Hacker News Reader

Comment by bardak | Hacker News Reader

The most compelling argument I can see is that due to its market share businesses cannot avoid dealing with the app store and it's fees.

View on HN

But they can though, there are plenty of apps that are android exclusive.

Would it be OK for your bank to exclusively support Android? Would it be OK for government apps to only support Android.

Of course not.

What’s the relevance of that? If that were the case the law should be to make everything available by the web which is inherently interoperable, which I think we both agree with, but still doesn’t have anything to do with Apple.

If it is de facto mandatory for a business to make an app for Apple’s store because of Apple’s market share of smartphones, and Apple uses their market power to influence those markets for apps to their own advantage (for example, crippling other web browser apps except Safari), that is anti-competitive and may be against the law.

It is not legal to use your power in one market to gain an upper hand in another different market.

EU tries to force apple to allow different browser engine but apple still don't want that - safari mobile is crippled and support for PWA is half baked on purpose. Most businesses (such as banks, dating apps, music apps) who would stick to support only Web with half baked user experience on iOS would loose to anyone who would provide native mobile app.

Banking and government apps aren’t paying App Store fees, beyond trivial amounts in developer account fees.

Maybe not the App Store fees, but they are paying the apple tax.

* $100/year for the developer account. You may think this is nothing for a bank, and you may be right, but it's still $100 more than it should be.

* MacBooks for every developer that should be able to work on the mobile app and every QA person that should be able to test the app on an emulator, even if they already have a windows/linux laptop. The Apple devtools only run on macos. There is no choice. If the org was not already running MacBooks they will be forced to do so now, and invest in everything that comes with it.

This is irrelevant for the case. The question is if Apple has a monopolistic position.

No more than it would be OK for government apps to support only iPhone.

What's your point here? AFAIK, there aren't any important government apps or bank apps that are exclusive to the iPhone, nor is there any pressure Apple is putting on banks or governments to be exclusive to them.

It sounds like you made a completely unjustifiable leap from "because of the popularity of the iPhone, governments and banks need to make sure they have iPhone apps (because it's discriminatory and irresponsible of basic services like these not to support a widely-used computing platform)" to "Apple is forcing governments and banks to exclusively support iPhone".

You don't think losing access to ~50% of the market is a disadvantage for a business?

No they can’t because consumers have already made that choice. It’s done. We are talking about this moment in time, not some fantasy world where everyone ditched their iPhones.

But they can. If you think they can not then explain.

Will they? Probably not because people with Apple devices tend to spend more money.

It's a moot point... We're saying the same thing. Sure they could, if they wanted to immediately tank their business. You could set your house on fire. What's your point?

The point is you can have a valuable business without having any presence on Apple stores to begin with. If you disagree with that, well you’re just wrong.

We're not talking about a fart app. We're talking about multi-billion dollar businesses that have been entrenched in App Store for a decade. Exiting that market isn't an option. If it was an option they would have done it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com