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Comment by nwallin | Hacker News Reader

I will not buy any device that does not give me control of the device. If I can't sideload apps, can't install a 3rd party store, do not have the ability to root my own device, I won't buy it. Apple has decided that's not allowed, fine, I won't buy their product. That's between Apple and their customers.

But it is certifiably insane that Apple thinks they have the right to dictate to Epic what Epic charges for its apps on their store. If Epic thinks Fortnite is worth $30, and Epic charges Android users $30 for the binary to sideload onto their Android devices, and because Apple charges a 30% surcharge, Epic sells the same app on iOS for $42.86, and Apple says, "no, you're not allowed to do that, you have to charge $30 just like you do on Android" -- no. Absolutely not. Apple does not have the moral/ethical right to do that.

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So they don’t get to be on iOS. I’d leave ethics and morals out of this convo since neither side has anyone’s interest but their own. Sounds like you already found a solution to this court case - don’t buy Apple if you want to tinker with your hardware. I’m shocked that is news to anyone. I’m shocked so many of us want to dictate what the rest of us have as the status quo because it doesn’t align with your feelings and belief system.

Anti-competition cases are about consumer protection,as it says in the article.

We'd be in a grim society if our values were "Don't like? Don't use it" without any capacity of deeper discussion.

Nothing so far has convinced me this will improve things for consumers. It will let minority of users who game or are technically savvy do more with their device at the expense of the current ecosystem. It is quite literally an outspoken minority riding the coat tails of a massive corporate law suit about one company wanting to make more money. Everything else is speculation and horseshit bundled as what’s best for the consumer.

'At the expense of the current ecosystem'. Stop peddling this nonsense that adding alternatives will somehow degrade the current App Store.

> don’t buy Apple if you want to tinker with your hardware

Apple makes good hardware. I should be able to buy an Apple device and use my own software on it.

I think it's fine for Apple to demand more as long as the end users know that they are paying more everywhere because of it.

Yes this would be a fine outcome. I’d buy less items which pushed the fee on me or buy it elsewhere if the convenience was not worth the surcharge.

> I’m shocked so many of us want to dictate what the rest of us have as the status quo because it doesn’t align with your feelings and belief system.

Would you still support Apple if they said certain race of people cannot use Apple devices. They can always use non Apple devices.

In the US there are protected classes, race being one, that are illegal for discrimination.

Side-loading, right to repair are not similarly protected. Although maybe they will be passed one day.

So if Apple had illegal discriminations, I think that would greatly decrease their support on this issue. Definitely from me.

The law should follow what we think is right, not the other way around.

I agree. And in this case, I think the law does follow. As more people think side-loading is as important as protected classes, the laws will change.

These civil rights classes are fairly new and less than a hundred years old, reflecting changes in the way people think and believe.

From the outside looking in, it looks like Apple are so ashamed of their own 30% price-gouging that they won't allow you to include it. It makes no sense whatsoever to dictate Epic's pricing, and this seems like an obviously dangerous hill for Apple to choose to die on.

It’s still unclear to me why Apple should have any limits in what rules they set for their store. Don’t publishers have the option to skip Apple’s store and sell in other ones?

I mean this isn’t price gouging generators during a winter storm. This is video games and apps.

What stops publishers from simply shrugging, walking away, and letting Apple users miss out?

It's still unclear to me why anticompetitive behavior is so hard to understand for people here. Free markets don't exist. Stop pretending they do. Apple has a crazy amount of power over companies selling apps on their platform. Power that would easily be considered a monopoly and anticompetitive if brought to court in, say, Germany. The fact that Apple doesn't own the smartphone market completely is irrelevant. What matters is their potential and real power to unilaterally decide on contract/business matters affecting any number of companies that use their platform.

Because it accounts for a huge portion of the mobile market. This is exactly what antitrust is for. When you have large swaths of a market controlled by so few, you don’t actually get proper free market dynamics. Antitrust cases like this put limits on few large players that abuse their positions and generally promote and incentivize further development in the market.

If Apple was forced to allow 3rd party stores or even forced to allow apps to be transparent to their users about pricing, it would allow room for more consumer choice.

The only problem here is that you have to show Apple changes practices to become anti-competitive once achieving large marketshare/control.

It's OK to have a monopoly, it's not ok to abuse it under U.S. law.

Apple has actually loosened restrictions over time as the platform gained marketshare/size. And when Apple created the App Store they more than doubled how much developers took home from gross revenue (70-80% of revenue went to distributors/retail prior to the App Store).

The only anti-competitive area I'm concerned about is Spotify/streaming services. I think Apple is being overzealous here.

Everything else appears to be a game/software distribution norm.

Epic pays 30% on Android, Nintendo, Xbox, and Playstation markets.

Steam needs 15% and GOG needs 22% of gross revenue from games to break even operationally.

Stripe charges about 3% of gross revenue for transaction services.

The 30% doesn't seem that high when you consider those factors:

15% just to keep the lights on (Steam break-even royalty rate). 3% for transactions at minimum (e.g. Stripe fee) Ongoing R&D costs of maintaining iOS/iPhones (more technically and cost intensive than Xbox and Playstation combined).

The kit for iOS development is remarkably cheap too, $99/yr developer account (mostly a gatekeeping path to keep malware out), and $700 for an M1 Mac Mini (If you don't want to just use a VM from AWS for < $100 yr).

I think they can do better for small-time app developers (the 15% fee has helped), but I still feel like these people should STFU and look up how expensive Gaming Console, Embedded SoC, and IoT dev kits are in comparison (And god, don't look at the agreements we sign on embedded hardware dev kits). I wish I only had to spend $99 a year, and be able to use $100 used cell phones to test my software on.

> It’s still unclear to me why Apple should have any limits in what rules they set for their store.

It's an exploitative monopoly. That's more than enough reason to place severe limits on it.

One of the things that came up in the trial was that Apple's share of Fortnite was more than $100 million in a single year. Which means that Epic's earnings from Fortnite on iOS for that year were more than $334 million.

That explains why Epic doesn't want to walk away.

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