Fortnite Removed from App Store
gamespot.com
gamespot.com
So this is the hill Apple wants to die on. It makes sense. 30% of all the apps economy is a lot of money.
I hope that antitrust and other government agencies take note.
The ability to take down the 7th top grossing iOS game without blinking shows the kind of power that Apple has over everybody else.
You totally get away with it if you have something that Apple needs badly enough
You can have a 10 GB smartphone plan with Rogers for $75. If you don't like that, you can switch to Bell's 10 GB plan for $75. If you don't like Bell, of course you can switch to Telus's 10 GB plan for, wait for it, $75.
The Big 3 operate smaller brands with fewer bells and whistles and lower costs. You can get a 4 GB cell plan from Koodo (Telus subsidiary) for $50, or from Fido (Rogers subsidiary) for $50, or from Virgin Mobile (Bell subsidiary) for $50.
Sometimes one of them has promotional pricing, like $45 instead of $50 for 4GB. The other two offer the same pricing for the same duration. Sometimes one of them increases their prices by $5 a month citing reasons such as infrastructure investments, lower Canadian dollar value, or inflation. The other two increase their prices by the same amount a couple of days later.
And none of this is collusion in the legal sense. They don't gather in smoke-filled rooms and decide how to screw over their customers. There is not back-channel communication whatsoever. And it is not because the competition is so perfect the prices have been commoditized. In fact, Canada has some of the highest cell plan prices in the world, even adjusting for factors such as population density and GDP.
It's just that the big companies have decided to stop competing. If you live in, say Alberta or Ontario or BC, you have three options and they are all the same overpriced crap. Cell carriers in Canada are not a monopoly, but you don't have to be a monopoly to harm customers with anti-competitive behaviour. Apple and Google, Android and iOS do not have a monopoly or a collusion agreement. But they are harming the customers all the same.
Memory vendors have explicitly colluded in the past, but they really didn't need to - they just needed to copy their competitors' posted pricing. Presumably that is what they do now.
If there are high barriers to new competitors entering the market, then the situation is unlikely to change.
“You can write apps for our hardware but all your purchases we take 30%...” imagine Microsoft trying this tactic in the 1990s.
But that's really not the right comparison. It would be more like back in the pre-clone era IBM taking a cut of everything that ran on a PC. They might have even gotten away with it had the courts gone the other way on the BIOS copyright lawsuit. Probably would have set personal computing back for years.