If the company that literally doesn't allow users to install ANY application, yet alone a whole store, is in the clear, it's mind boggling that Google's situation is the one they took issue with.
Apple literally has a higher market share in the US.
What's the lesson for future leaders in tech companies?
And as someone who’s done native for both, Android’s native SDK is a mess that even Android devs actually hate it.
Meanwhile, iOS’ SDK is incredibly exhaustive and coherent. I don’t know what your basis is for “better designed software”, but being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to a watch and a headset OS, and then have billions of users on it all and make a trillion-dollar company out of it⸺does that not sound like good engineering to you? All while the competition can hardly build anything that actually lasts.
Microsoft and Google basically did the same thing, and in neither case it's really a testament to how "good" their respective software is engineered. If the amount of driver cruft on MacOS is anything to go by, the engineering underneath iOS and WatchOS is probably a fucking nightmare in most respects.
I used to be "the Android guy" at a big games publisher. In my time the billing component had to be rewritten three times solely because of Google changes. The Apple one was written once and left alone.
We can't even discuss why those Google changes happened because doing so would get you shot, or worse.
The tech direction that was going on at Apple was enormously better than other companies. It does feel like they've gone off the rails a bit, but things like Swift are underappreciated entirely because they're so successful, just with the wrong sort of developer.
It just means that it will take a while, like Intel, or what is happening with search and Google.
Though I'd agree with provisioning+codesigning can be a mess with iOS.
Just compare how android and iOS handle backgrounding.
Thank you very much for correcting me!
A new entrant would be unable to secure the investment, because even if he would produce the exact same piece of hardware with the same quality, the carrier distribution channels, the brand-image and (walled garden) ecosystem of Apple will prevent users to even notice and adopt the product, and the press would jump onto it and rip it to pieces.
So how would this normally work?
--> You disrupt the market by doing something particularly good, while being average in other areas, succeed, then iterate.
But this doesn't work in the Smartphone space as:
1.) iOS users are unlikely to leave their ecosystem because they can't take _anything_ with them
2.) the Google ecosystem leaves little room to disrupt and secure return-of-investment, and
3.) for Android you need to (re)build your own ecosystem to _match_ Google/Apple from the start.
That's why it's not a competitive market anymore, and needs to be (wait for it:) regulated to restore an even competition field for Hardware, Applications and Services.
But yeah...not a popular opinion here, I know...
Also no iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Messages, Apple Pay, Apple Fitness, any kind of native Mac integration (Safari Bookmark sharing, Shared Bluetooth devices, clipboard sharing, Continuity Camera, AirPlay,...)?
No Apple Wireless charger, Apple Watch, Airpods, Apple-specific Accessories, Apple App-based carkeys or Apple CarPlay?
That's quite rare.
- nearly all apps support Android as well. The ones I used (navionics, banking apps, WhatsApp) you just log in on Android, no cost involved. - most Apple first party apps have a Google equivalent (google wallet, google keep notes, google messaging etc.) that is very similar - my AirPods work equally well with android
Google's been ahead of Apple on tons of core user-facing features since the start (widgets, backgrounds, folders). The two platforms have extremely slowly converged to near-total feature parity. The only "advantage" of Apple's total ecosystem lock-in is relative seamlessness due to the vertical integration between their various services.
The thing is, it's barely any harder to set up an equivalent Google/Android ecosystem and has been for well over a decade as well. The real issue on the Google side of things is the renaming/shifting of services. Messages -> Gmail Chat -> Talk -> Duo -> Messages, Google Play Music -> Youtube Music, etc.
The feature parity's been there
Users do not want to browse the web on mobile for all their activities, when Apps are generally faster, more secure, and has all their prefs recorded EVEN if a webapp is functionally equivalent (and most are only 70-90% equivalent)
So the new entrant has to curry favor with all these large software vendors (some of whom are now competitors) and offer something for some key uses of a smartphone.
They got where they did by leapfrogging the competition, dominating the supply chain, having incredible customer trust/service (with a sprinkle of Jobs' magic), thus reframing the entire category of smartphone.
It's unclear if anyone has delivered all these together. Google has dominated all other players at the OS level.
gosh, if they hadn't basically created the market for phones like this it's hard to see how they would be dominating the market for phones like this, given their behavior.
because that's what first mover advantage is in this case. They created a market, in hardware - that's pretty difficult.
regarding other posts saying Apple wasn't first mover in smartphones:
Hey, I remember what those old things looked like. There was such a qualitative difference between the iPhone and its competitors at the time that it seemed like a whole new category of product.
There were plenty of mobile phones out there before that could download and run apps, and Apple didn't even have their famous app store at the beginning of the iPhone, either.
The other big thing is more subtle: the iPhone was the first major break in the carriers’ value-extraction model. It was common that you’d get phones with half the storage used by promo apps the carrier wouldn’t let you uninstall, and the carrier app stores were both limited and unbelievably expensive. We had multiple clients who were interested in mobile apps but the cost of being in the stores was like $50k per carrier plus half of the proceeds, and that was an improvement over the time Qualcomm demanded to see the balance sheet so they could decide what percentage of their TOTAL revenue was fair – we asked and they confirmed that they expected a cut of every sale, even ones which never involved the mobile app. The energy at WWDC08 was incredible because the app stores were both terms were so much better than anyone had gotten before, and you only had to do it once. I still think it should be better now but it used to be so much worse.
The thing that really made iPhone different was capacitive touchscreen, and the OS designed around that. WinMo pretty much required the stylus for many things.
But the iPhone did _not_ have any first mover advantage. If anything, Apple was late to the party.
> [...] when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard.
Ie Apple introduced a new, arguably better, entrant into an existing market, and managed to grow that market.
But I can see your argument that you can re-interpret being that first to really commit to a big touch-screen only and (almost) no buttons to be a 'first move'. (Though a different comment mentioned that Apple wasn't the first here either?)
The iPhone was definitely a successful device!
I seem to dimly remember that they had some early lead on multitouch. But that one specific nifty technology is a far cry from a general 'first mover advantage' in phones with apps.
That meant the iPhone had a full fledged browser that you could actually use. The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular. A lot of smartphone plans also didn't include unlimited data. The BlackBerry plans were equally terrible, tied to BBM accounts, and the browsers were even worse.
The iPhone also had a real e-Mail client that could connect directly to a POP/IMAP server. A lot of competing smartphones only supported e-Mail through gateways run by the carriers or an enterprise connection. Even lacking features early on like BCC early iOS Mail was a lot better than the competition for normal users.
I think these all come down to Apple approaching the iPhone from asking what normal people might want to do with their phones instead of what "corporate" wanted people to do with their smartphones. This was 180° from the design approach of RIM, Microsoft, Palm, and even Nokia.
For instance decent enough to take a picture of an A4 page and be able to read it afterwards.
And IMAP support.
And Opera mini was a good enough browser, though mostly for text, as indeed 3G cellular (which the first iPhone didn't have) then cost 1000€/Go (funnily enough, that felt cheap and fast at the time, because it indeed was compared to what came before).
(Also video calls, though those are still niche for phones.)
And I hear Nokias were themselves quite primitive compared to what Japan had ?
Again, everything in your comment this seems like Apple made an arguably better offering in an existing market. That's not a first mover advantage.
If anything you can say, Apple was late to the party and learned from the mistakes of others?
I never claimed Apple had a first mover advantage. They made a smartphone much more aligned to consumer desires than any of the competition. Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia all approached smartphones from the angle of business/enterprise users.
You can call Apple's approach being late to the party but that presumes that them entering some market is a forgone conclusion. Apple has rarely if ever been truly first to market with a product.
Which is to say, not one that locked away features and functionality (ringtones! games!) to create additional revenue channels for carriers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but per memory Jobs used iPhone exclusivity to crack carrier "Our pipes" models open.
I had unlimited data on non-carrier controlled phones pre-iPhone on AT&T, and it was far cheaper than the iPhone data plan. Dumbphone plans had cheap data add-ons in comparison, just take the SIM from the ultra-cheap phone they included in the plan and drop it in whatever unlocked GSM phone you wanted. It supported 3G before the iPhone even launched. You just had to get a 3G-enabled cheap dumbphone with your plan to ensure you got a 3G-activated SIM.
Obviously, they didn't market this so most consumers didn't know this was an option.
The US judicial system makes as much sense as their tax code?
Apple didn't need to do anything, but they didn't "win" that convincingly.
On top of that is the DOJ antitrust case starting next year.
On top of that is the stalled, but not dead, legislation that would bring the US somewhat aligned with the EU in terms of competition.
I don't think Apple weathers all of this without broadly opening-up iOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Innovation_and_Choice...
I’m not very convinced that “opening up” the Apple App Store will amount to much but
I know this is a contrarian view.
Changing the accounting to decide what split multi-billion dollar company Epic gets versus multi-hundred-billion dollar Apple gets has nothing to do with innovation or competition, and this is particularly true in gaming.
In fact, it seems like these rulings are likely to have the opposite intended effect on new and innovative apps as costs to do business increase and navigating publishing across various app stores will come with their own rules, costs, and headaches all the while establishes firms who already have the resources can create their own app stores and further extract rent.
Epic charges I think 12% or 17% on their store? Maybe the costs are lower than Apple, idk, but now Epic who is your competitor dictates what you publish on their store and you get the privilege of paying them to do so.
I think we’re cutting off the head of a snake and it’s growing 10 more in response.
I vehemently disagree. When a user buys a game, where does their money go?
On the desktop, their money is sent to the storefront where the game was bought. Their payment is processed, the service's fee is exacted, and the user is given their game while the developer is paid their revenue. This is true even for MacOS, where the Mac App Store offers it's own experience in fair competition with Steam and other third-parties like GOG. iOS is unique in attempting to appear as a multi-purpose computer while also restricting user options to a small subset of profitable selections. That is not fair, to anyone.
> In fact, it seems like these rulings are likely to have the opposite intended effect on new and innovative apps
Pending evidence, you're just wrong. As a user of Android I will tell you from firsthand experience that my absolute favorite apps would not exist without sideloading. MacOS and Windows simply wouldn't have games at all if their distribution terms weren't free enough to attract publishers. And if you sort the iOS app store by top-grossing games, you'll quickly realize that the iPhone doesn't have real games either. Publishers like Nintendo left after their initial experiments - others like Epic and Microsoft were literally forced to leave.
You say that Epic's fee is just as bad as Apple's, but you don't substantiate how that's worse for users. Having two similar fees encourages competition - it creates an incentive to innovate in delivery and provide a superior service to users. Apple can charge twice as much if they want, but they (same as Epic) have to justify their pricing for it to compete fairly. Currently Apple answers to no one, which creates an obvious price fixing incentive on their behalf. This is demonstrably anticompetitive.
> I know this is a contrarian view.
Have you ever considered that it's not contrarian, and just wrong? People are eager to look at this from an "us vs them" perspective rather than an "profitability vs righteousness" one. Apple's stance is literally indefensible. When asked to justify their market position, the absolute best defense HN can present is that Apple abused the market first and never reneged their abuses. It's time for us to stop giving Apple a benefit of the doubt they don't deserve - the iPhone is not an appliance, and can be perfectly profitable without service revenue despite Apple's complaints.
Microsoft
Sony
Nintendo
Ubisoft
Epic
Valve
Square Enix
I just don't really care if Apple gets a larger cut of the venue or if these large corporations do. Even on Desktop things aren't that great. My friends and I wanted to play Civ VI recently and they were on the Epic game store and I had purchased the game on Steam and they weren't compatible for cross-platform play. I know that's mostly a one-off, but it's not like I can buy Nintendo's games on Steam, nor can I transfer my license of Elden Ring on Xbox to my Epic Game Store.
None of this helps small developers they just now have to publish their games to multiple app stores which you may or may not have or may or may not want to set up an account for and you're paying Epic 17% instead of Apple.
Of course you can argue (and should, in my view) that those things suck and we shouldn't support those things either and I would agree! But where I disagree is then saying well Apple's the only malicious actor here. They're all in it together.
> Pending evidence, you're just wrong. As a user of Android I will tell you from firsthand experience that my absolute favorite apps would not exist without sideloading. MacOS and Windows simply wouldn't have games at all if their distribution terms weren't free enough to attract publishers. And if you sort the iOS app store by top-grossing games, you'll quickly realize that the iPhone doesn't have real games either. Publishers like Nintendo left after their initial experiments - others like Epic and Microsoft were literally forced to leave.
Well, it is a recent change. So yes it is pending evidence. If Epic and Microsoft left it's because they want to gain control and more of the Apple revenue slice instead of paying out. Neither helps small game developers. Most of the limitation on mobile for gaming is that mobile gaming sucks and always will because the interface is bad compared to keyboard and mouse or a controller.
> You say that Epic's fee is just as bad as Apple's, but you don't substantiate how that's worse for users. Having two similar fees encourages competition - it creates an incentive to innovate in delivery and provide a superior service to users. Apple can charge twice as much if they want, but they (same as Epic) have to justify their pricing for it to compete fairly. Currently Apple answers to no one, which creates an obvious price fixing incentive on their behalf. This is demonstrably anticompetitive.
Well as a user now I have to install yet another app that has my payment information and its own arbitrary rules. I might forget what App Store has what app. Maybe Epic makes me agree to some privacy considerations that Apple didn't in order to play their game and they only publish this "must-have" game on their store so they can collect data on me.
As someone who uses a Mac it's frustrating that not all games work on macOS. Why does Microsoft get to release Age of Empires only on the Windows-only Xbox Game Store (or whatever)? That's ok? There's a lot more of these dark patterns going on than these companies are leading you to believe.
YMMV but stores are incentivized to conduct activities to keep people using their store. Sometimes it's helpful to users and results in lower cost, other times it results in gatekeeping and other things that suck. My point is just that it's not a net moral good, but instead it's neutral and probably worse for developers since they have more bureaucracy to deal with and users since they have to deal with all of these app stores and payment mechanisms and whatnot.
> Have you ever considered that it's not contrarian, and just wrong?
I've considered it, and then considered that it's not wrong and it's just contrarian to what most people here on HN think.
Most people day-to-day don't really care about this and just prefer a single App Store, but then on HN people who like to jailbreak their phones and install and tinker with their phones and want lots of app stores with apps and are over-represented here.
So yes, Apple could be subject to similar restrictions in the future. Either through another monopoly case, or [imo more likely] regulation.
how does some previous judge decision matter for weather you _should_ crack down on a company?
it doesn't, right
the government can change laws, and judges can overrule decisions and as the US supreme court has shown even if there isn't "any new evidence in favor of the new decision but even evidence in favor of the old decision" decisions can be overruled and be done 100% in opposition to precedence of the same court.
Looking at previous decisions and leveraging them basically is the job of a lawyer.
IMHO this decision won't stand long. You cannot apply different decisions to similar cases.
being atm. in a position where suing you doesn't work well doesn't mean you are not causing harm nor doesn't mean you are not acting outside of the law. It only means that there is currently no effective way to use the law against you. But that can always change. And the US cracking down on them isn't limited to judge orders from cases of 3rd party companies against them. More specifically it's not even part of the state cracking down as that only refers to legislative and executive organs of the state judicial organs are supposed to be neutral.
How is Android closed in practice?
Or we can look at why Google's Play Store is allowed to auto-update apps without user interaction, and... that's it. That's the only store that's allowed to do that. And while the tech community might like being able to control which apps auto-update, everyone wants some apps to be allowed to update without user interaction.
gps satellite data comes from a supl server, and supl support is built in to aosp.
now, unfortunately one of the most reliable supl data sources is google, but it's also trivial to run a proxy to mask where you're requesting the supl data from (neither the request nor payload vary)
not true. A standalone gps unit can use an almanac to get a gps lock, but supl suppplants using an almanac.
supl is a spec created by the telecom industry[1][2]. I don't think they want people to have good offline gps.
> it's also trivial to run a proxy to mask where you're requesting the supl data from
Lmao. It is definitely not trivial. I have an Android that is running lineage and microG, it's an endeavor for someone who likes tech.
Regardless, according to my understanding of the spec, the supl server authenticates your identity[3] and is already effectively tracking you, so using a proxy would only obfuscate your IP address. As such, I don't think IP alone is enough to maintain privacy from Google. You would need middleware to anonymize your device ID.
But really, I find it egregious that I can't choose to use simple gps almanac data and must instead either use a blind fix on my phone or give my data up to some random server. Standalone GPS units that use almanac data get a lock virtually instantly compared to my Note 10. I'm trying to create a disconnected smartphone for backpacking. It's garbage to have to burn battery needlessly.
[1] https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/1211168566155
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mobile_Alliance
[3] pdf! page 13 https://www.openmobilealliance.org/release/SUPL/V2_0_6-20200...
i'm running lineageos with no google play services on a verizon esim as my daily driver
Google incentivized the OEMs to do that. Amazon could have incentivized OEMs to do that also, but the business plan that Amazon pursued did not involve third parties building their own Kindle devices.
> Or we can look at why Google's Play Store is allowed to auto-update apps without user interaction, and... that's it.
This has never been true for Android in general. This hasn't been true for phones that only ship with the Play Store since Android 12, which I credit Epic for.
I'm on Android 14 here, shipped with Play Store by default. It still auto-updates apps.
Also, most modern devices won't even let you flash your own OS, even a modified copy of Android. It's irrelevant if the source code is available if you can't actually run it anywhere. It's the TeVo case all over again.
Go here, download and install the APK: https://f-droid.org/en/
You now have a third party app repository on your phone. And actually every Samsung device comes with their own app store installed in addition to Google Play. It's not perfect, Play having the privilege to automatically install updates, but good enough.
Also, AOSP is completely usable even without Google's apps or Play Services, and one proof of that is that Amazon forked it for their Kindle Fire.
The arguments from Apple fans are truly bizarre.
Having two competing companies being tried for the same monopoly is tragicomic, and only to show how rotten the courts have become.
Imo this is more similar to John Deere creating tractor DRM to lock out other entities from repairs. If Toyota came up with a proprietary motor design such that no other repair shop or parts manufacturer could make repairs, it'd be a similar situation. As it stands, there's 3rd party companies making replacement parts and a secondary market with used parts in addition to varying degrees of interoperability with other parts.
There is no secondary market for apps since they're all sold as licenses and never own anything. They also intentionally put restrictions in place to prevent 3rd parties from creating "replacement" apps
This is about the economic freedoms of end users and app developers within a platform, not whether lock in is a feature for consumer comparison when buying a phone.
That's the exact reasoning I'm calling tragicomic: They are competitors, neither of them have a monopoly on app stores. If you say that two competitors have a monopoly, then you can say that for example all car manufacturers are in a monopoly on making cars. Sure, then the word monopoly doesn't mean anything, and we have simply removed a word from the vocabulary and made everybody dumber.
Your points and comparisons are valid, but they haven't anything to do with a monopoly.
The e-book pricing scandal is an example of antitrust activity against a number of companies forming a cartel. The US government isn't bringing this case under those laws, but effectively for lay person conversations, using monopoly where more technical terms like duopoly is okay
Anti-competitive actions should be combated, but why do people insist that anything has to do with being a "monopoly"?
To draw a comparison, in criminal cases the courts will not determine if an accused is "a bad hombre" – they will determine if he committed the crime or not.
This is like those people (and lawmakers sadly) who try to define any sexual offense as "rape". Thinking that the severity of the crime is only tied to one single word.
Additonally, Google have used their position in the Android software market to cement their position in the smartphone OS market, and vice-versa. For example, they de-list certain apps from Google Play Store is they are offered on certain competitor stores (notably, Amazon's). And they don't allow Google Play to be installed on a phone that doesn't ship with it from the factory. And there are numerous other examples. Plus, they've been foolish enough to discuss a lot of these strategies internally over email as ways of ensuring competitors don't succeed, which came out clearly in the discovery process.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
> a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
Note the "typically", and other courts never even had this rule of thumb to begin with...
The reason it sounds weird is because you are insisting on wording it a particular way.
They're a duopoly. They're being tried for abusing that duopoly. Nothing rotten there.