount to several hundred dollars or even more without any limit? That is plain immoral in my eyes.

But Apple allows this. Worse even, they seem to quite support this, as the whole App Store design has driven most other game styles from the platform. On the other side, a lot of useful apps get disallowed from the App Store just for certain "rules".

Another bad example is the App Store search. When searching for an app, you get paid for app placements in the search result before the results which best matched your search. Germany released a covid-19 tracing app yesterday, but a simple search yielded my everything but that app. Only when searching for the exact app name, I got to it. This is bad with general legit apps, a disaster in this specific case.

In consequence, I do think Apple should urgently overthink their App Store approach. Otherwise, legislators should enforce an opening of the platform.

Towards using private APIs: while it totally makes sense to develop APIs by co-developing them with the apps which use them as a test case for the APIs, in general, they should be opened up to all apps. Not doing so is not only unfair competition, but dumb in the long term, as it encourages the existence of semi-maintained APIs for internal applications. And harms the quality of third party apps.

There's only smartphone platforms, apple and android.neither is perfect. Google drops apps and services it it does not have millions of users or it does not make a profit eg Google reader I use android I can sideload apps on my phone. Google does not seem to copy popular apps like apple does Apple is unlikely to provide an option to pay via PayPal or some credit card unless its forced to by Congress, like the EU forced Microsoft to provide a browser ballot Eg choose Firefox , chrome etc instead of Internet explorer years ago before Windows 10 was released Companys realise more and more products will be bought online using apps, if you can get people used to using apple pay or Google payment services you have an almost unlimited source of income. Even if apple is forced to allow apps to be paid with Other finance options like mastercard will they be easy to use will they have access to the api that apple uses for contact less payment We have seen before in tech the public tends to use the most easy to use app or services, it's easy to just put in your credit card into the apple app once and just buy any app or service with a few clicks without thinking about it The law is slow to catch up with tech. 10 tears ago people did not expect consumers to be Able to buy products and services using a smartphone app. Apple was the first company to offer an easy to use app to buy music or TV shows on a mobile device. The first music apps on phones were limited and hard to use

> #4: Give third-party developers equal access to APIs.

I used to work for a company that produced an app server. They sold the app server as well as applications that ran on the app server. Other companies also sold competing applications that ran on the app server.

One of the things I had to do was write a tool that scanned our applications for API usage to ensure none of them were using APIs internal to the app server. It would have been anti-competitive to create APIs that only our own apps were allowed to use.

It has always surprised me that Apple has gotten away with this for so long. I'm not sure if the company I worked for was concerned about being sued by the government or by other companies, but I don't think they would have worked so hard to stamp out private API usage if there weren't some risk of litigation.

Apple doesn't and won't care as long as its customers don't care. One can already see from some comments here that Apple is infallible and ever correct to some - and this is more of a technical crowd. Imagine what it's like for those who have a slight to little understanding of the issue at hand.

Unless a strong competitor comes along that does things differently and better (especially in marketing) Apple can continue delivering mediocre products and being an ass to devs. Unless it directly affects the majority in a tangible fashion, it won't care.

I think sideloading of apps on iOS would end up being a disaster for third-party developers and the platform. Some of the most pervasive hacks on the Android platform begin with a sideloaded app.

Astropad undermines their own argument by pointing out that Apple forced them to change their business plan by adding features to their product they otherwise wouldn’t have.

One of my first jobs was at a coffee shop, owned by a guy who once tried to expand his coffee shop to other locations, only to see Starbucks snatch those locations from his fingertips at the last second by walking in and offering the landlord a lot more money. He never did expand, and actually he just went out of business in part due to this government mandated economic shutdown, but he was old enough to retire so I wouldn’t cry for him, he’s got his wife and health and plenty of time to enjoy his retirement. I digress. The guy who owned the coffee shop knew the real estate fellow at Starbucks who would walk in and offer these last minute deals. He would always tell him, “it’s just business.”

Apart from walking in and taking the prime pickings of the potential retail spots to open a coffee shop, Starbucks had another much more well known practice of opening up shop across the street or right next door to other coffee shops. Now what would happen really depended on what how the coffee was like at the indie.

Starbucks would actually drive up interest in the area for coffee, so if your small indie coffee shop served good coffee, then Starbucks opening up next door might be the best thing to ever happen to you. Sales would go up, more people in the neighborhood would start drinking coffee increasing your possible pool of customers.

If your coffee sucked though, then you were probably going out of business. Your customers would try the Starbucks coffee, find it was better than you served and the writing would be on the wall. People would still come by and try your coffee, but if it wasn’t as good, they wouldn’t be back.

Software isn’t special. You can break your back putting your all into a product that people love and get a lot of value out of, but you’re not entitled to success just because you worked hard, and you aren’t entitled to go without competition, even from the platform vendor. When you find yourself at odds with the platform vendor, then you go multi-platform, you change, you adapt.

I bought my phone and iPad knowing their limitations, and I was okay with them. Every one of those developers I see in the App Store chose to be there, and if they weren’t there, somebody else would be. The App Store created the opportunity for small indies like Marco Arment to build sustainable businesses on, and for services like Spotify to reach a larger audience, and for services like Uber and Lyft and AirBnB to get their start. Facebook and Google changed strategies and went mobile first more than a decade ago when it became clear how big of a deal it would be, and Facebook paid $1B for Instagram, what was then a small startup of about 30 employees that got their start making an iPhone app.

Not every business is successful though, and going through Apple is part of the cost of doing business because it’s their storefront on their platform, a software platform where the included list of features can expand or shrink on a dime. App Store developers are in the same boat as YouTubers where their stream of revenue depends on a platform that changed over time, and YouTubers figured it out a while ago that to stay in business, they have to have a revenue stream other than YouTube and toe the policies.

If your business plan relies on the government coming in and busting your platform vendors chops, then you don’t have a very good business plan.

Life is tough, and so is business.

This strikes me as a bunch of wishful thinking that Apple shouldn't do.

Apple ought not be subject to ANY antitrust action because the only monopoly it has is a monopoly on its own phones and tablets. If that's a monopoly, then so is every other walled garden. Android's market share dwarfs iOS worldwide. It's bizarre to go after this minority player with these laws.

Not commenting on the merit or otherwise of the specific suggestions, because the only part that really matters is this:

"71% budget increase in the Department of Justice’s antitrust division to investigate big tech monopolies.

It’s in Apple’s best interest to be proactive and tackle the antitrust problem itself rather than waiting for the government to step in. "

That is: Tim Cook and the Apple board have to weigh up the risks. How likely is it that the justice department will actually come after them in a meaningful way? Can they head that off? Lobbying will be a much more attractive option, commercially and strategically. They will do the least they possibly can to head off any imposed change to the status quo.

That the DoJ actually went after Microsoft was very much the exception rather than the rule. Apple will likely learn from that: it's unlikely but not impossible. An enforced breakup would be catastrophic for Apple (even if - possibly - good for the market). Tim Cook certainly wouldn't survive that. OTOH, loosening any of the current constraints will hurt Apple's services play.

So this is 100% about risk management for Apple. Neither the welfare of its contributing app developer community, nor "fair" market competition, are remotely first order determinants of outcome.

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EDIT: fixed typo

#6 allow third party browser engines in iOS

Organizations can be really stupid. There is some test about delayed gratification. If you wait you get two candies, if not you only get one. Apple is currently a one candy company. You see this in how it deals with the Mac and in the policies about IOS Apps.

Please note this is not to say the people at Apple are stupid, but rather there is a very, very low level of organizational intelligence at work here. Very. Low. Sadly.

The article is great, well worth the read and written with great clarity!

"dear paesant, thanks for your concern, but we are going to stop the investigation the traditional way, using our millions from anticompetitive customers practices"

- apple

Lots of wishful thinking. If these were allowed none of them would have the effect author claims they would. See Android.

1. There are already alternative mail clients. Does author think that not allowing any of them being default tehy do not compete on quality? This is the only one I see as the reasonable one, albeit not for the reasons claimed in the article.

2. Uhm, Apple Pay is as frictionless as it can get. I have no desire to keept entering my credit card details into every app which thnks they have a better payment processor.

3. Apple does not "arbitrarily" reject apps. And it's restrictions that bring innovation, not the other way around. Author wants sideload apps, but somehow Apple would still be responsible for the security. Let's see how that works for Android.

4. Just no. I do not want John Doe's app accessing my text messages.

5. Well you wanted the competition in #1, so how about that.