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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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bryanlarsen·

60% market share by revenue in 2019.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

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Isn't that just because Apple's customers are more willing to spend money on apps than other customers?

Willing is not the right word. They generally have a greater means to do so.

Of course. My point is that this doesn't seem to be related to any anticompetitive behavior on Apple's part. If Apple was using market power to force smartphone competitors out of the market to increase Apple's own market share, that would be one thing. But to accuse Apple of anticompetitive behavior because their small smartphone market share spends more money on apps than other smartphone owners does not seem reasonable.

Epic is not suing Apple because Apple used nefarious means to achieve dominance. You, I and Epic would probably all agree they earned that dominance fair and square.

But once you have dominance different rules apply.

That's fair enough. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the subjective argument "Apple is really big and profitable now, and I don't like their App Store rules, so let's try to get them to change it." I find it less ridiculous than arguments that attempt to construct some supposedly objective principle like "iPhone are general-purpose devices and therefore they must allow running unsigned code."

Ideally, I'd prefer that this kind of back-and-forth between developers and Apple would happen strictly through negotiation, rather than invoking the court system, but I realize that not all markets are functioning well enough for this to be practical.

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