They control all ingress onto their platform. Nothing gets on that they don't want.
Then they proceed to control the economic activity of everyone in the Apple ecosystem.
You literally cannot do business with Apple customers.
This is as bad as Standard Oil.
You might even say I'm paying them to protect me from your poor business practices.
(There are other problems with PayPal, so if that bothers you, replace X with PayPal that has the same privacy and subscription management features)
This we need to regulate. This is what our lawmakers should be doing.
Apple isn't doing this out of their own generosity. They're trying to get a slice of the pie.
It's also why they shut down mobile advertising IDs, which on the surface sounds delightful. Ultimately that's more commerce going through Apple rails. More pie.
Apple is strong-arming here to put more people in their walled garden. The government should craft legislation to protect privacy and should stop the "pretend privacy" game Apple is playing.
Apple doesn't care about you, otherwise you wouldn't have to pay extra for a phone charger and they wouldn't squash 3rd party repair shops.
> You don't get my email address or my information unless I want you to.
This prevents businesses from establishing their own, hard-earned relationships with customers.
Apple has your email and sends you promotional material all the time. Do you send those to trash?
> slipping in "features" that abuse my privacy
Apple already abuses your privacy, and if you don't see it you're being naive.
They track which apps are running on Mac, and they recently caused an outage doing so. This is part of their push to ultimately lock down that platform behind an App Store.
They do the same on iPhone. They know your location, your files, your chat history. You trust them. Mark Zuckerberg had a quote for that.
Sorry for the privacy-invading Giphy/Facebook link, but Apple is literally this: http://gph.is/XJxIL3
It requires them to earn the relationship instead of leveraging a single transaction into an unwanted intrusion.
It's the fact that Apple doesn't let you, the owner of your phone and licensed user of iOS, take full advantage of what you purchased.
The inability to side load apps you want to use outside of the App Store (or to use another app store) is an artificial limitation. It's created from greed or fear of competition from a better managed app store.
I think what people are arguing for is a similar model to macOS. Have you ever heard anyone get mad that they were able to download apps outside of the App Store on macOS? No! You can use the App Store if you want, but you're still able to trust a third-party developer to use the device you purchased to it's full potential.
You know what other benefit I get from it? My parents, children, and friends who have iPhones have the same benefits. When my mom calls me for help, I know for sure where all her apps came from. I know that they've been at least somewhat vetted and come from a singular trusted source. I know that "some kid from school" didn't show my kid how to use this "cool other app store" where you can download "all kinds of free stuff". I have not yet had to help one of them get malware off of their iOS devices.
My point here is that this has been the deal for over a decade. If you bought an iOS device, you knew the deal. This isn't new. Many of us bought it BECAUSE of these. And you may think that having access to other app stores doesn't affect me, but it does. At this point, I don't understand why people who don't like it are buying iOS devices. There are options out there that do exactly what you want. Why did you buy an option that doesn't have the features you want, and now you want to take away a feature many of us like?
Your parents are consenting adults. What makes you think your parents don't deserve to be trusted to use an app they want to use?
As for children, just don't give out your Apple ID password. Children under 13 are not allowed to create accounts.
> I have not yet had to help one of them get malware off of their iOS devices.
This is a completely different issue. Apps can still be sand-boxed for security.
> Why did you buy an option that doesn't have the features you want, and now you want to take away a feature many of us like?
You have nothing to lose here. I really don't understand why you're still calling this a feature.
It’s the exactly same mentality of intelligence agencies: There’s a microphone, location tracker and communication logger in the pocket of every citizen but they are not allowed to access those! Ban encryption to make my job easier! Give me a backdoor to everyone to make my job easier!
I am a developer too but I try not forgetting that I am also a user. As a user I don’t feel obligated to make developers job easier who screwed me many times before, I love dealing with Apple and I like keeping it that way.
If you think you can do it better, go do it on Android and if it happens to be good I may switch. There’s no monopoly.
I don’t know why developers think they have right to access me. Apple made the thing and I bought it from them knowing what I am getting into and I have no complaints. I am being taken care well and I will ditch Apple if this changes.
This sounds rather hyperbolic. Sure, if you want to do business with customers through Apple's platform then you need to abide by their terms, but you can do business with them.
On the surface it feels a bit like complaining that you can't do business with customers through Stripe, because Stripe has Ts&Cs that you need to abide by. Apple's situation is more complex, but I think the underlying reasoning on this specific point is the same isn't it?
I can't do the same with Apple.
You could only accept MasterCard, but you’re choosing to limit your audience.
I can't reach iOS customers for payment processing without going through Apple's offering in payment processing (which interestingly enough takes a 10x higher cut than Visa, Stripe, et al.)
If Visa used their market leadership in payment processing to try to dominate other markets, then it would be comparable (and then they should absolutely get antitrust scrutiny).
It is one that is separately analyzed, well reported, clearly delineated, demonstrably an arena of choice, and significant to the consumer. This makes it difficult to ignore on any taxonomic basis of irrelevance.
No threshold is itself enough, since there's no strict liability; generally speaking, it's not unlawful to have market power, it's unlawful to abuse it. Any regulatory or private action has to make a qualified case. But as far as thresholds go: that 60%, plus Apple's contractual requirement for market participants to actively mislead the consumer, is pretty terminal.
It's specifically about the goalposts, that's my entire point. It's not as straightforward and clear-cut as you're suggesting.
Even saying something like "mobile applications market" doesn't make it clear whether we're talking about number of users, revenue, number of apps, number of app downloads, which mobile devices and so on.
There's an arrogance in tech that we can make up definitions to suit ourselves. I guess it's related to the fallacy that the law is some kind of programming language.
So if Apple had 100% of all phone users and 100% of all apps but the apps were entirely free, that wouldn't be a monopoly?
> there being no other universal unit.
I suggested a number of other units above.
> There's an arrogance in tech that we can make up definitions to suit ourselves.
The question of defining the market is the basis of how the decision is made in court and the biggest point of argument between the legal teams. This isn't about tech arrogance.
I also feel like this back-and-forth isn't constructuve so I'll stop here.
Notwithstanding which, sure, monopolies are indeed not defined by revenue, they are defined by market control, which is enabled by market share, which is quantified by value (there being no other universal measure), i.e. by sales i.e. revenue, which is why it's part of the consideration but you still need some qualification to support the quantification. Such as, by way of painfully topical example, Apple successfully forcing other market participants to actively mislead the consumer or withdraw products, which is not merely a naked display of market power but also an egregious misuse thereof.
Hate to break it to you but there is and I showed it which is why you made this salty reply. Certainly in the US there is no major Anti-Trust case which revolved around revenue as a measure of monopoly. Not Microsoft, not ATT and not Standard Oil.
Sadly I fear it is as grounded in reality as the rest of this ... scrawl.
Abusing your monopoly position in the market, to the detriment of consumers and fair competition is against the law.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/monopoly
Amazingly, hundreds of very thick books about what legally defines a monopoly are not the same as a single sentence from a web site.
But keep in mind that there are legal definitions of some things, and those often differ greatly from the colloquial definitions we use from day-to-day.
Exactly, which is why it's in no way clear that "Apple's market share comes nowhere near close to being a monopoly." If you defined Standard Oil's market as "fuels," it wasn't a monopoly because it was competing against coal and wood. If you defined AT&T's market as "communication services," it wasn't a monopoly because it was competing against TV, Radio, and the Post Office. And if you defined Apple's market as "3rd party software distribution, in general," you'd get the same result, but maybe not if its market is "3rd party software distribution for ~45% of all American phone users."
Since the advent of antitrust law, every monopolist has a definition of its market that magically makes it not a monopoly and obscures its anticompetitive behavior; but that's not the definition we should use to judge them.
Not really, if you look at it from the perspective of software developers. If an Android developer no longer wants to be a customer of the Play Store (or gets rejected by them), they can go to a 3rd party app store or tell their users to sideload. An iOS developer has no options besides Apple: they either stick with them or essentially `rm -rf AllMyIOsInvestment/`.
I think it’s reasonable to put some restrictions on the choices a company can make about their product direction, but just “it screwed a third party that built on my product” is a bad one.
Market dominance paired with leveraging that dominance in a way that hurts consumers.
If it’s levered in a way that doesn’t hurt consumers, that may be hyper competitive and other businesses may not like it, but that’s not a monopoly abuse.
At least that’s my layman’s understanding of the law.
Apple’s behavior is arguably good for most users (restricting tracking/spying). I don’t think Apple’s behavior meets that consumer harm standard.
Apple may not be a monopoly. They've definitely set up the ecosystem to be anti-competitive. Whether that's harmful to consumers (which is what matters) is debatable. I tend to think it's harmful, but they've done such a complete job of locking it down that it's hard to even compare without having to change a lot or things, since they control and exclude others from the hardware all the way up to sales transactions for services, and everything in between.
That said, the fact that Apple was able to quickly cut their fees from 30% to 15% for some developers just because of growing public sentiment seems to indicate that competition is not working well to normalize these app store fees, and that likely means developers and by extension users are paying more because of that.
Trust is the key. People can not trust thousands of random companies/developers. Trust is built up over time through a relationship.
Without Apple, most of these transactions would not take place. This trust, App Store etc., has been built up and cannot be transferred automatically to another party.
> Then they proceed to control the economic activity of everyone in the Apple ecosystem.
> You literally cannot do business with Apple customers.
This describes every brick & mortar store ever and just about every gaming console since the NES. I'm not sure what differentiates Apple from Nintendo or Target here.
NTDOY's market cap is two orders lower than AAPL and their impact on the worldwide software application market is comparably quite small. TGT is also under $100B and they have essentially no impact on the software application market.
What makes Apple different? Their size and market power. How much of the world economy is now dependent on their devices and services?
Amazon.com
Edit: Actually I wish Amazon exercised the kind of control that Apple does so I wouldn't have to guess if the phone charger I bought will set my house on fire.
Amazon.com takes in hundreds of billions from online stores, tens from physical:
Retail has limited space. Also, I can buy milk from dozens of different places.
"Cyperbunk 2077" is being sold just about everywhere, retail and digital. Target, Walmart, Amazon, Steam, ...
Where do I buy games and productivity apps for my iPhone?
Software sales and the marketplace capacity are infinite. Apple is artificially limiting it and should open up. They have no argument other than platform protectionism. (They're doing it for themselves, not you. They sure as hell track you and run experiments on your usage.)
These kinds of dynamics already exist in brick & mortar retail with wholesale clubs. Very few people have memberships to more than one and are usually very loyal to the one they like so if you want to reach their customers you don't have many options.
The issue with Walmart is the monopsony concerns:
I really don't understand all this hyperbole on this subject. Somehow everyone on HN decided to become democratic socialist only when it pertains to App Store commissions lmao
Remember, MS bundling IE is nothing compared to the tightly coupled ecosystems of today.
* You have to use my payment system.
* I get 30% of your gross revenue.
* You have to follow my guidelines about what you can and can't sell and how you're allowed to sell it.
* You can't, while you're at the market, advertise how customers can reach you outside the market. I'm not about to just let you use my space as an advertising channel for free.
And in this hypothetical universe my customers love it! They do all their shopping here. I can both see how businesses that don't want to follow my rules would feel super frustrated but those rules are what makes my market worth coming to. My rules basically boil down to "fuck you pay me" and treat my customers well.
This exact thing exists. From bazaars to food courts to antiques centers. There are hundreds of thousands of these situations around the world.
But for some reason because "it's on the interwebs!" it's supposed to be magically different.
You argue you don't have a monopoly because your tenants can always move, even though most of their possessions cannot be moved to other housing.
Reasoning by analogy is bad, but I think it's important to note that most people's phones are their digital home. It is not a low friction situation to just "shop elsewhere" for a single product when it wouldn't be compatible with your home.
I'm not saying it's low friction at all. Hell I would try to make my hypothetical market as high-friction as possible by having a prepaid high-cost membership fee, as many exclusives as I could find, and lots of benefits and services tied to it. This just seems like business.