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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

All I care about is having some healthy competition in the marketplace again.

If that takes tying Google's hands behind its back for a few years, fine.

Taking a 30% cut should have been, prima facie, evidence of monopoly abuse.

Tying Google's hands while giving Apple a clean bill of health isn't going to increase competition, it's going to solidify Apple's lead in the US.

The competition that actually matters is between whole platforms, it's only Epic's lawyers who want everyone to get fixated on the idea that the app store markets are the whole story (or even really a significant portion of the story). I could totally get behind efforts to prevent Google and Apple from together duopolizing the entire mobile phone space, but this is not that.

The important competition isn't Google v Apple.

It's everyone else v Google and/or Apple.

Ironically, forcing this onto Google might be the best thing for Android, as it's the openness the platform really needed to compete against Apple, but costs Google too much revenue to ever do it if left to their own decision.

Then why is there one result for Google and the opposite one for Apple?

follow the money. Which judges handled which cases in which location?

but the non-partisan bailey answer is along the lines of "android promised freedom, IOS never did".

So it's better to be bad than to try to be good and fail?

Based on the legelese here, yea. I guess an equivalent is how you can be a for profit corporation with no issue, but if you're a non profit and you honestly mismanage some $10k as an accounting error, you get the book thrown at you.

Because the law isn't written the way fairness is written in our heads, and judges decide based on the law.

The main thing Google got in trouble for is all the emails and deals they sent to device manufacturers to prevent competition with Play Store.

Apple inherently never sent these emails. There’s no deals they made because they were closed from the get go.

Google created a market of “android app distribution”, and then put its thumb on the scales so it always wins. That is why Google lost and Apple didn’t lose (as much).

> it's the openness the platform really needed to compete against Apple

It’s hard to believe the best way to compete with Apple is by being more open then they are.

If that worked, we would all be running some unix os on our phones.

It’s clearly an utterly false premise.

This is going to hurt google and do literally nothing to Apple, except perhaps scare some people into the “saftey” of its curated ecosystem.

apologies for the pendantic nitpick, but:

iOS is based on Darwin which is BSD based, and Android is based on Linux, which is heavily inspired by Unix.

So technically, we are "all running some unix os on our phones"... perhaps you mean some open-source OS? Even then, Android markets itself as being open-source (although I imagine they must add some closed source stuff on top of it).

Apple XCode is required to compile code for Apple iOS. Android Studio is not required to compile code for Android.

Android Studio doesn't run on Android. XCode IDE doesn't run on iOS.

XCode IDE requires an MacOS device. Android Studio works on Win/Mac/Linux/Chromebook_with_containers.

Android Studio runs in a Linux container. XCode only runs on MacOS.

Apple does not allow, and per a recent ruling, and DOES NOT HAVE TO allow 3rd party app stores.

(There are already 3rd party app "stores" for Android like FDroid.)

Android already allows, and per a recent ruling, MUST allow 3rd party app stores.

In terms of Application stores, (after trying to trademark the phrase "app store" to anticompete Amazon) Apple gets protectionism for their walled garden, and Android may not have a walled garden.

Apple went with Objective-C; C with standard macros; IIRC before C++?

Apple built a new language called Swift.

The Java pitch was "write once, run anywhere" because you port the JVM, and J2ME.

Google rewrote many parts of the Java stack.

Google ported to Apache Harmony/ OpenJDK to port away from Sun then Oracle Java.

Google built a language called Kotlin.

Swift runs on MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Kotlin runs on Android/iOS/Win/Mac/Linux/JS. Dart lang also runs on any platform. Flutter also runs on any platform.

As I recall, the original App Store argument was "It would cost a lot more than 30% to mint CDs and sell them in Waldenbooks, so we're doing developers a favor by _only_ charging 30% to distribute."

How generous!

That's the kind of argument that only gets a pass if you have no other option as a user. Wink wink.

There are a myriad of points which make this metaphor a insufficient argument at best (at worst intentionally obfuscating the nature of digital publishing and digital marketplaces as having similar physical analogues) in favor of the current app store landscape:

1. AFAIK anyone can manufacture and distribute CDs

2. The argument that anything below the cost to manu CDs is acceptable only holds water if you have an inefficient market that doesn’t reflect the actual cost of digital distribution.

It was 30% vs whatever parties like Symbian asked at the time. Or other existing platforms like consoles where developers were left with less than 70%.

Safely distributing software was a pain in 2007 and did involve a lot of expensive publishing

The problem is that cut hasn't come down in the last 20 years, because there's no competitive pressure within ecosystems to force it to.

It’s because no one wants to wade through the oceans of malware that exist online, and reputation is expensive to build.

I told my family many years ago now that they get no tech support for issues caused by downloading things outside of the App Store. I will download from outside of the App Store, but I have zero confidence that the vast, vast majority of people will ever be able to not get fooled, and if they do, they won’t be able to fix it.

With an Apple problem, my relatives call Apple, and the Apple tech support person remotes into their phone and walks them through a solution. Or gives them a refund.

And the thing with phones and computers these days is that they are your identity, they are your wealth, they are your life. You lose control of that, and you are in for a world of hurt. Someone can clean out your brokerage and bank accounts. The stakes are too high.

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