Today's average smartphone is a more general computing device than the PC 20 years ago when Microsoft had it's anti-trust case.
And Apple is far more egregious than Microsoft in this case.
Would love to hear other views.
And Apple is far more egregious than Microsoft in this case.
Would love to hear other views.
I have trouble seeing that. 20 years ago, you even had a choice of operating systems and could execute arbitrary code on a PC so it's hard to see that PC as less general purpose than a smartphone which is generally designed to use only an OS and apps allowed by the app store maintainer.
It’s also possible they are entirely similar and Apple just has the benefit of a more mature SW development ecosystem and more experience navigating the legal and political systems learning from the missteps of others and themselves.
I don’t think this is a black and white thing though. In fact, the closedness insulates any underperforming engineering teams from competition because competitors are unable to get access to the same APIs and compete on providing alternate implementations of the same thing. That’s a challenge for Apple in terms of continuing to excel in the products they ship. I doubt it’s a big one they care about though.
Apple is not competing against Epic games here. They aren’t blocking them to force users to buy their Apple version of whatever. And the Epic games can run on tons of popular platforms.
This is really just about payment transactions? So I don’t see a comparison in any way with the facts of the Microsoft case. Other than two big companies asserting greedy rules on their platform. Is that enough for anti-trust? I can’t argue that case in a post
The crux of the Epic case is that there's no alternative to the app store. If there were an alternative to the app store, Epic would not be subject to Apple's capricious whims or 30% tax. So, yes, Apple is blocking competition with their services on their platform.
You make good arguments. Just to play devils advocate, PlayStation and XBox are also closed platforms and I think they take a cut. Amazon Fire devices take a cut by making you buy their virtual currency. I don’t know if Apple is doing anything different.
And the real issue in my mind is Microsoft had a real monopoly. Epic is free to put their games on millions and millions of other devices. They aren’t locked out of “the market” as a whole
Literally a court case.
Can I write programs for my smartphone using my smartphone?
Yes; at least if its Android you can develop, package, and deploy apps to your device from the same device (for ergonomic/UX reasons this works better with external keyboard and display, or a tablet, than a bare smartphone) as well as editing code and running it in any one of many available interpreter apps.
Views heard: [downvote]