Epic Games, Google and App Store Monopolies

I've argued before that the Apple/Google Tax forces a chilling effect on innovation: there are business models and concepts that simply cannot survive with the spectre of a 30% hit to their _gross revenue_ hanging over them. And while you could argue that makes them bad businesses, I think it's far too rich to simply be forced to accept a _thirty percent_ cost of doing business as baked in, top-line-revenue-leeching overhead.

Plain and simple, this is pure rent-seeking. The idea that the app stores should inherently incorporate some form of gatekeeping makes some degree of sense on the surface, even though the far more restrictive nature of iOS means that you simply do not control the device you purchase from Apple in any meaningful way. But the value-extraction level of 30% is just prima facie absurd.

We've been conditioned into paying silent, embedded taxes like merchant fees essentially throughout our economy, but even the Mastercard and Visa cabals have the good sense to temper their greed and merely skim 3% off the top. The app stores taking a 30% swing right out of the gate was always a bold decision. I'd love to see the internal Apple emails when that was initially being discussed.

It's hard to identify what would be a "fair" price point that wouldn't arouse the ire of, well, everyone, but there are some instructive examples, including some of the "sweetheart" deals Google struck with big players like Netflix--a 10% rate that Netflix rejected anyway.

In any event, the egregious anticompetitiveness isn't in the app stores charging usurious in-app purchase rates. It's in the behavior that they would reject your app if you offered an alternative payment method, or even offered a lower price elsewhere that wasn't at parity with the app store pricing. THAT is pure anticompetitive greed, and they deserve to burn for it. Yes, even accounting for the creation of the market itself and the management and maintenance of all that entails, and all of the other arguments. But this chilling effect is real and we're being hurt by it in ways we don't even really know, and that's a real shame.

I'm curious what the fallout will be on Apple now that there is some legal precedent going the other way against Google, even though there are differences as the article cites. (And Apple has relaxed some of their prohibitions towards alternative payments. But you still cannot offer a purely non-IAP payment option openly in your app, and that still feels criminal to me.

I liked the article but there was a lot of statements about the case with not a lot of explaining explanation, such as, the Android app market was considered a relevant market but the Apple app market wasn't. Why? What are the differences? Did the jury explain that reasoning?

Additionally, I feel like repeatedly calling the charge to bill through the app stores a tax misleading, since there are plenty of similar service charges for things like credit cards. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.

However, this was a good article for laying out the relevant information on a tidy list.

Nice article explaining why Apple won while Google lost: https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-w...

I think monopolies are great. Without monopolies the products break a lot.

It’s mind boggling that Apple won their case against Epic in my opinion since they really do the exact same thing as Google. The only legal difference as pointed out in the Google trial is that Google doesn’t control the hardware that the app stores come on while Apple does (owns the end to end ecosystem). Apple won simply because they monopolize the entire ecosystem. And before people chime in with “Apple deserves their 30% because security” fanboy nonsense, think about how Apple and Google both arrived at 30% as Thr number for their cut and why it’s never changed in the 14 years it’s existed - because it’s a monopoly!