For all apple's flaws, having single app store is better for user security as you know who to trust, it also gives conveniently makes Apple monopoly that they exploit to make 50B+ a year.
The question is will Apple sacrifice revenu for user security or is security and privacy are only there when it makes Apple money.
Developers associate the freedom of open standards and protocol to these abuses. In the early GNU years, the same philosophy applied to source availability. Closed source does make similar abuse fare more easier.
Abuses can be prevented with well built regulation. Developers do not like to get into governance and policy so they want to solve it technically, Open Source or open protocols and standards etc, sometimes that opens up avenues vulnerabilities in design, which devs generally are tech savy enough to be immune to and come up with even more tech like https, adblockers hardware keys etc.
This cat and mouse game leaves rest of the population far behind and vulnerable, sometimes you just have to do governance than look for pure tech solutions.
No, Apple didn't make $50B in profit "a year" or last year or in ANY year from App Store fees. Takes about 30 seconds to look up Apple's financials and disprove that. And no, Apple doesn't have a "monopoly". Sony, Google, and Microsoft also get 30% of all revenue from their app stores. Claiming Apple has a "monopoly" is ludicrous and just shows that you don't know what a real monopoly is.
I did not say they made profit, I said they made , in my part of the world made means commonly revenue not profit.
The 50B is well established estimate of App Store revenue.
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/07/apple-app-store-had-estimate...
> and generated about $15 billion in revenue for Apple
the 50 B is total gross sales.
However using GMV[1] as a proxy for revenue is fairly common practice in retail industry. Walmart's revenue in similar sense is not really $500B, while it bit more complicated as Walmart buys from producer/ wholesaler and sells to the consumer (less so by Amazon as significant chunk of their inventory is owned by the sellers directly however revenue numbers are counted the same way).
The revenue for their operations is only the difference between selling price and buying price, profit is after you remove the cost of operations from that number. Ecommerce / travel/ delivery startups etc have for long time used this as somewhat misleading metric.
This practice used to particularly annoy me few years back, during fundraise pre-series A especially angels used to somewhat blindly compare retail statups "revenue" with SaaS startup numbers.
Who gets to decide who is ok or not? The WTO?
Until the epic took this to court, nobody has the balls to challenge Apple. Epic has standing to sue and is ready to fight it.
This is going to be decided in U.S. courts.
WTO is unlikely to step in, they do not take disputes at a company level, usually betwwn country , unless another country sues the U.S. government for unfair trade practices over allowing this WTO has no standing to take the case. I don't see any country taking it to them , that country will need to show damage to their own app developers, this is difficult as Apple charges the same for U.S. devs too.
The EU anti trust and competition does have standing to take it up, and in the past they have fought Google and Microsoft over similar things (promoting own products and browser choice respectively), but I have not heard anything till now. Perhaps epic may also sue/ file complaint in europe and they may take on Apple in the future.
Mildly OT, but this applies to Lineage users as well.
I am not sure how much of EU's intervention helped Firefox however given Mozilla's connection to Netscape. Netscape being the reason MS was being investigated by EU in the first place, it is not implausible.
I am not saying EU did a good job of it, just that can and do fight large American tech companies, it is not unlikely they won't take this up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Layou...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/internet-browser-market-sha...
Apple might lose distribution of some things, but they can justify higher commission rates with a market that has a reputation for security, versus newly competing markets. I can see this being very beneficial for consumers, with a series of choices that will have different costs associate with them.
Short-term, Apple will lose revenue, but this is also a good justification for Apple to open an App Store in the Android ecosystem and offer a "more secure" app store than Google.
Long-term, I don't see this as a negative shift for really anyone. If the App Store expands to other platforms, Apple might focus on exclusive distribution rights agreements which would probably give them a greater degree of competition.
They now have 50% market share in the US and there’s no sign of that stopping when 90% of the youth market only wants an Apple. They’re a monopoly through and through at this point. If this lawsuit doesn’t get them another one will. It’s just a matter of time.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/951537/worldwide-average...
They now have 50% market share.... They’re a monopoly through and through at this point
That’s not how monopolies work. Can you name one case in the past 50 years where a company was declared a monopoly with a 50% market share?
That is how monopolies work. You don’t need 50% market share to be a monopoly, but having that certainly grants you monopoly power. Here's an example of 2 things that Apple can currently do, straight from justice.gov:
"Market power and monopoly power are related but not the same. The Supreme Court has defined market power as "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market,"(8) and monopoly power as "the power to control prices or exclude competition."(9)" [1]
You can't have a very successful app business without being in Apple's app store in the US, which would exclude you from half the population.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...
Have you seen the phones sold at the MVNO’s like MetroPCS, Boost Mobile, and whoever Walmart uses? You’re in a bubble if you don’t see all of the people with less income who don’t go to the major carriers.
And you can quote websites, but is there precedent in the last 50 years that the government has ever gone after a company with 50% market share?
The Department is not aware, however, of any court that has found that a defendant possessed monopoly power when its market share was less than fifty percent.(30) Thus, as a practical matter, a market share of greater than fifty percent has been necessary for courts to find the existence of monopoly power.(31)
Apple currently has 46% market share in the smartphone market (https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...) and is below this threshold.
Also those numbers you linked to are quarterly sales, not current active users. Not sure if that makes a big difference.
I’ve seen other comments saying that it’s 50% but like I said, 90% of the youth market wants an iPhone so it’s just a matter of time. If this lawsuit doesn’t get them then another one will soon.
Epic could make their own platform to sell games on, but they want the market Apple has built and the devices Apple has created.
The courts will decide, and since for decades courts have sided with platform creators being allowed to police content and charge access fees (SEGA, Nintendo, and later Sony, all have such cases), I think Epic will lose.
Despite some claims Apple has some monopoly, their share of mobile is far too small to count as such. I expect the courts to tell Epic to sell Android only if they don’t like Apple terms.
logic also works the other way around. Without software smartphones are expensive scrap metal. Every popular piece of software that runs on the phone adds value to it.
As such, the contract between the companies is the legally binding method to access Apple hardware. Apparently Apple has designed the contract so millions of apps got developed for the phones. Epic wanted different terms, but has no legal right to unilaterally break contracts to do so.
The courts will likely side with Apple. There’s ample precedent for platform owners to have wide latitude on fees to publish.
It just means that the argument was terrible because Apple didn't 'built the market themselves'. Developers and third parties are what made smartphones so valuable, and Apple is a part of that, but not some sort of messiah, and not even the major contributor. the market value of everything that runs on the phone is much larger than the phone.
As to what should be the case, yes I think people should have the right to run on their phone whatever software they want. If they only want to run Apple software they can do that no problem, there is no downside here. What are you afraid of, too much competition and freedom? If the Apple experience is so great they've got nothing to lose.
Also applies to game consoles in my opinion. I'd love freely moddable console games and if developers could publish on a playstation without paying fees to sony or being limited by them. I'd love to see platforms unlocked so that there is a maximum amount of opportunity for everyone to do what they want with it. That's how creative things are made.
Not by any metric I can find.
Apple has a market cap of 2 trillion; half their revenue of 260B is phone. The market cap of all mobile companies is dwarfed by Apple.... Mobile app sales total 76B a year, including both iOS and Android. The iOS part is around half of that value.
So by one simple metric, Apple revenue on phones is around 130B a year, mobile revenue on iOS is around 38B.....
What metric did you base this "much larger" claim? Did you base it on market numbers or make it up?
>I'd love freely moddable console games and if developers could publish
There's plenty of such platforms. They don't take off. Ask yourself why. Conspiracy stuff like "the big men stop them" is not the answer.
Even huge players like Steam have tried - and they certainly have the resources to push such a thing. It failed.
Why didn't developers rush to these free to publish on platforms? Maybe you are missing important things about the value of the platform versus the value of the software.
>What are you afraid of, too much competition and freedom?
Competition is not breaking contracts as you see fit. Competition will not exist without rule of law - this is basic econ. You'll end up with chaos and theft when contracts cannot be enforced.
And you're welcome to do whatever you want. Buy other hardware if you don't like Apple's terms of service. Build a product and sell it if you think there's demand for a different product.
People buy Apple because they find more value in it, as is, than their other choices. The same as people who value freedom and openness are allowed to buy other products as they see fit.
I don't understand why people continually think they have some rights they simply don't historically, legally, or even morally. Just like I'd expect you to claim it's immoral for some other entity to force things you created to adhere to their whims, or hand over value to you because you demand it, you have no moral right to do that to others.
I guess we just see it differently on the morality of forcing others to bend their work to our whims.
You also forget that once Atari did let developers publish will nilly on Atari 2600, and there was such a deluge of crap, that the market and platform crashed. Nintendo and all following companies learned that lesson: everyday consumers don't have the skill to protect themselves from crap, so to make a solid consumer platform, the owner of the hardware should provide significant protection for users.