“There is nothing anticompetitive about charging a commission for others to use one’s service,” Apple said in the filing.
What about forcing someone or some company to use a service (apple's payment systems)?
What about forcing someone or some company to use a service (apple's payment systems)?
I'm a huge Apple fan, but they have been digging themselves a grave in terms of developer goodwill with their reaction to these lawsuits.
We've seen this many times, it's not exclusive to the case against Epic.
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Please note that I have not weighed in on whether I think Apple or Epic is in the right (legally or otherwise). I'm just informing you of their justification, and why they claim this isn't a danger for other developers who may accidentally (or, perhaps, much more minorly) break the terms of service.
I have no understanding for anyone that buys Apple and then complains.
One could, you know, make a case that it should be illegal, go to court to get that official, and then the way to implement your own payment processing is open.
But beginning at the last step, is totally the wrong order to do these kind of things.
Besides that, Epic and Apple had an agreement the moment Epic published fortnite in the app store. If they dont like the contract, they can leave. Again, if they think the terms are illegal, go fight that out BEFORE you implement something that breaks the contract.
Or what goes into each game console, my cable provider installs on their set top box, and so on.
I for one am happy to see Apple fire back with both barrels. Epic deserves it. A message has to be sent.
Tolls like the above were how the mainframe started and are nothing new.
We had a historical anomaly with the PC being a hobby platform at its roots where everything felt so free. Legally it never was, that was a marketing fiction created by Apple, Microsoft, IBM and others.
Any attempt to do a sealed experience for average users was subpar in execution... except perhaps gaming consoles.
Honestly, tech was depressing in those days when NHS was running on Windows XP. Oh wait; yes, you're right. "These" days are still around today :(
https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/healthcare/nhs-co...
Previous consumer OSes had major usability and security drawbacks for the average consumer. Through no fault of their own, their computers would gradually get slower and corrupted by 3rd parties.
This is similar to the shift to cloud computing. It’s more valuable to have a service take care of me than to have the freedom of licensed software .
I’m not saying this stance is without problems - but it does seem to be what the market is saying.
It’s also worth noting that software always has been considered a service in some sectors - enterprise software dating back to the 1970s for example required 21-25% of your purchase price in annual service & support fees with penalties if you terminate.
We would never even be at the level we're at if there weren't those malware-plagued PCs and their open marketplace of software and operating systems competing with each other.
> Previous consumer OSes had major usability and security drawbacks for the average consumer.
You mean Windows did, because A) it was the OS of the vast majority of desktop systems and B) they had a culture and practice of not taking security very seriously, or at least prioritizing so many things over it that the outcome was the same.
Apple's operating systems traditionally faced less scrutiny (but now there are more security problems since they are more popular). Windows has gotten much better and Microsoft appears to be much more serious about security (since it because a large enough problem to actually threaten their OS market dominance).
> Through no fault of their own, their computers would gradually get slower and corrupted by 3rd parties.
Not really my experience over the last 6-7 years. Prior to that, depending on OS, sure.
> This is similar to the shift to cloud computing. It’s more valuable to have a service take care of me than to have the freedom of licensed software .
To you, sure, but for the average person or company, it's variable and based on many things (capability, scale, etc).
> It’s also worth noting that software always has been considered a service in some sectors - enterprise software dating back to the 1970s for example required 21-25% of your purchase price in annual service & support fees with penalties if you terminate.
The enterprise doesn't really scale to the individual level we're talking about at all. An enterprise buying a specific computer with certain hardware with a custom OS delivered as a service is like a person buying some Tamagotchi toy and looking at it for 5 minutes a day for a week. Enterprises run anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of desktops and/or servers and any software as a service they pay for in that ecosystem is minuscule compared to the whole. Apple controls a non-negligible portion of most iPhone users compute time in one way or another (or multiple ways).
Yeah totally.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and macOS since Panther.
These days I spend most of my time on macOS but I have a Windows 10 desktop machine and it works beautifully. Performance is way better than on macOS.
If Windows had a better text rendering engine I would probably switch. I just have an irrational disgust for how fonts are rendered on Windows. I know it's subjective but as someone that spends most of its time reading and writing text it's imperative I enjoy that.
The mobile industry would also never even be at the level it's at if it wasn't for the iPhone.
One of the biggest selling points of iOS was precisely that it was free of random third-party crap that everyone was sick of by that time.
Ever since Apple refused to let AT&T shovel their bloatware on the first iPhone, the very identity of iOS has been that it's a curated platform, and you only have to be concerned with one company for almost everything.
It was a breath of fresh air, bringing the philosophy of consoles to a mass consumer device.
Millions of people love that. For everybody else, there's Android.
That's ridiculous. That has nothing to do with the reason people selected it when it came out. It was pretty, it had features no other phone really had, such as a browser that rendered the same as the desktop and good touch controls, but security and safety had nothing to do with it.
Companies allowed the switch to iPhone when they realized that it was in theory as secure as Blackberry, and didn’t require a BES server.
So of course a major appeal was that it was a curated and totally secure platform was from day one. I know this because I was a many year Blackberry customer and was in the record lines in June 2007.
Blackberry was far and away considered the much more secure and safe option, for those that needed it. Your company could run your own messaging service (through Blackberry Enterprise Server), so it was far more secure in that respect.
I also had a Blackberry at the time the iPhone was announced. You were in the lines for an iPhone at the time because you wanted the safety and security it offered? Or because it looked really nice, had a browser that rendered correctly, and had a nice new way to interface? Because I don't know anyone else who switched for security at the time.
People bought iPhones because they trusted it was secure, and chose it over Blackberry because of features and UX. And they kept buying it because it was secure, had the release of the App Store opened the platform to a horde of malware, we would be saying remember when Apple sold iPhones?
People mostly choose their plane flights based on cost, comfort, and time. Not because safety isn’t important, but because it’s assumed it’s by default excellent. Now how high a priority will safety be for travelers when the 737 Max is cleared to fly again?
>>>>> Since day one security and safety have been the most important feature for iPhone, and the biggest reason consumers select it.
Is incorrect, because safety and security were not the major selling points. The person who said that is incorrect.
Nowhere am I saying that the iPhone was unsafe or insecure, but that it definitely wasn't seem as a "more secure" option and it definitely wasn't the "most important feature" and "biggest reason consumers selected it" from "day one".
This comment of your and the prior ones make it pretty obvious you understand this, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue anymore. Are iPhones often chosen now for for safety and security? Yes, although I still wouldn't say it's the most important feature or the biggest reason people choose it. It definitely wasn't that when it first launched though.
And anyone who administered BES really wanted to see a market switch to ActiveSync on Exchange, because BES was a massive resource hog on Exchange for no major security benefit over ActiveSync: the messages got routed over auto generated TLS Certs to BlackBerry’s data centers in Canada... so the main benefit was properly configured end to end TLS. Which admittedly wasn’t nothing in the late 90s, so few understood SSL/TLS, and Exchange was a beast, and early ActiveSync was buggy and insecure! But by the mid-late 2000s Microsoft started getting its act together.
But this isn't what you actually said. You made a very specific claim, and that specific claim is what I said was ridiculous. You can admit the original claim was a bit hyperbolic, and then we don't really have anything left to argue, or you can defend that safety and security where the "most important feature" and "biggest reason consumers selected it" from "day one", in which case I don't think there's much left for us to cover.
Ugh, my mistake. Those weren't your words. I got you and the other commenter mixed up here and elsewhere (as in I specifically tried to address you each as your respective roles, but got it backwards). Sorry for that.
Why does Apple spend so much on safety and security if it doesn’t sell iPhones?
I'm not saying make it super easy. I would be perfectly happy with a situation where it's hard to install a separate store (on Android to install any app not from the shipped with stores you specifically have to go to settings and enable untrusted apps. But there's a huge difference between "hard" and "legally impossible".
> Why does Apple spend so much on safety and security if it doesn’t sell iPhones?
Because it lets them completely control the platform, so they don't have to worry nearly as much about competition? The fact that Epic can't just install another store and get around Apple's 30% cut is a huge incentive to spend money on "safety and security", because the way they've chosen to achieve those goals is "we control it all, you control nothing, and we'll keep you safe". That's very convenient for them.
Yes they are worried about competition, Android. Epic isn’t competition. Without the walled garden, the iPhone loses a huge differentiator between it and Android, a and one of their developers and customers most valued features.
It has direct parallels to that age-old argument beloved of software lawyers that consumers do not own their copy of installed software, but are merely borrowing it by the grace of the vendor.
In contrast, here's a study that says even consumers in one of the most technologically aware regional markets do not perceive a difference between iOS and Android safety:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316573401_A_Study_o...
which is much more in keeping with just about everybody's experience of people outside the tech echo chamber.
Even better if you allow yourself to make giant leaps of assumption about the underlying motives. Then it can justify almost any apology for bad behaviour.
Apple competes with a horde of phone makers who sell cheaper phones at vastly lower profit margins. And who don’t have to spend a dime on OS development.
To compete Apple spends enormous effort in keeping iPhone secure and safe. And it makes safety and security a top iPhone marketing message. And it’s upper management repeats this mantra in interviews.
Apple knows how they came to dominate the high end of the smartphone market, they have pursued the same consistent strategy all the way back before the App Store existed. The first iPhones were locked down not allowing any third part apps. When they opened the App Store the security was already baked in, App Review, ode signing, sandboxing, the works.
It’s easy to be that dude on the internet who doesn’t believe Apple, but they aren’t running a $200B business by the seat of their pants. They have thousands of marketing people talking to customers, and if they could sell more phones by allowing sideloading and alternate app stores they would.
Marketing materials are not evidence of consumer preference. If anything, they're potentially the opposite; if people cared so much, why is constant repetition of the message necessary?
Investment levels are not evidence of consumer preference. There are countless strategic reasons why companies spend money in a certain direction.
If you're going to claim that consumers are suddenly factoring device security and relative levels of curation-dependent application safety into their platform selections, in the face of decades of history being incapable of doing so, you'd better be prepared with more statistical power than "they spend a lot of time & money convincing me how insanely great they are".
The final nail in this sorry coffin of corporate malfeasance is that even if consumers did value safety to the extent of choosing one platform over another on that basis, this can never justify actively misleading the consumer and requiring that other parties participate in the same deception.
Ok, you win. Apple doesn’t know it’s users, they put so much time, effort and marketing behind safety and security, while not understanding that customers don’t care about them.
It’s just random luck that despite being outsold 6-1 that they make more profits off smartphones than all other smartphone companies combined, and pay developers 50% more than any other company in earth. It can’t come from any deep understanding of what their customers want, since you don’t have a statistically viable sample confirming it.
The corporate malfeasance is using your market power to force third parties to mislead consumers. That's straight-up illegal in my country. I hope it is illegal in yours too.
Attributing Apple's 66% share of the global app store market to "consumers actually want a walled garden that lies to them" is wildly unfounded.
I don't have to prove anything, since I'm just calling out a unfounded claim being used to justify bad behaviour. If you want a forum where those will go unchallenged, and more apologists for the same, try an Apple website. Maybe there you can even get away with name-calling, and belittling major overseas markets as "small" (fun fact: wherever you are in the world, Korea has better broadband than you).
Same goes for any other platform like Google Play, Xbox, Nintendo, etc. Or selling concert tickets through Ticketmaster.
Also, it's not only about the App Store. You can't simply tell the iOS users of your mobile web app to use an Android device.
If the market is video games in general, Apple is but a tiny sliver of control of that market.
If the market is iOS devices, yes of course Apple controls 100% of that.
Where does the line get drawn? How many outlets does Epic have to sell what it develops? I think that's for the FTC/SEC to determine.
Epic's in the fairly unique position of having a "killer app" that a large portion of the iOS user base would want to install to get the ball rolling on a competing store. Given their rates a much better than Apple's, I imagine a lot of game studios would want to distribute through them, and they could offer cheaper prices and still make more profit, so people would be incentivized to install and use the competing store.
You know, actual competition.
You know, actual innovation.
Creating a phone OS wouldn't actually let them compete on the same level, because you can't run anything but iOS on Apple hardware.
The only companies that actually compete at the same level as Apple and Google and Amazon, since they both create the hardware, run an OS on it, and provide a store on it. Any while it's a pain to do (and they take steps to make it not work well, even if it does work), you can install their stores on each other (Amazon Fire store on Android, and Google Play store on Kindle Fire devices).
Not to say that those companies are paragons of openness in their platforms, but Apple is quite it bit farther along the spectrum in locking down their devices, in that you can't run any software other than what they approve on them (unless you jailbreak, but I'm but sure that's legal in many jurisdictions).
> You know, actual innovation.
There are plenty of locations to innovate. Why should epic have to create an OS (which they can't actually run on the hardware the people they are trying to reach are using) just so they can try to provide a better store experience for people. They could "innovate" be being more deterministic in what they accept or reject than Apple and being cheaper. Those are innovations that many customers and developers would welcome.
I'm sure Apple will be thrilled with this line of reasoning and will definitely argue it (/s).
(In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with the person I'm responding to, sarcasm over the internet is hard).
Yep. That's the argument I've been making for a couple weeks now. Mainly, that Apple's actions are anti-competitive, even if they may not match the current definition of monopoly. If the harm is great enough though, then we should maybe think about extending the definition of monopoly or enacting some more specific laws restricting anti-competitive actions that match the modern market more accurately. It's not like the current laws from the the constitution, they were added in the late 1800's and early 1900's.
At a minimum, some consumer laws that protect us from people locking down hardware to specific software in some instances (and thus allowing competition on Apple hardware) may help in some small ways overall, even if it doesn't directly address the App Store and OS coupling. Being able to (legally) run Android (or something else) on an Apple phone would change quite a lot, IMO, even if it took a while to do so.
How to deal with the warranty is the tricky part. Custom software can degrade the hardware. It seems fair that Apple should provide easier access to dev tools for bare-metal iPhone programming and jailbreaking but is no longer liable for the device.
I thought of this the other week, since it's not a stretch to think Epic will want to go after those marketplaces as well if they can.
It feels a little different, but I'm not willing to let that make me a hypocrite. We should have control over that hardware if we bought it, full stop. If that means we can't get those platforms as cheap anymore because they can't recoup their money from store fees, so be it. The world will be better off.
You can't trust any company to have your best interests at heart. You can barely expect this a miniscule amount of the time with your elected representatives, and that's their whole job. The market is for providing competition and innovation. Laws are for providing safety and security (and that includes keeping the market functioning well enough to provide those legitimately). Let's not forget that.
For instance, you can buy games for your switch from amazon or best buy. They have no such restriction where you can only buy games through Nintendo's store
The choice between fortnight and a good camera seems like a strange one.
Why couldn't Netscape have just made their own computer, instead of relying on windows boxes?
Nothing prevented them to do so, in fact that is what ChromeOS and FirefoxOS are all about.
For units sold: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...