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Report: Sideloading in Europe Will Still Involve App Review and Fees
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And this is exactly what Macrumors wanted Apple to do. Pull out of EU!.
I think I understand now: there is confusion between different regulations and different terms.
"Dominant player" in general defines any market actor with enough power to distort competition. This is defined in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which is quite old and pretty much settled.
The "sideloading" is not being forced to the Apple App Store due to the above-mentioned regulation: it's being forced due to the Digital Markets Act, which is a relatively new regulation which defines the role of "Gatekeeper", with specific criteria and regulations which apply to them
So, Sony is a "Dominant" player in the market, but not a Gatekeeper since the Sony Playstation Store does not meet the criteria for the latter.
Furthermore, the Digital Markets Act is relatively new, so there is a fair chance it will be challenged in court.
I think people have a fundamentally misunderstanding about what the fees Apple charges are for. People pejoratively refer to it as a tax; but there’s nothing shameful in it being a tax. Like how your federal taxes subsidize the running of a government (just go with me here, Libertarians), Apples fees subsidize the platform.
How would you monetize iOS development if you didn’t want to run iOS as a loss leader for iPhone sales and encourage continued development? Charge end users a monthly subscription to access the store?? Increase the fees for all developers, including those who create free or low-cost apps? Currently, Apple has a progressive tax scheme wherein only developers who have digital sales (mostly large developers) subsidize the platform.
For example, we appropriately applaud Apple for their investment in accessibility features in iOS. The R&D costs for some of those implementations would be cost-prohibitive for any single developer. But developers benefit directly since it expand their addressable market or allows them to retain users who have become disabled. Because iOS is the most profitable mobile platform, such investment is allowed by shareholders who would otherwise question the ROI.
Windows/Mac is a duopoly. iOS/Android is a duopoly. Which one has lower prices for software?
So, basically it's a waste of time and these third party app stores should swiftly die off.
I like the work apple is doing in the space of accessibility. But why would you frame it in the way you did? Is it not just the decent thing to do? Why does this justify behaving anticompetitively in another unrelated space?
Games are apps on the device they're running on. To my phone, a game or a movie are just streams of data from a server somewhere. This attempt at trying define things in this goofy way is part of why the DMA was enacted in the first place. Apple previously got to define the rules of how half of an enormous market would operate to their own benefit.
Haha. You’ve never lived in a new development cul-de-sac. Some people choose to live in a gated community with suck restrictions.
The question for you is do you think those gated communities should be illegal? Or if properly disclosed holding, buyers should be able to invest in the type of community that fits their specific needs and properties?
I'm not sure what you are arguing about. It's a fact that "dominant position" is a clearly defined term in the EU antitrust legislation and it's a fact that said legislation has been successfully used for years to regulate the market.
Anyway, as written before, "dominant position" is not even relevant to the sideloading as the regulation applies due to the Gatekeeper status, which is a completely different concept.
And yet, that wasn't the point that you made that I was responding to. I'm addressing your repeated claims that the mobile duopoly justifies regulation. According to your numbers, Xbox has double the market share of Apple in the EU.
But the fact that Google enters into anticompetive agreements with its horizontal competitors across 70% of the market should be held against Apple for because... why?
One of us misunderstood what the other person said and I don't know who that is. In any case, PCs are in practice a duopoly. The difference here is that Apple and MS aren't putting onerous restrictions on those markets and so they aren't a target of new regulation. Anyone could develop an app for Windows or macOS and not pay MS or Apple a cent. They can also deliver that app to users in whatever way they see fit. They aren't relegated to the OS's app store.
Games are what Microsoft is selling with a cloud based service regardless. So they are selling apps. Just not native iOS apps. Which meant that they needed to sell them through the internet browser instead of the App Store. So your streams of data are still happening on your iPhone and you can still buy the gaming apps from Microsoft.
I have WebCatalog loaded on my Mac Studio it functions like a subscription based App store. I don't mind paying for a place that manages macOS apps. The Mac App store is a poor cousin to the iOS App Store. WebCatalog takes care of payments and subscriptions. A lot of the App's I have had loaded for years in my iPhone are not found in the Mac App store. This isn't just because they don't have a Mac version they are just not there. But I find an Mac version available on WebCatalag. I had, at first, to get over the paranoia on loading App's outside of an Apple App Store but I have been doing something like this for many years on my Windows computers without trouble, I am very careful about who I am loading stuff from.
Please point to any point where I said gated communities should be illegal because it seems a lot more like putting words in my mouth. I stated that gated communities should not be able to prevent and profit from deliveries to owners of houses who solicited for said deliveries.
This. And if they tried to do the same thing with desktop OSs, then lawmakers would hit back even harder, because it would impact thousands of IT companies and government services. Apple and Google could get away with it for some time on mobile. But now that Smartphones as a platform became such an important driver for the economy, there need to be rules.
In Russia iPhone market share grew after Apple pulled out. Idk about Iran, but I know you can buy iPhone there on every corner. Android users can easily shift to other Android brand, not so much for iPhone users.
Don't you find it convenient? Now you can bypass all the court monopoly-mumbo-jumbo and just assign the next "bad guy". And to pick another "gatekeeper" you can simply adjust criteria. It's called direct market manipulation, usually ends bad. It's not an anti-trust action and it's not to "fix" market due to monopoly.
I think it will not, it's a regulation, not a court decision.
Exactly, convenient.
I framed it as an example of the benefits that developers receive from being a part of the iOS ecosystem that goes beyond the processing of payments or app distribution. How should those benefits be valued?
Apple is a public company. They are responsible to their shareholders. It is because of the profitable App Store revenue that provides them the funds (and leeway) to invest in programs and APIs that don’t have a direct return on investment but benefits the developers on the platform.
The criticism seemed to be that Apple is doing nothing for developers and just demanding a cut. I think it is more realistic to say that Apple requires a fee to subsidize the development of the platform and their ongoing contributions to all developers.
I see, I misunderstood your earlier comment. Let me address it again. Neither MS nor Apple are putting onerous restrictions on the users or developers of those platforms. I can make an app for either one and deliver it to consumers however I see fit. The same can't be said of iOS.
I'm not sure why you think which one has lower prices matters. The software on mobile is often less fully featured and people are also typically less willing to pay as much money for mobile apps as well. While someone might be willing to pay $20 for Minecraft on a console because they expect to spend hundreds of hours playing it at home, they might not be willing to spend that much on Minecraft for iOS when they only expect to play for perhaps dozens of hours while on a commute or waiting at the doctor's office.
It is not a "concept", it's a "construct", created specifically for a single case of Appstore (as we don't see any other cases using DMA in other walled gardens), that allows politicians to bypass the judicial system (because there's no monopoly and it's a lost anti-trust case) and enforce whatever they want.
I think this is a naive view of corportations. Apple, as any other business, is doing everything to make more money for their shareholders, and to pay nice bonuses for executives. They found a way to make money from software that is made by third-party developers, so they decided to keep a share. But not to "cross-subsidze" development. The only reason is to make more money and pay higher dividends.
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One of the reasons that I absolutely beyond despise that Apple is pushing for services revenue, instead of sticking to hardware/software.
The rent-seeking services economy is a dumpster-fire of greed and bull****, that I avoid whenever possible.
My tone was not meant to be accusatory. I was posing the question. Many housing communities do indeed restrict services that homeowners can use for certain deliveries with approved vendors/contractors for which they have an existing business relationship. Homeowners associations are notorious for very draconian policies but that environment has a marketplace and homebuyers can choose to live there.