Any legal issues hinge, as the author hinted, on a court inventing a relevant market here. The Clayton Act (and specifically 15 U.S.C. section 14 on tying), like other antitrust laws in this country, requires that the tying either create a monopoly or "substantially lessen competition...in any line of commerce". Simply lessening competition is not illegal, it has to be on the scale of affecting the entire line of commerce, aka relevant market.
If a court decides that in dealing with App Store sales, we're talking about the software market, then the App Store is such a tiny piece of the software market that literally no policy they set can SUBSTANTIALLY lessen competition in the entire market. It's a private company so they're free to set whatever policies they want. If they want to tie their browser to their phone and prevent you from using anyone else's browser, that's completely legal.
A court would have to really stretch and define something very narrow, like a smartphone application market, to even begin arguing any antitrust case.
I just published my first Android app today. The development and publishing experience is far better than on the iPhone. Java on Mac/Windows/Linux instead of Objective-C on Mac only, easy testing on your own device instead of paying Apple and screwing with certificates, published apps show up on Android Market in minutes instead of weeks.
If Google can attract a critical mass of customers to Android devices, I suspect large numbers of iPhone developers will be happy to jump ship.
Are you still doing iPhone app development? Help me out here:
1. Do you use an iPhone or Android phone as your primary phone? One problem I have over developing for multiple platforms is I can only have 1 primary platform (1 desktop/laptop + 1 mobile device). It's the only way I know to ensure the product is good. How do you do it?
2. It's early, but how's sales like compared to iPhones?
3. How's UI like? I had a G1 dev phone and haven't been much up to date with the developments of Android since. In particular, (a) the UI library - do you still pretty much have to cook up your own style because the native ones are terrible, and (b) how do you deal with compatibility over different handsets?
1. My primary phone is a Nexus One, I switched from a first generation iPhone. I still have it but I'm not writing iPhone apps at the moment.
2. It's a free app so sales aren't a factor. I did get an email from somebody who liked it about 10 minutes after it popped up in the market, so there are at least some users out there.
3. The built-in widgets are fine for my purposes, although I only needed a few buttons and a text view. For testing I set up a bunch of virtual devices in the emulator with different screen sizes and OS versions, and I didn't have any problems. I was able to stick to Android's layout managers which do a decent job of adapting to different resolutions. (And I'll be interested to see how Apple deals with future higher-resolution devices, since most iPhone UIs use absolute pixels).
This is just a hobby for me so I have the luxury of focusing on what I enjoy more, which is Android by quite a bit. Of course if I had a plan for an app that I expected to make a lot of money, I'd have to go with the iPhone.
The huge variance in form factors makes GUI apps a little hard to test effectively.
The time to market aspect of Android makes it desirable, but the fact that there are 213049283 free versions of everything means it is relatively hard to sell your app there comparably still.
5 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] threadhttp://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/14.html
If a court decides that in dealing with App Store sales, we're talking about the software market, then the App Store is such a tiny piece of the software market that literally no policy they set can SUBSTANTIALLY lessen competition in the entire market. It's a private company so they're free to set whatever policies they want. If they want to tie their browser to their phone and prevent you from using anyone else's browser, that's completely legal.
A court would have to really stretch and define something very narrow, like a smartphone application market, to even begin arguing any antitrust case.
If Google can attract a critical mass of customers to Android devices, I suspect large numbers of iPhone developers will be happy to jump ship.
1. Do you use an iPhone or Android phone as your primary phone? One problem I have over developing for multiple platforms is I can only have 1 primary platform (1 desktop/laptop + 1 mobile device). It's the only way I know to ensure the product is good. How do you do it?
2. It's early, but how's sales like compared to iPhones?
3. How's UI like? I had a G1 dev phone and haven't been much up to date with the developments of Android since. In particular, (a) the UI library - do you still pretty much have to cook up your own style because the native ones are terrible, and (b) how do you deal with compatibility over different handsets?
2. It's a free app so sales aren't a factor. I did get an email from somebody who liked it about 10 minutes after it popped up in the market, so there are at least some users out there.
3. The built-in widgets are fine for my purposes, although I only needed a few buttons and a text view. For testing I set up a bunch of virtual devices in the emulator with different screen sizes and OS versions, and I didn't have any problems. I was able to stick to Android's layout managers which do a decent job of adapting to different resolutions. (And I'll be interested to see how Apple deals with future higher-resolution devices, since most iPhone UIs use absolute pixels).
This is just a hobby for me so I have the luxury of focusing on what I enjoy more, which is Android by quite a bit. Of course if I had a plan for an app that I expected to make a lot of money, I'd have to go with the iPhone.
The time to market aspect of Android makes it desirable, but the fact that there are 213049283 free versions of everything means it is relatively hard to sell your app there comparably still.