Your argument earlier in this thread was that YOU wanted to be able to get cheaper apps. Are you now saying that any action against apple will be unlikely to actually benefit you, the consumer? In which case, why are you arguing against the consumer interest?
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Epic Games Files Complaint to Support UK Antitrust Watchdog's Apple Probe
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Disney would be bound by laws regarding right of way, where one private landowner cannot encircle and cut off other landowners from common infrastructure.
Coming back to trains - we have coal freight lines, they are privately owned, transporting coal from the trianline owner's mine, to the port they also own. They're required to carry coal for competitor mines, and allow use of their ports for coal shipping, even though alternate train lines could theoretically be built, even though alternate coal ports could theoretically be built. The simple fact is when you are the owner of a level of infrastructure, the rules change, and you don't get to be an infantile-minded father of teenage children claiming "my house, my rules".
Some people simply don't seem to be able to progress beyond the idea that just because you build something, doesn't mean you get to set the rules for how it operates.
Too narrow, according to what? Your arbitrary declaration? Wow, we can just put all the lawsuits aside, apparently this is solved.
Well it seems pretty obvious, is it not? As a developer I get to pick which stores or tools I want to use therefore the market is a collective of those different stores and tools.
Theres already evidence of this being the case because some developers make the same apps available across multiple stores and some chose to only release in a subset of those stores. Either way, the developers themselves have a choice to pick which stores and tools they want to use for their apps.
MY consumer interest is to have app developers who are financially viable. Many of them are claiming that Apple taking 15-30% of their revenue for something they can do themselves for 6% makes them unviable.
I also develop and sell through Apple platforms, where I pay 30% of my revenue, for what amounts to DRM and the ability for customers to download updates to things they've already bought. Even if I sold DRM-free, I'd still be paying that 30%. Thankfully, I do hav alternative options for distribution to sell to iOS users, unlike app developers.
No, it's not obvious at all, it's completely arbitrary.
Can a person who wants my app switch from iOS to Android if I don't like the Apple's store policies? No, they can't because they're invested in the iOS / Mac ecosystem - iMessage doesn't run on Android, iCloud sync won't work with their other apps, even if they do have Android versions.
This idea that iOS and android are zero friction alternatives to each other is laughable.
App developers are already financially viable on the iOS App Store, hence there’s a huge number of them with a huge number of apps and a significant amount of competition.
Its very clearly financially viable for epic to be on the iOS App Store yet they are trying to argue that it is not.
Of course there’s some friction but that’s because apple has additional differentiating features that makes their product more competitive in the competitive smartphone market. If the consumer values those additional features over and above following your app to android that is that consumers free choice to make. You’d also need to decide as a developer whether it is worth you pissing off your iOS app users by removing the app from them.
A consumer is not entitled to have every feature they want in any device they want. That is not how competitive markets work.
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I can claim that I don't make enough from my day job, but the fact is I do make enough to have a comfortable life. Really depends on what we want out of life. In fact, for me, if I can write an app priced at $0.99 in the iOS App Store and get 100K download a year, I'll be getting around $70K or even $85K a year with the recent cut in commission. Even with the 30% cut, I would still be making quite a decent living where I live. Many folks are supporting a large family with even less income of $70K annually.
Of course I would have to continuously innovate with new app ideas yearly to continue this income stream, but that is how it is in this world. We need to work hard at getting a good income and not stop at just one idea.
Very true. Many nowadays equate their 'wants' to their 'entitlement' or 'rights'. Sad really.
Agreed.
I’d also suggest that if you can’t make a living out of an app in the App Store then it’s probably not because of apples commission but because you have an app that not many people want in which case it is right that you can’t make a living from it; it’s the free market telling you you need to do something else to make money.
Developers are not entitled to make a comfortable living from app store revenue. If you can’t you either need to make better apps that people will pay more money for or get out of the game and do something else.
A company is not entitled to use their domination of a market, to prevent competitors from competing with it within that market. That is how competition law works.
A devotion to the theology of market capitalism is no substitute for the fact that regulators worldwide are expressing opinions that "Smartphones" is not a defined market for regulatory purposes. iOS, (and Android) is.
The irony being, that every integration and platform exclusive Apple creates to increase the friction of swapping from iOS to Android, further cements the non-interchangeability, and therefore position as distinct markets, of them in the eyes of the only people whose opinions matter - the regulators.
Where has apple been found for the above? Apple is also allowed to have a legal monopoly on their products. Which is it? Legal monopoly or domination of markets?
Opinions that appear to be "legal opinions" such as the above have a place, venue and time to be decided. Not in the court of MacRumors.
That's not the question I asked. You provided "something" (an answer is too strong a description) to something that is now a meme.
When/where was a finding the app store constituted an illegal monopoly...as opposed to a legal monopoly?
Apple's ability to lock Amazon out from being able to sell directly in their iOS app on an equal footing to Apple's own Book Store was instrumental to their ability to have sufficient leverage to collude with publishers to fix the price of eBooks on an industry-wide basis.
They are a convicted antitrust felon, and everything they do to thwart competition is reasonably able to be viewed through that lens, and considered as a recidivistic failure to accept the behavioural reform necessary, in order to claim that they have "paid for their crimes".
Monopolies are not illegal - using a monopoly on app notarisation and "trusted" binary storage, to create a secondary monopoly in payment processing* is where most antitrust authorities will, I suspect, be concentrating their cases.
*These are separate business processes, with no natural link, as evidenced by their being separate for the entire history of online software purchasing prior to the appstore. Apple's attempts at arbitrary bundling those separate services together, does not fundamentally alter that, any more than Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, and claiming it was "part of the operating system" worked for them when the antitrust authorities came calling.
Well okay. You can view them through that lens. I'm going to abstain from that meme. Do you really believe the justice system won't evaluate this case on it's own merits, or will it rubber-stamp a verdict? I believe the former. You of course are free to believe what you want.
I'll wait for an official ruling from a government entity that can enforce a change, if any ruling or any change comes to pass.
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But anti-trust doesn't look at whether it's an inconvenience to swap, they look at whether "there are reasonable alternatives". There are reasonable alternatives available on Android, but many of them. You don't have to have iMessage, you can use WhatsApp, signal, telegram, discord, FB messenger and a million other options for every app that is available on iOS.
I suggest you brush up on "Market Definition": https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2137&context=facsch_lawrev
As has ben mentioned in this thread (and others) this is probably not an issue that will be decided by American courts, or based upon American definitions of competition or markets.
Most likely, it will be the EU that sets the agenda, and Apple will end up having to homogenise its rules to suit whatever jurisdiction acts first.