This article lists a bunch of the special deals Google made with various companies in order to prevent competition https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...
> One Google Play exec boasted she got Riot to halt development on its own app store by promising the company $10M in marketing.
> Another Google exec suggested that sharing revenue with Samsung would be “better at disincentivizing other app stores from being preloaded.”
> Google wanted to offer a 16 percent Google Play revenue share to key Chinese OEMs to “secure Play exclusivity” — and wound up giving them 20 percent.
> A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android’s app store fees
Apple made significantly less of these deals - they have their rules that you can either follow or not participate. I do think that some of those rules limit competition and make worse products for consumers.
Apple makes a lot of deals. A lot. I'd expect them to be about even.
Beyond that there’s no evidence one way or another that there are any sweetheart deals. None of the public documents from the trials showed that.
Anything beyond that is speculation.
Apple makes the devices, so they aren’t making others squash competition. They’re exactly what they say.
Google just has more types of companies in the ecosystem to make deals with. Apple’s iOS OEM deals can’t be found anticompetitive because they don’t have those deals to begin with.
Supposedly, the 15%-after-first-year rule for subscriptions that they instituted was because they were trying to entice Netflix to continue to take in-app payment for subscriptions. Rather than a sweetheart deal, they rolled it out as a platform change.
There are areas which I think are more questionable, such as their Apple TV partnerships with Amazon and a few others.
I think Apple just did that because it was becoming clear that what they were saying wasn’t true/they were getting political pressure about charging 30% no matter what.
I don’t remember the exact timing on the change so my guess as to the cause may be wrong.
But even one deal is enough.
Smartphone makers need app store revenue to make the handsets competitively priced. It would really hurt Android market share if all non-Google Android phones were say 10-20% more expensive to compensate for that. Or alternatively if you had a fragmented ecosystem with a separate app store per OEM.
I'm not saying that it's a good thing, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to share app store revenue with the OEM making the device.
Can't speak to the deals with particular app developers like Riot or Spotify
Google, as evidenced by their own internal documents put into record in this trial, was not interested in creating a platform where they had any real completion with the Google play store
For example, what's stopping Samsung then from using the world's most inefficient and old manufacturing techniques, and then complaining Apple's more efficient (but expensive to research) techniques are propping up their profits? Nothing. It would even be easier for Samsung to do that, and then use their competitor's own cost-cutting innovations to take them down.
B. Android also charges 30%. Developers making under $1M per year pay only 15% (initially announced by Apple, copied by Google). You can't argue you'd save a penny going to Android.
C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.
D. It is no secret that the 30% fee has nothing to do with consumers, but will instead be used to increase the developer's profit margins. Expect to pay the exact same after the fees are lifted.
I could not disagree more.
> B. Android also charges 30%. It's actually better on iPhone, because developers making under $1M per year pay only 15%. On Android, everyone pays 30%. So you'd be paying more to Google on Android than on iPhone.
Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
> C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.
Will I get refunded for the apps I bought? What about the macbook I bought because I entered the apple ecosystem?
> A. That's not exactly secret information, so your ignorance is not an excuse when you could have easily found that information if you cared. It's not a secret contract.
How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?
Well, we can agree to disagree, but call it a prediction - in three years, prices will be exactly the same as they are now. No business, especially in this economy, gets an opportunity like this to raise margins without affecting sales.
> Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
Yes, and literally nobody will install it. And the few app stores that are available - Aurora will get your Google account banned, while F-Droid re-signs all apps with itself, meaning you are opening your device to serious security risks. A middleman in F-Droid would mean every app you install from them could be compromised with fake developer signatures. Fun.
> How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?
How about paying attention since the 30% commission was announced at the iPhone App Store launch in 2008, literally by Steve Jobs on stage when iPhoneOS 2.0 was announced? There's no legal requirement to advertise every possible detail to cover every possible person's perspective - especially when it's old hat announced a decade and a half ago with fanfare.
https://youtu.be/WUrzjLjP4UQ?t=217
Edit for the comment below about iPhone being anti-competitive (because I'm "posting too fast"):
Well, here's the problem with trying to investigate the iPhone.
Remember how I showed that announcement in 2008? iPhone market share, at the time, was less than 5%. Almost the entire smartphone market was split between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.
Now look at where iPhone is now, despite the fee. That demonstrates, to a regulator, that it is a competitive product, and the market preferred it, despite the fee which was implemented at the beginning. Apple didn't build the iPhone to where it is now and then lock it down - developers signed up right when it was beginning and didn't care then, so they can't care now that it's a success.
Apple has basically an ironclad argument for competitiveness. If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored. This came up in the argument with Epic - Apple argued, successfully, that the market chose them and their "anti-competitive practices" despite them having almost no clout, which can only be the result of market support for being a competitive product.
Edit 2 (same issue, thanks @dang):
> What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?
The iPhone took off because of third-party support, any market analyst will tell you that. If it didn't have third-party support from the App Store, it would have died.
Why was that third-party support there? Previously, on almost all other cellphones, every carrier had their own App Store. With their own policies. And a 50/50 split at best. Some only gave the developer 30% with the carrier taking 70%. With the developer paying for your own credit card fees and hosting fees. Many carriers had severe upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars to get a half-functioning SDK. The 70/30 deal with one App Store was revolutionarily competitive for the time. Developers flooded Apple's scene because it was, by far, the cheapest and most profitable App Store available at the time. They can't claim, high on the success that Apple gave them, that Apple's the problem now when Apple did not even change the deal that they initially signed for. At least, not legally easily.
What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?
I also think youre mixing up your markets here. The app store is not the same thing as the iPhone. The iPhone was a very competitive product that has an anti competitive market in it and some consumers are willing to look past that. Doesnt make it acceptable.
Aurora isn't an app store. It is an unauthorized client for the Play Store.
Of course, I don't know if we can say that Apple's app store approval process filters out more or fewer security issues or malicious apps than F-Droid's vetting process does.
I don't really get this point. Internet service providers are all anti-competitive, but they're doing quite well, because there are no alternatives. When the iPhone was released, so so so many people immediately saw it as completely in another class above all previous phones, and there were no alternatives in the same class. (Obviously there were trade offs: I personally know quite a few Blackberry people who scoffed at the iPhones lack of physical keyboard.) Even barring all that, the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field was still going strong at that point. The iPhone was cool. (And at that point, there wasn't even an App Store, and no SDK for third parties to build apps.)
Most people don't realize that they're negatively impacted by anti-competitive behavior until it's too late. They've already bought into the ecosystem. Sometimes they don't even know things could be more innovative or cheaper or whatever, because they have nothing to compare it to. To revisit my ISP example, a simple reason I'm mad at Comcast's anti-competitive behavior is because I know it can be so much better, based on people I know who live in other places and have an order of magnitude faster internet connection for a fraction of the price. If I had no other examples that suggested that 1200/35 for $90/mo was a bad deal, I might think that was just how it had to be in order to provide the service.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. I agree that developers are unlikely to lower prices if the 30% fee is eliminated or reduced. But it seems reasonably likely that the next time they look into raising prices, they may raise them less, or decide not to raise them at all.
I do agree with the underlying point: prices are not set based on cost, but are set in line with what the market will pay. If the market will pay $10 when the developer has to pay a 30% fee, the market will still pay $10 if that fee disappears.
But still, consider that for many apps there's going to be a tension between what the market will pay, and the minimum the developer needs to keep the lights on. The developer might settle for a lower per-sale profit if they get a bunch more users that more than offsets the lower per-user revenue.
Let's say a developer sells at a $10 price point, which nets the developer $7 (after Apple's 30% cut), and that they need $6 to keep paying their other costs; they'll get $1 in profit after all is said and done. But maybe they can only make 100,000 sales at that price point, or $100,000. Kill the 30% fee, and they make $4 per sale, or $400,000. Great! Instant 4x profit! But maybe they'll be able to make 150,000 sales if the price were $9, which would give them $450,000 in profit. That's a compelling reason to drop prices. Or at least not raise them even when their other costs go up from $6 to $7.
Obviously these numbers are made up; maybe dropping the price to $9 only nets them an additional 5,000 sales, so it's not worth it. But we can't just flat-out say that no developer will do the math and decide that dropping prices can actually help them.
What absolute unsubstantiated nonsense.
At any rate, maybe try for some productive discussion rather than shallow dismissals?
If anything, they’re hurting developers, but even that may be hard to argue. Developers still flock to the platform.
Even if those developers can’t make a living doing that (and many likely can’t), that’s not an argument for Apple’s fee being too high. There’s no right to be able to make a living in the way you want.
You can always build your own phone and setup your own app store. Samsung does.
I generally agree with your point, but this is a weird argument: towns can and do ban big-box stores, and yes, "move to a different town" is exactly the only remedy people have, if they want to live close to those kinds of stores. And frankly we generally see that as a good thing! Big-box stores tend to kill downtowns.
> I've invested considerably money into the apple ecosystem.
This confuses your Walmart analogy quite a bit, because there's no such thing as "investing money into the Walmart ecosystem". Walmart doesn't have an ecosystem. If your Walmart closes down and other stores pop up to replace it, you just start shopping at those other stores, and likely don't really notice much of a difference.
And that's precisely the point of the issue with Apple. If I've been an iOS user for years and years, and suddenly Apple changes the terms to something I really don't like, it'll cost me a lot to switch to another platform.
In the Walmart case, you've bought your house. Presumably up until now you've mostly relied on Walmart to furnish it, and to buy groceries, etc., etc. Walmart disappears. Your existing furnishings are fine and still work. You can buy more furnishings at other stores, and they will work just fine in your existing house, with your existing furnishings. You can buy groceries at another store, and consume that food just fine in your existing house. Also consider that Walmart has online ordering and ships things; if you really want to continue to get some items from Walmart, you can still do so.
Sure, if you're unwilling to take the entirely reasonable step of finding alternatives to Walmart, I guess you'd have to sell your house and move to a town that still has a Walmart. But that's... a pretty ridiculous course of action to take, honestly.
And yeah, Google taking 30% as well also sucks. Just because Google does it, it doesn't mean it's fine Apple does too.
No, the opposite, it is evidence that Apple is a monopoly, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten away with taking 30% with no repercussions. It should have driven their profits to 0 in the appstore market since why would users pay such a massive markup for everything? But it didn't due to their anti-competitive measures.
> A company employing anticompetitive practices would drive those profits to zero
No, that isn't how it works, they weren't anti competitive towards other apps, just towards other app stores. Their massive tax on those apps is the result, you can still be profitable even with a massive tax.
Google, as evidenced by their own internal docs and company deals, had no interest in having any real competition for the Google Play store.
It’s really hard to see these deals when Google is the arbiter of android and anything but extremely anti competitive
What if they didn't just pay off, but forcefully forbid it, wouldn't it be anticompetitive? Basically, as Apple does on iOS.
I have no idea if iOS or Android is better (or maybe if iOS is actually worse on some basic level, but they can rely on the single store to reach parity).
But, their justification is at least plausible. Do I think they actually telling the truth? I think it at least is a case of financially motivated reasoning. But they haven’t completely given it away.
Google has by being willing to open up as long as some financial requirements are met.
Consider how many of those items apply to Google's behavior and how many apply to Apple's.
That Apple is the only way to get the hardware or software for their products (compare to getting Google software licensed on Samsung) is a very important distinction.
I personally don't think the distinction you point out should actually be important at all. The end result is an anti-competitive platform, and that's all that should matter.
If we go by the oft-used test of consumer harm, consumers get harmed in exactly the same way on both platforms, with higher prices (due to percentage fees that you can't opt out of) than if the market were more open.
Google is anticompetitive because they allowed users to install third party apps, but paid big players not to develop app stores.
But if they had just done what Apple does, and just ban third party installs all together, that'd be what? Hyper competitive and fair?
It absolutely pains me to see Google essentially punished for having the only phone platform that allows users to install their own apps.
I kinda get how it plays out that way in a legal sense, but it still baffles me that so many people can simultaneously support this ruling against Google and continue to praise Apple's practices. Cognitive dissonance (and the Jobsian RDF) is a thing.
They do. It's either Apple store or you go out of business, if you are developing a mobile app.
They don't. Apple is selling both the services and the hardware. They're not asking anyone to develop apps for them and no one is entitled to build an app store for their hardware.
But if I'm an Android phone manufacturer and Epic wanted to build an app stores for my devices, but I refused for no other reason than Google's money or pressure, there's a case for anti-competition. If Apple licensed iOS to other manufacturers, the same case would apply.
You are clearly missing the point on purpose. Imagine that all roads in the US belonged to Apple and you had to pay 30% of the cost of your goods to Apple for the privilege of transporting them.
This would be OK, because you'll still be able to walk or maybe even use rail transport.
Apple's ecosystem is _unavoidable_ if you are making mobile applications (not games). You HAVE to support iOS, or you'll go out of business. No alternatives.
Ultimately if you're a sizeable company that wants to operate in the US, and a mobile app is something you need to offer, you have to build one for iOS. If you don't, you'll fail.
I would say these days you aren't going to do quite as well if you don't also build an Android app, but you can probably get away with it in quite a few markets if you really didn't want to.
Heh, I remember when Instagram was iOS-only, and that was the case for... at least a year? More?
If you go this route, not all roads would have belonged to Apple. People would use Apple's roads because they're well built, the majority of cars are nice ones and drivers drive well because enforcement is harsh. Maintenance is usually done on schedule and if people want hassle free travel, it's the best choice even if they're boring and uniform.
There exists other roads for every (start, destination) pairs. But only the new ones are maintained. Drivers do whatever they want and even enforcement wants to stop at every turn. Sometimes you're not even sure what exactly are alongside you on the road.
Here you come trying to create a taxi service (But you did not build any road yourself) and both companies ask you for the same fee. But you know you can probably get your cars on Google's road and bypass the fee with some hassle. But Apple's won't let you do that. People has paid a high fee to get access to these road and they don't want random cars on it. But you know these people has money and you want some of it.
I could go on and on with this.
> Apple's ecosystem is _unavoidable_ if you are making mobile applications (not games).
If you're a business, why would you care for 30%? Apple is providing the whole SDK for free, and your users' platform is getting updates for free. You are not doing any of that. the 99$ yearly fee is peanut.
If you're building things for yourself, Apple has never advertise that iOS was something to tinker with.
Yes, some backwoods roads would belong to Android. Maybe around 30%.
> If you're a business, why would you care for 30%?
Because it's a lot. Apple is triple-dipping:
1. You have to pay for Apple computers.
2. You have to pay for the SDKs.
3. You have to give the MAFIA shakedown 30%.
There are good manufacturers for Android. But they're still unmatched in terms of services. In the above analogy, nice road, worse travel experience.
> Because it's a lot.
It's the cost of doing business with Apple, made clear to you since you begin. You just factor it in your offering.
> 1. You have to pay for Apple computers.
Because it's the tool for the job. No ones expect you to build a Windows App without a computer running Windows. The tools Apple provides only run on MacOS which only runs on Macs.
> 2. You have to pay for the SDKs
You don't. You're paying only for access to the distribution channel (base fee).
> You have to give the MAFIA shakedown 30%
Remember the tools and services above? If you're making business with Apple customers through Apple services, you're paying for it on a transaction basis.
Again, it doesn't matter if roads are nice. Or if your mafia thugs give you a handkerchief after they beat you bloody.
> It's the cost of doing business with Apple, made clear to you since you begin. You just factor it in your offering.
Just like mafia.
> No ones expect you to build a Windows App without a computer running Windows.
Can I buy macOS to run on my PC? No?
> You don't. You're paying only for access to the distribution channel (base fee).
Since you mentioned Windows, I can compile and distribute as many Windows applications as I want. Without paying a cent to MS.
> Remember the tools and services above? If you're making business with Apple customers through Apple services, you're paying for it on a transaction basis.
Again, like with mafia. But now on iPhone!
After all, without their generous service, you wouldn't be able to earn money. Right? What's that puny 30% of your income to you? It's really nothing!
Building a mobile app SDK and an app store is very much asking a lot of people to develop apps for them.
Certainly the definition of "success" differs depending on who you ask, but if we're talking about a player like Epic, they absolutely have to sell their app on the Apple app store. They absolutely should also sell on the Google Play Store, but it's still table stakes (at least in the US) to have an iOS app.
Apple on the other hand has tried very hard to make sure such perceptions of markets do not exist; for instance, the requirements they gave to Microsoft for shipping a game subscription service on iOS is that the games themselves had to be in Apple's App Store, pass App Store review, and take payments for DLC or currency via in-app purchase.
This is also IMO why Apple will never actually lock down macOS so that things are only available in the Mac App Store. Whether or not it is a good idea, they can't defend it legally.
I'm not sure why this should matter, though. I don't see why it's somehow better to use technical means to refuse to allow there to be a competitive market, than to use shady business deals to ensure a competitive market doesn't grow.
Now finally some big guys are getting a sense of the issue with centralization. There can only be one government-ordained winner and it's not the one who plays fair and square who wins. It's usually the biggest political manipulator.
Google is in a weak position now due to the perceived risk of AI disrupting its business. When you show any weakness at all, the law starts working against you in the most blatant ways and it becomes self-fulfilling.
Just wait 10 or 20 years. Watch the system concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and people blame everything under the sun except the design of the system. I think the winner will probably be either Microsoft or Oracle because they are the most corrupt.
Seriously, does Microsoft or Oracle do anything useful these days? No, they just extort money from the government via overpriced proprietary software licenses, lock-ins and contracts obtained through corrupt practices. That's what winners do.
And while you have a bit of a point about Oracle being stagnant... Microsoft? They own and develop tons of things. Microsoft isn't just Windows and Office.
I don't think this will be uncovered because you need money to have a voice in this system and as this serves the bigger moneyed interests, anyone who has an incentive to cry foul will find that their cries fall on deaf ears. Also, PR firms will manufacture narratives to spin things to make the people who are complaining seem like a lunatics. They will also gaslight individuals who raise alarms to lower their confidence. In many cases, they can dig up dirt on whistleblowers and have them jailed. In some cases they can manufacture dirt on whilsleblowers (e.g. Julian Assange) to have them jailed to send a message to future whistleblowers. So they can hold the fort for a very long time.
That's what a video game console is, technically speaking. It's a completely locked down environment which is curated tightly.
> but open yourself up to any competition and your behavior becomes anticompetitive.
That's called the antitrust investigation into Microsoft Windows; or the complaints about Apple's "sherlocking."
Edit: I'm actually OK with this, even legally, because I view devices as being means to an end for an experience, which is also how I think most consumers view devices. When viewed that way, we really have three major "buckets" of devices if you will: "Computers", "Gaming", "Phones".
The "Computers" market is a race in most minds between Windows and Mac (and thus Windows gets hit with antitrust investigations). The "Phones" market is once again a 2-cart race between Android and iPhone (and this time, Android gets the antitrust investigations). The "Games" market is a 4-cart race between 3 console manufacturers and the PC, with 2 additional smaller carts called Cloud Gaming and the Smartphone (which, themselves have 3 and 2 carts respectively) - thus, no interest in investigating anyone there. However, if gaming didn't exist on the PC and was strictly Sony v. Nintendo, it would totally be investigated.
And they get away with it because Apple isn't competing with anyone within their own ecosystem; it's not a market.
Really is a neat little bit of lawyering, iOS and all apps within aren't competing with each other hence the rule about too many apps with similar features, they're competing as a unit with other computing platforms.