It's this attitude, that Government should decide not only for companies, but for consumers, what practices are good or not. As it stands now, Apple only has a 23% marketshare. And there has been no proof that Apple is harming the market in any way. Indeed, if you want more competition, you'd let Apple work to eat away at Google who has an overwhelming marketshare.
The idea that you are going to decide what a business in a healthy market should or shouldn't do is silly. And why I find all of you arm-chair CEO's to be ridiculous.
Again. There are 2 billion active iOS devices in the world. For the third time, that's a device market as large as all Windows 10 + 11 PCs; with Apple in complete control of the app marketplace (prior to regulation against that). Stop hiding behind percentages to pretend we're discussing something small, when we're not.
Android is a completely different digital marketplace (with its own problems mind you, see the Epic loss, but this thread is about Apple). Yes, Apple has a 20 something percent device market share; of the physical hardware market, not the digital marketplace that we are actually talking about... The App Store and the Play Store aren't competitors with each other in a traditional market sense. They each serve software to billions of devices, and there's no crossover between the billions of devices they serve.
A traditional marketplace is somewhere you can wander around and buy from a variety of different vendors. I can't take my iPhone and buy one app from the App Store, another from the Play Store, and maybe a third from the Galaxy Store. The reason I can't do that because the software marketplaces are separate entities. Can you switch phones to access the Play Store? Yes, but painfully once you're embedded in Apple's ecosystem, but they are still separate and distinct marketplaces. I can physically travel between real world marketplaces too, but that still doesn't make them one marketplace.
All that the EU is doing is enabling consumer choice in the digital markets. If you want to get all your apps from the App Store, you can, and you should be able to. At the same time if you want to get apps from a different store, you should be able to too. That's all. If I'm playing armchair ceo, I'm playing a bad one, as I'm not deflecting or arguing that Apple should be entitled to a cut of revenue from app stores they don't operate...
I've said in other threads that I fully expect the App Store to maintain 90% marketshare on iOS, even with third party stores. Which makes all this malicious compliance stuff even more petty. The App Store is the long established way to get apps on the iPhone, it's trusted, it's good and it's the default. That seems very unlikely to change.
What enforcing the consumers right to choose will help with the most is keeping Apple honest with their App Store pricing and policies. There's plenty of evidence of past harmful practices if you actually look for it. We've already seen improvements on this front, with Apple opening up to game streaming and game emulators worldwide, simply because the Alt Store was ready and able to launch in the EU. Protecting a consumer's right to choose is essential for maintaining a healthy and competitive market economy. As a consumer: if that requires fining Apple until they get with the program, I'm here for it. As a shareholder: I hope they get with the program sooner than later.
forums.macrumors.com
