Hacker News Reader

Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

"Another difference is that MS never blocked you from installing a better browser, but Apple does that on iOS. That policy is becoming increasingly ridiculous..."

Why has that not resulted in anti competitive behavior lawsuits? MS got in to a fair bit of trouble for similar things. They didn't stop you installing an alternative.

View on HN

Netscape used to be a paid product* before Microsoft made IE free. What Microsoft did was make a free competitor and install it on every machine running their OS.

So what Microsoft did that was illegal was use their monopoly power to destroy an existing player. That's how they were "anti-competitive".

While Apple not allowing any competing rendering engines to be written for iOS is anti-competitive in the dictionary sense that they are preventing competition to be created, it isn't the type of behavior targeted by anti-trust law.

(IANAL, but my understanding is that if Apple had removed Spotify, Pandora and other music apps from the App Store while releasing their streaming music service, that would be an anti-trust violation.)

*Netscape was $49 in 1996 http://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape

The real issue is just whether Apple has a monopoly or not. IANAL, but as I understand it what's illegal is using a monopoly in one market to muscle into another market via bundling deals. Just doing bundling deals if you're not a monopoly is perfectly OK.

If Apple sold the operating system used on the vast majority of computers you could have a case, as did the government when 95% of PCs were shipped with Windows.

Even by the most generous definition of "computer", Apple holds 20% market share at most.

Samsung won't get sued for anti-competitive practices because you can't switch the browser on their so-called smart TV for the same reason.

And while Netscape screwed up on their own too, it also affected Opera (remember the ads?)

They also provided a free graphical text editor, thereby destroying the market for commercial text editors. It boggles the mind that they escaped punishment for notepad.exe.

Apple provides Garageband for FREE! They're getting away with it.

This stuff is rampant.

Netscape screwed up and were standing on the edge of a cliff. Microsoft just gave them the last nudge off.

There were also the facts that IE was deeply integrated with the OS to the point where r was impossible to remove and MS had anti-competitive agreements with OEMs preventing them from providing Netscape bundled.

MS was deemed to have a monopoly on desktop software, Apple is not. You're allowed to hinder competition for software on your operating system, if the user can reasonably easily choose another operating system.

Apple has a monopoly of taste – a self-defining market that won't switch OSes even if that constrains their other choices. But they could, so the "market of Apple users" isn't a discrete market under the law.

[Edited: gosh I type slow.]

Is it actually reasonably easy to install a different operating system on an i device?

On a particular brand of device just isn't the standard.

No, but its reasonably easy to buy a non iDevice.

It doesn't need to be. MS in the late 90's dominated, and you could not do work with someone using MS products unless you also used MS products. One person having an iOS device and another having an Android device does not cause any issues between the two, they are fully able to communicate by the nature of cell phones. I would bet that the lawsuits against MS would not go through if they were brought up today (and, of course, MS was still doing the same things), because it's actually possible to switch desktop operating systems without ending up unable to collaborate with your coworkers and family.

You can't facetime or iMessage with an iPerson if you don't have an iDevice.

No, but you can use SMS, Skype, or Hangouts.

Facetime works fine with just a MacDevice, no iDevice needed.

>It doesn't need to be.

Maybe, maybe not. That is what the person I was responding to claimed though.

I don't believe it is reasonably easy to choose/install another operating system on an i device. I could be wrong.

>One person having an iOS device and another having an Android device does not cause any issues between the two, they are fully able to communicate by the nature of cell phones.

By the nature of cell phones? What is the nature of cell phones?

Ethernet existed in the 90's and I personally setup networks using it that allowed Windows and Linux systems to communicate with each other.

I can't tell you how many times I've had to help people who switched away from their iPhone and then saw eternal, intermittent issues with not receiving text messages because their friends iPhones were convinced they should be sending iMessages and not SMS. The situation gets even worse with group messages.

Even tech-savvy users (read: me) sometimes get bitten by that. I wonder if it would make sense to auto-disable iMessage when a phone's SIM is removed? The problem probably isn't even on the radar, though (iPhone users never switch!).

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

Yeah, I know. In some cases this somehow still doesn't always work for some people. Even after you delete the old conversation, which also sometimes has to be done.

But the very idea that someone has to know this has to be done and disable iMessage is insane to me, and I suspect part of the reason it is the way it is is because Apple doesn't really mind what (to the average Joe) is a major annoyance when switching phones.

To be fair, matters were even worse before Apple released that tool. But this has been an ongoing issue for something like four years.

Oh sure, I understand it's a bit of an issue.

I wonder if Apple could really fix it any way short of asking the phone companies to know when someone switched.

Apple does not have a monopoly. MS did. If Apple owned 99% of the smartphone market, they wouldn't be able to get away with this behavior.

So on one hand people say that Android has more market share, on the other hand they're anti-competitive with iOS and Safari. Is Apple preventing you from using another device? is Apple using its position to put Chrome out of business?

This will ultimately hurt Apple. They're giving away marketshare of end users who want or need to use some other browser than Safari.

Web browser is arguably the single most important app on any phone. Or a computer. How many browsers you have currently installed on yours?

I should be able to install any browser on iPhone, just like I can on my Macbook.

While I was still using iPhone, that forced me to always reach for Android phone when I wanted to read any page with wrong size font for me. Which is pretty often.

IMHO, there's just one good mobile browser, and it's Opera. Not mini version, but the proper mobile one.

The big feature? It can always reflow any div (paragraph) text to 100% screen width. Always the font size I want and never any horizontal scrolling.

I hope Apple will finally allow other browsers that are more than just embedded mobile Safaris. Including full Javascript JIT support, because that's what modern web requires. Currently on iOS only app that can allocate executable pages is Safari.

Apple isn't trying to use the weight of the monopoly it doesn't have in a market to try to monopolize another.

Because Microsoft had a monopoly.

I presume because it's not true. I currently reading this page in Chrome on iOS

Sorry, that's not chrome, that's a gui that looks like Chrome.

Might want to fact check before posting.

Because Apple does allow you to install other browsers.

But then again that depends on how you define browsers...

Let's define it as apps that actually use a different browser engine, and aren't merely a reskin of the exact same engine used in Safari. In short, something that is actually capable of supporting new features that Safari doesn't.

This is not possible on iOS without a jailbreak, because Apple simply doesn't allow alternative browser engines to be used.

Why not? Apple also doesn't allow Flash, so the question is, why? Does Apple make money from Safari? Is there a technical reason that might preclude another browser engine?

That is an excellent question I'm afraid I have no answer to.

My understanding was that they don't want to allow executing downloaded code that hasn't gone through the App Store review (such as JavaScript in web pages). I think they allow Lua for scripting in games, though.

So, basically, a 3rd party JavaScript engine is not allowed. I guess you could write your own browser engine that doesn't support JavaScript.

I guess Flash was not allowed for performance and security reasons (lots of vulnerabilities, right?)

Alternative browser engines are forbidden, JavaScript or no JavaScript.

Steve Jobs wrote an essay why Apple didn't allow Flash on iOS in 2010:

Thoughts on Flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

>>> Why has that not resulted in anti competitive behavior lawsuits?

IANAL but folks over reddit explained it as this:

Microsoft was a software only vendor in the past but Apple is the hardware and software vendor. US and EU laws dictate that the hardware manufacturer to have full control over the ecosystem becuase of the industry behaviour in the past and who the end-consumer pays his money to.

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39q25f/el...

I am not sure how correct it is but at least it makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com