Actually, Walmart often demands you lower your price to them year over year. Don't cut their costs enough and you no longer are a supplier.
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Korean Startups Call for Investigation into Apple and Google In-App Purchases
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Actually, Walmart often demands you lower your price to them year over year. Don't cut their costs enough and you no longer are a supplier.
Note: What happened to the merge replies feature?
Google charges 30%, but they don't lock you in to their store. You can both sell and purchase Android apps elsewhere and install them on your Android phone. So, Google could charge a 99% fee and still not be considered a monopoly because of the existence of alternative app stores for Android. As a developer, you don't have to use the Play Store and pay Google a 30% cut, as you can sell your apps on any other store available for Android and pay a lower fee.
With Apple, this argument won't fly and you know why. There is no alternative store on iOS, and it's not for the lack of desire on the part of others to have their own iOS-compatible app stores. It's because Apple blocks anyone else from selling iOS-compatible apps. So, when Apple charges 30%, there is no recourse for developers. They can't take their apps off the official App Store and sell them on alternative stores. This is a HUGE problem for Apple; without an alternative store option, one can claim that 30% is excessive. If there were alternative stores and they all charged 30%, Apple could defend the 30% fee as a competitive rate. Without competitive store options for developers and their customers, Apple can't defend their 30% fee as reasonable. Google's 30% is not going to help Apple defend their own 30% fee because a duopoly is not considered a competitive environment. The reason anti-trust laws exist is because duopolies conspire with each other to fix prices.
You guys can delude yourselves into thinking this thing will just go away. It ain't going away.
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Except the market to look at is apps, nbot just iOS apps. Monopoly are based on markets. Just becasue someone wanst to open a store and sell X doesn't mean a company is obliged to let them sell their products.
Od ocurse not. Developers whill whine no matter what.
And iPod was tied to the iTunes Music Store for digital music purchases. Companies tried to sue Apple to open it up and lost. Apple was also far more dominant in the MP3 player market than the smartphone market. So that argument was fought and lost a long time ago.
Now if Apple and Google are conspiring to setting the cut they receive at 30%, that would be a violation of anti-trust laws and abusing their power they have in the market. But Apple only allowing their app store is not and it is hardly a monopoly. If iOS had 95% of the marketshare you can make that argument like MS did back in the days it tried to use its position to get rid of competing browsers to Internet Explorer.
I actually think the more interesting direction would be to require Apple to sign third party operating systems to run on their hardware. This is going to be more important with macOS Big Sur when they start to lock down their Mac hardware more than they used to. I think having a requirement to sign third party operating systems, potentially with a warranty waiver so that if you load a third party operating system that bricks your device, Apple shouldn't be forced to replace it. This would mean that the hardware is yours and you're also not bound to Apple dropping support for currently functional hardware. One could spin this as an e-waste reduction measure as well.
Where I will disagree is that Apple not selling their operating system for generic computers is a monopoly. Apple shouldn't be forced to sell their operating system for hardware that they don't want to support. Not wanting to support arbitrary hardware is a business decision because you need to have drivers that work for the hardware your customer uses and if the hardware vendor doesn't want to do that because you have a minority software footprint (e.g. Linux) then your operating system runs into difficulties.
Parts of the suit against Google are similar to Apple however the one thing that sticks out for me is that Google interfered with third party companies and threatened to remove their access to Google services if they shipped the Fortnite launcher. This is very similar to the actions Microsoft took to threaten OEM's that it would refuse to give them access to Windows. Google obviously can't limit access to Android but it did threaten to remove access to it's services like the Play Store. This I think actually means the case against Google is more likely to succeed on the monopoly grounds than Apple's case.
I think the 30% piece of the store charge will stand for both Google and Apple as being the terms of their respective agreements with the narrow definition of market defined solely by the creator of the App Store being broadened to all smartphone devices as being the market for which Apple might have a monopoly in and for Google it has the monopoly on mobile operating systems (since Apple doesn't sell an operating system) but Google's operating system provides a mechanism to have alternative app stores and side load applications which enables competition within it's operating system.
This is where I'd like to suggest that the hardware be decoupled from the operating system. You can buy the hardware and put your operating system on top of it. I don't think having a lack of an alternative store on top of their own operating system is problematic because of how IP law is structured. One can argue that Apple has a monopoly within the market it itself has created but that is true of any company. If you want to demand that you don't need to pay for the 30% and it gives no value then you need to remove the operating system from the picture as well as it's an integral piece of the system.
One would have to prove that they both conspired to set 30% however I don't think the price fixing argument could be advanced because there are plenty of other stores that use 30%. The argument would be that all of these stores are actively conspiring with each other to use the same percentage but they're also all in different markets: Steam doesn't compete with Google or Apple for example but it also takes a 30% share.
What MS did back in the day is actively coerce OEMs and Netscape to advantage itself and to leverage private APIs to attempt to marginalise Netscape. We don't have evidence of Apple doing this back room dealing to disadvantage Epic though there is evidence that Google interfered with Epic with OEMs wanting to use the Fortnite launcher. I think this strengthens the case against Google in a way that I didn't see in the Apple suit.
You mean the way we all did before Apple Pay was a thing and they processed digital transactions like every other company under sun. What was that, like five years ago?
South Korea isn't the first government to start looking into Apple, and they won't be the last. Apple's tied too much of its revenue stream to the App Store, and now that revenue is facing an existential crisis. Their only hope now is that they really are too big for any government to fight them.
I don’t think so. You could always rip a CD and upload the MP3 to the iPod. I’m old enough to remember how it worked.
As I said.... Digital music purchases. You couldn't buy a song from the RealPlayer Music Store and then put it on the iPod. If you wanted to buy a song from an online store and put it on your iPod, it had to be the iTunes Music Store.
Yes and no. This is one of my issues with the App Store concept in general. Yes, each developer pays the same commission percentage (supposedly), but that isn't the same thing as saying each developer pays the same fees (assuming "fees" is Apple's cost to review apps, run the store, process payments, host files, etc).
Developer A has a game that sells for $5 and takes up 1GB of storage space. Developer B sells a productivity app for $50 that only uses 50MB of space. Obviously these two developers are not paying the same "fees". Hosting and transfering the 1GB app costs way more than the 50MB app. Let's say the game is very popular and the productivity app is very specialized. Bandwidth costs for the game are huge, while almost non-existent for the productivity app in comparison. Many of the other costs are more or less fixed for Apple, yet the game developer pays far less per user/install for everything. I realize this is very similar to how a retail store operates, but that still doesn't strike me as fair.
The fair thing to do would be to bill developers for the services (ie: hosting, app review, bandwidth) they use rather than levying an all-inclusive 30% commission. The commission structure, by design, favors certain types of apps and forces certain developers to essentially subsidize others. And, as a developer, you have no ability to negotiate. If you want access to the platform, you must agree to everything. Period.
And that's the real issue with Apple's App Store. Should Apple be entitled to act as the gatekeeper to their entire platform (after the user has spent thousands of dollars to buy their products)? Who gets to decide how I use the product I bought? It's one thing to operate a store and make decisions about what you carry, what commission you charge, etc. It's another to say "my way or the highway" where the whole platform is concerned. Plenty will say "buy an Android", but that is the lazy answer and completely misses the point.
Will the Apple fans who today defend App Store policy as gospel (rather than some rules a big corporation made up a few years ago to benefit themselves, rules that change regularly to suit their needs...) be singing the same tune when the Mac requires one to buy from the App Store too? Will they continue to defend Apple when their favorite Mac app is killed off because it didn't meet the App Store requirements?
As users we shouldn't be so quick to cede control of what we can and can't do with our devices to a single gatekeeper. If Apple's vision becomes the norm across all major platforms, a handful of massive corporations will each have a kill switch for whatever app or developer offends them. There will be no recourse. Collusion and suppression will be easy. If you let your mind travel down the dystopian highway for a bit, the possibilities become quite chilling.
A lot of people spend more a year than some make a year. You’re not special.
But the guy I was referring to made it seem like he doesn’t wanna pay anything without going through Apple. Ok. Let Apple hold your hand for everything lol
As they say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. It's pure hubris on the part of Apple fans to believe that Apple is untouchable.
You can make the argument that iOS isn't a dominant platform, that viable alternatives exist, but that really misses the point. Does Apple own the platform and can they decide what I do with the device I bought? Can they kill an app I depend upon because of a spat with a developer? That is about as consumer-hostile as it gets. Just because their lawyers made up a 100 page license agreement, that doesn't mean the agreement is 1) legal, 2) ethical, 3) fair to the consumer, 4) fair to the developer.
There's no way this ends well for Apple. It might take years but, eventually, some government will force them to make changes and those changes will likely be applied globally.
No one would force you to use a third party store. The Apple store would still exist. This is a fight about choice vs monopoly power.
Or you could leave it up to the stores to implement their own rules. That way users who want, say, apps which Apple would consider too risqué for their family brand, can get those apps without being parented by Apple, and download them to the privacy of their own device. It could mean, say, that I could get a dictionary of swear words installed on my phone so that Apple stops freaking autocorrecting me every time I swear in a text message. I'm not a 5 year old, and Apple is not my mother for crying out loud.
Exactly. Today, on the Mac, you can select to only install software from the App Store. I just changed both of my parents' Macs to this setting after finding the dreaded MacKeeper on my mom's iMac. There's no security crisis on the Mac, despite Apple allowing software to be installed from outside the Mac App Store.
It's also a bit delusional to buy into Apple's "security" marketing spin. Many apps on the App Store today track your location, sell your data, etc. Apple doesn't prohibit apps from doing this. What happens on your iPhone definitely does NOT stay on your iPhone.
Furthermore, Apple clearly doesn't review apps very well or we wouldn't have had hundreds (maybe thousands, who knows) reading clipboard data without the user's knowledge. Who knows what else is going on today that we don't (yet) know about. It's simply impossible for Apple to review code, run through every possible app setting, check all network traffic, etc.
People have bought into the "security" marketing spin hook, line and sinker, and Apple has profited handsomely.
This, more than anything, is pushing me away from Apple as a brand. It is so patronizing and offensive the way they infantilize their customers and act like we need some big corporate nanny to protect us from ourselves.
I would pass my credit card info to Amazon. Let them keep it. It is a physical product mostly. Having Epic keep mine? No way. Plus what they are selling is not quantifiable.
Not really. Any non-DRM music could be uploaded to the iPod. You could certainly buy the music elsewhere.
I believe the subject at issue was that the iPod didn't support WMA and someone sued Apple claiming that Apple intentionally used their own DRM system and disabled WMA even though the hardware Apple used in the iPod supported the format. The contention was that many online stores used WMA and that the action taken by Apple was monopolistic. The suit also contended that iPod owners only option to purchase online music was from Apple's music store which sounds somewhat familiar to the current situation. I can't find any mention of it actually completing though there was an article from a few years ago where the class action suit ran out of class members who could participate and someone saw an article on Ars Technica decided to step up and could prove they were a part of the class.
You could buy or steal an MP3 file and upload it to iPod. The fact that WMA wasn’t supported didn’t mean the only place you could buy music for the iPod was the iTunes Store. I recall that DRM music for the iPod could only be purchased in iTunes, but non-DRM music for the iPod could be purchased elsewhere.
Oh I agree, it was a stupid lawsuit but that was the contention that if you bought WMA then you weren't able to readily play it on the iPod. The fact it dragged on for so long that WMA stopped being a format that phones these days care about and the world moved to streaming. The fact the class action lawyers had their members progressively dismissed over the decade or so it dragged on shows how much of a cash grab it originally was.
OK, then. So, this lawsuit filed by Epic actually has much more merit than the one you referred to because Epic can’t sell their software to iPhone users outside the official Apple’s App Store.
Perhaps, but EPIC doesn't have a fundemental right to be able to sell their product to iPhone users unless they follow Apple's rules, any more than someone has the right to create content for Fortnight and then make it avaiable on Fortnight for sale to anyone without complying with any rules EPIC makes.
But Apple haven't "unveiled" anything, its been set in stone and been accepted - its not new.
And FYI that kind of thing DOES happen in malls and other developments - where you can only use certain service providers or contractors and the owners get a substantial kickback.
I agree the Epic suit has significantly more merit than the WMA one but I also believe it's unlikely to succeed as well. I can see the case they're trying to make but I don't think the courts will permit them to retain such a narrow definition of the market.
the other side to this hole debate which is not mentioned and I’m. Rey curious about is:
which payment system of app sales to the developer is faster?
which payment system to developers has THE least issues for consistently paying?
which payment system has the best analytics of your apps and sales in markets?
which payment system has the most refunds to users? How are refunds considered or processed?
which payment system to developers is preferred by developers considering all the above?!