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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:

> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.

Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.

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Sure, but parallel to the mobile device (featurephone) ecosystem, there was also the old smartphone ecosystem which grew out of the PDA market where you could install your own program without paying the middleman. I would argue that modern day smartphone is more similar to the old smartphones than the featurephones.

And somehow despite that ecosystem existing before, new entrants Apple and Google emerged victorious. Maybe it had something to do with their different approach.

I doubt it was because people wanted The App Store. If the PocketPC/Windows Mobile had an App Store it would not have won.

Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.

Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.

If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.

> Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.

In addition there are some exceptions when it comes to new stuff which app stores were at the time. When you come up with something new e.g. you can choose who to make business with. Different to what you can do running a dominant platform.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps.

In 2007 web apps were severely limited in performance and functionality, so this wasn't remotely feasible for most apps. I still believe Apple's original plan was a console model where hand-picked partners would get the secret native API. Then they realized the demand for native apps was much greater than they had anticipated, and decided to take a 30% cut from millions of developers rather than large licensing fees from a few.

It's worth noting that other fields take a radically different perspective on this. You can see Brandon Sanderson talking about how software developers get such great deals from publishers, with Apple, Google, and Steam taking puny 30% commissions, and he wishes authors could get something similar.

The 30% number was taken very positively when the Apple app store launched. It was much lower than what software companies typically budgeted at that time for marketing and distributing a new product.

Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.

> They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.

Sure, 100% web apps will never work. It should be 95% web apps.

These days that’s obviously true. Back then web technologies lacked a lot but today I seriously question why say, a retailer, needs to waste the massive cost of building an app and putting it on both of the App Stores and updating it for every OS change. Especially considering it’s just going to be using React Native and likely isn’t any faster or more responsive than the Web.

And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.

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