Of course you can try and distort the meaning of monopoly but that isn't going to get you very far.
It's like having a monopoly in California. "Just sell in New York instead" doesn't work, because you already sell in New York and not selling in California doesn't get the California customers to the New York store.
Compare this to stores that actually have competition, e.g. three grocers on the same street corner. If you don't want to sell to one of them, the customers who want your product just go across the street and buy it there. If you sell to all of them they each represent a third of your sales. If you don't want to sell to one of them, you don't actually lose all of those sales because the same customers can still buy your product from the other stores.
If you don't sell to Apple, none of those app sales go to Android because people don't replace their $1000 phone to buy a $1 app. That's what makes it a different market, which is what makes it a monopoly.
But everything you said would still hold true:
"They have a monopoly on iOS app stores." "This is a different market than Android app stores because the set of customers is completely different."
So clearly this definition cannot be the correct way to define what is and isn't a monopoly.
That's because it would still be true, because the market for apps for a particular type of phone that has its own type of apps is a separate market no matter what percentage of the market for phones that type of phone represents.
In practice if the market was that small then nobody would care. It takes a certain market size before it's worth the effort of bringing a case against the monopolist. But that's a different question than whether there is one or not.
Your argument is essentially that if a small town with a population of 100 has only a single retail store within two hours drive, that store doesn't have a local monopoly because not enough people live there. But they still do. Even if they're too small for anybody to do anything about it in practice.
Apple, of course, is not that small.
That's incredibly tautological. Walmart has a monopoly on the distribution of products sold in Walmarts. Nintendo has a monopoly on the distribution of games on Nintendo products. Visa has a monopoly on Visa transactions.
These are not meaningful distinctions: the consumer has a choice not to shop at Walmart, not to buy a Nintendo product, and not to use a Visa card. Similarly, the consumer has a choice not to buy an Apple product.
The types of apps available on a particular phone are part of the purchasing decision of which phone to buy, just like which games are available for a gaming console might influence which console you buy.
It's not, because markets are defined by economics and not brands. People keep asserting over and over again that a brand is not a market, but nobody is claiming that, they just happen to coincide in this case.
What defines a market is whether there are substitutes. If you have an iPhone and need an app, and you could install an Android app on your iPhone, then iPhone apps and Android apps would be the same market. But since you can't, they're not.
Notice how this doesn't apply to random Walmart products. There may be a Walmart brand of motor oil that only Walmart sells, but you can go to Amazon and buy a different brand of motor oil and still use it in the same car. The relevant market is "motor oil of the spec that works with your car" rather than "Walmart motor oil" and Walmart doesn't have a monopoly on that.
But for the market "apps of the spec that works with your iPhone" you can only buy through Apple, so they do have a monopoly.
Sorry, that makes no sense. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all compete in the market of video games. They are not competing in three separate markets of "video games for Xbox", "video games for Playstations", and "video games for Nintendos". Nintendo games are substitutes for Xbox games, even though you can't take a Nintendo game and directly plug it into an Xbox.
As another commenter put it, you're gerrymandering the definition of the market to suit your argument.
A better analogy would be having a person with you all the time and told you what products you can buy or not buy from any of these stores and took a 30% either from you or the producers everytime you did.
Walmart is only a monopoly on walmart branded products sold on Walmart, for everything else you have the option to buy them somewhere else. Apple has monopoly on every single app sold on their app store, you can't buy them somewhere else without depending on the developer making a different version and forgoing the iPhone you had already bought.
> Apple has monopoly on every single app sold on their app store, you can't buy them somewhere else without depending on the developer making a different version and forgoing the iPhone you had already bought.
As I said elsewhere, both the hardware and software are part of the purchasing decision you make when you buy a phone. If you don't like the software, you can choose to buy a different phone.
Maybe not to you but it is how the anti-monopoly law work in lots of countries. Funny that you can just say "Doesn't work, NEXT!" as if you know better than Telegram's lawyers. Apple will be fined or settle.
The Commission considers that low market shares are generally a good proxy for the absence of substantial market power. The Commission's experience suggests that dominance is not likely if the undertaking's market share is below 40 % in the relevant market.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...
That is precisely the point. iPhone has a market share of 45% in the US. Therefore Apple has absolute control on 45% of the US population's app provision, they are precisely a monopoly (etymology: single - provider) for that market. If 45% of the roads in the US was built by Apple and they had absolute control what cars run on it, they would still be a monopoly for all intents and purposes of why a monopoly is harmful and extractive.
Before we think "but users can buy Android too", iOS and Android are not completely fungible operating systems nor the hardware they come with. Even if they were, at best it would mean we had a duopoly instead.
I'm only taking exception with claim that "Apple has a monopoly on iOS app stores" based on reasoning that ignores market share, because that reasoning is tautological.
Also, Telegram's complaint was filed in the EU where Apple only has 25% market share and likely would not be considered to have a monopoly.
> Before we think "but users can buy Android too", iOS and Android are not completely fungible operating systems nor the hardware they come with.
Competitors do not need to be 100% identical to be considered alternative products to each other. Xboxes, Playstations, and Nintendos have different hardware and software but they are all competing in the gaming console market.
I hope the investigation ends in telegrams favor.
Therefore, the legal options available to Apple are either 1) open up their platform, 2) permit Telegram to be sold on the App Store, or 3) rescind their false advertising. The ball is in the EU court.
[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/03/14/privacy-thats-iph...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/telegram-messenger/id686449807
The device is yours, the operating system is not, it has its own license and you even get regular updates of its terms. If you don't agree with them, you are free to jailbreak your device and use it at your own discretion & expense.
The key to understanding this is to realize that you're talking about two different markets, which makes your question ambiguous.
Are you asking, do they have a monopoly over the market for the Mercedes brand of leather seating? In that case the answer doesn't really matter, and I suspect this is the point you were trying to make, because the market for the Mercedes brand of leather seating is not a meaningful market definition, since there could be other seating brands that compete for the same customers.
But the analogous question to the one I'm asking is, do they have a monopoly over seating for Mercedes vehicles? That could very well be a sensible market definition, because if you need a new seat for your Mercedes, one designed for a Chevy may not fit. And then the answer depends entirely on whether they have any competitors in that market. If five different companies make seats you can put in a Mercedes, none of them have a monopoly. If Mercedes -- or another company which isn't Mercedes, if Mercedes itself doesn't make them anymore -- is the only one making seats that fit in a Mercedes, then they have a monopoly on that market.
The question is whether the customer who has a Mercedes and needs a seat can only buy it from one place.
Are you arguing app developers have to see their apps to Apple? Which then sells them to consumers (as a monopoly)?