Apple: We Won’t Make an Exception (Fortnite)
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I realize Epic is hardly a sympathetic company in this to many gamers, and their motives are pure profit and control of their own cash cow platform. That said, Apple is demonstrating about as much bundled-product market control as a company possibly can. They're preventing access to a whole ecosystem over a single product, and they can't even argue their ecosystem is vertical since individual TVOS and iPad devices can run without phones. Sure, Epic isn't on TVOS yet, but they could be...but only if Apple likes what they do on iPhone.
IF Apple is dominant enough to be subject to Clayton Act controls, this sort of cross-product behavior will most certainly prompt that scrutiny. The fact that the developer program is a "single product" backing them is irrelevant when the consumer products are separate. Epic is making a bold move, but I think it's a very well-timed one.
I see this sort of sentiment everywhere. There seems to be a mass delusion occurring. The AppStore is not it's own economic market. It is just one member of many in the actual economic market.
The WalMart down the road from you is not an economic market. It is just a store, one implementation of the entity that is Walmart. But even taking every WalMart together, you do not have an economic market. It is just a store. One store. What economic market is WalMart in? This one: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_hypermark...
AppStore is just a store, one of many many implementations of a package management system, with retail sales and free apps. The economic market includes AppStore, Google Play Store, LG SmartWorld, Huawei App Store, Sony Apps, Amazon AppStore, Aptoide, F-Droid, GetJar, AC Market, SlideME, Uptodown Market, Itch.io, Cydia, neXva, Bemodi, AppBrain, 1Mobile, Appolicious, Kongregate, and AppLand collectively all together. And far more than that is included in the actual economic market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...
Apple has many many competitors in both hardware and software. There is no such thing as "the Apple economic market," or "the AppStore economic market."
Let's be realistic here. Iphone users don't have a choice of app stores, and the useful android options have a high technical barrier to entry. That's not a market, that's an oligopoly.
It's like ISPs that gouge content providers for carriage costs, and then customers for throughput and limits. You can't snap your fingers and make competition appear, so you regulate the players to prevent abuse and protect the consumer.
Let's be realistic here. FreeBSD users don't have a choice of package managers. It's pretty much PKG or nothing.
So what? Choice does not define an economic market. Competition does. Can't use Apple's AppStore on Android! Google is a monopoly!
These details do not matter. You have a choice. You want iPhone, you're stuck with AppStore. You want Android? You're stuck with PlayStore. You want FreeBSD? You're stuck with PKG. It has always been this way. Linux proper gives a few choices, probably dozens. macOS has the Mac AppStore, but also can use MacPorts, Brew, you can even use pkgsrc if you want. iOS is maintained as a walled garden for security. And, you can still jailbreak it and use Cydia.
Apple is doing nothing wrong, protecting their IP and their walled garden. Don't like it? Go elsewhere. Epic is acting like an infant, and chewing off their own foot while they do it. It is all absolutely absurd. What a waste of resources. At least the lawyers are happy.
Competition is directly correlated with choice. The more competition there is, the more choices consumers have. And the fewer choices there, there is effectively less competition.
Apple and Google abuse their market share to limit competition by building walled gardens and taking large cuts of revenue from publishers, because they know that very few publishers have consumers willing to switch platforms or tolerate heroic acts of jailbreak. Netflix is one of the few publishers that come to mind that have such a large and dedicated subscriber base that they can force users off their device to do their signup and purchase flows on the web.
While Epic is pouting and making a spectacle, I also think they're rightly pointing out that Apple's policy of killing their publisher account and disallowing them from signing their packages effectively removes choices from the consumer.
A competitive market would have a way for publishers to self-publish, and Apple is prohibiting that, which is anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
A package manager is NOT the same as a company controlled Marketplace, i can intergrate my own apps, build my own ports, use python-virtenv with pip, Rust with cargo and so on...and the best thing, FreeBSD has no controll over what i have on my computer...and that's good.
Many are hedging words, confusing a market, where you might purchase bananas and soda, with an economic market, AppStore is strictly not an economic market, i.e. not distinctly "a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange." AppStore is in an economic market, the market of package managers for handheld devices.
You can't force MacPorts to accept your software. The maintainers and regents of MacPorts are pretty reasonable, but if you develop software that locates children for sexual abuse, you're probably not going to be allowed to distribute your software with MacPorts.
In kind, if you violate the terms of Apple's developer agreement, which you must agree to before you can even download their developer tools, Apple has the absolute right to ban you from distributing software in Apple's (it belongs to no one else) AppStore. It is not anti-trust behavior. It is written policy.
True, it's a marketplace.
>where you might purchase bananas and soda
No, you buy apps (maybe buy banans over the app)
>You can't force MacPorts to accept your software
Thats their projekt and they can accept whatever they want.
>if you violate the terms of Apple's developer agreement
The marketplace owner to be correct ;)
The reality is that Apple is under a lot of antitrust scrutiny right now. Like a few weeks ago, Tim Cook was testifying to congress.
And now Apple pulls this? Regardless of the situation, it's bad optics.
That said I would not be surprised if the court case consists of lawyers trying to define what exactly a market is in order to determine if various antitrust regulations apply. That's going to be a tricky and potentially precedent setting case.
Epic pulled a fast one, not Apple. Apple's behavior is following the algorithm of their written policy. Epic violated the developer agreement with sneaking in a payment option with an upgrade. It is an intentional and gross violation of the developer agreement, the one they agreed to.
All Epic must do to resolve this is update their software again and remove the forbidden payment option. Apple didn't do his. This started with Epic's bad behavior.
Apple wants Epic's software in the AppStore. Why wouldn't Apple want to continue the relationship? Why should Apple make an exception for Epic to support greed?
This conflict is absolutely absurd. Epic shot itself in the foot, and is now dumping capital into attorneys fees fruitlessly. You heard it hear first, Epic is doomed to lose this fight they alone brought to Apple's doorstep.
The 30% rule only applying to digital products is arbitrary and capricious.