On the browser front, it’s easy. iPhones have batteries so battery life is a concern. That’s why Apple treats them differently than Macintosh computers, which you can choose your own default browser engine for.
If they are so concerned with not letting their users drain the battery if they wish, why do they allow games on their store?
Remember, you (nor apple) are not their parent.
Other people should still be able to decide for themselves.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010701/apple-app-store-...
That brings us back to the question whether they’re a monopoly. The justice department seems to say they have a monopoly on iOS, so that users cannot shop elsewhere.
If such a thing can exist, of course they have a monopoly on iOS, just as Coca Cola has one on Coca Cola, Mercedes has one on Mercedes cars, etc. Next question would be whether they misuse that monopoly.
Apple will argue that ‘a monopoly on iOS’ doesn’t make sense as a concept and that, if you want to run Firefox or Chrome on a smartphone, there’s plenty of choice in the market, and even if there weren’t, there’s no obligation for them or any company to make a product that users want.
In the end, the outcome of this will depend less on logical arguments than about what ‘the people’ want. Laws and their interpretation will change if the people want that. That, I think, is what Apple should be worried about.
They should not be free to prevent others from selling (or providing for free) apps for the computing device that consumers bought.
The problem is that user's can't shop elsewhere, because apple locked the operating system down to prevent that from happening.
Are we ruling out the possibility that competitive browsers could offer better battery performance, too?
And yeah, I think it’s unlikely someone could have made a more efficient browser than Apple since they didn’t give public access to all of their functionalities. And that might have been partly for security reasons, if there were less-secure aspects to hidden functions, for example.
The counter-argument is that they should have opened everything up, but Apple will say they were going as fast as they could responsibly go, and that’s why there were limitations that have been relaxed over time.
For instance giving a special placement to Apple Music and not allowing other apps to get the same privileges, because music playback needs to be efficient, and a bad music experience would hurt the iPhone's image. Same for movies, same for ebooks, same for spreadsheets (including needing to execute macros, so security risk is through the roof)
I feel I could get paid by Apple to come up with excuses for each app they need any.
If you look at any iOS vulnerability reporting, Safari is a big weakness and often the source of zero day attacks. Browsers are hugely complex pieces of software with a lot of attack surface. A large part of Apple’s value proposition is being secure. It sounds like the new approach (in the EU only) that allows additional browser engines requires specific security measures to be taken.
Rightly or wrongly device security is going to be a strong defense Apple has against some of these allegations.
No, a user should be allowed to take the security risk of installing whatever they want on their computers. Security-conscious users will have clean phones, and ordinary users will have phones full of viruses like their computers.
Let people choose.