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Good points. I think the thing that irks people is Apple's bullying. They just don't seem to be operating in good faith. For instance, from the report, here are Apple's "Anti-circumvention Policies":

>2. “Multiplatform Services: Apps that operate across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site,... provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app. You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase.”

Apple is dictating what I can tell my customers in "general communications" where Apple is not involved. That's not a free market, it's abusive. If a customer comes to my site from a search I should be able to say "Here are the purchase options. Please note that Apple takes 30% if you purchase through their store. If you purchase direct, our processing fees are only %2.5".

In that statement, I'm not making any judgement call on whether Apple is good or bad. I'm simply stating a verifiable fact. If the value proposition of Apple's store has benefits to the consumer then its merits should stand on their own.

For the record, I believe the App store offers many solid benefits to consumers. I'm just saying we should let the consumer decide if the benefits of the App store outweigh their other chosen criteria.

TL;DR Apple has no business inserting itself in my customer communications on my own website so long as I only state facts.

Edit: This is from the perspective of say, an eBook author or MacOS developer. I realize that iOS apps can only be purchased through Apple so the point there is moot.

>Apple is dictating what I can tell my customers in "general communications" where Apple is not involved. That's not a free market, it's abusive. If a customer comes to my site from a search I should be able to say "Here are the purchase options. Please note that Apple takes 30% if you purchase through their store. If you purchase direct, our processing fees are only %2.5".

Everyone that argues against the rule that says you can't advertise in your apps ways to bypass the App Store for payment are basically arguing that they should be able to free ride on the platform, something discussed in this study.

>In addition, for their business model to be successful, digital marketplaces often have to rely on rules that prevent customers from free riding on their services. Free riding involves buyers and/or sellers avoiding fees after the platform has helped connect them, which means that the platform is not compensated for the successful match and the use of the platform’s technology, tools, and services to facilitate and promote valuable transactions between buyers and sellers. A review of the policies and rules of large app stores and online marketplaces that distribute physical goods and services — marketplaces for which the risk for free riding is particularly high — shows that digital marketplaces routinely forbid behaviors aimed at avoiding fees.

>In addition to the commission on paid apps and in-app purchases of digital content, services, and subscriptions, Apple imposes guidelines that govern the use of the App Store. Among those policies are rules about in-app purchases to prevent users and developers from free riding on Apple’s App Store services and investments. Apps cannot explicitly steer app users away from in-app purchases — for example, by providing external links that bypass the App Store.

My example was about communications with customers who come to me without Apple's help. Such as on a website that I paid for, and the customer comes to me via a Google search ad (or good SEO) that I paid for.

Ultimately, a mobile app [0] will be purchased through Apple. Should they get a commission? Of course. But since they didn't provide the "discovery" or lead generation it should be much less.

[0] I'll use mobile apps in this particular example because it's less ambiguous.

How are we to determine who came from what source the customer came from? Offer them a choice to say, "I found this book on my own and just want to buy it here, discount = -10%"?

Referral links have been around since the late to mid 90's.

That part is not going to be popular among developers, who understand that Apple "free rides" off of them too–without them there would be no platform. There are some "free" apps that are literally cornerstones of the iPhone, to the point where people might switch to a competitor if they didn't exist.

Plenty of apps themselves do what you seem to be classifying as none of their business to intervene in.

Doordash or other delivery apps tell restaurants they can't hint to their customers to order outside of the app. In fact they monitor communications with restaurants to ensure it's not happening, which is pretty gross. Uber/Lyft don't allow drivers to see who's asking for a ride and then ask the customer to pay outside of the app. If you're an eBook platform app, are you going to allow authors to hawk their books with a first teaser sentence "feel free to buy this eBook from my personal site instead of on this app"?

I wouldn't say Apple is "inserting itself" into a transaction where it has no business. The app developer agreed that in offering the app, Apple's terms would be agreed to, and those include not offering or suggesting methods to circumvent the financial transaction that the app is directly relevant to.

My example was specifically about a customer coming to me directly as first point of contact, and not using Apple's platform or resources in any way [0]. I also mentioned nothing about price. I only mentioned communicating that the commission exists.

[0] Edit: I realize that my TL;DR above didn't capture this important nuance, I've updated it.

To me a core problem is that the market is segmented into a handful of oligopolies. People sometimes say "can't you sell your software elsewhere", and while I can sell a chair at another store, if somehow chairs had to be compatible with tables and somehow there were only like two or three kinds of table in the world and all of them had this weird chair restriction and it was all based on weird artificial interoperability barriers... I just don't think the people who thought through these laws--even the DMCA (which is all about this stuff and wants it... but only so far! it has explicit exclusions based on principled stances taken by congress that are now obsolete) and even the people at the EFF who try to fight it (based on my work with them and extensive discussions with some of their people on our shared projects)--considered what asymmetric encryption and tamper proof module digital rights management technology does to competition (where the case law and legislative intent had always been that these kinds of restrictions should not have much merit: see Sega v. Accolade as a landmark case, wherein Sega hadn't no right to try to lock Accolade off their platform _and everyone liked that and consisted their lack of such right to be important for competition_ and yet now you can build that lock out of encryption and no amount of reverse engineering is guaranteed to break it and all of the assumptions that "software interoperability" is even possible have been destroyed).

> And advocating that any platform provider is a monopoly restricting free exercise of selling goods.

It's not any platform, it's a platform which actually has a monopoly.

Amazon is a "platform" for selling boxed software but they haven't got a monopoly on it. You might make a few extra sales from being on Amazon than not, but even most of the sales you make through Amazon would only be diverted to Walmart or Best Buy or your own website if your software wasn't for sale on Amazon. If they insisted on paying you 30% less than competitors, you would make more by refusing them and then losing 10% of those sales while 90% of them get diverted to other distributors who take smaller cuts. Which in turn prevents them from doing that, because getting the normal distribution margin in a competitive market is better for Amazon than getting nothing.

That isn't true for Apple because there is no diverting those sales to a different distributor because there is no other distributor. You can sell a Windows app to the same customer with a Windows device through any number of distributors, but nobody but Apple distributes apps to iOS devices.

It will turn quite heavily on what is the market in which you assert a monopoly exists. There certainly are alternatives to someone developing mobile apps -- Android, others.

The more narrowly you define it, of course you can make anything seem like a monopoly. Whether that narrow market is truly what is in dispute, is the question.

But you should listen to Thiel's talk on this -- is a restaurant that is the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield a monopoly over the British restaurant industry on Main Street?

> is a restaurant that is the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield a monopoly over the British restaurant industry on Main Street?

Which brings you to the question of substitution. If the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield raises prices by just a modest amount, does that cause a significant number of customers to take their business elsewhere? If so, they haven't got a monopoly and the "elsewhere" is part of the same market, which in that case would presumably include restaurants serving different types of food or which are still in the same general vicinity.

So what's the substitute for the App Store? If they raised prices, could developers switch to Google Play instead? Well, no. Developers need both at once because they each reach different customers. If Apple charged too much a developer might abandon the iOS market entirely and use only Google Play instead of using both, but none of that business from the App Store could get moved to Google Play because those customers don't have Android devices and Google Play doesn't distribute iOS apps. They would just have to lose all of that business, not substitute Google Play for the App Store by moving the customers over there.

Compare this to where you stop selling your boxed software to Amazon but continue selling it to Walmart and Best Buy. Most of the people who would have bought your software on Amazon still want it, so they just buy it from some other place. The same customers. Your iOS customers can't do that because nobody else distributes apps for their devices.

Also notice that they did this on purpose. Suppose the owner of the only "British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield" is also a landlord who owns 20% of the land in the city. They don't have a monopoly on land, but then what they do is build a wall around the portion of the city they own, so that it's a two hour drive around the wall to get out of their domain. Then the competing restaurants that had been "one street over" are on the other side of the wall, which puts them in a different market (can't substitute them anymore), so now they've got a restaurant monopoly.

With a world wide market share of about 20% and being absent from many countries where Android, or classical feature phones rule, hardly makes it a monopoly by letter of law.

world wide market share is immaterial as such decisions are not taken at global level. In US it has ~50% market which makes it dominant enough.

Which still might not be enough legal basis, and when it does, it is specific for one country among 195 acknowledged countries.

You're assuming Android apps and iOS apps are the same market. Which they might be if they both ran on both kinds of devices and you could distribute iOS apps via Google Play or Amazon, but that isn't the case.

It's like having a regional monopoly. Even if Google has 80% of the world market, if no one but Apple has a store in California, they have a monopoly in California. If you (or any of your customers) live where they have a monopoly (i.e. have an iOS device) then no other app distributor is reasonably available.

Obviously they could change that by not restricting iOS users from using other app distributors. They separated iOS app distribution into its own market explicitly and on purpose, but that's still what it is. "Windows app distribution" might be its own market but Microsoft has no monopoly on it.

I am assuming that 99% of people on HN with opinions have zero understanding about law and how it applies to each jurisdiction across the globe.

Like your comment proves by the way.

You're implying that it's wrong even though the economics of it are right and the sane legal systems are going look at the economics of it.

I am implying that anyone that is clueless about law has no place calling Apple whatever they feel like, just because it doesn't fit their world view.

You still haven't given any argument for how they don't have a monopoly on iOS app distribution, or why iOS app distribution and Android app distribution should be considered the same market when they don't run on the same devices, the set of customers is effectively 100% non-overlapping, and they can't in any meaningful way be substituted for one another when a developer would still need both to reach the entire "market" if the market was defined to include customers on both platforms.

You don't get to define what is a monopoly to fit your world view.

The market is mobile phone devices and each device owner is free to set their own rules on their devices.

Apple is just a big supermarket chain, and like any supermarket chain gets to choose what comes on the shelves, don't like it? Go to another digital supermarket and get a law book for your jurisdiction.

> Hacker News readers are a pretty biased sample of people

That's a vacuous statement. Is anyone working at Apple or benefiting from Apple's monopolies any less biased? The essential question is rather if such behavior is fundamentally anti competitive and contrary to the spirit of the law.

Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment, while Apple is getting away with behavior far worse than Microsoft's, yet it goes unpunished, so they get encouraged to behave even worse. I guess it's all about proper lobbying nowadays.

As a consumer of mobile apps, I'm generally farther removed from the argument, and not going to benefit from the decision either way. Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions?

App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. And argue from a "principle" point of view, when really all it is is a price dispute.

> Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions?

Not necessarily, but developers will have a higher margin, which will allow them to continue developing their apps and increase their quality, because they don't have to waste their time thinking about X ways to increase their tiny margins of the product, so they can survive for a little bit longer.

>App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision.

Apple is highly likely to claim that the platform is not monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. See? the statement can be easily inverted, again it's a vacuous statement. Is their behavior anti competitive and in violation of the spirit of the law? That's the essential question.

They also don't have to waste their time doing sales infrastructure, like many J2ME and Symbian developers used to do.

> Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment

It probably wasn't, which is why the government didn't follow through with the breakup of Microsoft.

Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with, Microsoft was outcompeted in a number of areas that the regulators never anticipated, including Google Chrome taking over the browser market, as well as other areas Microsoft directly competed in such as search and smartphones.

It makes you wonder, how can a company be an unassailable monopoly yet get its butt kicked by other companies competing in the same market?

The DOJ sued Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Chrome came out in 2008.

The courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were not even about the web browser, which did not exist yet -- they were about Windows licensing agreements from the 1980s.

So again, Chrome was released in 2008, seven years after the settlement. There was no ready alternative to Explorer at the time of the settlement.