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Comment by ekr | Hacker News Reader

They don't get to say that due to antitrust laws. Hence why you can use Amazon's appstore on Android, or FDroid etc. I'm not really familiar with the Apple ecosystem.

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They do get to say that. Apple has a minority of the market and wouldn't run into legally-justifiable antitrust problems.

Monopoly is not necessary for antitrust enforcement - 'market power' is sufficient: https://www.justice.gov/atr/monopoly-power-and-market-power-...

FYI, your account seems to have triggered the system that hellbans new accounts. I vouched for your comment (which revived it), and I sent a message to hn@yc to point out that it looks like there was a false-positive. Your last few comments haven't been visible without showdead set or been able to be interacted with by anyone.

Thanks. I noticed that most of my comments were invisible, but with a few seemingly random ones getting through. I assumed it was a matter of time before restrictions were lifted on my account.

WOW thanks for vouching for him and keeping watch on that.

Apple certainly has a monopoly in the iPhone app market.

Sure, and Frigidaire has a monopoly on Frigidaire refrigerators.

I said legally-justifiable antitrust claims. Apple has a minority of the smartphone market. You can make anything into a "monopoly" if you define it narrowly enough but that's not legally justifiable in any way.

But that's not what the discussion is about. Frigidaire doesn't try to limit you to only putting stuff you bought at Walmart into their fridges.

Nor does Apple: you can have as many PWAs as you want. As JS is Turing complete, you can then have every sort of app. They've always encouraged PWAs.

Unless you want to legally force every company to surrender their source code (which I enthusiastically would support), there's no legal basis for Apple not being able to have their proprietary feature phone locked down.

Though if you'd like, you can look at Keurig, which does limit what you can put into it to "only Keurig products" or one of the millions of other things that limit what you can put into it.

> Though if you'd like, you can look at Keurig, which does limit what you can put into it to "only Keurig products" or one of the millions of other things that limit what you can put into it.

Whatabout...

What use case is there for Fridgidaire refrigerators that cannot be fulfilled by other brands?

What use case is there for Apple devices that cannot be fulfilled by other brands? Literally none.

> iPhone app market

There are no other options for Apple devices besides the App Store. This is not about a monopoly in the smartphone market.

If I buy a house I can put any fridge in there. If I get an iPhone, I can only buy through the App Store.

That's not a monopoly nor is that how monopolies work. iPhone is their device and creation, they can lock it down as much as they choose. They could only allow apps they develop if they wanted.

That's debatable. Just because the Play Store exists doesn't mean the App Store isn't its own market

The app store is not a free market. If I set up a card trading store, I'm free to set any constraints I want. Maybe I want to only allow users to trade cards that were purchased at my shop. That's my right as a private enterprise. Maybe everyone will hate it and go to a different store, and that's the free market. If I somehow prevented any other card stores from existing, then we would have a monopoly

Also - that's not the reason. The reason is because Android is open source and Google allows sideloading.

I don't think Google allows Amazon to distribute their app store through the Play Store, so you have to sideload it.

Doesn't solve the distribution problem anyway – the app stores are the shelf

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