Hacker News Reader

Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

There's no competition, which competition exactly? The only tariff change Apple ever done in 10 years was due ... to a threat of an anti-trust lawsuit, you can't make this up. Even Apple basically admits indirectly the lack of competition. You only have two companies, with very similar rules and behaviour, there's no market anymore.

Don't get my comment wrong, I'd say the exact same thing about Google. It's a duopoly without any competition whatsoever.

> if any company can disrupt the smartphone market then the takings are all theirs

I don't think that's possible, even Microsoft failed at it with their massive funding.

View on HN

https://www.gsmarena.com/makers.php3 loads of mobile phone companies, lots of healthy competition. Non-technical consumers don't perceive the device and the OS as separate things.

I'm talking about the mobile app market here, not the quality of the camera.

Right, but Apple is a mobile phone company, not a mobile app company. iOS app companies exist entirely at the pleasure of Apple, just like companies who depend on the Twitter API.

I disagree with that, Apple is a mobile app company and there's only two in the world.

Twitter as big as it is, is just a website across millions of others. In the mobile app market there is exactly two companies, Apple and Google, that's it.

Does Oppo or Samsung has any power when publishing an app? No? Then they are not part of this market.

There aren't many mobile apps you can buy from Apple. Apple is primarily a hardware manufacturer. Their entire product lineup consists of devices[1].

1. https://www.apple.com/us/store

Entirely?

https://www.apple.com/services/ https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/ https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/

Of course, these are not the bread and butter products.

I find it a bit pointless to separate their hardware and software. I know few people who run Windows or Linux on their Apple hardware. For me, Apple is primarily a products company that excels in fusing hardware and software together. They are increasingly expanding into services, too.

They are plenty of mobile apps you can buy from apple, it's called the appstore. Whether they make them themselves is irrelevant to the point.

And similarly again there's none you can buy from Oppo and Samsung (I'll consider the Samsung store negligible in terms of market share).

> Right, but Apple is a mobile phone company, not a mobile app company.

Apple has consistently made more money from collecting their 30% tax than they have from manufacturing iPhones:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263402/apples-iphone-rev...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-...

Isn't that the whole point? They can only make that money because they build the phones to begin with. They also invested in building the entire platform, literally from scratch. Isn't this just a return on their investment? Aren't they perfectly entitled to it? Why can't phones be loss leaders into mobile app ecosystems, just like razors are loss leaders into razor blades?

App developers shouldn't be beholden to using Apple's payment processing if they don't want to use it. Along that same line of logic, forcing developers to go through Apple for first-party distribution gives them a defacto monopoly over the iPhone. Apple could charge 85% overhead and there would be nothing developers could do about it.

The only fair resolution here is to force Apple to compete with other storefronts to prove that the value they provide is competitive. Apple could resolve this issue in a number of ways, but they've only chose to make the problem worse; that's why 34 states have come forward voicing their concern[0], and why EU regulators have been stepping in to block Apple's service expansions. They're the largest company in the world, and they deserve the most regulatory scrutiny for it; anything else is a failure of democracy and capitalism.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-dozens-u-states-apple-03470...

Apple could decided third party apps aren't allowed and then developers make 0%. It's their platform to decided what to do with. If they think 15/30% works well, then so be it.

> monopoly over the iPhone > Apple could charge 85% overhead and there would be nothing developers could do about it.

That's exactly right! Then fewer and poorer apps would be built on iOS, and users would notice, and they would migrate to other platforms. This has happened plenty of times before. Yes, Apple has a monopoly over the iPhone - it's an Apple product. Just like Sony have a monopoly over the PS5, and Samsung has a monopoly over the WF45R6300AV Front Load Washing Machine.

The only fair resolution would be to allow Apple to do whatever it wants with Apple devices. If everyone at Apple collectively lost their minds tomorrow, they would have every right to pull all apps from the App Store completely. They could shut down the platform. It's literally theirs in every sense of the word. They built it. They own it. They operate it. Just because people are concerned doesn't make socializing iPhones or the App Store in any way reasonable.

> That's exactly right! Then fewer and poorer apps would be built on iOS, and users would notice, and they would migrate to other platforms.

You're admitting yourself that there's not much value provided by the appstore to developers and they only use it because they have not choice (and I do agree with that being a developer myself)

It's called market abuse. Other companies have been broken before for abuse, that won't be the first one.

> Aren't they perfectly entitled to it?

Up to a point, no. Common Carrier laws have been around for a long time and had demonstrable benefits. Net neutrality means phone companies can't use their infrastructure however they like. AT&T wanted to just sit on their patent for the transistor but was pushed by the government into to licensing it to Motorola, TI, etc. There's no reason why similar regulations couldn't be applied to mobile app platforms.

Common Carrier laws exist to ensure that infrastructure that occupies one physical location is shared. If AT&T had sat on the transistor patent, then Telefunken would have invented the transistron a whole two years later, and that's what we'd be calling the switches in our computers. Even failing that, delaying the information age by the expiry time of a patent doesn't seem like a big deal when you look at the big picture.

There's quite a few ways to slice data, but profit would likely be better than revenue.

Apple does not make 30% profit off of total iPhone revenue, as they do still have to pay for development, infrastructure, and supporting staff.

They have a historical 38% margin on hardware, and just reported a 70% margin on first-party services.

The stores (iTunes Store, App Store, Books) may very well be their lowest margin divisions. Which would make sense, since they are selling other people's products.

Apple is 100% a mobile app company. They guard all the doors, they hold all the keys to the hardware device. Thereby they dictate what you can run on your hardware that you paid for after the sale.

> they dictate what you can run on your hardware that you paid for after the sale.

You bought the hardware from Apple knowing exactly what restrictions they place on the hardware. You were knowledgeable about it and still decided to purchase the hardware.

That reasoning just cannot work in society to keep a functioning and healthy market

Reply on news.ycombinator.com