Edit: P.S. Amazon is the other obvious one.
So this all comports: you’re free to make your own App Store and not get the 30% cut, but in exchange you will not have a billion device user base on day 1 to ship your apps to.
Maybe apple makes the nicest hardware and someone buys for that reason but it doesn’t mean they support the App Store lock-in.
The market for applications is entirely separate from the market for hardware. By tying the two together, Apple is dipping into a revenue stream that they have no right to, just as Ford has no right to profits from sale of gasoline.
This seems like a matter of opinion, and one that Apple has disagreed with for decades as far as I can tell.
So when you say that the lines between markets is a matter of opinion, of course it is. When you say that Apple has a different opinion on the matter, of course they do. Those were not in dispute, and so your comment on it being "a matter of opinion" is both true, and so widely applicable as to convey effectively no meaning.
Instead, you could have responded with pointing out inconsistencies in the analogy given. You could have pointed out ongoing work done by Apple to justify the ongoing payments. These would have worked to shift the opinion on Apple's business practices, not merely to point out the general category of "matters of opinion".
If you just assume the issue at hand resolves in your favor then it’s trivial to come up with analogs that appear in your favor! It just isn’t very convincing.
Consider if 50%+ of people moving from horse and buggy to automobiles picked Ford and in order to support this new market creation Ford had to invest billions to create gas stations all over the country. It does not seem crazy at all that they would prevent other manufacturers from utilizing those gas stations, and that they’d take a cut from every gas station operator who chooses to service the giant market that Ford created.
Regarding the gasoline/automobile being "obviously two distinct markets" and computing software/hardware being "not obviously distinct", I'd say that's a description of how the markets current are, and not a argument for how they ought to be. I intentionally selected an analogy where two complementary good (gasoline/automobiles) are treated as separate markets, to state that goods being complementary, just as computing hardware/software are complementary, does not mean that they are the same market.
> Consider if 50%+ of people moving from horse and buggy to automobiles picked Ford
Looking it up, Ford did have 56% of US automobile market share in 1920 [0]. Not really relevant to either of our arguments, but was interesting to find.
> and in order to support this new market creation Ford had to invest billions to create gas stations all over the country.
I tried to find history of gas stations, to see what historic parallels could be drawn, but it looks like gasoline was either sold at general stores or hardware stores, with dedicated gas stations being either owned independently or by oil companies, and were started in response to the rise in automobile ownership [1]. That is, the existing infrastructure was used for the automobile.
I'd say this is a pretty good parallel for Apple's App Store. The existing infrastructure for software deployment, the internet, was and is the primary method by which software is distributed to iOS. This infrastructure predates Apple, and is a far larger part of the software deployment. Apple's primary role is not one of enabling software deployment (i.e. enabling deployment where it would otherwise be impossible), but one of restricting software deployment (i.e. preventing software deployment where it would otherwise be possible). That strikes me as entirely undeserving of an extra cut of payments.
Another potential analogy would be in vehicle repairs. Your manufacturer warranty is valid, even if the car is serviced by a mechanic not employed by the manufacturer. This required legal battles to resolve, and established that even closely tied markets such as car sales and car repairs should be considered as separate markets.
[0] https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-ford-cre...
It isn't even retaliation anymore, they can say "well they can use their own app store, which is what they wanted anyway." Don't get your hopes up.
Or Microsoft.
This is exactly what the case study looked like for Microsoft when they were producing phones and were just getting their app store up and running. People were hesitant because their app store didn't have all the apps they used like YouTune, Facebook and Twitter.
The one classic example is how Google refused to allow MS to have a YouTube app in their store - that single app alone kept thousands of people from switching to the MS mobile platform which in turn contributed to their low market share and eventual collapse and MS killing off most of their mobile platform.
I have nothing against Steam or Epic Games; rather, I am curious why the discourse around the two seems to be different, even though they're quite similar as services?
Did Epic Games do "something wrong" (not sure what the right term here is, please do suggest a better one if it comes to mind) in comparison to what Steam does?
Gamers, and PC gamers in particular, are quite stubborn. I suspect there's a lot of loyalty to Steam for many reasons and Epic making their own copycat store split their already well-curated libraries. That and they literally yanked games already released on Steam and moved them to Epic, so I'd say that's where most of the bad blood comes from.
Valve doesn't have anything in the phone space AFAIK.