Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices?

Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?

Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.

Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..

It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.

Yes! Why do people keep on asking this? Yes, practically every single tech product that you buy from Walmart will include links to their online stores in the packaging. Including Apple products! And this has been the case for ages.

I remember buying DVDs from Walmart and opening them up and the first thing you would see is a slip of paper telling you in giant letters to use some reward program or streaming service rather than buying the DVDs physically.

If you buy an iPhone from Walmart, there will be a link to the apple store in the packaging. If you buy a Switch, there will be promotions for digital downloads that directly compete with Walmart in your packaging. It's not just digital links either, when I bought a Roomba it came with instructions about how to order future purchases, filters, and parts directly from the manufacturer.

Apple bans developers from including links to alternative stores in bundled manuals and help pages. I can not think of a single physical store that does the same, and I can't think of a single tech company including Apple that doesn't link to competing storefronts in their manuals and packaging inserts.

Apple is worse than Walmart on this issue.

> Thus the Court found:

> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.

Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart