Would probably also put the CA out of business in no time if they did.
It’s very easy to see two steps ahead on this
by whom? the platform makers (apple/microsoft) or malicious third parties?
Whether or not we care for the contents of the agreements is a separate issue. Apple did not capriciously act against Epic - if they had then Epic wouldn’t have had an advertising campaign and lawsuit ready to go within hours.
The situation with WinRAR is completely different and it doesn’t help anything in trying to conflate the two; indeed it just muddies the waters :(
If one company took over all the physical land on the planet, and had everyone sign agreements to essentially pay taxes to them with every transaction, would we still argue that that’s not only legal, but morally justified?
They became the market leader (and I say this as an Android person who dislikes Apple and would never own one) because it's not a public market - they offer a "premium" experience, and part of that is the heavily curated app store. Opening up the platform would undermine the whole reason why it's popular to begin with. As long as you aren't using a jailbroken device (and there aren't any current 0-day attacks, which are rare) you don't have to worry about downloading random malware or side-loading something nasty.
Not to mention that it would prevent Apple from enforcing things like sign-in with apple ID, which again reduces user convenience and undermines the reason apple products are popular in the first place. People buy Apple devices because they "Just Work" and are willing to trade away control of the device to get that convenience - there's no real difference between an iPhone and a flagship Samsung phone (for example) in terms of hardware quality, it's all about slickness and ease of use.
>If one company took over all the physical land on the planet, and had everyone sign agreements to essentially pay taxes to them with every transaction, would we still argue that that’s not only legal, but morally justified?
Do you not believe there is a significant ongoing cost relating to the Apple store? Bandwidth, storage, CDN, power and HVAC for equipment, other building / data centre costs, IT staff for maintaining the servers and services, developers to develop the store and maintain Apple's side of the arms race between malicious devs trying to fool Apple's automated checking and Apple trying to detect and prevent malicious apps being uploaded, other miscellaneous overheads (accounting, auditors, etc.)... why should they be prevented from collecting taxes to cover the costs?
I'm sure it would be profitable for Apple to some degree, but not nearly as much as people seem to believe - IIRC something like two billion iPhones (not sure if that includes other iOS devices or just the phones) of various makes have been produced, and almost all of those will have checked in regularly to the store for updates and installing new stuff over the course of the devices lifetime - how much bandwidth do you think that would use? Apparently the (ballpark) storage on a device consumed by an install of fortnite on iOS is around 8GB, multiplied by 100 million downloads... That would not all be concurrent and earlier install would have been lighter, and how much of that comes through Apple vs. Epic's own CDN I do not know (e.g. if they can distribute game content themselves), but in any case I'm sure it is still a massive load on the store IX.
I hate to rant like this but the whole "ApPlE gReEdY" argument with no consideration of the costs involved is really irritating, and I've been seeing it everywhere since the dispute over Fortnite kicked off - I don't know the actual figures but I'm sure there are massive ongoing costs involved in running the Apple store. Putting a significant burden on that infrastructure and then complaining when you get kicked off for not contributing to it is an incredible display of gall on Epic's part.
1) Apple's popularity at least partially comes from their highly restricted platform. If you don't agree with the terms of use for that platform, or want to develop on a less restrictive platform, you are not forced to use it. It's not a public utility, and forcing Apple to open it would remove one of the fundamental aspects that made it successful to begin with.
2) It's fair for Apple to pass costs on to the third party developers who consume their resources, and unfair for Epic to try and subvert this - especially when their obligations were made clear in the terms of use for the platform.
Epic "only" have a 17 odd billion dollar valuation, so while they're not in the same ballpark as Apple they are by no means some helpless small business getting crushed by a giant corporate bully. As I see it, Epic are throwing a tantrum because they want all of the benefits of using Apple's platform and none of the drawbacks. Cutting off services for customers who refuse to pay is the norm in pretty much any other instance - why should this be different?
#1 I agree with the value proposition of Apple's App Store.
I disagree with your conclusion in two ways.
Treating these digital marketplaces, including App Store, the same as traditional physical marketplaces would remedy most of our current drama. I'm not saying we must nationalize these private platforms, thereby transmuting them to public open markets. I am saying that given their current economic importance, they must be normalized.
The job is as yet not done. As a long time enthusiastic Apple customer, I demand that App Store continues to improve. I want more curation, more safe guards, more fairness. Yes, for customers, App Store is currently best in class. And yet that's a pretty low bar.
re #2. The only opinion I have on the Apple vs Epic vs Fortnite slap fight is that any and all other content providers should also be able to fight it out with Apple on similar footing.
Even Amazon’s S3, which is arguably one of the more expensive places to store data (and which covers all of Amazon’s overhead plus a healthy profit) is $0.023 per GB. Even the cheapest paid app/IAP is $.99, which gives Apple $.33, and is likely 100-200MB. In the 8GB case, that’s still $0.184 and there are a lot of potential IAPs to “make up costs” and use 0 bandwidth.
When you run the actual math, it’s very hard to argue for “massive ongoing costs” and “significant burden”, especially when Epic has said that they would host and distribute the files entirely themselves if given the ability.
Well, that's basically the definition of a country, so...
Edit: countries tend to define what is legal.