Well, that’s all that your cited statistic proves, that smartphones are popular, not essential. Whether or not people assume you have a smartphone or not is irrelevant, it has no bearing as to whether the aforementioned regulation/ruling is good. Furthermore, there are many companies that produce smartphones. Apple is hardly the only one in that product category.
A. You are shifting ground. You first claimed that Apple is a monopoly, now you claim it doesn’t matter if Apple is a monopoly when it becomes clear that isn’t a defensible position… As to your claims that it doesn’t matter whether or not Apple is a monopoly because consumers don’t always own both, and developers are supposedly under some burden to support both, I have already pointed out the issues with this argument. No one is forcing developers to support both platforms. There are many apps that have opted to support one or the other rather than both. And developers can provide web apps, this is platform agnostic and completely self-hosted, so developers wouldn’t have to pay commissions to either platform. Xbox Game Pass opts to go this route, I see no reason an app like Spotify could decide to do the same, in fact, they already offer a web app. They could easily decide that iOS users use the web app if they didn’t want to pay App Store commissions. They are not obligated to offer a native iOS app if the burden were too great to their business…
I said Apple was a Monopoly in all the ways that matter and that I do stand by. I said it didn't matter if they were a monopoly in the
smartphone device market because, from the developer perspective,
there is no smartphone app market, there is an iOS market and an Android market. Apple has a monopoly and controls the iOS market.
W.r.t. web apps, they aren't as capable as native apps, and while I think many native apps could be just fine as web-apps that doesn't mean that they all could.
The reason companies like Spotify don’t want to do that is because they benefit heavily from Apple’s platform and the added exposure to users it provides. They’ve benefited greatly from the App Store. Some such companies essentially want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to reap all of the benefits of Apple’s services, but then they don’t want to pay for those services. They expect to be able to benefit from prime shelf-space and the additional reach and promotion of their product that provides in Apple’s store, but then cheat Apple out of their commission when customers go to checkout… It is not good business, nor would that be fair to Apple who is leasing them store space…
Apple
already decided that the benefit to them is greater if Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc... are in the store and pay them nothing than requiring them to pay. You keep saying these apps are cheating Apple. But it is Apple that set the original terms that allowed monetized apps to exist on the store without paying Apple any money. Did Apple set themselves up to be cheated?
B. You think the current terms are arbitrary, but I’m sure that they are not. Businesses have good reasons for the terms they put in place when leasing their property to vendors, you calling those terms “arbitrary” doesn’t make it so…
You're sure the reasons aren't arbitrary? Wow didn't know you had a direct line to Phil Shiller and Tim Cook.
I mean the word arbitrary in the sense that they are designed not to obtain compensation for their IP (which you keep claiming is a big deal) but that the rules are setup to extract as much revenue as they can without scaring away the few big developers Apple can't bully. The rules aren't fair is, I suppose, a better way to put it than arbitrary. The rules are harsher for small devs and game devs than anyone else. The big devs that Apple can't bully have repeatedly gotten the rules changed to suit them while small devs don't have that power.
C. It is not the government’s proper scope of authority to tell private businesses they can’t collect commissions from vendors leasing their store space. You can try to couch this in as many rosy terms as possible, but reality here is that a judge is trying to dictate to a company how they must or mustn’t collect commissions from vendors using their platform/store. This is not the judges authority to do. Judges are not lawmakers, they are supposed to uphold existing law. This judge is not upholding existing law, there is no existing law on the books saying companies can’t have terms for use of their storefronts, or that companies can’t collect commissions from vendors using their storefront. Otherwise, if such a law did exist, where are all the lawsuits against Etsy, Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. for collecting commissions on products sold in their stores? This judge is acting like she is the law, when she is not. At the very best, this is her engaging in extremely “creative” interpretations of the law. This is well outside her scope of proper authority, and well outside of even real “law-makers” scope of proper authority. At the end of the day, if the only required criteria to fall under such legal persecution is a judge determining you are “an entity which is doing everything it can to ensure it is always standing between the customer and the seller”, then pretty much any business that leases store space could be arbitrarily determined to be included in that. Does Target do “everything they can to ensure they’re always standing between the customer and the seller” because customers deal with Target employees when purchasing products, and Target collects a commission on sales? Because vendors aren’t allowed to deal directly with Target customers and take direct payments bypassing Target’s checkout line? Where’s the burden of evidence for such claims? The problem is, that’s an extremely subjective criteria, and our legal system is not intended to be based on the whims of judges… Judges are not supposed to act as petty tyrants…
You keep trying to make this analogous to a physical store, it isn't.
It is totally in the scope of a governments authority to tell a private business they can't collect commissions if they so desire.
No commissions ≠ giving away IP for free or property for free. It just means that commissions are not deemed a fair way of collecting compensation for that IP. I keep bringing up the CTF because I think a tweaked version of the CTF would actually work well as an IP fee.
Power utilities and telecoms could, in your world, charge a commission of all users of their services, all iPhone apps and payments that occur on that iPhone would have to share a commission with the telecom. We won't connect your factory to the power grid unless you pay us a percentage of your revenue etc... I would hope the government would step in if they tried to do this.
Apple runs a store that
by Apple's own choice allows free apps that pay them nothing. When I leave the store with my product why should I pay Apple more money? The App belongs to the third party, not to Apple, the design, the layout, the code, its all the third parties property. Sure it requires an iPhone but that doesn't mean that it is identical with the iPhone. The iPhone that was already paid for by the customer the app is trying to interact with.
If Apple wants a fee for IP they can split that out separately and charge
everyone for it (like a better version of the CTF), what they should not be allowed to do is require a share of
all transactions that take place via an iPhone.
If I use my banking app to pay a bill should Apple get a cut? Why not? They use Apple's IP and are boosting their business by adding nice budgeting features to their app that allow in-store and on-the-go updates.
I can subscribe to Spotify on the web on my Mac, should Spotify require an additional subscription to use the iOS app?