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> I don't care about competition, I care about the best product.

Competition is how you get to the best product. Lack of competition leads to malaise of product improvements as the market dominators are owning the space and happily exert their power over people.

> It's no different than going to a restaurant and them serving only Pepsi products.

There are two viable players for the average Joe in the phone market. There are I would guess 200-300 restaurants in my not so big town.

The number of choices matters a lot. If there were only two real option for restaurants around me, I would hope the management does not decide to be evil and lower food quality, jack up prices, or collude to only offer specific food while the other restaurant does not offer.

Also, in the restaurant example, we always have the option to buy our own food and cook at home. So to match the phone market situation, imagine cooking at home is illegal, and the only food you can eat is from two restaurants.

> Competition is how you get to the best product. Lack of competition leads to malaise of product improvements as the market dominators are owning the space and happily exert their power over people.

I think the malaise is when you require every company to take the exact same approach.

Let two companies take different approach. One is walled garden and the other is bazaar. I wish we had more walled gardens personally. I'm tired of wading through hundreds of results in Amazon through shady third party sellers. At this point I go to Best Buy, knowing that they won't sell me absolute garbage. Curation is very useful.

This seems like a distinction without a difference. Curation is totally allowed, in Apple's own app store. They just can't prevent people from using their devices how they see fit to maintain that curation.

> I think the malaise is when you require every company to take the exact same approach.

I think you're arguing against yourself here. The way to allow companies to take different approaches is to require any app store/approach be allowed. Then Apple can curate, FOSS app stores like FDroid can use their approach, etc.

Fundamentally I think this issue is about ownership. Modern companies/products like to pretend that you don't own the things you buy, because it makes them money. Apple loves their 30% cut of apps, and hides behind "protecting the users" to maintain it, but they really want to control the your device. People would never ever tolerate not being in full control and maintaining true ownership of most things in their lives, but for some reason we let it slide with phones, which, like it or not, are one of the most important objects people own. They should be treated that way, and provided full ownership of them.

Sorry but allowing you to side load apps for a product like Apple makes it shittier. If helps companies that don't want to pay the Apple tax, but that's a bit funny considering that Apple essentially made this ecosystem and now they want to pretend it was just inevitable or always there.

I don't want to worry about giving my dad an iPhone and making sure he doesn't sideload some scammy app because that's essentially what you'll get. The same was the "third party sellers" on places like Amazon are pretty terrible.

I'm on an Android because I like the freedom. But again, Apple would not exist if you had this rule in place because it would immediately be en-shittified and no one would voluntarily pay the Apple tax that allows them to invest and invent this new ecosystem if they feel they can't control it.

If you don't want walled garden, don't use Apple. Plenty of people don't use Apple products. iOS is about 25% of European market, so what are we even talking about here?

Preventing every other iPhone owner on the planet from having full access to their own property because you don't want to do tech support for your dad is not an acceptable argument.

Preventing bad things at the cost of certain fundamental freedoms is not a desirable goal. Law enforcement is intentionally made harder by the 4th Amendment. It's literally there to obstruct the police, because it's more important for people to have privacy.

The same applies to your phone. A device you buy should be yours to use however you want, especially a device as important as a smartphone in the 21st century. No one expects to be able to run Linux on their toaster if it didn't already come with it, but preventing certain major functionality because ToasterCorp wants a walled garden is not acceptable. I see no difference with a phone.

Going forward, you could emphasize to Pops: "Never install anything not from the Apple App Store. Only use the Apple App Store." Problem solved. The rest of keep our freedom, Pop is safe.

I'd also like to see more walled gardens. Imagine an app store on iOS that only contained truly hand curated, exhaustively audited and continually monitored apps. I'd have no problem paying for access to this store or paying more for apps purchased via this store because it's adding something valuable to me.

Unfortunately we have the platform owners controlling (or essentially controlling) which stores are allowed to operate on those platforms right now. This needs to change.

> I'd also like to see more [curated] gardens.

Fixed that, and agree. ("Walled garden" means a platform that doesn't allow other choices, curated or not.)

I don't know why this needs repeating every time this comes up, but no one - absolutely no one - is asking you to leave the App Store walled garden.

> Competition is how you get to the best product. Lack of competition leads to malaise of product improvements as the market dominators are owning the space and happily exert their power over people.

Competition means differentiating your product. You don’t have competition if both products are the same.

Apple is trying to differentiate by offering a curated experience. Google is trying to differentiate by offering less curation and more customizability. Both are valid.

It would be bad for competition if iOS and Android were just copies of each other. That would be malaise.

> It's no different than going to a restaurant and them serving only Pepsi products.

I don't think that accurately depicts the situation.

> Apple has threatened to remove creator platform Patreon from the App Store if creators use unsupported third-party billing options or disable transactions on iOS, instead of using Apple's own in-app purchasing system for Patreon's subscriptions.

This happened because 5 years after Patreon published their app, Apple decided they were now due a 30% recurring cut of "indie creator" revenue. And that's ignoring that they did this while under court order to allow external payment options. And we've seen them try to force IAP purchases and subscriptions into WordPress, to Hey, and other apps too.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-says-patreon-must-switc...

It seems ridiculous if you think about it. Imagine you're running a market and as part of that you allow vendors. The vendors have to pay some percent of sales to you, either credit card or cash. And then you start selling things in crypto thinking you can save on the market cut.

It's their market. No one is forcing you to participate. But if you do you should have a good faith effort to abide by the rules. If not, bow out. If enough people bow out then he market is no longer the best market and they will lose to competitor markets.

Patreon weren't violating their rules, Patreon weren't doing anything wrong, and Patreon aren't getting anything out of this modified deal other than "their business not getting burned down if they comply" with a new condition that compelled a 30% fee. For which customers had to pay an extra $4.50/month in fees per creator they support.

It's their market. No one is forcing you to participate.

On the regular 'market', you have plenty of options. You can sell to supermarkets, you can make a webshop, you can sell on a local market, etc. You could even directly sell goods from your own farm (which works in a lot of places). Similarly, a buyer can get most products from a lot of places.

If you make an smartphone app, you practically only have two markets: the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. They can dictate outsized fees and draconic rules, because there is no other way to sell your product. Moreover, they can kill apps that they decide to compete with or pick winners. It is everything but a free market and the EU is right to regulate it with the DSA/DMA.

> It's their market.

It's not. That's the entire point. The EU Single Market is the EU's. No trying to take it away, that is exactly what this is all about.

We, the European people, are the ones that have set up the world's largest market of well-off consumers. Apple is the one that is trying to subdivide it and create a walled-off area where they don't have to follow our rules.

> I can download an APK and easily install it on my device (unless this changed since I last did this).

It changed with Google's announcement yesterday.

> I can download an APK and easily install it on my device (unless this changed since I last did this).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

> I don't care about competition, I care about the best product.

You can’t have the best product if there’s no competition.

> And if Google fails to deliver the best product, I'll switch.

You won’t if there’s nothing to switch to because due to monopolistic practices no other service was able to survive.

> Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems entirely reasonable to me to have different models for an ecosystem and market.

The practice of charging different prices for the same digital good depending on the buyer’s country is generally called international price discrimination (or geo-based price discrimination). Just so you know.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-si...

> Android exits, it's relatively open. I can download an APK and easily install it on my device (unless this changed since I last did this).

It didn't yet but it will change next year. All APKs will have to be signed by Google then.