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Comment by methodin | Hacker News Reader

With no skin in the game, I could just as easily counter with:

Supporting Apple in this fight is just setting a dangerous precedent that big players should be able to just intimidate platform developers into giving them whatever terms they want. Don't do it.

Again I don't really have a concrete view but a lot of these discussions tend to boil down to preference against one party or the other and not objectively looking at the arguments from both sides. Replace Epic with one of your critical apps. Replace Apple with Google and the arguments are the same.

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It’s a flawed argument, developers don’t come saying “we’ll give you 30% of our revenue if you let us build on your platform”.

If they don’t like the terms they can simply choose to not develop there.

Or they can do what they're currently doing.

And if Apple doesn't like US antitrust law, they can simply not make the App Store available in the US.

>>If they don’t like the terms they can simply choose to not develop there.

Sure, but sometimes, as a society, we decide that this is simply not ok.

I know this is not a completely correct comparison, but the main counter against forcing businesses to accept non-white customers was "well, they can simply go somewhere else, what's the big deal". We as a society decided that no, actually, it is a big deal, and regardless of whether you can "simply" go somewhere else or not, you shouldn't have to.

I'm hoping that this will be the first victory in a string of rulings forcing platform holders to open them up, because we value that more than we value the platform holders ability to keep them closed. Apple just happened to be first.

This is like saying if you don't like how your government is run, just move somewhere else. So basically never push for improvements.

Yes, because buying an Android phone instead of an iPhone is like moving to another country.

As a consumer, you can push for improvements by voting with your wallet and flat out not buying Apple products. As a developer, you can push for improvements by not supporting that platform. Given that you have alternatives to Apple both as a developer and as a consumer, I don't think there's any justification for the government to force Apple to accept Epic blatantly breaking the terms they agreed to comply with.

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