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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

> Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.

I don't know if that's inherently correct in people's eyes. For a counterexample, note that video game consoles are very popular, and I don't see any widespread opposition to the idea that e.g. Nintendo is controlling what you can play on a Switch.

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I wouldn't be so sure. A major reason people pick PC gaming over consoles is specifically because they have control over what they are allowed to do.

And they are free to make that choice. Surely consumers who care about this choose Android.

Rights are things that you cannot choose to give up. You explicitly cannot trade them away since the poorest people would be forced to do that in order to afford anything.

I assert that I have rights under the first sale doctrine which let me do whatever I want with the things I own. Apple has no more of a right to dictate what I put on my device than Walmart has a right to dictate when I put on my table simply because they sold it to me.

The failure of the courts to update first sale doctrine to the digital age is the root cause of many ills.

Unfortunately, it's a tricky question, because it's more akin to compelling speech when the content is served by another party at a future time.

If I get a device that uses cloud functionality... is whoever I sell that device to entitled to that functionality?

Well the more important question is are you entitled to that functionality, or can it be taken away on a whim?

But those are more "advanced" questions. We still haven't even established the fact that I should indeed own the thing I purchased (see music or movies or anything). So we have a while to go before we get to questions of transference of services.

The point of the suit is, they should be free to make that choice on their iPhone. No one is going to remove the app store, and if you love sucking from the teat of Apple so much, you can continue to do so in an environment where there are competing app stores

Your point is fine but you have to at least acknowledge the dynamic that users are takers of software and companies have every incentive to take their popular apps off the app store.

It's gonna be the first thing Facebook does, and maybe that's fine but it's going to reduce consumer choice. You won't be able to have the Facebook but with the tracking restrictions anymore because it's bad for their bottom line. I don't really know if there's a good answer for how to strike this balance but it seems drastic that people want it to be illegal to offer a platform where all participants have to play by the platform's rules.

What tracking restrictions do you refer to that are implemented through app-store policies that are not (or cannot) be implemented through OS level restrictions?

I'm sort of skeptical about that being a major factor, though I'll admit I've not seen any good surveys about it.

(My money is on "I already have this computer for work" being the single biggest factor, with "the graphics can be better on the PC" being #2.)

Anecdotally, the people I know who do console gaming are really fed up with the lack of backwards compatibility; New console comes out, all your old games are now incompatible.

Now PC games often lose backwards compatibility when upgrading OS versions, but patches, compatibility modes, and even VMs are realistic options and ones that people will use.

The consoles are the most obvious example, but there are other things, too.

Perhaps the "best" counter argument is the Mac App Store and Steam - both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.

People care much more about what is or is not permitted, not where the money goes.

In fairness, from everything I've heard the Mac App Store is really not doing well.

> both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.

This isn't true. You cannot bypass the stream 30% fee from the consumer side.

Because of practices that stream does, which are arguably anti-competitive, I cannot buy the same exact game, from the game developer's website, and receive a 30% discount.

If such discounts were possible, and it was clearly advertised that I could just get the game for cheaper from a different location, customers would absolutely take that option almost always.

You can bypass the Steam fee as the publisher. Steam's rule is that you can't sell a Steam key for your game somewhere else consistently cheaper than it's sold on Steam. You're free to go wild with pricing, so long as it's on a completely separate distribution platform.

See: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

(At the very least, if they're trying to do a most-favored-nation rule, they're not listing it in their policies and are enforcing it through back-channels.)

Plenty of people complain vocally if you don't release your game on Steam, same deal when a musician doesn't release their music on Spotify.

I think a lot of developers will be surprised how many customers actually side with the convenience of the platform over the actual person creating the value.

Steam value to customer is huge - and it's understandable why people just go to Steam and "don't have to think about it" even when you can get the same item elsewhere, perhaps even cheaper.

While interest in doing so on handhelds has lessened a little due to phones almost always being more capable, wanting to be able to run custom software on consoles is common enough that lots of effort is spent on the cat and mouse game between console hackers and console makers.

Yes, piracy is admittedly very popular. (And maybe 0.02% of said custom software isn't piracy, but...)

You might think that, but at least back during the PSP and PSVita days (when I was into consoles), a large chunk of it was about the homebrew. For a decent chunk of the Vita's existence you only could do homebrew and emulators. Piracy is always just a service problem, with most other pirates being people who weren't going to be customers anyway.

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