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Comment by mmcclure | Hacker News Reader

It's very relevant to note that Google Play's terms around in-app billing[1] are far more liberal than Apple's.

> Developers offering products within a game downloaded on Google Play or providing access to game content must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment. Developers offering products within another category of app downloaded on Google Play must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment, except for the following cases:

> Payment is solely for physical products

> Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players).

That second note is critical here and the example quite literally describes the exact situation here as an exemption.

[1]: https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/

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First of all, my stance here is that Google is pretty reasonable with their guidelines compared to Apple.

My biggest issue in the iOS vs Android debate is that apple is behaving monopolistically and Google isn't. Using the respective app stores give publishers an inherent audience to distribute/sell content through. I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple/Google to try to profit off of the audience they've built. Where I have an issue is that if you don't want to sell on the Play Store, you don't have to. You can install APKs from anywhere and there are even alternative app stores that are completely within Google's ToS. With Apple, you have to sell on the app store or not at all (I know Enterprise apps exist, but it's not the same).

I think Apple gets away with this because they're not selling digital content, they're selling a service/subscription.

One thing that drives me up a wall about Apple is that you cannot purchase a Kindle book in-app on an iOS device. So if you're in the kindle app and want to buy a book you need to actually go and check out on a web browser (true for both the Amazon app and the Kindle app). On Android, you can do whatever you want.

I'm pretty sure that Apple is going to lose this one. We need an open, fair ecosystem for publishing apps.

Google's stance here looks good on paper, but the reality is very different.

Fortnite was the most ambitious attempt to distribute outside of Google Play. Here's what Epic had to say:

> After 18 months of operating Fortnite on Android outside of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a basic realization: Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third-party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.

And Epic gave up and put it on the Play Store.

I didn't realize that epic came back.

I also understand why Google is doing this. (1) the obvious money making reasons and (2) legitimate security concerns. Remember the days of accidentally undertaking a zillion browser tool bars? I feel like making it painful to install from 3rd parties help combat that.

I do think there can be a better solution though. Like some sort of signing process by Google to make you a trusted app that can be revoked in the future if they find you to be malware or whatever. This is kind of sounding like an app store though :)

That all seems very reasonable. Apps downloaded from other sources are much more dangerous than apps downloaded from Google Play.

Ok, sure. But the claim was that Google is absolved from "behaving monopolistically" because they permit ex-Play Store distribution. In practice, it's so onerous that not even a brand as strong as Fortnite can make it work.

Whether you prevent ex-app-store distribution through fiat or through engineering, the result is the same. So I don't think the distinction is important.

I don't know why you would think that, there's no additional guarantee on the Play Store.

Apple is a minority player in every single market in the world, including the US. You can't have monopolistic behavior without a monopoly. You can't be a monopoly if you are not the market leader.

People want this to be a legal issue but it's just a market issue. If people don't like these policies they shouldn't buy Apple products or release apps on Apple devices.

>Apple is a minority player in every single market in the world, including the US.

While I heavily agree with the rest of your reply whole-heartedly, this specific part isn't entirely correct.

You are correct that Apple (when it comes to smartphones) is a minority player worldwide, but it isn't the case in the US, where it sits at a comfortable 58% smartphone market share [0], thus making it a majority player.

0. https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

That link does not load for me and it contradicts Statista[0] so I am not sure exactly what to believe.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

I believe the OP is using "market share" as porportion of revenue" of the marketplace and not actual number of users.

I'm highly skeptical that iOS is greater than 50% of the US market based on the endless web analytics I've looked at through my career (and that >50% goes back a number of years in their stats).

>You can't have monopolistic behavior without a monopoly

This is wrong. Monopolistic behavior is anti-competitive behavior that doesn't require having a market monopoly.

Think of it as a pattern of behavior that moves you towards having a monopoly.

>This is wrong. Monopolistic behavior is anti-competitive behavior that doesn't require having a market monopoly

okay, sure. but it's only illegal when you have a monopoly.

In the U.S.

E.U. does not require a dominant market share to fine companies for monopolistic behavior.

It does, but: "In the AKZO v Commission case,[79] the undertaking is presumed to be dominant if it has a market share of 50%. There are also findings of dominance that are below a market share of 50%, for instance, United Brands v Commission,[74] it only possessed a market share of 40% to 45% and still to be found dominant with other factors. The lowest yet market share of a company considered "dominant" in the EU was 39.7%.If a company has a dominant position, then there is a special responsibility not to allow its conduct to impair competition on the common market however these will all falls away if it is not dominant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Which market would Apple be moving towards having a monopoly in, in the App Store policy case?

The mobile app market, there's only two companies in this market anyways, it's not that hard to prove monopolistic behaviours.

Who loses when Apple doesn't allow other payment systems on it's phones?

That's literally every company trying to increase their marketshare.

Anti-competitive behavior is different than typical growth operations.

I agree, that's my point. Growth moves you towards having a monopoly, but growth by itself is not anti-competitive.

It is not wrong. It's not monopolistic behavior without a monopoly. Anticompetitive behavior can lead to a monopoly and that type of behavior can be considered illegal. However, this behavior from Apple is not an illegal attempt to control more of the market. If anything it is net negative for Apple and their marketshare.

This boils down to semantics:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopolist.asp

>In many jurisdictions, such as the United States, there are laws restricting monopolies. Being the sole or dominant player in a market is often not illegal in itself. However, certain categories of monopolistic behavior can be considered abusive in a free market, and such activities will often attract the monopoly label and legal sanctions to go with it.

While it is correlated, monopolistic behavior is not always from a monopoly. Suppliers in free markets can still exhibit monopolistic behavior without being a monopoly.

I would think Apple has a monopoly either in selling iOS apps to consumers or, if you argue you don’t buy from Apple (but I don’t think that would hold under EU consumer law) in providing services to sell iOS apps to consumers.

A ruling on this might be tricky, though. It would have to argue that “iOS apps” are a separate market, that this is detrimental to consumers, and would have to phrase things in a way that there’s no collateral damage.

For example (possibly a very bad one; I’m not an expert in any law), theaters and music festivals typically sell their own tickets, passing on part of their revenues to performers. If, as is often the case, their show is unique, that might be called a ‘monopoly’ somewhat similar to what Apple does (sell iOS apps, passing on part of the revenues). They would have to find an argument as to why one thing is allowed while the other isn’t, and it can’t be “because we feel it’s different” or “because we don’t like Apple”.

Apple advocates always point to Apple capturing the vast majority of the profits in the mobile market but when discussing antitrust issues it's only units sold that matters. You can't have it both ways.

What tablets are out there that make Apple a minority in the tablet world?

Not in Switzerland as far as I know, they have very slightly over 50% apparently.

If it makes some people in this thread feel better, Google also acts in many ways that are breaches of competition law, just in different ways!

But nothing compared to anti-competitive measures and dishonest marketing of apple.

Apple puts severe restrictions on developers, that they should develop on macs, that they should use Apple's IAP features, that they should provide 'sign in with apple' (although last one may be reasonable). They even tried to prevent cross platform application frameworks some years ago, by mandating that apps should be written in C/C++/ObjC.

And the dishonest marketing is well known.

Apple promoted swift, fine. But, since they couldn't implement GC in swift because Cocoa interop, some apple people (or maybe fanboys, apple's negative cost marketing strategy is its cult) attempted to make it look like ARC is competitive advantage against Android.

Apple is a patent troll. They sued samsung for some trivial things. They trademarked the word 'app store'. They patent trivial programming language features like optional chaining.

Apple is much more harmful than Google. HN defends web technologies and apple apparently because many here are invested in it (although often they are at odds). But please don't support a patent troll like apple.

But it says "on other music players". It doesn't really specify, but I would say that "Spotify" is the music player, and you still need to use it whether it is on the browser or other platform, but it is still "the same music player". I guess that the second case is more related to buying digital content, say an image, music, video, where you get the actual right to use that image, music, video on any platform. But I could be wrong.

In any case, as other users mentioned, if Apple music really lets ANY developer create an application that may reproduce the purchased content, then it may look fine.

I will say it does seem a bit ambiguous, but I believe their intention is similar with how they view physical products.

I believe their intention is that once you download an asset (e.g. song/video/movie), it's a tangible, portable copy that's yours to do freely as you will regardless of device.

You wouldn't be able to play music downloaded via Apple Music directly on just any generic music player (like a car stereo or a CD player) due to DRM and other various restrictions, so I don't believe that this would be exempt from that condition.

I take "on other music players" to mean other devices. If you have an Apple Music account, you can listen to the music on your MacBook, your iPhone, your iPad, and apparently also your Android phone. All of these devices are functioning as music players when you're playing the music you pay for on Apple Music.

The same goes for Netflix. Google does not try to take a cut of Netflix revenue even though you can only watch Netflix shows and movies through the Netflix first party application. You can, however, watch Netflix on many different devices.

I'm interested in whether allowing Google Play In-app Billing is sufficient to meet the requirements (while also allowing external payment), or if the requirements are supposed to mandate Google Play In-app Billing as the sole possible method of payment. It's not clear from the policy page.

From the policy, emphasis mine: "MUST use Google Play In-app Billing as THE method of payment."

They could be clearer that those words are significant, but in practice this is what the policy is.

Which is what you'd expect because the whole point of mandating that form of payments is to take the 30% cut (for digital goods meant to be used primarily on Android devices within apps downloaded from the Android app store).

> Which is what you'd expect because the whole point of mandating that form of payments is to take the 30% cut (for digital goods meant to be used primarily on Android devices within apps downloaded from the Android app store).

That may be a very large portion of the point, but it's not the whole point. For example, if you pay for additional functionality in an app using Google Play In-app Billing, then you can unlock that functionality again on any phone as long as you're signed in to the same Android account. If you paid externally, you can't do that.

Note that this directly lowers revenue from the 30% cut of in-app purchases, by removing some people's need to repurchase content they bought in the past but lost access to.

Some apps were temporarily delisted from the Google Play store because they dared adding a donation button that doesn't go through IAPs.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-pulls-open-source-android-...

Other apps offer in-app purchases where you have the choice of in-app or external payment.

But the second doesn’t apply - you can’t listen to Apple Music with a different app, you have to use their app.

You can listen to it in a browser. You can use an iPad. There are many ways to use Apple Music that do not involve an Android app.

This, but to take this even further, MusicKit and the Apple Music APIs even allow for 3rd party Android apps to play back purchased content.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs

MusicKit JS lets users play songs from Apple Music and their Cloud Library inside your JavaScript app. When a user provides permission to access their Apple Music account, your JavaScript app can create playlists, add songs to their library, and play any of the millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog directly in a browser, with no ...

Also note that Google allows third-party payment gateways via the Google Play API – Netflix, as an example, dodges the cut with a custom implementation of Stripe! It's a lot more work to implement, but developers actually have the option.

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