Comment by catmistake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by catmistake | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

> Choice does not define an economic market. Competition does.

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.

>FreeBSD users don't have a choice of package managers.

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.

AppStore is not a speadsheet or a word processor. It is not a graphics editor or text editor. It is a package manager. That is the kind of software it is. AppStore "automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner." That is its type. That it sells things does not change the fact that it is a package manager.

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.

>AppStore is not a speadsheet or a word processor.

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 ;)

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