More choice is always a win for the customers. Customer can get to decide who is providing a better quality of service and go with them instead of the current situation of having one choice forced down their throats because the vendor decides that is whats best for the customer.
Not if it solely results in fragmentation. Having the choice between Ubisoft Connect, EA Origin, Steam and Battle.net isn't a "choice", it's just 4 different storefronts for me to manage credentials for.
Likewise with video streaming services: Netflix, Disney+, etc. It would be nice if content could be unbundled from distributor in this case - like what you see with music.
If and when Apple is forced to allow other app stores (and Google is forced to give them the same abilities and privileges as their own), the wailing and gnashing of teeth when “competition” ends up like the much derided state of PC gaming will be hilarious. At least there’s the login with google/Apple ID thing and OS level restrictions on program privileges?
You cannot have choice without fragmentation, you cannot complain about lock-in without wanting choice. Choice and fragmentation go hand in hand, and customers get to decide who wins and who loses.
But fragmentation doesn't guarantee a choice. Take web streaming for example. I don't have a "choice" between Netflix and Disney, the choice is made by the content they provide. Now I'm essentially required to have two accounts to access the services that could appear on just one.
Music streaming is a different ball game altogether; I have an actual choice here between Spotify and other providers. Yes there are some exclusives but for the most part I'm choosing based on the features they provide, brand loyalty, price, etc.
Games consoles are somewhere in between (largely due to the methods of funding video games) - you choose between Xbox or playstation (or Nintendo I guess) and get access to a wide range of games on your platform. Yes there are some exclusives (most of which are funded by the console maker and just wouldn't exist if it weren't for this), but by and large your choice is dictated "where are my friends", gamepass, price of console + services, brand loyalty.
This is going to end up like origin vs uplay vs battle.net, where you don't have a "choice" on where you play because there's no overlap, you just have to have axcpunts with them all and deal with all their individual crap, and shitty practices rather than just Apples
[EDIT] trivial and clear illustrative case that should be easy to apply to murkier situations: a regulation that bans known poisons in food reduces choice.
[EDIT EDIT] more relevantly, and a bit tangentially to the example above: thanks to coordination problems it's possible for more-desirable states to be unmaintainable without reduction of choice—it's possible for someone's—even everyone's—favorite outcome to require a reduction of choice, and for that option to cease to be when more degrees of freedom are introduced.
Personally, I am surprised at all the anti-competitive actions Apple has been able to get away with over the years:
Bundling the OS with hardware
Enforcing an App store
Dictating/Castrating Browser on mobile
And the list goes on.
I'm not saying this as a ding on Apple products, because I genuinely appreciate them, but I think at the same time Apple has resorted to creating roadblocks rather than innovating.
Yes, you can buy them, but not everyone does. Phones are by default portable with their own network connection, whereas iPads have to be specifically chosen to have cellular data service. It's alright to overlook them.
Are ultraportable laptops tethered? Would you call them mobile?
Anyway, "mobile" has long been used as a short form for "mobile phone" rather than a "mobile device". E.g. the iPod was not called a mobile, and AFAIK barely anyone uses that term for tablets.
"Desktop OS's and software" is an arbitrary definition. Smartphones are just computers that make calls. Steve Jobs even famously said that the iPhone ran "OS X" when it was first launched.
It is somewhat arbitrary; yeah, smart phones can run whatever, but practically, they don't.
For many reasons, the vast majority of people stick with the OS a device ships with, and mobile OSes are directed towards app stores and limited filesystems, and desktop OSes are directed towards applications (with a side of app stores) and visible filesystems and what not.
You can run Android on a desktop PC, and you can (if you try really hard) run desktop Windows on a phone or a game console, but that's not how the devices are generally sold, and that's not how the devices are generally used. Apple sometimes claims their tablets are as useful as a computer running a desktop OS, but they don't provide Xcode for the iPad, do they?
Is this really an issue? I agree Apple has been pretty shady but this is a facet of any hardware you buy today from any manufacturer. Now, preventing/obfuscating the install of _other_ OS software, I agree, total bullshit.
In my opinion it should be, it should be an abuse of Apple's monopoly on the hardware (including patents preventing someone else from building an equivalent device) to create a monopoly on the software.
Legally I don't think it is today though, and my understanding of the law is that it's precisely because they haven't advertised their hardware as open as you say.
It's an issue given that I'd be more interested in using a Mac if I could choose which graphics card I get to use instead of perusing a pre-approved list of B-rate processing units.
Technically, if you've got the know-how, you could code your own graphics acceleration drivers for nVidia cards on MacOS, it'd just be extremely hard and expensive to do so.
You’d run into the same obstacle NVIDIA has, namely that Apple won’t sign your driver so it won’t run.
NVIDIA isn’t morally opposed to Apple, it’s largely Apple that’s opposed to NVIDIA, for reasons like the cuda ecosystem and how it locks you into something that’s not an Apple product and how that would affect Apple’s leverage in future negotiations. Apple wears the pants, not their suppliers.
I can't speak to where it stands in the current legal framework, but personally I don't think the vendor of any product should have any rights to determine how it's used once the customer has paid for it.
Why isn’t a toaster a general purpose computer? There are toasters with wifi, touchscreens and other functionality.
As for your car question - why not? No one would buy such a crippled device. The problem would resolve itself.
If a car manufacturer sold a car without a steering wheel that self drove, perhaps people would buy the car in spite of the limitations. What they shouldn’t do, is buy a car advertised without a steering wheel and then complain that it doesn’t have one.
Come on, to assert that a "smart toaster" is not categorically different than a laptop or a smartphone is a bad faith argument.
I think market forces don't work well in cases where you have a lot of vertical integration, and increasing consolidation.
The "just don't buy it" argument only works in a competitive market with lots of offerings. What we have in the world of computers is more of a lesser-of-a-few-evils choice in virtually every technology choice.
> Isn’t it common sense to not buy a toaster expecting it to be a server even though they both have circuit boards and technically can both compute?
The key here is control, not computational power. An ideal law, in my opinion, would be one which prohibits building and selling any device that can run code in a way which allows the manufacturer to have more control over it than the legal owner after the sale has been completed. I think this idea is actually great because it never limits how limited a device can be, it just prohibits it from being made in a way in which the OEM/maker can control it more than the end user/new owner could.
As an example, say you make a "smart toaster" with Wi-Fi and all that "good stuff" in it. If you just burn the firmware into the sillicon and that program has no way of updating itself, then you're good to go because both the company and the end user are stuck with the same level of control (In this context, "control" means "ability to make the computer parts run the code that you wish them to run")
If you include the firmware in a writable EEPROM, and no further checks for the update firmware besides checksums, you're also golden, because then both the new owner and you (OEM) can exercise the same level of control over it.
If, however, you decided to include signature checking using a public key burned in the sillicon, then and only then you would be violating this hypothetical law, because that creates a situation in which you, the OEM, can exercise more control than the device's legitimate owner after purchase.
So, to summarize, from the OEM's point of view under this law, less control is good, equal control is good, more control is bad.
I think this is what should be proposed as a new bill in U.S congress, although I have to admit the Open App Markets Act serves a great purpose as of right now for some specific devices.
I think it's reasonable that if your toaster has modifyable software memory, that if that modifiable memory is locked down cryptographically, that the toaster manufacturer be required to include that cryptographic key with purchase of the toaster, yes.
We've had all these debates. It was called "TiVo". It should be illegal for manufacturers to sell hardware with capabilities specifically denied to the owner. That's not when any sane person would have thought "ownership" meant prior to 1980.
It is not an issue. MS is the outlier here in that they sell their software to anybody (Linux is given for free), like you said everybody else (TV manufactures, cars, etc) bundle theirs.
You could, maybe, make the argument that what Apple does is anticompetitive, but in the laptop space they are the ones being hurt by a monopoly, not the ones who benefit.
One fact that has emerged is that Apple is pushing lock-in as a strategy. So to everyone who has ever felt like they are too "invested" in the ecosystem to leave- that is by design. You are victims.
Sounds to me like the invisible hand of the free market economy. Use that phone, then. A given company is not obligated to serve all of your specific needs and desires.
Not mutually exclusive. You can build systems that work well together and are easy to use without lock-in. Users should want to use the product because it is the best, not because they feel trapped.
An example of lock-in is making a conscious decision not to port iMessage to Android, specifically because it would make it easier for iPhone users to move to Android[0].
Making Apple products work well with other Apple products isn't lock-in. Purposefully making Apple products work worse with other systems, phrased within the company as a way to punish users who switch, is the kind of thing we're talking about when we describe lock-in.
Is your argument that Google doesn't try to engage in lock-in? Or is your argument that lock-in is good for users?
Either way, when there are literal emails in the company saying that the reason iMessage isn't on Android is because otherwise it would be too easy for Apple users to switch to Android -- then that's what lock-in is.
I don't get the whataboutism here. It's lock-in. Google is also a crappy company, but that doesn't change anything about what Apple is doing, and it doesn't change anything about the fact that the court case has revealed enough documents to show that lock-in is a deliberate market strategy that Apple undertakes.
Google also acting crappy in a few cases does not mean that the very concept of lock-in is suddenly invalid. People forget that Apple is not the only company being sued for antitrust in regards to their app stores.
I don’t have time right now to expand, but the greater argument is that data portability is a much larger problem. There is nothing nefarious about Microsoft deciding to not support Office on Mac, just like iMessage on Android. It’s a business decision. There are plenty of cross-platform alternatives. If Apple actively blocked messaging apps from exporting their data then we’d have a story.
Absurdly, I've done it multiple times. It runs over SMS, literally any phone that can receive SMS' is already compatible.
I believe many of the messaging apps on Android also support exporting your messages as an archive, but no idea whether iMessage has any support for importing message history.
>Making Apple products work well with other Apple products isn't lock-in.
Cool. iMessage works perfectly well with SMS, which is the only true open messaging standard, and therefore will work with anything else that interoperates with SMS. Job done.
I agree that Apple not bringing iMessage to Android is lock in and very purposeful. But I don't think (at least not initially) it's because it works better than plain old SMS. I think there is quite a bit of social pressure to have "the blue bubble" especially in middle/high school.
Most of the iMessage features, text, video, pictures and "reactions/tap backs" work over SMS. The only real feature missing is delivery and read receipts but most people in my experience have read receipts turned off. Apps also don't work but I've yet to see someone actually use that feature.
> Most of the iMessage features, text, video, pictures and "reactions/tap backs" work over SMS
Other than 'text', none of those things use SMS:
Sending pictures and videos uses MMS, which is one of the most flakiest parts of the old feature-phone ecosystem because it's inextricably tied to the level of support from both the sender's carrier and the receiver's carrier for particular MMS message content - and how carriers love to charge insane $-per-byte for SMS/MMS content. While in the US exchanging video MMS between the 4 (or 3...) major carriers you likely won't experience any problems provided the video is under a few megabytes and using a well-supported codec like H.263/H.264, if you see what it's like for the rest of the world (Europe, India, etc) you'll understand why services like WhatsApp are so popular: because carrier SMS/MMS service is awful... if not obscenely expensive.
The "reactions" thing you mention, to my knowledge, is not supported by SMS either - it's either an Android-specific MMS extension or you're using RCS - and Apple has no incentive to support RCS, excepting any kind of laws requiring phone carriers and handsets to fully support RCS (I wish...) in order to be sold in a giving region.
Some time ago I received an ordinary SMS on the iPad but I couldn't read it until I signed into iMessage!
So iMessage app doesn't work like SMS reading app. It forces you into using iMessage account to just read an SMS. Later it lures you into using iMessage instead of SMS to make it harder to switch to another OS later.
Until these systems start aging and are no longer interoperable with more recent versions. It's not like Apple is giving us a bash like experience where things just work for decades.
I'm not. Amazon does the same thing: produce a great end product, and users won't give a shit about what you did behind closed doors to get it that way.
What about bundling camera, speaker, screen, processors etc? They are selling a product. You don't complain about car companies bundling 4 wheels and a motor.
Wow, this is huge! We'll see how this holds up, but definitely seems like a turning point.
The effect of this order seems to be Apple can't prevent apps from telling customers about alternative in-app purchasing methods, which is a central issue of the case at hand in Epic vs Apple.
This seems pretty big, like it should have an immediate impact with everyone who ever wanted to use alternative payments on any app store should be submitted an updated app today kind of big.
Are there strings like appeal rights that means we won't see a change for years?
This injuction only applies to Apple, as it says pretty clearly in the decision. That prohibition does benefit all developers using the App Store, not just Epic.
There is a good chance that this precedent will encourage other lawsuits that will lead to more injuctions, such as one that applies to Steam.
If someone has read the full ruling and is familiar enough with the case, what are the odds Apple appeals this - and if they do, is it likely they will win the appeal?
This has to be an insta-appeal though so much dirty laundry has come out in discovery maybe they won’t. Then again App Store profit margins are so high … maybe they will take the hit on the 30% and double down on App Store advertising instead since first party advertising is blessed now?
Reading only a snippet of the opinion, 100% chance of appeal. At the very least, the court effectively says it has no authority as to why it can issue a nationwide (instead of statewide) injunction; you'd be a fool to not at least appeal that. The fact that the court also came to a different decision from both Apple and Epic as to what constitutes the appropriate market for determining monopoly also seems like it would be fruitful grounds for appeal.
Will Apple win? I don't know 9th Circuit or the applicable law anywhere near enough to answer that question.
(Not a lawyer, or really an expert on anti-trust law)
I fully expect both sides to appeal. To much money is on the line to not try.
Even if Apple knew they would lose the appeal, I expect they still would, to try and get a stay on this ruling pending the outcome of the case.
I've always been very sympathetic to Epic's side of this case, still am, personally I don't expect Apple to win appeal [1], but I also wouldn't rank the odds of that happening as significantly lower that I thought the odds were of them winning the initial case.
Epic might be willing to settle without an appeal in exchange for the ability to continue developing unreal engine for iOS... but given that Apple is not likely to be willing to settle (see above) I doubt that will happen. Apple might choose to unban epic anyways, since the game engine only being available for android hurts them, but I doubt it.
[1] Though if a detail here or there changed in Apples favor that would not be surprising.
> Epic might be willing to settle without an appeal in exchange for the ability to continue developing unreal engine for iOS
I wonder which parts of the lawsuit are even amenable to a settlement at this point. Sure, the breach of contract claim is between Apple and Epic, and Epic could negotiate away their right to appeal.
But presumably the injunction just issued is NOT negotiable, as this is based on behavior that Apple is alleged to have engaged in against all developers?
> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.”
It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
Yes, those laws in California are not uniform among states. If Apple is not a monopoly and violating Federal Law, then on appeal, to higher than state laws, the case is more likely to reversed.
Since other states do not have the same laws of California, the Supreme Court will likely apply Federal Law, not California law, on appeal.
Epic is headquartered in NC, after all. Thus this will fall under interstate commerce clauses, and California law only applies to transactions in California.
> I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
Why would it? The court basically dodged the question, so we still don't have an answer provided by the court system. Until that happens, we can discuss it to death if we want!
Edit: excerpt from the ruling is:
"Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. (...) The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
"the Court concludes that Apple is a monopolist under federal / state antitrust laws"
"the Court concludes that Apple is not a monopolist under neither federal nor state antitrust laws"
Instead, the court went with the third, which to me means "we have not ruled on whether Apple is a monopolist or not, lawsuits welcome". Is that not the right way to look at it?
Hmm. I'm reading "the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws" as "we cannot decide on this matter". Is this not the right interpretation?
That is not the right interpretation. They didn’t say they cannot conclude one way or the other - they said they cannot conclude that Apple is a monopolist, period - meaning that they have concluded Apple is not a monopolist (under current state and federal laws).
They did not say “we cannot ultimately conclude whether Apple is a monopolist” which would be your interpretation.
[edit] Given the downvotes (really?) I suppose I should add the nuance that all of this is based on this specific case and evidence presented; the case did not conclude that Apple can never be a monopoly (in another case, with other evidence) but that in this case, it isn’t.
Why twist the words straight from the ruling ? If they “concluded Apple is not a monopolist” they would have said so. They deliberately choose a different turn of phrase for these words, let’s respect the nuance they cared to put there.
They literally did, at the bottom of page 1 of the ruling
> Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. [snip explanation] The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal
monopolist.
The judge found that Apple is not a monopoly _in the market for payment processors for mobile games_, not that Apple is categorically not a monopoly.
> “The relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store,” Gonzalez-Rogers wrote.
> Under that market definition, “the court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she continued.
My main point of surprise is that anti-trust was even relevant in a lawsuit between two private parties. I thought this would only be relevant if the state were trying an anti-trust case.
Bialpio has a reasonable interpretation for court-speak. The fuller relevant quote is this:
"Having defined the relevant market as digital global gaming transactions, the Court next evaluated Apple's conduct in that market. Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
Borski's interpretation is right under the "innocent until proven guilty" burden-of-proof in criminal cases. Bialpo's interpretation is correct in that this Court has not made, as a finding of fact, that Apple is not a monopoly, only that the evidence brought by Epic to this trial does not prove Apple is a monopoly (i.e. another case on this topic may be brought if more compelling evidence is available).
I seem to recall reporting around some Supreme Court ruling that was phrased as "there is a ruling but the question is still undecided". It may have been Google v. Oracle, where it didn't say APIs are copyrightable or not, but Google's use fell under fair use irrespective of that. So just the existence of a ruling doesn't mean there is an answer to the question that was asked.
The judge issued a injunction based on another law that didn't require Apple be a monopoly, found that the record did not prove that Apple was a monopoly (and thus against Epic on that theory), but took the time to clarify that Apple might be a monopoly, it just wasn't proved.
Whether the current definition of a monopoly needs to change.
If you are mixing the two arguments discourse can go nowhere because you're substantively discussing cause and effect. The current definition of a monopoly needs to change, imo, then we can talk about whether Apple is a monopoly.
I'm also interested in discussing conglomerates and whether they are good or bad, and how to control them similar to monopolies, but that discourse can't be had until we can agree on something like the definition of a monopoly.
How would you like the definition of a monopoly to change? Or to avoid sniping over details if you're not sure of a definition text, how would you like it to change and to what objective?
Personally? I think we should get away from "monopoly" and move towards "excessively large market entity."
The problems now have more to do with market capitalization / revenue than they do with physical control.
Apple or Google aren't trying to buy all the railroad tracks between Cincinnati and Kansas City (app stores aside). They're trying to assemble a company that owns all the disparate but critical pieces in an ecosystem, then leverage those into extracting higher than free market rents.
Consequently, remedies shouldn't be the same as for monopolies (read: breaking up companies). They should instead of targeted on (1) classifying corporations by their size & (2) placing limits on their actions, in places where that size provides its own monopolistic-esque advantage.
Afaict, these should take the form of prohibiting acquisitions of competitors (Facebook shouldn't be able to buy Instagram or WhatsApp, but Instagram and WhatsApp should have been allowed to buy each other / merge) and stricter limits on market entry (FAANGM or SoftBank deciding they want to throw stupid money into a hole to poison the well and capture market share).
I'd rather stay away from focusing on the size of the org itself, and moreso on the "markets" that they create.
When a platform or market is created by an entity, and that platform reaches a certain scale, they must allow free competition within that market.
Here's an extreme example. Say somewhere down the line Facebook invents some metaverse or VR world. This becomes the primary form of interaction between people... 99% of interactions take place in this virtual world. It's clear the scale and extent to which this platform impacts people's lives is substantial. So Facebook logically would have to allow other sellers to enter this virtual world and compete to drive prices towards a free market equilibrium.
Past monopoly legislation has focused on competition outside the walls, product vs product. But nowadays the walled gardens are getting big enough to the point that these companies have large control over our lives.
Maybe that example just muddies things, but the important thing in my mind is to identify "private markets" and enforce that competition be allowed.
Your describing a monopoly. IMO the real question is what actually harms consumers.
Requiring companies to open their platforms is one option for regulation, but perhaps not ideal. Great for tech companies sure, but possibly a huge opportunity for scammers. Consumers and companies are often at odds, banning app coins for example is great for gamers and the opposite of an open platform.
A flat regulation that all software platforms are limited to X% fees might be a better option.
What probably harms consumers the most is that companies with large purses have an outsized influence on policy and typically write their own regulations that serve to generate additional profit and make it difficult for new entrants to the market to emerge. You don't need to have a monopoly for that, just a good old fasioned colluding industry and a politician who cares more about their individual wealth than the collective good of their electorate that they represent.
You're right that the analogy was not quite right.
Here's a better one. Facebook creates a virtual world where 50% of the population choose. Apple creates a different virtual world which the other 50% choose.
If you simply look at the boundary/entrance you can say there's freedom of choice. But whether you choose apple or Facebook, there's 0 competition once you're inside that world.
Further, once you've established a home and connections within one world, switching to the other becomes quite expensive.
Competition at the gates, monopoly within.
I might add that this is very similar to the concept of company scrip whereby the local coal mine had a monopoly over local jobs and gouged workers for basic necessities. Absolutely you could have moved a town over, but the cost to do so was deemed too high in many cases.
When cost of switching is high, monopolistic power can be enforced upon customers. It's a similar situation with a lot of SaaS who have pricing power to strong arm their customers into high margins due to the cost of switching to alternative technologies. In a truly competitive market, SaaS margins should be close to 0. Obviously that's not the case today.
Regulation will catch up to all of these tricks, just a question of the timeline. Capitalism only works well when there's an environment of competition, and leveraging high costs of switching or large gated systems to enable profit margins well beyond what a competitive market would bear is antithetical to this concept.
That's why antitrust law is so important, and needs to evolve to handle modern business structures.
That’s not really it though, HN like most websites are 100% HN once your inside their walled garden. That’s the normal situation, nobody complains because McDonalds happy meals only contain toys sourced by McDonalds. In the past it’s only monopolies where companies dominate positions gave them leverage that was an issue, otherwise consumer choice was upfront and that worked.
Xbox, iOS, and Windows are platforms that also provide basic utility where third parties are part of the basic product. It’s by owning a platform they gain some control over that relationship between consumers and those other companies. Such complex relationships aren’t completely new, malls are gatekeepers for the stores within. But, such relations are normally heavily regulated.
The obvious difference is the scale. Sometimes difference in scale is difference in nature.
All of what you listed are easily substituted, and not very impactful to somebody's life.
The same games exist on Xbox and Playstation (95% overlap). McDonald's is a buy one time product, where you can easily choose on a given day to go to BK or Wendy's. You buy an iphone, you aren't going to just buy an Android the next day if Apple raises costs. Isn't it obvious how different these are?
You can bet that if Microsoft charged any third party apps on windows 30% of their revenue they would have been regulated long ago. You really think otherwise?
I don't understand the Apple defenders. Encouraging actual competition within the platform is the pro business stance. Competition is the basic element that makes capitalism work.
You don't have competition if cost of switching is high, it's that simple.
Platforms with sufficient impact on people's lives, and sufficiently high cost of switching will be regulated to require competition. It's as simple as that, though fanboys will kick and scream for the next few years until it passes into law. It's the obvious outcome, and china is already paving the way on legislation.
It's a good point. To quantify it, I guess you'd look at total user count and percent of all users on the platform?
Most of the ills we're trying to avoid don't seem to easily slip around, if there's a law that says "If you control more than 25% of a market of more than 1M users..."
I don't think anyone is arguing that Apple shouldn't be allowed to create an iEcosystem.
But what we all want is a future where Apple's ownership of the iEcosystem can't be used in such a way, and generate enough profit, that no one can ever overturn Apple's position.
I just want take the time to compliment this question. I find it difficult to articulate exactly what you've done here, but I wish I saw it more often.
Agreed. Lina Khan is one of my favorite voices on this matter for that reason.
Edit:
Stating my opinion without why isn't very HN-ly of me, eh?
She's been on Planet Money and discussed her ideas, where they come from, etc before. I don't think I'd quite do them justice explaining them myself. Apparently she's now a chair of the FTC as well (which I was unaware of).
In one of the podcasts she dives into the history of anti-trust. She talks about how after Standard Oil we convinced ourselves everything was a monopoly and stifled a lot of innovation, which led to some reforms later and the anti-trust we have today which are demonstrably too permissive. She has picked on Amazon (as a wider corporation) quite a bit, but a lot of it has to do with the practices of their ecommerce division and the extent to which Amazon can compete with it's vendors. Basically, she believes there's a middleground to be found between the two anti-trust time periods and that it's important to be concise in how we do that. You can see some of her specific criticisms in the article above.
I initially downvoted but thought it would be better to ask for the information I think would make your comment more helpful.
Would you mind linking to something pertinent, in order to add to the discussion? What does she say? Where does she say it? Why does that appeal to you?
She's been on Planet Money and discussed her ideas, where they come from, etc before. I don't think I'd quite do them justice explaining them myself. Apparently she's now a chair of the FTC as well (which I was unaware of).
In one of the podcasts she dives into the history of anti-trust. She talks about how after Standard Oil we convinced ourselves everything was a monopoly and stifled a lot of innovation, which led to some reforms later and the anti-trust we have today which are demonstrably too permissive. She has picked on Amazon (as a wider corporation) quite a bit, but a lot of it has to do with the practices of their ecommerce division and the extent to which Amazon can compete with it's vendors. Basically, she believes there's a middleground to be found between the two anti-trust time periods and that it's important to be concise in how we do that. You can see some of her specific criticisms in the article above.
To be fair, when Hacker News publishes "____ Has Died" posts and makes the title bar black, 99% of the time I have absolutely zero idea who "____" was. So I don't think it's terribly over-burdensome to expect the curious to highlight a name, right-click, and select "Search".
In this case, the opening of the person's Wikipedia page probably sums it up right away:
> In the article, Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework, which focuses on keeping consumer prices down, cannot account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as that of Amazon. She proposed alternative approaches for doing so, including "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."
In my opinion we don't need to change the definition of monopoly, we need to integrate "conflict of interest" more into anti-competitive practice discourse.
Apple, Google, etc. are having their cake and eating it, too. They have platform which they charge others to use (ok), and then they study usage data (somewhat shady) and then launch direct competitors (<<super>> shady).
That's the root of the problem in many cases.
Of course, this needs to be coupled with stronger anti-cartel enforcement. Because tech is rarely a pure monopoly, but extremely often is ends up under the control of a cartel.
Most of the apps that Apple sells are already in highly competitive markets like music, video streaming, cloud storage, etc.
I really don’t feel bad if some developer selling a leveler app for 99¢ goes out of business because Apple pre-installs a free leveling app on the iPhone.
Honestly the shadiest practitioner here is Amazon. Google and Facebook are possibly second and third. I think Apple is a pretty distant one, maybe behind folks like Netflix.
The issue is more that they are conglomerates - they control the device, the discovery mechanism, the payment mechanism, and the identity mechanism. In each of those areas, they may or may not be a monopoly - but together their broad control creates an anti-competitive environment.
The problem is that the proposed new definition of "monopoly" generally goes something like "any company who has a product that I like and does anything at all with that product that I don't like." Like, regardless of what the iPhone's market share is, if I like to use my iPhone, but I don't like one aspect of the iPhone, that means that Apple is acting like a monopoly because they're not completely honoring my personal preferences and the only option I have is to switch to another smartphone which I don't want to do.
Why would we want to change a term that is used in countless legal and economic contexts just to dumb down the definition for the sake of a few people who haven’t bothered to do a bit of light reading on the topic?
Have you any idea of how many laws would need to change, not to mention all the academic papers, legal and academic commentaries and textbooks?
Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous.
They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole.
Their objective: capturing attention and keeping their users on their platforms longer. They use their platform bubbles to capture a large group of users that will never leave their services. Like Apple users. They're all in a bubble, and if you want access, you have to pay a steep tax and jump to the beat of the their whims.
And this isn't a new kind of monopoly? It's a monopolization in a new sense: they wrap their shroud over individuals and companies and keep them attached at the hip. Switching costs become incredible.
Apple, Google, and Amazon are turning us into serfs. They have a quasi republic going on that they tax and control. You can't start new businesses. You can't escape. If they target your small market, you're screwed.
The DOJ needs to break these companies up into twenty or so smaller ones that don't form a cobweb of entrapment.
Apple/Google/etc fans and shareholders will disagree, but these companies are hurting our industry and soaking up all the innovation.
[1] FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior
I don't think we need a new word for this. What you've described is a cartel [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel]. To the extent that they restrain trade, prohibit competition, or artificially increase costs on consumers, cartels are already illegal in the US.
What you're describing looks more like the supermarket shelves. Some 80% of products in the cereal aisle are owned by three companies. Nobody really cares, but the switching costs to get a cereal outside that controlled space turn out to be pretty high (just try it with a family with kids).
If you want to make your own cereal, good luck; the supermarkets trust the Big Three and are pretty uninterested in flighting something new; shelf space is finite and people don't trust off-brand cereals.
The cereals care more about attention than price-competition. They know it's all the same crap; they want you to care more about whether there's a bear or a frog on the box.
And the same companies that make the cereals make several other verticals too, all carved similarly.
This configuration has not, generally, been considered illegal in terms of market regulation in the US. The standard is harm to consumers, not harm to non-incumbent manufacturers. Your battle to show why either of these spaces should be regulated more stringently is uphill against the default in the US to take a hands-off approach to market activity unless necessary to cure an obvious ill (and the ills here are non-obvious; how do we show the cereal market, or the software-services market, don't look the way they do because the incumbent players have hit on a locally-optimal approach to give value to customers, while customers are satisfied? Amazon, for example, are bastards, but they're bastards that have managed to unlock such efficient distribution and value-satisfaction for their customers that they rendered an entire ecosystem of competitors as obsolete as the buggy-whip manufacturer).
I think you have that analogy backwards. Google, Apple, and Amazon are the supermarkets. But they're also filling the shelves with their own products. It might not be too different from Walmart, save for a few points:
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores. Or repair their devices (bad analogy).
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do. Like turning into music and movie studios.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket. Famgopolies created an artificial warehousing system and forced us all into it.
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores.
As a user of Apple, Google, and Amazon tech for decades, I simply disagree on the other two. You'll have to clarify in what way Google and Amazon make it hard to shop at other stores. Google, in particular, enables side-loading on every Android device. Of the three you've named, Apple is the biggest offender, and it appears they have touched the hot stove, unless this Court's ruling becomes reversed. But they touched it in a way that Google and Amazon do not, unless I'm missing something.
I don't think a world where F-droid continues to exist is one where we can claim Google, in particular, is a supermarket that makes it hard to shop at other stores.
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do
That's not by itself illegal, or discouraged. Traditionally, companies have considered such expansion a bad idea because they expose themselves to outsized risk in a market downturn. But there are examples of other companies doing that. Sony is a hardware manufacturer and a movie producer. Disney owns theme parks and movie production. Proctor & Gamble make some 90% of what goes in, on, or around the American body and home that you can buy off a store shelf (including many apparently-competing products). ViacomCBS owns theme parks, television studios, book publishing, heavy-industry machinery, and nuclear technology.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
The user experience from the era you're describing, to be blunt, sucked. Mobile devices, when apps could be loaded on them at all, where hard-to-manage, the apps were buggy, and they were hard to find. Lack of standards, lack of oversight, no trust that any given app wasn't a security mess (or just a Trojan) without something like brand recognition to rely upon. It wasn't just Apple and Google who changed that; we saw Steam come along and regularize the games-on-PCs space, we saw package management get more robust in the Linux ecosystem... People weren't forced into software catalog ecosystems, they ran to them and brain-drained alternatives because most of the alternatives were actively painful.
The government wants to avoid stepping on the neck of a better customer experience inadvertently via over-regulation.
And perhaps most importantly: you can still do that. You can still write an Android app and put it on F-droid, or self-sign it and give users instructions for enabling side-loading. But you won't see the adoption you will in using the big app stores, because the big app stores are a way better experience for most users. Outside of those app stores, discovery, reputation-tracking, consumer communication, anti-Trojan safeguards, etc. are '90s era.
> >The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
> I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
It is a false dilemma that you either have vetted apps with Apple, or unvetted apps.
You could still have other app stores reviewing apps. That would increase competition but still let users choose safety over a Wild West.
And brands who have gone to great efforts to obtain user trust can sell directly.
How does this differ from traditional brick and mortar retail? The retailers posed a barrier to selling to consumers at scale and wholesale prices, I think, were closer to 50% of retail markup.
Sure, manufactures could find small retailers and build a following from there, or find ways to market direct to consumers. But it seems like that is still true, if not even easier in the modern age. So what is different. I ask this not rhetorically, clearly there are differences. Is the scale the difference? Was it always wrong and we just didn't see it a clearly? Is the smaller number retailer the major factor?
No brick and mortar store has anywhere close to Apple’s dominance on mobile apps and the retail industry is not a defacto duopoly. Apple and Google control 95% of the global app market. Apple alone was 65% last year.
For reference, Walmart and Amazon have about 14% and 10% market share respectively. Numbers differ from report to report, but the scale of difference is pretty clear.
> It's a new game, and we need new definitions. [..] Famgopolies (FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior) behave different than monopolies.
There are many authors that have been exploring the economic aspect of platforms. As such nowadays that phenomenon is know as "platform capitalism" in literature due to Nick Srnicek's 2016 Polity book of the same name. [1]
That quote is a bit of a cherry pick resulting a wide interpretation that isn't supported.
The actual ruling is something more like "Epic failed to prove that Apple is a monopoly in the market the judge decided is the relevant market: digital mobile gaming transactions".
Here are the relevant sections of the ruling:
> The Court disagrees with both parties’ definition of the relevant market.
> Ultimately, after evaluating the trial evidence, the Court finds that the relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store. The mobile gaming market itself is a $100 billion industry. The size of this market explains Epic Games’ motive in bringing this action. Having penetrated all other video game markets, the mobile gaming market was Epic Games’ next target and it views Apple as an impediment.
> Further, the evidence demonstrates that most App Store revenue is generated by mobile gaming apps, not all apps. Thus, defining the market to focus on gaming apps is appropriate. Generally speaking, on a revenue basis, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenues. This 70% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of all App Store consumers. These gaming-app consumers are primarily making in-app purchases which is the focus of Epic Games’ claims. By contrast, over 80% of all consumer accounts generate virtually no revenue, as 80% of all apps on the App Store are free.
> Having defined the relevant market as digital mobile gaming transactions, the Court next evaluated Apple’s conduct in that market. Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrustconduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist. Case Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist.
> Nonetheless, the trial did show that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct under California’s competition laws. The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.
> It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour
Can someone ELI5 why Apple is considered to be anti-competitive for not dedicating resources to assisting another business in creating a competitor to a market for a platform they and they alone created?
If Epic wants to have their game on a phone, it makes sense they abide by the rules enforced by the company that allows the whole ecosystem to exist. If they don’t like it, they can go and create their own phone hardware and app ecosystem.
Apple goes beyond not facilitating other businesses; they actively ban other app stores (because the only legit way to get an app store on an iPhone is to install it from their app store).
Apple is in several markets in the same time and using its position in one to control the competition in another.
There are limits to what you can do in a vertically integrated business stack, especially when you invite third parties to participate in pieces of that stack.
As a consumer, I can't have a phone for every software vendor I want to purchase from, that's obviously ridiculous. If Apple wants to create a marketplace, it has to allow certain things to happen in that marketplace. If the App Store was an entirely separate business not tied to hardware, the restrictions would be significantly less.
I don't think anyone is saying that they need to provide support for third-party payment processors themselves, but their rules can't restrict someone else from supporting them.
I don't know why that would be controversial.
Imagine a world where Google required a 30% cut of everything bought through Chrome. How is what Apple's doing any different from that?
Because end-users own their phones, and Apple restricting the ways software can be loaded onto the phone is robbing those users of their rights. The same applies to game consoles and other similarly locked-down devices.
If I buy a table, I can choose to stain it a different color, or put a tablecloth over it, or cut the legs off, or burn it for firewood. I have the right to use it however I want for whatever purpose I want, because I own it. For some insane reason bootlickers are willing to throw such rights out the window the moment you try to apply them to computer hardware and software.
Well the table manufacturer is not obliged to make it possible or easy for you to use the table as a chair, a bed or an airplane. I'm not really a fan of Apple but it's not that they are hiding the fact that you can only install software on the iPhone via the app store. It's the way they choose to design their product and it's an inherent feature of it (and part of their business model). Should all companies which build devices which include general purpose computers internally be legally obliged to make it possible (and easy) for users to install arbitrary software on them?
> Can someone ELI5 why Apple is considered to be anti-competitive for not dedicating resources to assisting another business
(emphasis mine)
Nobody said anything about Apple assisting other businesses. They could easily just let everything be, but instead, Apple is going out of their way to prevent competition.
Imagine if your favorite Linux distro only allowed you to install software from their package repos, and you had to jump through tons of hoops to install software from outside their repos, and adding other repos was impossible.
I know you'd say "I'd just switch distros!", but in the mobile world, you effectively only have two choices.
>If Epic wants to have their game on a phone, it makes sense they abide by the rules enforced by the company that allows the whole ecosystem
What about the sucker that bought the phone? why the company that created the device should decide what the owner can do?
Isn't ironic Apple prevents someone showing you a link to the product webpage and the explanation is that you are too stupid to be let opening a webpage from the app = will they remove the web-browser ?
Because it's vertical integration and refusal to deal. To me, it's very similar to the Hollywood anti-trust case, when movie studios used to own movie theaters. By your reasoning, those theaters should have just made their own movies?
> . If they don’t like it, they can go and create their own phone hardware and app ecosystem.
What do you even think a monopoly or anti-competetive behavior is?
During the standard oil trials, would you support the argument of "If people don't like it, they can go build their own railroad!"?
Do you simply not believe in any forms of monopoly law? Because your argument could be used in literally any monopoly trial, if you actually believe it.
I'm sure it won't put a stop to it, I love to read discussions about "Does company X engage in anti-competitive behavior and are they a big enough player that it's a problem". That seems to be a much more useful discussion (i.e. it gets at "do they need to be reigned in by We The People") than "are they a monopoly" which is just bickering over what words mean (with some shades of "if they _were_ a monopoly, then We The People should do something about it).
At the end of the day, who cares if they are a monopoly or not - you don't have to be a monopoly to be in a position to do Bad Stuff to The Market.
> if they're a monopoly, then they simply shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Market driven de-facto monopoly are allowed. If you own >90% search engine marketshare it is fine as you have earned it. If you abuse the marketshare to enter shopping, travel market it is monopoly-*abuse* and it should be blocked/fined.
Abuse would include if you were charging ridiculous amounts of money for your monopoly service, like Ma Bell did, right? What about deterring competition with portfolios full of braindead patents? Buying legislation that puts high barriers around the market? I think the separation between government and big business is a farce, today, and in combination they're way more oppressive than high priced telephone service was way back when.
You are very confused.
Courts don't make calls as to whether companies are monopolist in general. The judge doesn't even try to do that (though someone is trying to make it seem like they have).
They make a call about whether a company has monopoly power in a specific market defined in a specific case.
In this case, the court does not believe Apple is a monopolist in a specifically defined digital gaming market.
That has no bearing or relevance on whether they are a monopolist in some other defined market (or even on a different day in the same market!)
>I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
Are those threads arguing about a legal definition, because if not then this would have little impact on them. Even if they are arguing form a legal perspective, it would have to be within the same legal system as this court and thus could be argued for other legal systems. And even then one can argue the judge is wrong, look at how many judges end up being wrong based on appeal results. Technically you can't be sure which judge is actually wrong, you know which one is in the court that overrules the other, but you can still point out that the disagreement means one of them is wrong even if you can't say definitely which one is.
Online court systems are here to stay. They're much more efficient than traditional in-person court, both in terms of overall time spent and in manpower.
There are still a lot of kinks to work out, such as how to handle court decorum & technological disparities such as low availability of high speed internet and good quality camera systems/lighting/privacy.
Personally I think the federal government should contract for an app other than Zoom because if I had to go to trial I wouldn't feel very comfortable knowing it was all being hosted by a private company, but that's a minor gripe.
It took over a year for this ruling to come out. Also, this was a bench trial as opposed to a jury trial, which also makes it faster.
Of course, what really makes court cases take very long is when they get appealed to hell and back -- see Google v Oracle for an example of such a case.
(And this is a final order, so it can get appealed).
The lawsuit was filed in August of last year, and arguments in court spanned most of May (and were conducted in-person, not virtually), and then the judge issued her decision today. That's not exactly lightning quick.
The rate at which court cases proceed really depends a lot on the complexity of the case, the length of the discovery phase, etc. Both Apple and Epic didn't want to have a jury trial, so there also wasn't the matter of empaneling a jury.
> permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and (ii) communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app.
This sounds like the same agreement Apple came to a few weeks ago [0]. They can’t bar developers from linking to external payment methods, but doesn’t require them to allow other forms of in app payment.
I disagree here. My read on it is that Apple is prohibited from prohibiting "calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms", not "purchasing mechanisms" themselves. So Apple can still say App Store IAP is the only allowed form of IAP, but they have to allow CTAs to other mechanisms.
You're thinking of a different concession they made a few years ago. This one is specifically about developers reaching out to their customers outside of the app, for example via email (which they may have obtained from the app).
But it doesn't force them to allow other purchasing mechanisms, just that they cannot bar "calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms". My read on that is that Apple is still allowed to force Apple-only IAP, but they cannot bar CTAs to external purchasing mechanisms.
> [Apple] are hereby permanently restrained [..] from prohibiting developers from including in their apps [..] buttons [,..] that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms [..]
I'm not sure how exactly to interpret that but it seems reasonable to interpret that has being able to put a button in your app that takes someone to a checkout page.
I'm really happy to see this moving forward, but I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay.
I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it's unfortunate we have to make a tradeoff at all.
Hopefully, this move will put downward pressure on Apple's payment infrastructure that incentivizes devs to keep using Apple payments because it's the same fee structure as whatever 3rd party they might move towards.
Right, but the only reason for that is it prevents circumvention. I would assume after this injunction they will allow using apple pay in order to re-capture some of that revenue.
Will I be able to use it with King's implementation, or my local pizza place's outsourced app?
edit: I was instantly downvoted without any discussion, which doesn't add to the conversation. The reason I ask is because that's what the key value add is of Apple's IAP - I know that my payment method is accepted on the app store.
On Android, I use Google Pay all of the time for in-app purchases, and it doesn't require Google to take 30%.
It's just another payment processor. It often shows up beside "add a credit card" in apps. I use it to order food, pay for rideshare, buy tickets, etc.
According to google, that is not correct. They levy a 30% fee on all Play Store transactions for apps and IAP. I've seen articles that say they are cutting the fee to 15% for businesses with under $1m revenue, but that's not what the support page says.
To use Google Pay this way, you'll have to find a payment processor that handles local taxes and all that. As a developer from a country where Stripe isn't available, it's a significant hurdle.
I agree. Literally makes no difference to me whatsoever. Even using a websites payment system is usually trivial because Android's autofill is pretty smart these days.
Just to be clear here (and this fact doesn't really detract from your point) - Apple Pay is very different to Apple's In App Purchases. Apple Pay can be used anyhere, and it could still be used if a company rolls their own purchase system on their website that they link to from the app. Apple only gets a very minor % cut of Apple Pay transactions, from the bank, compared to Apple IAP where Apple gets 30% from the developer.
Besides, isn't the competition here what we want? Apple IAP are still easier, and probably will convert at a higher rate than pushing a user outside the app to do the payment on a website, so there's still incentives for developers to use them. If Apps switch away from IAP, then Apple is incentivised to actually compete (imagine that!!) and make something better that developers actively want to use.
It says something about the state of competition where Netflix can just say "no, we no longer want people to sign up on an iPhone and give us money". That says they don't think IAP is good, and Apple should actually work on building something that companies want to use.
Who is we? I imagine app makers want this, but as a user I do not care to enter my credit card details just so they can save on their cut to Apple. It’s understandable from their POV, but not my problem.
In my opinion not in this specific case. As an iOS user I WANT a system where everything conforms to certain guidelines. I do NOT want to fiddle with some weird custom in-App payment dialog which does it's own thing again.
It'll be interesting to see how this court order will be "implemented", my guess is that not much will change for now.
Yea, but obviously no company will offer that option unless forced. This decision undeniably benefits app developers, but the benefit to customers is murkier.
Apple couldn’t previously require payment flow through Apple’s payment systems, as evidenced by apps like Audible where you have no purchasing in the app and just have access to the content that you purchased through their website. Since Apple couldn’t outright force app vendors to monetize through Apple payment channels, their cudgel has been to ensure that app vendors have no way to link to external purchase options in the app, and hope that this was inconvenient enough for app vendors that they would choose to integrate with Apple’s payment channels. And it worked for most, but not all of them. Some apps, like Audible, just chose to live with having no way to sell anything from the app.
If Apple can’t even do that, they lose the ability to provide for their customers a consistent payment experience across apps.
This is an example of application of the policy I described.
> “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”
> Today, Apple confirmed to us once again that the rule is more lenient than it sounds: “free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool” don’t need to use IAP as long as the apps themselves don’t offer purchases, and as long as the apps themselves don’t ask users to make purchases outside the app.
apple pay is not the same as Apple's In App Purchases on iOS.
Apple pay is like a credit card, usable like one. IAP is the method by which apple forces app developers who sell through their app to pay the apple tax.
They might try to force developers to offer Apple IAP as an option for centralized in app purchases. I don't think they can enforce the default setting though.
And developers will have the right to offer a cheaper non-centralized in-house IAP payment system, of course.
> Besides, isn't the competition here what we want?
Depends what you mean. The subtlety that is always lost in these conversation on HN is how deep does the competition have to go? I don't think anyone seriously argues that iPhones do not have viable competition in the smartphone market. And yet, if I as a consumer want to use a smartphone which places strong restrictions on third-party developers (which is one of the most significant reason I use iPhones and recommend them to friends and family), somehow those restrictions are considered "anti-competitive." If these restrictions are lifted or prohibited, that clearly removes one of the key differences between iPhones and their competitors (mostly Android phones), and it baffles me that this could be construed as a more competitive smartphone market for consumers.
> which places strong restrictions on third-party developers
Malware isn't under the probe here; IAP is. Apple's behavior has been objectively awful specifically concerning the subject being discussed. Broadening the argument to Apple's desirable curation process is a misrepresentation of the issue.
People will continue to be able to enjoy the convenience of Apple IAP. Savvy users might seek better prices externally - but convenience does hold immense value. Developers can now also, as a pertinent example, ask for donations for open source projects without being taken down.
Malware was absolutely under probe here until today’s ruling (which closed the door to forcing Apple to allow sideloading).
Had third party app stores/sideloading been allowed to happen as epic demanded, that would have made it impossible for any app sufficiently large enough to demand it from their users.
The risk here was very much a return to the Google/FB “gift cards for root access” scheme, minus the gift cards of course, if they had prevailed they would have just blocked web access to iOS and just demanded you root yourself for them if you want to use their service.
On the other hand if we had sideloading, we could finally get a browser on iOS that isn’t just Safari reskinned.
Mayne then we would have PWAs that work the same way everywhere.
The existence of competition might even motivate Apple themselves to adopting new video codecs and image formats that weren’t invented inside of Apple Hq.
Go buy a different phone. No one is forcing you to support Apple, and if you already use Android, get off your high horse and stop screwing with a product I like and you don’t.
> The risk here was very much a return to the Google/FB
Only Google?[1]
In addition, there's a very steep slippery slope in use here. It is currently possible to sideload on Android, and has been since day one, and yet we don't see the kind of end result you have predicted.
Apple Pay charges the banks a percentage per transaction on the credit card, despite not taking absolutely any of the risk in that operation. Plus a quarterly fee per card.
Do you think the banks are going to foot that bill? Of course not: it's us, the consumers.
Are you willing to have everything be a bit more expensive, for everyone, so that you, apple users, can have something a tiny bit more convenient?
Isn't that how any convenience works? Credit cards already increased the price of everything for the convenience of using credit cards, as an example. I'm old enough to remember there was once one price for cash, and another for credit cards.
> I'm old enough to remember there was once one price for cash, and another for credit cards.
Some businesses in my town still do this. When I see it, the only thing I think is "they must be committing light tax fraud". Maybe it's wrong, but I know what merchants pay for CC transactions and it doesn't justify the whining from business owners who have been accepting cards for decades and suddenly decided CC transactions were unprofitable because business is slumping /rant.
It is not tax fraud [1]. Merchants are violating the terms of CC provider. The merchant agreement explicitly forbids merchants to have different cash price from what is charge with the card.
It is fairly common in geographies where CC providers can't litigate/enforce easily . It is not a penal crime, only a contract violation between two private parties and settled in arbitration/civil courts .
[1] Such Merchants also may commit tax fraud if they don't declare the cash income for tax purposes, that however is not directly related to Credit Cards or payment medium and usually even if they do commit tax fraud, they don't pass on their tax benefits for GST/VAT or Income Tax (10+% in most countries) to the customer.
Not sure about other countries, but in the US, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2011) ensures that merchants are allowed to offer cash discounts.
> A PCN cannot stop you from offering your customers a discount or another incentive for using a certain method of payment, as long as you offer it to all your customers and disclose the offer clearly and conspicuously. For example, you can offer your customers a discount or a coupon if they pay with cash or a debit card rather than a credit card.
Correct- it is 0.15% on credit card transactions, or a flat $0.005 per debit card transaction.
Stripe (which charges 2.9% + $0.30) is willing to eat this fee, presumably because of the benefits of vastly lower fraudulent transactions and chargebacks.
As a user, I have zero desire to use some random payment gateway, using Apple makes my life easier, I can reasonably trust Apple not to let someone steal my money, how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?
Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see the ruling as forcing Apple to lose money.
If I were Apple, I would have gone nuclear early on, and eliminated all % fees but made the annual fee per app of $X to each developer (whatever $ makes sense) and then you can collect money however you want. This would likely kill a lot of small app developers, but the big ones would not care. The ruling makes Epic a big winner, but everyone else loses in the long run, because Apple (and Google) will find a way to recover lost revenue.
Some people also want to have 1000 app stores allowed. Good luck with that one... imagine having to build an app store just for your app, or supporting 25 different app stores.
My concern is less about random one-off purchases but more the management of on-going subscriptions. Having Apple handle that, is a blessing, from a user perspective. I have a single place to manage all the random $1 - $10 subscriptions that I have, making it easy to change/cancel at any moment's notice, and from any device.
What is to stop you from searching for services that still let you use Apple Pay? No one is stopping you from living in your tight-knit Apple world, but you seem discontent with the idea that people will no longer have to live there and would rather find ways to force them to stay there with you.
I don't think there's anything in this injunction that stops Apple from building a mandatory subscription-cancelling API, which I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually already working on due to earlier rulings this month. In other words, you might be able to subscribe to FooCalendar using their Stripe API system, but FooCo has to make sure that your FooCalendar subscription shows up in your list of subscriptions, maybe under a "Non-Apple Subscriptions" list, that still lets you cancel with one tap -- or at least one tap to take you to that app's subscription management page.
(I'm sure there will be some people upset at that kind of interfering overreach, but it's the kind of interfering overreach most of us would actually like.)
Why would Apple make and provide something like that? They won't get anything for providing such an API to make the billing experience nicer for their competitors. It's directly in their interest to have as many scam billing providers as possible so they can point at them and tell us that this is what they protecting us from.
Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?
At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning signs that all is not well.
Honestly in some cases, yes. Subscription in-app purchases are the only subscriptions I have ever signed up for that are easy to cancel.
I prefer to subscribe to services through in-app purchases over the service's website itself because it's always easy to cancel subscriptions made through Apple, and I never forget I'm getting charged because I get payment receipts.
There’s tons of value in a unified payment system, which is why it’s app developers who were unhappy, not users. For instance, ease of cancellation of recurring fees is enormous. You can bet that’s going to get harder as developers get more control. And anyway, The app developers have no motivation to charge you less, the market already bears the fees, they just want to capture that profit for themselves.
Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system, but I don’t play mobile games so I’m probably not representative of who this impacts the most.
> which is why it’s app developers who were unhappy, not users
The judge commented on that
>> "Apple created an innovative platform but it did not disclose its rules to the average consumer. Apple has used this lack of knowledge to exploit its position.
---
> Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system
You, as a consumer, will now have a choice, which you'll get to exercise! You will be able to send a market signal for products (either the service you might subscribe to, and Apple) to get better and attract more developers/users. This sounds like a win!
Not if I wasn't interested in having the choice to begin with. Now some apps will not be purchasable by me unless I go through their account flow, which I don't want to. It's strictly worse (for me).
There will be larger players who won't bother with any cut -- they want to own the relationship with the customer, and view any intermediary with hostility.
What big names haven't developed iOS apps but may do so now? I'm hard pressed to think of any. They may not always allow in-app purchases, of course, but they generally exist.
They’re either already not on Apple’s IAP (Netflix or Spotify) or they are very sensitive to optimising conversions, and would pay a premium to give users an easier option (which Apple is now incentivised to lower)
No one wants to own the payment instrument. That's useless, causes missed sales, and is a security nightmare. Companies don't reinvent their own Visa or Mastercard, for example, because that's a huge pain and the fees for using the existing products are low.
App developers were mad about Apple's egregious 30% cut for doing payment processing. If Apple wants everyone to accept Apple IAP, it can simply lower its fees to competitive payment processing rates.
> App developers were mad about Apple's egregious 30% cut for doing payment processing. If Apple wants everyone to accept Apple IAP, it can simply lower its fees to competitive payment processing rates.
Apple has never characterized the 30% as "payment processing" -- it's it's always characterized it as a commission, which the court affirmed and explicitly mentioned that Apple is allowed to pursue that commission, even if the developer chose to use another payment provider. Apple's IAP has been an enforcement mechanism for that 30% cut.
It's not guaranteed, but one realistic outcome is that its IAP services get worse, because e.g. automatically saying yes to all refund requests is less feasible when margins are thinner. Retailers like large supermarket chains are only able to have no-questions-asked refund policies because nobody is actually taking a bad box of cereal back to a store, but in digital, it might too easy right now for a 3% cut + absorbing chargebacks to be sustainable. Similarly, having cancellation be one-click and done is great for the consumer but if you're in the razor thin margins game unfortunately making unsubscribing difficult is a competitive edge.
IAPs are only indirectly a product that app customers get a choice in; the primary customer is app developers who have vastly different interests. There may have to be a shift on some of these axes for Apple to compete on price.
I trust Apple will force developers to provide a drop down menu of options for payments. I don't think they'll allow dodgy redirects and webviews. That's not in line with Apple's design principles.
I already had a choice. That’s one of the primary reasons I chose iPhone and tend to recommend iPhones to friends and family. This decision will by definition reduce the amount of choice available to smartphone buyers.
I highly doubt every, or even many mobile game devs who could suddenly switch from IAP to Stripe would pass those savings on to the consumers... Let's be real here.
That’s getting into pretty basic economic theory, costs going down across the board in a very competitive market will generally bring down prices, eventually.
I think if you offered the two options to users with even partial differences in price, most users would go for the cheaper option even if they had to do cartwheels to process payments.
> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?
Honestly, yeah. I'm way more likely to click "subscribe at $5/mo using your normal payment flow" than go through a whole new account creation flow and wonder how cancellation will work somehow down the line or how trustworthy this vendor is with my data.
I would. I'm very careful about what I pay for anyway. If you want me to pay for your product it needs to be something that brings me real value. Even then I limit myself, as I only have a certain amount to spend anyway, so you're competing with other products for my limited amount of budget.
Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service. It's consistent as well, which means I don't have to keep hunting through your site to find it because you hid the location of canceling behind "Please contact us to cancel" type crap.
Do I think Apple is charging too much for their cut? Yea, I do. But as a consumer, the benefits outweigh it. As a potential business owner, yea... I would be upset too.
The ability to simply cancel any subscription without clicking through increasingly desperate "Don't go!!!" nag screens is easily worth an extra 30% for me, too.
Yup. As a consumer, Apple's IAP and Apple Pay driven experience is pretty darn good. I wish their business didn't revolve around subscriptions as much, but at the very least it does make purchasing really easy as a consumer.
> This means that competition is working, because you would choose apple's IAP, over the third party, even if it was more expensive.
Aren't you heavily assuming these developers would even bother integrating apple's IAP? This ruling will allow the developers to completely go around apple and never use apple's IAP at all.
>Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service.
This doesn't require Apple's payment monopoly. IAP would just need to make an API call to some 3rd party API. Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?
> Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?
This does not get you out of your contractual obligation to pay, if you have one. You could end up getting an annoying surprise from a debt collection agency a few years down the road. An important thing that Apple was able to provide that a credit card processor suspending payment can’t is to force the vendor to let you actually cancel the subscription, not just the payment.
Apple can't remove contractual obligations either. Any subscription which requires serious amount of money (enough to make a lawsuit worthwhile) should be very carefully managed.
Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.
> Apple can't remove contractual obligations either.
They can’t remove them, but they can prevent them from existing in the first place. It’s their platform, and they can and do make it a requirement that the app vendor’s subscription contract conform to a standard where ending the subscription from within Apple’s subscription management UI actually terminates all future obligations for the customer. This is why many subscriptions that are otherwise quite hard to end and involve deliberate inconveniences like requiring calling in during business hours can just be cancelled from the subscription page if they were started via the app.
> Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.
This is just not correct. Vendors do this all the time, credit companies don’t care and have no policies against it, since it’s the customer’s responsibility to have a legal justification to tell the credit company to refuse charges, and the PR blowback is demonstrably nonexistent.
Some of the services I pay via Apple's subscription workflow is cheaper. Unbelievable, but true. Pocket is one, Evernote is other. However, they later synchronized their pricing to be cheaper everywhere, but it doesn't matter. It makes my life easier.
If I'm paying for a cross-platform service, I can happily use their own methods, but if I'm paying for an app-store only application which either runs only on iOS or macOS, good luck to them. I won't subscribe via their methods, because it makes my life more complicated.
> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway?
This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing. The iOS App Store is filled with cheap apps, to the point where many people react to a one-time price of $9.99 as disturbingly expensive. Apps and games that are literally identical on iOS to other platforms are frequently cheaper in their iOS releases because that's what the market expects. So in practice, the 30% cost is usually being eaten by developers, not passed on to consumers. There's a lot of good arguments to be made for cutting that 30% share down to 15% for everyone across the board, but "now you'll only be charged $4.99 instead of $5.99 for this game you would have paid $14.99 for on the Switch version" just isn't one of them.
> This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing.
It's not an argument, it's a question. Some people have clearly answered it as yes, yes they would. This shows some distinct value provided to them by Apple. Value that's worth something, though perhaps not 30%.
Apple's next step is to provide a compelling enough offering that developers and consumers alike pick it over the soon-to-be competing offerings. Wouldn't that be awesome if they pull it off?
> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything
This makes what is, IMO, an unjustified assumption: that competition in the payment scene will drive prices down for the same item based on payment method.
Instead, I think we'll see the same thing we see with the cash/credit card split: The same price regardless of your payment method, with price differences lining the publisher's pockets.
True that cheaper payment methods may not drive down the price of an app or in-app transactions. But as a user, you would be more satisfied knowing that that the $10 you are paying for an app (or for some transaction within it) is going to the creator of the app, rather than some arbitrary percentage (decided by Apple) of your money. As a user, you would even feel worse knowing that Apple simply pockets the remaining amount.
Yes, if it saves me from having to call to cancel my subscription or going through a bunch of weird "are you sure", "how about 2% off", "how about 5% off", "how about we bill you $5 less", "why do you not like us? Fill out this 75 question survey to cancel". Yes it does.
>Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?
Most in-App purchases are in the range of 1-5$. If I pay a couple of cents more to have a unified experience, yeah sure.
It'd be interesting to see how much users spend on in-App purchases. For me it's almost nothing, maybe 1 purchase a year? The big money is probably in the free2play market where players spend a lot to buy booster packs or "gold".
There this weird misconception floating around the topic that if Apple where to reduce their cut, things would be cheaper for people, conveniently forgetting this is a fight between providers and distributor for margins and not between consumers and sellers for pricing.
> As a user, I have zero desire to use some random payment gateway, using Apple makes my life easier, I can reasonably trust Apple not to let someone steal my money, how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?
I think this is a fair argument, and I believe also shows that if options are available, that is where us as a consumer have our freedom. I also personally like the ability to quickly pay when needed for things using Apple, but in return - if I was able to pay for it because another offer, or option, or something was presented to me that was easier, I would totally take that that too. However, I can see how that would be a loss for the people writing and maintaining the app and the associated services.
The problem I see is that this swinging at the moment between a single payment gateway and every payment gateway out there is a huge pendulum that is swinging to the extremes of both, neither side actually gets anything good out of it.
It would be lovely in a world where the option was to use Apple + an external, and letting users decide what they feel safe with. Some will be happy going direct with Apple, some would be happier with <insert payment style here>.
I think it is mentioned below, I can see larger companies immediately dropping the Apple method because it loses them the extra profit, and just making the ecosystem harder. People lose faith in paying for services, and then another service comes along, charging 30%, and we are back where we started.
So yeah, IMHO, it is good it is being recognised, but at the same time, its going to be a bumpy ride.
I think what it will eventually turn out to be is - Apple will require IAP/Storekit but will be forced to allow others. And you will see something like this - $10 - Pay by Apple, $8 Pay via Amazon/Google/Whoever big name enters this business, $7 pay by credit card directly. And you can chose if you need Apple's unsubscribe, want to trust Amazon for $2 discount, or want to get a further $1 discount by entering your credit card number and risking doing a chargeback in the future if the developer is really crappy.
Eventually Apple will get down to make the Amazon not turn profit out of iOS IAP and then you will be left with two choices.
> how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways?
It's your government's job to make sure that you have faith in financial institutions and trust the infrastructure through which financial transactions happen.
If not, corporates like Apple will continue to exploit your misplaced trust by charging you 30% - 50% on every transaction. The solution isn't Apple or Google or some other corporate, but your government and better regulations.
HN libertarians: “This isn’t the right approach! You need government regulation!”
Everyone: so could I get some regulation on [literally any exploitative startup practice”
HN, creepy smiling face: “haha eat shit”
The reaction to GDPR, or the Cali privacy law, or the Uber employee classification, or literally any other regulation* shows how hollow those words are. When anyone tries to regulate these sorts of things you’ll shriek like a banshee about how unfair these regulations are.
No, and it wasn’t meant to. It was meant to let companies keep more and give Apple less. That’s all.
In all likely hood things will get worse for consumers. I will definite not buy apps requiring custom payment platforms. Hopefully it’ll settle on stripe companies will offer multiple payment methods rather than trying to force their own.
I look forward to it making Apple lower its IAP fees for everyone. I’d still like to use their infrastructure, but without the enormous fees (15% for small devs is still huge).
The win would be that you're actually able to sign up for more things in the iOS ecosystem that you previously weren't able to, like Netflix or Spotify.
How many developers do you have already, that 35% more money would let you hire 4 more? Back-of-the-envelope calculation says you've got 7, does that match up?
It’s more about what our annual app fees to Apple are, 1.2mm. We have diverse revenue streams so the correlation between Apple revenue and salaries isn’t apparent.
Uh, if the correlation between Apple revenue and salaries isn’t apparent, then how are you sure Apple dropping their take will provide you with 4 new salaries?
Sorry I might have been confusing you, I was only referencing the reverse calculation of current mobile devs on team. We would hire four people, maybe five, and distribute some to mobile some to backend.
I would absolutely take all the savings from the fee drop and hire as many people as it allowed, napkin calculations says that’s between four and five for me.
It would be hilarious if the end result was iOS users no longer being as valuable to app developers, if the ecosystem just starts to feel sketchy and people stop spending as freely on it. I don’t think it’s likely, but it feels plausible enough to lol at the idea.
This doesn’t stop Apple from controlling which apps can be installed. It stops them from using a link to external payment as a criterion.
I do think this will have some effect that you describe (e.g. perhaps Epic suffers a breach in their payment system) on the end user side but it’s not as bad as the android store situation. if anything it will make iOS users more attractive to devs as they can now keep a larger percentage of IAP sales.
But when IAP costs less than 30% I expect all paid apps to go the IAP route.
It feels ironic to ask customers to bear the burden to make big companies behave, in a thread about a court ruling regulating anti-competitive behavior.
the burden has always been with the customer. But the fact that apple had been able to mandate the use of their IAP means the customer could not have exercised this "burden" until now!
Customer rights are always balanced with corporate rights, and laws and rules are there to assure neither customers nor corporations act in detrimental ways to society.
Customers can choose what they want to succeed, but none of the choices should have strong moral implications. I shouldn’t have to choose between destroying the env. or not, or support crushing rival businesses or workers rights or not, etc.
So no, I don’t think it’s customers burden to have companies behave. Except if by “burden” you mean suing the companies collectively.
I think it will ultimately boil down to 2-3 major payment gateways such as Stripe after initial chaotic 'every app trying to be force their own payment processor' phase
> Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
this is not an unresolvable issue though. Apple could force developers to make their payment option as the default payment option similar to how they forced devs to use Sign in with Apple (when they have third party login). Big companies like PayPal could provide an SDK which can be used by devs to complete trasaction similar to web. I could think of many more ways to solve this issue.
As a Developer, I also don't look forward for integrating 50 frameworks for payment, deal with the limitations of each and every one and go through the bureaucracy of 180 countries for export compliance and taxes.
When you sell something through Apple, depending on the location of your user, Apple will act as Agent or as a Commissionaire. This makes everything easy, even for a solo developer. Sold an in-game coins in France? Apple collected the money, paid the VAT to the French government. If you do this through your own means, you will need to establish a relationship with the French government so that you can pay them the VAT that you have to collect from your users.
This will ultimately benefit large companies who can jump through the hops of managing all this, putting the independent developers in a disadvantaged position due to the high barrier of entry into improved margin(compared to Apple Store where everyone gets the same cut) payments. In some places you can be required to send a printed receipt to the user.
It would not be fun to watch, let's say Zynga, collecting their low cost payments across all their portfolio by making users sign up once and having indie games instantly losing a payment or falling back to high commission options because users are tired of entering payment info for each game.
Sad day for the little guy. Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission or is it Epic, Netflix, Spotify who will benefit from this? Unless you do low margin commission work (like platform where you take a cut, i.e. online tutoring) the %30 commission is a non issue.
Game crystals don't really have a cost, so %5 cut or %30 cut doesn't really matter that much. However, one company having access to the %5 and other not having access to it will change the landscape because the large company will be able to advertise more thanks to its better margins, wiping out the rest.
I'd be stunned if everyone starts using niche payment providers. I think it's more likely the larger providers will step up. It'll be more along the lines of:
Pay With --- Apple IAP ($1.43) - Stripe IAP ($1.06) - Paypal IAP ($1.06)
That's also why Epic is disappointed. If Apple were forced to allow competing app stores, Epic is in a perfect position. They have app store tech with payments, commissions, etc. built in. If Apple's only forced to allow competing payment providers to become more prevalent, everyone thinks of Stripe, Paypal, etc. first. Epic probably has their own payment processing fees to cover, so they'll never be able to compete on price and that's where things are heading IMO.
I think it would be more like Apple IAP($1.43), Your Local payment($1.43), Paypal($1.43).
They will add something like a bonus if you choose the alternative ones. I'm baffled why people expect that the margin will go to the user. Do you think that Epic sued Apple because altruism? To help users save money? They are are after the margins.
Because of the "Your Local payment" option, binary sizes will grow(Uber has this problem, they need to ship the framework of numerous payment providers on every market) or you will start maintaining different binaries for each country.
Also, each payment provider will come with its own rules. One will say "this is too close to gambling, no unless put this text next to the price to clarify" the other will be like "is this related to crypto, you can't do that", the next one will be "I think you must provide 3 months refund guarantee. Also, coins allowed boxes not allowed".
Then you will have to do the legal work for each country separately or work with publishers who do that for you for a hefty cut.
The business side of things is a full time job. That's why when you publish a book or release a song you tend to get tiny amount of the price payed.
I am afraid, this fragmentation has the potential to turn the App&Game business into Books&Music business where you don't make money unless you are superstar.
When costs go down, and profit margin increases, the price point where a company can achieve maximum profit also goes down. This doesn't require altruism or stunts or a fixed profit rate.
Is there anything in the ruling that prevents Apple from requiring all prices be the same or preventing companies from providing extra "value" if their payment processor is utilized?
You make It sound like apple's service will disappear over night. If you're fine with them taking 30% then that's your choice. And if your app does become big enough to reap the benefits of implementing mutiple payment providers then thats even better.
It doesn't work like that. Friction destroys revenues, large companies can remove friction by having their portfolio of users with credit cards collected. Small devs cannot do that because the user will need to enter payment details each time. The best chance would be to use something like Paypal, which is again a huge friction since the user will need to switch apps or enter login information.
As a result, unless you are a huge publisher you don't actually have a realistic chance to sell over alternate low-cost methods. This is not because you can't put the code there but because it will make the user experience so bad that a fraction of your users will proceed.
It's not about being technically possible but it's about being feasible. It doesn't matter that you can technically do it if not enough people want to play along and deal with it.
Maybe I wasn't clear. The problem is that smaller developers will not have access to the same frictionless services anymore. 180 million people have an account with Epic, who knows how many of them have already provided the CC.
If you are an indie, you don't have access to the 180 million people, which creates uneven competition.
When the only payment in town is Apple IAP, you and Epic have the same margin. Suddenly, Epic has %28 more margin with at about the same level of friction. If you need to match Epic's margin, you need to introduce friction.
Are there App devs on this site anymore? It feels like arguing with people who have no idea.
> will not have access to the same frictionless services anymore.
Yes they will... They will have access to same exact Apple In App Purchases feature that they had before.
> Suddenly, Epic has %28 more margin
Ok, so then it is not about you having access to the exact same thing that you had before.
Instead, it is that other developers, have more money, and don't have to pay an Apple fee.
Thats pretty different.
You are not complaining about losing something. Instead, you are complaining that other developers, have to pay a lower fee than they had before. But you still have exactly the same thing as you had before.
Generally speaking, lowering costs are not something to complain about.
Large corporations not paying taxes is bad, because it means society has less money to pay for things.
That is very different from companies paying less money to a multi trillion dollar company. Companies paying less to a multi trillion dollar company is a good thing.
It is dishonest to equate that to necessary government services being underfunded.
Lower costs are good. So no, I reject that this is bad for small developers.
It is most bad for apple, as they get less money.
> Tough luck
There is no tough luck. Smaller developers can continue to pay the same amount as they were paying before.
They are not disadvantaged by it, as they get access to the same deals that they had in the past.
The only different is that now, some companies, have the ability of no longer having to pay large amounts of money to a multi-trillion dollar company (apple).
That is a win.
The fact that less companies have to pay many millions and millions of dollars, to one of the most valuable companies in the world, is a win.
And small companies, still have access to the same exact programs that they had before.
> As a Developer, I also don't look forward for integrating 50 frameworks for payment, deal with the limitations of each and every one and go through the bureaucracy of 180 countries for export compliance and taxes.
It sounds like you should be using some kind of service that does that for you, maybe even provided by Apple?
> Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission
Independent devs seemed pretty happy overall with the 15% concession they already got as a result of the legal scrutiny on Apple. No doubt they'll enjoy further improvements to the terms once there is an actual threat of switching.
The point is not that smaller devs like to pay more, the point is that smaller devs would like to compete on even playing field.
The lower the commission, the better. That should be obvious, but it is not better if it comes at cost that is potentially much higher than the reduction of commission.
When Apple announced it was introducing intentional security vulnerabilities to their Apple Pay platforms last month that was the signal that they were done trying to be a bank. I wonder if that decision was made knowing the likely outcome and downstream results of this case.
I think the judge didn’t specify how equal access needs to be given to alternatives means of payments. It’s very straightforward to design a payments SDK where card data gets stored on the phone and payment providers are forced to use that SDK so that all of them would absolutely the same experience as Apple pay. You can even force them to provide subscription cancellation like Apple does. But Apple wants you to believe that’s not possible, so probably they won’t do it.
The most likely move here is that Apple forces developers to put a drop down of payment options, with Apple Pay being the default. Same way Google did when Android was forced to offer a choice of default search engines
>I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have gotten greedy...
This is the problem with major companies that think they can just control everything. Then when the government steps in they say what they were doing is anti-competitive and suddenly the consumers now have to bear the brunt of the negative aspect of full on competition. Had Apple just been reasonable and not charged egregious fees from the get go, this wouldn't have been an issue.
I'd prefer allowing apple to do whatever they want in their appstore, and forcing them to accept third party app installation, including alternative stores
> Notably, the judge rejected both parties’ definition of the marketplace at issue in the case. “The relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store,” Gonzalez-Rogers wrote.
I guess the question is does Mobile gaming cover handheld game device like Switch? If so, it may impact Steam Deck as well.
Steam does have rules about it, but they are not strictly enforced. If your game have it's own backend / website then you can freely bill people there after you onboarded them via Steam.
IAPs are different: here Valve actually require you to process payments through steam when game is running via Steam. But even in this case a lot of games can be launched independently after installation through Steam.
Also on top of this Valve already decreased it's comission from 30% for large publishers.
It's hard to draw parallels to Steam, because this case was about iPhone + App Store, not just the App Store itself.
If you don't want to pay Steam's cut, or follow their restrictions you have plenty of other options. You are not restricted in the sense you are with iPhone + App Store.
Should apple appeal this? Is it really worth further damage?
It turns out the little guys were right all along. It's surprising that it took legal action for apple to realize that, when you invite millions of third parties in your marketplace, you should treat them with some respect. And when this leads to prices of purchases going down, how are people going to keep justifying apple's position.
I think the biggest win is that micropayment services will grow which is good for all developers (not just in iOS)
The ruling could cost them billions of dollars in revenue. It's absolutely worth appealing. Even if they lose in the long run, they'll make a few billion more in the mean time.
how many billions? It seems their max app gaming revenue lost would be 64 * 70% * 30% = 13.4B for 2021 , but it's probably a lot smaller due to special deals, and also this would assume they would lose ALL the revenue. In reality they'd lose about,maybe ~$3B ?
The alternative would alienate some of their best developers -- who knows, maybe they'd leave?
This will certainly get appealed and bogged down even more in the legal system, right? What are the chances this actually happens? And when?
Secondly, this is such an easy way to increase your take by 20+% that I would imagine almost every publisher is going to be offering their own payments platform, not just the biggest ones like Epic.
Why would the app store model stop working? Paying through the app store has a direct benefit to usability. Before in app purchases the app store model worked fine.
Even if the Epic lawsuit goes completely off the rails and Apple is forced to allow external app stores on iOS, they can still maintain a profitable app store if they provide the best experience to end users. Building an app store is very hard, and convincing people to install an alternative store is even harder, so I doubt they'll lose much there.
The app store is so ludicrously profitable that the exclusivity they enjoy can't possibly be the only reason it's making them money. This cut into Apple's (and Google's) profits, but it certainly won't mean the end of app stores as we know them.
> if they provide the best experience to end users
I don't think they can. Their DNA on this evolved as a monopoly. They won't be able to compete, they will be slow and boring while clever people will overpower them.
I think they will find a way. The Mac App Store is far from a monopoly yet it still remains profitable as far as I know.
My grandma isn't going to use any alternative store, she probably doesn't even understand the concept of different app stores. I think Apple will be fine, at least until competitors somehow gain a MASSIVE usability advantage.
It doesn't kill it much more then it killed the android store in the past when it wasn't (roughly, in practice) enforcing the same thing.
It's a revenue cut, but at least for the beginning it won't be a problem at all for apple, this might change at some point, but stocks have no reason to majorly drop now they still can do so in the future if it makes sense.
It will be interesting to see how many small companies figure out that tax and general compliance is worth every penny that Apple charges them. Smart ones will opt for a seller of record approach, but many will get burnt.
Stripe provides a lot of tooling ( more than apple) for compliance. Apple is hardly the only payment provider which simplifies payment processing for small developers.
"Tooling for compliance" sounds a hell of a lot more complicated than "you sell my app and send me a check", which is the deal on the App Store, Steam, etc.
Finance and compliance is lot more complicated than send me a Cheque for most businesses.
Stripe ( and others) have products right from incorporation (Atlas?), identity verification, custom reporting, fraud/risk, Charge backs, Tax reporting/ filing and even PoS terminals etc.
Most businesses have to deal with multiple channels (Android, web, iOS and others), custom reporting, and different risk/compliance will need solutions well beyond what Apple is offering
All apps; the language in the ruling against Apple is:
>>
permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app.
This is somewhat surprising to me. I thought Epic had a reasonable chance of getting an eventual win on some points, or in getting enough attention that regulators stepped in. I also thought Apple had a pretty decent chance of winning.
But I did not think that Epic had a particularly strong chance of getting an injunction like this.
I hope that the takeaway people take from this is "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case", and not, "the judge was always obviously going to issue this injunction." I still personally think knowing what I know now, if I went back to the start of this case I still wouldn't be able to confidently predict this injunction.
But maybe other people are better at reading court signals than I am.
I did follow the trial, and actually probably commented on that exact compromise hint at the time (although I'd need to look over my comment history to know for sure).
I didn't read a "compromise" as indicating that an injunction was particularly likely, and most of the commentary I read on HN at that time didn't read it that way either.
I think people are looking back with the benefit of hindsight at something that was not by any means a generally assumed outcome, even from people who were covering and talking about the trial on HN itself or on other social media sites I followed.
A hint that the judge is curious about finding middle grounds in a lawsuit is definitely not a promise of a permanent injunction.
Something that I like to do, when discussing these issues with people, is get the other person to commit to a position, ahead of time, and go back to those comments later to see who was right.
I had multiple discussions, with many commenters on hacker news, where people were way too certain about the court case, when clearly it could have gone many different ways (Thus, I agree with you that "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case" ).
Great news for mobile developers (and for Stripe). Everyone doing in-app purchases has a huge incentive to quickly find some drop-in replacement that charges 3% instead of 30%.
I would be surprised if Apple ends up keeping the fee at 30%. If this injunction holds up, I think they will drop it within the year.
Apple isn’t required to reinstate Epic, and it actually also enforces damages for the breach of contract during the time when Epic was stiffing Apple for the fees.
Despite a lot of reporting about how this is some big win for Epic, the court is siding with Apple there, the ruling is Epic was in the wrong (breach of contract) and needs to pay up, and if Apple decides they don’t want to do further business with epic then oh well, “play stupid games…”
Next time you want to try and negotiate a lower contract rate, don’t breach a legal and valid contract and then try to use the courts to do your dirty work. The courts are not your sales rep.
But since Apple is known to refuse store submissions for opaque reasons, what would stop them from retaliating against apps that provide links to external payment processors with vague unrelated reasons? I would not put that past them.
Also, I hope the anti-monopoly part gets picked up at the federal level; no one can deny Apple & Google are de-facto duopoly.
It's possible but it will be hard to get away. If there's an official policy to do it, there might be whistleblowers or people might notice patterns. If that happens, courts tend to take a very dim view of what they see as intentional retaliation or creative workarounds to not follow the court orders. The court might first tell Tim Cook to appear in court to answer what exactly happened and who decided to do it.
Afaik they cannot ignore a ruling. And they don't need 30% fees for maintaining IOS ecosystem - when you buy an apple phone for $1000, you pay Apple enough for it to maintain its AppStore.
Also they earn money from AppStore advertising (which apps out of the millions should the small screen show); so maintaining AppStore should not be a problem.
Because that’s not how the law works. Sure, they can technically ignore the ruling, but they’re opening themselves up to a whole host of lawsuits, and any judge in those lawsuits would not look favorably on Apple.
This doesn't apply in this case because Apple is not stupid. They are not gonna ignore a court ruling because it will land their execs in jail.
Rather than that, they will use legal means such as appealing the ruling. They are a 2T$ company, and they will try their best to use their money to change this decision in their favor.
"Apple must allow the use of third party payment processors" does not mean "Apple cannot enforce any other rules against apps using third party payment processors". If they decide to go on a harassment campaign of petty violations against third party payment using apps or put undue requirements on them, those parties can complain to the courts and likely succeed. If the third party payment provider is stealing credit cards or obviously malicious behavior in some other area, Apple would likely prevail when pointing to that as the reason they banned them.
> What's the penalty for Apple just ignoring this ruling, if any?
In addition to whatever penalties are available in law for the act outside of the ruling, they would also face additional consequences for contempt of court. And its generally easier to prove a violation of the order than a violation of the law justifying the order.
>If any part of this Order is violated by any party named herein or any other person, plaintiff may, by motion with notice to the attorneys for defendant, apply for sanctions or other relief that may be appropriate.
The penalty for contempt of court is often incarceration. Note that the order enjoins not just Apple the corporation but also Apple's officers. It would be highly unusual for the CEO of a major corporation to openly and defiantly flout a court order, but if it happens, he can expect to be arrested for contempt.
Hopefully this will eventually lead to a day where users once again have full control over their devices. Android is a bit better, even if alternate app stores don't have the same system privileges as Google Play, but Apple devices are wholly authoritarian in what you can run on a device you supposedly own.
Freedom is not a boolean, it is a scale and google offers more than apple at the moment.
Ironically the pixel devices are one of the few where bootloaders are unlocked in the US and you can flash a customer google free rom.
Assuming there is no hardware based surveillance this is as close to free as we can get at the moment.
It's a case of choosing how you lose. Android certainly is more open and free in terms of what you can do with it, but you become Google's product and they will mine all meaningful data from your interactions.
What would be swell is an open device you fully control which doesn't spy on you. Turns out that cuts off most of the ways to make big bucks.
You can basically have this today - you might have to give up a few niceties, but if you don't rely on anything too fancy, Lineage + F-Droid, with optional MicroG will generally do the trick for most apps.
Gotta be a bit of tinkerer to set that one up though, not something for grandma.
If she had an iPhone, how many paid apps or in-app purchases was Grandma going to make anyway? Probably none.
Heck, I'm a developer and tech enthusiast that owns numerous Apple devices, and I honestly can't remember the last time I made a financial transaction through the iOS App Store or IAP.
> n the counterclaim, in favor of Apple on the counterclaim for breach of contract. Epic Games shall pay (1) damages in an amount equal to (i) 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic Games collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Epic Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus (ii) 30% of any such revenue Epic Games collected from November 1, 2020 through the date of judgment, and interest according to law.
> On the counterclaim, in favor of Apple on the counterclaim for breach of contract. Epic Games shall pay (1) damages in an amount equal to (i) 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic Games collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Epic Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus (ii) 30% of any such revenue Epic Games collected from November 1, 2020 through the date of judgment, and interest according to law.
What do you think is unjustified here? The 30% is literally the money they collected while breaching their contract, that was money Epic agreed to pay Apple and Apple is rightfully owed.
The big picture here is that Epic lost the case - they were ruled to be in clear breach of contract and Apple was determined to not have acted anticompetitively except in one specific respect (the anti-steering clause).
Epic gets no third party App Store - meaning ”platform” app stores are not anticompetitive, a ruling that 30% app store fees are not anticompetitive, a ruling that Epic still owes the money during the time when they were knowingly and willfully breaching their contract, a ruling that they have to pay apple’s lawyers for the frivolous suit, and no requirement for Apple to reinstate Epic’s account after all these shenanigans.
Oh yeah and anti-steering clauses are probably illegal. Big win for Epic there.
Despite newspapers racing to frame this as a big loss for Apple, it’s really Epic who lost here (and that’s why they get to pay the lawyers, pay the breach of contract, etc). It’s completely consistent with the rest of the ruling, because that’s what happens when you lose a suit.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadI’ll keep using apps and services that take funds via Apple Pay though. I trust Apple in this sense.
Not if it solely results in fragmentation. Having the choice between Ubisoft Connect, EA Origin, Steam and Battle.net isn't a "choice", it's just 4 different storefronts for me to manage credentials for.
There are always pros and cons.
Music streaming is a different ball game altogether; I have an actual choice here between Spotify and other providers. Yes there are some exclusives but for the most part I'm choosing based on the features they provide, brand loyalty, price, etc.
Games consoles are somewhere in between (largely due to the methods of funding video games) - you choose between Xbox or playstation (or Nintendo I guess) and get access to a wide range of games on your platform. Yes there are some exclusives (most of which are funded by the console maker and just wouldn't exist if it weren't for this), but by and large your choice is dictated "where are my friends", gamepass, price of console + services, brand loyalty.
This is going to end up like origin vs uplay vs battle.net, where you don't have a "choice" on where you play because there's no overlap, you just have to have axcpunts with them all and deal with all their individual crap, and shitty practices rather than just Apples
It's sometimes a win for customers.
[EDIT] trivial and clear illustrative case that should be easy to apply to murkier situations: a regulation that bans known poisons in food reduces choice.
[EDIT EDIT] more relevantly, and a bit tangentially to the example above: thanks to coordination problems it's possible for more-desirable states to be unmaintainable without reduction of choice—it's possible for someone's—even everyone's—favorite outcome to require a reduction of choice, and for that option to cease to be when more degrees of freedom are introduced.
tl;dr IAP DNE Pay
Bundling the OS with hardware
Enforcing an App store
Dictating/Castrating Browser on mobile
And the list goes on.
I'm not saying this as a ding on Apple products, because I genuinely appreciate them, but I think at the same time Apple has resorted to creating roadblocks rather than innovating.
Not just mobile, but iPad Pro and iPads too.
Anyway, "mobile" has long been used as a short form for "mobile phone" rather than a "mobile device". E.g. the iPod was not called a mobile, and AFAIK barely anyone uses that term for tablets.
PC based tablets are kind of weird, but iOS/Android mobile OS based tablets are more or less phones with big screens and no/limited calling features.
For many reasons, the vast majority of people stick with the OS a device ships with, and mobile OSes are directed towards app stores and limited filesystems, and desktop OSes are directed towards applications (with a side of app stores) and visible filesystems and what not.
You can run Android on a desktop PC, and you can (if you try really hard) run desktop Windows on a phone or a game console, but that's not how the devices are generally sold, and that's not how the devices are generally used. Apple sometimes claims their tablets are as useful as a computer running a desktop OS, but they don't provide Xcode for the iPad, do they?
Is this really an issue? I agree Apple has been pretty shady but this is a facet of any hardware you buy today from any manufacturer. Now, preventing/obfuscating the install of _other_ OS software, I agree, total bullshit.
Legally I don't think it is today though, and my understanding of the law is that it's precisely because they haven't advertised their hardware as open as you say.
NVIDIA isn’t morally opposed to Apple, it’s largely Apple that’s opposed to NVIDIA, for reasons like the cuda ecosystem and how it locks you into something that’s not an Apple product and how that would affect Apple’s leverage in future negotiations. Apple wears the pants, not their suppliers.
Isn’t it common sense to not buy a toaster expecting it to be a server even though they both have circuit boards and technically can both compute?
Still don’t get why don’t you just buy things that advertise the functionality you want.
As for your car question - why not? No one would buy such a crippled device. The problem would resolve itself.
If a car manufacturer sold a car without a steering wheel that self drove, perhaps people would buy the car in spite of the limitations. What they shouldn’t do, is buy a car advertised without a steering wheel and then complain that it doesn’t have one.
https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Cooking-R180-High-Speed-St...
I think market forces don't work well in cases where you have a lot of vertical integration, and increasing consolidation.
The "just don't buy it" argument only works in a competitive market with lots of offerings. What we have in the world of computers is more of a lesser-of-a-few-evils choice in virtually every technology choice.
The key here is control, not computational power. An ideal law, in my opinion, would be one which prohibits building and selling any device that can run code in a way which allows the manufacturer to have more control over it than the legal owner after the sale has been completed. I think this idea is actually great because it never limits how limited a device can be, it just prohibits it from being made in a way in which the OEM/maker can control it more than the end user/new owner could.
As an example, say you make a "smart toaster" with Wi-Fi and all that "good stuff" in it. If you just burn the firmware into the sillicon and that program has no way of updating itself, then you're good to go because both the company and the end user are stuck with the same level of control (In this context, "control" means "ability to make the computer parts run the code that you wish them to run")
If you include the firmware in a writable EEPROM, and no further checks for the update firmware besides checksums, you're also golden, because then both the new owner and you (OEM) can exercise the same level of control over it.
If, however, you decided to include signature checking using a public key burned in the sillicon, then and only then you would be violating this hypothetical law, because that creates a situation in which you, the OEM, can exercise more control than the device's legitimate owner after purchase.
So, to summarize, from the OEM's point of view under this law, less control is good, equal control is good, more control is bad.
I think this is what should be proposed as a new bill in U.S congress, although I have to admit the Open App Markets Act serves a great purpose as of right now for some specific devices.
We've had all these debates. It was called "TiVo". It should be illegal for manufacturers to sell hardware with capabilities specifically denied to the owner. That's not when any sane person would have thought "ownership" meant prior to 1980.
You could, maybe, make the argument that what Apple does is anticompetitive, but in the laptop space they are the ones being hurt by a monopoly, not the ones who benefit.
An example of lock-in is making a conscious decision not to port iMessage to Android, specifically because it would make it easier for iPhone users to move to Android[0].
Making Apple products work well with other Apple products isn't lock-in. Purposefully making Apple products work worse with other systems, phrased within the company as a way to punish users who switch, is the kind of thing we're talking about when we describe lock-in.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-never-made-i...
Either way, when there are literal emails in the company saying that the reason iMessage isn't on Android is because otherwise it would be too easy for Apple users to switch to Android -- then that's what lock-in is.
I don't get the whataboutism here. It's lock-in. Google is also a crappy company, but that doesn't change anything about what Apple is doing, and it doesn't change anything about the fact that the court case has revealed enough documents to show that lock-in is a deliberate market strategy that Apple undertakes.
Google also acting crappy in a few cases does not mean that the very concept of lock-in is suddenly invalid. People forget that Apple is not the only company being sued for antitrust in regards to their app stores.
I believe many of the messaging apps on Android also support exporting your messages as an archive, but no idea whether iMessage has any support for importing message history.
Cool. iMessage works perfectly well with SMS, which is the only true open messaging standard, and therefore will work with anything else that interoperates with SMS. Job done.
Come on. Apple's VP of software engineering would not be debating Android support in internal emails if SMS worked "perfectly well".
Most of the iMessage features, text, video, pictures and "reactions/tap backs" work over SMS. The only real feature missing is delivery and read receipts but most people in my experience have read receipts turned off. Apps also don't work but I've yet to see someone actually use that feature.
Other than 'text', none of those things use SMS:
Sending pictures and videos uses MMS, which is one of the most flakiest parts of the old feature-phone ecosystem because it's inextricably tied to the level of support from both the sender's carrier and the receiver's carrier for particular MMS message content - and how carriers love to charge insane $-per-byte for SMS/MMS content. While in the US exchanging video MMS between the 4 (or 3...) major carriers you likely won't experience any problems provided the video is under a few megabytes and using a well-supported codec like H.263/H.264, if you see what it's like for the rest of the world (Europe, India, etc) you'll understand why services like WhatsApp are so popular: because carrier SMS/MMS service is awful... if not obscenely expensive.
The "reactions" thing you mention, to my knowledge, is not supported by SMS either - it's either an Android-specific MMS extension or you're using RCS - and Apple has no incentive to support RCS, excepting any kind of laws requiring phone carriers and handsets to fully support RCS (I wish...) in order to be sold in a giving region.
So iMessage app doesn't work like SMS reading app. It forces you into using iMessage account to just read an SMS. Later it lures you into using iMessage instead of SMS to make it harder to switch to another OS later.
It’s 2021 and there is still no file system that is safe, and works on both macOS and Windows.
What about bundling camera, speaker, screen, processors etc? They are selling a product. You don't complain about car companies bundling 4 wheels and a motor.
Is this anticompetitive if it's a fundament of old business model back from 80s?
And Microsoft was a signatory to this lawsuit arguing Apple should have to open up but their store is “different”…
(Should oil companies be penalised for the damage they have done to the environment just in terms of promoting plastic?)
The effect of this order seems to be Apple can't prevent apps from telling customers about alternative in-app purchasing methods, which is a central issue of the case at hand in Epic vs Apple.
Are there strings like appeal rights that means we won't see a change for years?
There is a good chance that this precedent will encourage other lawsuits that will lead to more injuctions, such as one that applies to Steam.
Will Apple win? I don't know 9th Circuit or the applicable law anywhere near enough to answer that question.
I fully expect both sides to appeal. To much money is on the line to not try.
Even if Apple knew they would lose the appeal, I expect they still would, to try and get a stay on this ruling pending the outcome of the case.
I've always been very sympathetic to Epic's side of this case, still am, personally I don't expect Apple to win appeal [1], but I also wouldn't rank the odds of that happening as significantly lower that I thought the odds were of them winning the initial case.
Epic might be willing to settle without an appeal in exchange for the ability to continue developing unreal engine for iOS... but given that Apple is not likely to be willing to settle (see above) I doubt that will happen. Apple might choose to unban epic anyways, since the game engine only being available for android hurts them, but I doubt it.
[1] Though if a detail here or there changed in Apples favor that would not be surprising.
I wonder which parts of the lawsuit are even amenable to a settlement at this point. Sure, the breach of contract claim is between Apple and Epic, and Epic could negotiate away their right to appeal.
But presumably the injunction just issued is NOT negotiable, as this is based on behavior that Apple is alleged to have engaged in against all developers?
Would any actual lawyers care to weigh in?
It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.
The argument is not "bigger". It is exactly the same. If we're not a monopoly (Apple), how can we be anti-competitive?
> (the judgement) then leaves a bigger argument for reversal on appeal.
is supposed to mean by "bigger argument".
Since other states do not have the same laws of California, the Supreme Court will likely apply Federal Law, not California law, on appeal.
Epic is headquartered in NC, after all. Thus this will fall under interstate commerce clauses, and California law only applies to transactions in California.
Why would it? The court basically dodged the question, so we still don't have an answer provided by the court system. Until that happens, we can discuss it to death if we want!
Edit: excerpt from the ruling is: "Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. (...) The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
"the Court concludes that Apple is a monopolist under federal / state antitrust laws"
"the Court concludes that Apple is not a monopolist under neither federal nor state antitrust laws"
Instead, the court went with the third, which to me means "we have not ruled on whether Apple is a monopolist or not, lawsuits welcome". Is that not the right way to look at it?
Leaves the door open for Spotify to sue.
They did not say “we cannot ultimately conclude whether Apple is a monopolist” which would be your interpretation.
[edit] Given the downvotes (really?) I suppose I should add the nuance that all of this is based on this specific case and evidence presented; the case did not conclude that Apple can never be a monopoly (in another case, with other evidence) but that in this case, it isn’t.
> Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. [snip explanation] The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist.
> “The relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store,” Gonzalez-Rogers wrote.
> Under that market definition, “the court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she continued.
My main point of surprise is that anti-trust was even relevant in a lawsuit between two private parties. I thought this would only be relevant if the state were trying an anti-trust case.
"Having defined the relevant market as digital global gaming transactions, the Court next evaluated Apple's conduct in that market. Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
Borski's interpretation is right under the "innocent until proven guilty" burden-of-proof in criminal cases. Bialpo's interpretation is correct in that this Court has not made, as a finding of fact, that Apple is not a monopoly, only that the evidence brought by Epic to this trial does not prove Apple is a monopoly (i.e. another case on this topic may be brought if more compelling evidence is available).
The current definition of a monopoly.
Whether the current definition of a monopoly needs to change.
If you are mixing the two arguments discourse can go nowhere because you're substantively discussing cause and effect. The current definition of a monopoly needs to change, imo, then we can talk about whether Apple is a monopoly.
I'm also interested in discussing conglomerates and whether they are good or bad, and how to control them similar to monopolies, but that discourse can't be had until we can agree on something like the definition of a monopoly.
The problems now have more to do with market capitalization / revenue than they do with physical control.
Apple or Google aren't trying to buy all the railroad tracks between Cincinnati and Kansas City (app stores aside). They're trying to assemble a company that owns all the disparate but critical pieces in an ecosystem, then leverage those into extracting higher than free market rents.
Consequently, remedies shouldn't be the same as for monopolies (read: breaking up companies). They should instead of targeted on (1) classifying corporations by their size & (2) placing limits on their actions, in places where that size provides its own monopolistic-esque advantage.
Afaict, these should take the form of prohibiting acquisitions of competitors (Facebook shouldn't be able to buy Instagram or WhatsApp, but Instagram and WhatsApp should have been allowed to buy each other / merge) and stricter limits on market entry (FAANGM or SoftBank deciding they want to throw stupid money into a hole to poison the well and capture market share).
When a platform or market is created by an entity, and that platform reaches a certain scale, they must allow free competition within that market.
Here's an extreme example. Say somewhere down the line Facebook invents some metaverse or VR world. This becomes the primary form of interaction between people... 99% of interactions take place in this virtual world. It's clear the scale and extent to which this platform impacts people's lives is substantial. So Facebook logically would have to allow other sellers to enter this virtual world and compete to drive prices towards a free market equilibrium.
Past monopoly legislation has focused on competition outside the walls, product vs product. But nowadays the walled gardens are getting big enough to the point that these companies have large control over our lives.
Maybe that example just muddies things, but the important thing in my mind is to identify "private markets" and enforce that competition be allowed.
Your describing a monopoly. IMO the real question is what actually harms consumers.
Requiring companies to open their platforms is one option for regulation, but perhaps not ideal. Great for tech companies sure, but possibly a huge opportunity for scammers. Consumers and companies are often at odds, banning app coins for example is great for gamers and the opposite of an open platform.
A flat regulation that all software platforms are limited to X% fees might be a better option.
Here's a better one. Facebook creates a virtual world where 50% of the population choose. Apple creates a different virtual world which the other 50% choose.
If you simply look at the boundary/entrance you can say there's freedom of choice. But whether you choose apple or Facebook, there's 0 competition once you're inside that world.
Further, once you've established a home and connections within one world, switching to the other becomes quite expensive.
Competition at the gates, monopoly within.
I might add that this is very similar to the concept of company scrip whereby the local coal mine had a monopoly over local jobs and gouged workers for basic necessities. Absolutely you could have moved a town over, but the cost to do so was deemed too high in many cases.
When cost of switching is high, monopolistic power can be enforced upon customers. It's a similar situation with a lot of SaaS who have pricing power to strong arm their customers into high margins due to the cost of switching to alternative technologies. In a truly competitive market, SaaS margins should be close to 0. Obviously that's not the case today.
Regulation will catch up to all of these tricks, just a question of the timeline. Capitalism only works well when there's an environment of competition, and leveraging high costs of switching or large gated systems to enable profit margins well beyond what a competitive market would bear is antithetical to this concept.
That's why antitrust law is so important, and needs to evolve to handle modern business structures.
Xbox, iOS, and Windows are platforms that also provide basic utility where third parties are part of the basic product. It’s by owning a platform they gain some control over that relationship between consumers and those other companies. Such complex relationships aren’t completely new, malls are gatekeepers for the stores within. But, such relations are normally heavily regulated.
All of what you listed are easily substituted, and not very impactful to somebody's life.
The same games exist on Xbox and Playstation (95% overlap). McDonald's is a buy one time product, where you can easily choose on a given day to go to BK or Wendy's. You buy an iphone, you aren't going to just buy an Android the next day if Apple raises costs. Isn't it obvious how different these are?
You can bet that if Microsoft charged any third party apps on windows 30% of their revenue they would have been regulated long ago. You really think otherwise?
I don't understand the Apple defenders. Encouraging actual competition within the platform is the pro business stance. Competition is the basic element that makes capitalism work.
You don't have competition if cost of switching is high, it's that simple.
Platforms with sufficient impact on people's lives, and sufficiently high cost of switching will be regulated to require competition. It's as simple as that, though fanboys will kick and scream for the next few years until it passes into law. It's the obvious outcome, and china is already paving the way on legislation.
Most of the ills we're trying to avoid don't seem to easily slip around, if there's a law that says "If you control more than 25% of a market of more than 1M users..."
I don't think anyone is arguing that Apple shouldn't be allowed to create an iEcosystem.
But what we all want is a future where Apple's ownership of the iEcosystem can't be used in such a way, and generate enough profit, that no one can ever overturn Apple's position.
But everyone always becomes substantially less interested in topics once it becomes hashing out legal language. Which is why we pay lawyers well.
However, I fear most efforts would start with "Companies X, Y, and Z need to be categorized as monopolies. Let's write rules to fit"
Edit:
Stating my opinion without why isn't very HN-ly of me, eh?
She's been on Planet Money and discussed her ideas, where they come from, etc before. I don't think I'd quite do them justice explaining them myself. Apparently she's now a chair of the FTC as well (which I was unaware of).
If you want a raw view of her views on anti-trust: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
In one of the podcasts she dives into the history of anti-trust. She talks about how after Standard Oil we convinced ourselves everything was a monopoly and stifled a lot of innovation, which led to some reforms later and the anti-trust we have today which are demonstrably too permissive. She has picked on Amazon (as a wider corporation) quite a bit, but a lot of it has to do with the practices of their ecommerce division and the extent to which Amazon can compete with it's vendors. Basically, she believes there's a middleground to be found between the two anti-trust time periods and that it's important to be concise in how we do that. You can see some of her specific criticisms in the article above.
A more full bibliography can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan
I highly suggest "The Separation of Platforms and Commerce" as that's the one that resonated with me, having worked in the startup world.
Would you mind linking to something pertinent, in order to add to the discussion? What does she say? Where does she say it? Why does that appeal to you?
If you want a raw view of her views on anti-trust: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
In one of the podcasts she dives into the history of anti-trust. She talks about how after Standard Oil we convinced ourselves everything was a monopoly and stifled a lot of innovation, which led to some reforms later and the anti-trust we have today which are demonstrably too permissive. She has picked on Amazon (as a wider corporation) quite a bit, but a lot of it has to do with the practices of their ecommerce division and the extent to which Amazon can compete with it's vendors. Basically, she believes there's a middleground to be found between the two anti-trust time periods and that it's important to be concise in how we do that. You can see some of her specific criticisms in the article above.
A more full bibliography can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan
I highly suggest "The Separation of Platforms and Commerce" as that's the one that resonated with me, having worked in the startup world.
In this case, the opening of the person's Wikipedia page probably sums it up right away:
> In the article, Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework, which focuses on keeping consumer prices down, cannot account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as that of Amazon. She proposed alternative approaches for doing so, including "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan
Apple, Google, etc. are having their cake and eating it, too. They have platform which they charge others to use (ok), and then they study usage data (somewhat shady) and then launch direct competitors (<<super>> shady).
That's the root of the problem in many cases.
Of course, this needs to be coupled with stronger anti-cartel enforcement. Because tech is rarely a pure monopoly, but extremely often is ends up under the control of a cartel.
I really don’t feel bad if some developer selling a leveler app for 99¢ goes out of business because Apple pre-installs a free leveling app on the iPhone.
I wrote more about that here: https://www.tinker.fyi/6-break-up-tech-conglomerates/
Have you any idea of how many laws would need to change, not to mention all the academic papers, legal and academic commentaries and textbooks?
Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous.
They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole.
Their objective: capturing attention and keeping their users on their platforms longer. They use their platform bubbles to capture a large group of users that will never leave their services. Like Apple users. They're all in a bubble, and if you want access, you have to pay a steep tax and jump to the beat of the their whims.
And this isn't a new kind of monopoly? It's a monopolization in a new sense: they wrap their shroud over individuals and companies and keep them attached at the hip. Switching costs become incredible.
Apple, Google, and Amazon are turning us into serfs. They have a quasi republic going on that they tax and control. You can't start new businesses. You can't escape. If they target your small market, you're screwed.
The DOJ needs to break these companies up into twenty or so smaller ones that don't form a cobweb of entrapment.
Apple/Google/etc fans and shareholders will disagree, but these companies are hurting our industry and soaking up all the innovation.
[1] FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior
Some of the prevailing themes:
- These companies are after attention across any vertical a person may touch
- These companies build platforms that scope creep into other platforms and verticals. They connect and entrench them.
- They make it impossible to access consumers without them, and then they tax the entry points
- They make switching costs high
If you want to make your own cereal, good luck; the supermarkets trust the Big Three and are pretty uninterested in flighting something new; shelf space is finite and people don't trust off-brand cereals.
The cereals care more about attention than price-competition. They know it's all the same crap; they want you to care more about whether there's a bear or a frog on the box.
And the same companies that make the cereals make several other verticals too, all carved similarly.
This configuration has not, generally, been considered illegal in terms of market regulation in the US. The standard is harm to consumers, not harm to non-incumbent manufacturers. Your battle to show why either of these spaces should be regulated more stringently is uphill against the default in the US to take a hands-off approach to market activity unless necessary to cure an obvious ill (and the ills here are non-obvious; how do we show the cereal market, or the software-services market, don't look the way they do because the incumbent players have hit on a locally-optimal approach to give value to customers, while customers are satisfied? Amazon, for example, are bastards, but they're bastards that have managed to unlock such efficient distribution and value-satisfaction for their customers that they rendered an entire ecosystem of competitors as obsolete as the buggy-whip manufacturer).
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores. Or repair their devices (bad analogy).
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do. Like turning into music and movie studios.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket. Famgopolies created an artificial warehousing system and forced us all into it.
As a user of Apple, Google, and Amazon tech for decades, I simply disagree on the other two. You'll have to clarify in what way Google and Amazon make it hard to shop at other stores. Google, in particular, enables side-loading on every Android device. Of the three you've named, Apple is the biggest offender, and it appears they have touched the hot stove, unless this Court's ruling becomes reversed. But they touched it in a way that Google and Amazon do not, unless I'm missing something.
I don't think a world where F-droid continues to exist is one where we can claim Google, in particular, is a supermarket that makes it hard to shop at other stores.
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do
That's not by itself illegal, or discouraged. Traditionally, companies have considered such expansion a bad idea because they expose themselves to outsized risk in a market downturn. But there are examples of other companies doing that. Sony is a hardware manufacturer and a movie producer. Disney owns theme parks and movie production. Proctor & Gamble make some 90% of what goes in, on, or around the American body and home that you can buy off a store shelf (including many apparently-competing products). ViacomCBS owns theme parks, television studios, book publishing, heavy-industry machinery, and nuclear technology.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
The user experience from the era you're describing, to be blunt, sucked. Mobile devices, when apps could be loaded on them at all, where hard-to-manage, the apps were buggy, and they were hard to find. Lack of standards, lack of oversight, no trust that any given app wasn't a security mess (or just a Trojan) without something like brand recognition to rely upon. It wasn't just Apple and Google who changed that; we saw Steam come along and regularize the games-on-PCs space, we saw package management get more robust in the Linux ecosystem... People weren't forced into software catalog ecosystems, they ran to them and brain-drained alternatives because most of the alternatives were actively painful.
The government wants to avoid stepping on the neck of a better customer experience inadvertently via over-regulation.
And perhaps most importantly: you can still do that. You can still write an Android app and put it on F-droid, or self-sign it and give users instructions for enabling side-loading. But you won't see the adoption you will in using the big app stores, because the big app stores are a way better experience for most users. Outside of those app stores, discovery, reputation-tracking, consumer communication, anti-Trojan safeguards, etc. are '90s era.
> I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
It is a false dilemma that you either have vetted apps with Apple, or unvetted apps.
You could still have other app stores reviewing apps. That would increase competition but still let users choose safety over a Wild West.
And brands who have gone to great efforts to obtain user trust can sell directly.
Sure, manufactures could find small retailers and build a following from there, or find ways to market direct to consumers. But it seems like that is still true, if not even easier in the modern age. So what is different. I ask this not rhetorically, clearly there are differences. Is the scale the difference? Was it always wrong and we just didn't see it a clearly? Is the smaller number retailer the major factor?
For reference, Walmart and Amazon have about 14% and 10% market share respectively. Numbers differ from report to report, but the scale of difference is pretty clear.
There are many authors that have been exploring the economic aspect of platforms. As such nowadays that phenomenon is know as "platform capitalism" in literature due to Nick Srnicek's 2016 Polity book of the same name. [1]
[1]: https://theceme.org/richard-godden-platform-capitalism-nick-...
The actual ruling is something more like "Epic failed to prove that Apple is a monopoly in the market the judge decided is the relevant market: digital mobile gaming transactions".
Here are the relevant sections of the ruling:
> The Court disagrees with both parties’ definition of the relevant market.
> Ultimately, after evaluating the trial evidence, the Court finds that the relevant market here is digital mobile gaming transactions, not gaming generally and not Apple’s own internal operating systems related to the App Store. The mobile gaming market itself is a $100 billion industry. The size of this market explains Epic Games’ motive in bringing this action. Having penetrated all other video game markets, the mobile gaming market was Epic Games’ next target and it views Apple as an impediment.
> Further, the evidence demonstrates that most App Store revenue is generated by mobile gaming apps, not all apps. Thus, defining the market to focus on gaming apps is appropriate. Generally speaking, on a revenue basis, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenues. This 70% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of all App Store consumers. These gaming-app consumers are primarily making in-app purchases which is the focus of Epic Games’ claims. By contrast, over 80% of all consumer accounts generate virtually no revenue, as 80% of all apps on the App Store are free.
> Having defined the relevant market as digital mobile gaming transactions, the Court next evaluated Apple’s conduct in that market. Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrustconduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist. Case Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist.
> Nonetheless, the trial did show that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct under California’s competition laws. The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.
Unlikely. While there may now be a legal decision in place it will still be argued whether or not it was the correct one.
Can someone ELI5 why Apple is considered to be anti-competitive for not dedicating resources to assisting another business in creating a competitor to a market for a platform they and they alone created?
If Epic wants to have their game on a phone, it makes sense they abide by the rules enforced by the company that allows the whole ecosystem to exist. If they don’t like it, they can go and create their own phone hardware and app ecosystem.
Maybe I’m just naive.
There are limits to what you can do in a vertically integrated business stack, especially when you invite third parties to participate in pieces of that stack.
As a consumer, I can't have a phone for every software vendor I want to purchase from, that's obviously ridiculous. If Apple wants to create a marketplace, it has to allow certain things to happen in that marketplace. If the App Store was an entirely separate business not tied to hardware, the restrictions would be significantly less.
I don't think anyone is saying that they need to provide support for third-party payment processors themselves, but their rules can't restrict someone else from supporting them.
I don't know why that would be controversial.
Imagine a world where Google required a 30% cut of everything bought through Chrome. How is what Apple's doing any different from that?
If I buy a table, I can choose to stain it a different color, or put a tablecloth over it, or cut the legs off, or burn it for firewood. I have the right to use it however I want for whatever purpose I want, because I own it. For some insane reason bootlickers are willing to throw such rights out the window the moment you try to apply them to computer hardware and software.
(emphasis mine)
Nobody said anything about Apple assisting other businesses. They could easily just let everything be, but instead, Apple is going out of their way to prevent competition.
Imagine if your favorite Linux distro only allowed you to install software from their package repos, and you had to jump through tons of hoops to install software from outside their repos, and adding other repos was impossible.
I know you'd say "I'd just switch distros!", but in the mobile world, you effectively only have two choices.
What about the sucker that bought the phone? why the company that created the device should decide what the owner can do?
Isn't ironic Apple prevents someone showing you a link to the product webpage and the explanation is that you are too stupid to be let opening a webpage from the app = will they remove the web-browser ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Anti-trust_Case_of_1...
What do you even think a monopoly or anti-competetive behavior is?
During the standard oil trials, would you support the argument of "If people don't like it, they can go build their own railroad!"?
Do you simply not believe in any forms of monopoly law? Because your argument could be used in literally any monopoly trial, if you actually believe it.
At the end of the day, who cares if they are a monopoly or not - you don't have to be a monopoly to be in a position to do Bad Stuff to The Market.
Even if they aren't a monopoly, they shouldn't be allowed to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
Market driven de-facto monopoly are allowed. If you own >90% search engine marketshare it is fine as you have earned it. If you abuse the marketshare to enter shopping, travel market it is monopoly-*abuse* and it should be blocked/fined.
Seems like that just makes "it's a problem" do all the work.
They make a call about whether a company has monopoly power in a specific market defined in a specific case.
In this case, the court does not believe Apple is a monopolist in a specifically defined digital gaming market.
That has no bearing or relevance on whether they are a monopolist in some other defined market (or even on a different day in the same market!)
We need strong federal antitrust enforcement. This only worked because Apple is based in California, which has stricter rules.
Are those threads arguing about a legal definition, because if not then this would have little impact on them. Even if they are arguing form a legal perspective, it would have to be within the same legal system as this court and thus could be argued for other legal systems. And even then one can argue the judge is wrong, look at how many judges end up being wrong based on appeal results. Technically you can't be sure which judge is actually wrong, you know which one is in the court that overrules the other, but you can still point out that the disagreement means one of them is wrong even if you can't say definitely which one is.
"The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."
Is this something that can get appealed?
There are still a lot of kinks to work out, such as how to handle court decorum & technological disparities such as low availability of high speed internet and good quality camera systems/lighting/privacy.
Personally I think the federal government should contract for an app other than Zoom because if I had to go to trial I wouldn't feel very comfortable knowing it was all being hosted by a private company, but that's a minor gripe.
Of course, what really makes court cases take very long is when they get appealed to hell and back -- see Google v Oracle for an example of such a case.
(And this is a final order, so it can get appealed).
The rate at which court cases proceed really depends a lot on the complexity of the case, the length of the discovery phase, etc. Both Apple and Epic didn't want to have a jury trial, so there also wasn't the matter of empaneling a jury.
This sounds like the same agreement Apple came to a few weeks ago [0]. They can’t bar developers from linking to external payment methods, but doesn’t require them to allow other forms of in app payment.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-us-developers-a...
Apple's concession also limited to one link, whereas this refers to links in the plural, and also metadata (eg app store descriptions).
> [Apple] are hereby permanently restrained [..] from prohibiting developers from including in their apps [..] buttons [,..] that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms [..]
I'm not sure how exactly to interpret that but it seems reasonable to interpret that has being able to put a button in your app that takes someone to a checkout page.
I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appealing to me, despite the win for consumers and developers.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it's unfortunate we have to make a tradeoff at all.
Hopefully, this move will put downward pressure on Apple's payment infrastructure that incentivizes devs to keep using Apple payments because it's the same fee structure as whatever 3rd party they might move towards.
edit: I was instantly downvoted without any discussion, which doesn't add to the conversation. The reason I ask is because that's what the key value add is of Apple's IAP - I know that my payment method is accepted on the app store.
There are also standards like Web Payments.
It's just another payment processor. It often shows up beside "add a credit card" in apps. I use it to order food, pay for rideshare, buy tickets, etc.
https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/7159343?hl=...
Buying physical goods and services may not count, in the same way that they don't count on the Apple App Store.
Same distinction exists on Apple's side with IAP vs. Apple Pay. For example Apple Pay on the Web ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w... ) doesn't take anywhere close to a 30% cut. In fact it, like Google Pay, is also free for merchants, who just have to pay the normal payment processor fees. https://squareup.com/us/en/townsquare/apple-pay-for-small-bu...
Besides, isn't the competition here what we want? Apple IAP are still easier, and probably will convert at a higher rate than pushing a user outside the app to do the payment on a website, so there's still incentives for developers to use them. If Apps switch away from IAP, then Apple is incentivised to actually compete (imagine that!!) and make something better that developers actively want to use.
It says something about the state of competition where Netflix can just say "no, we no longer want people to sign up on an iPhone and give us money". That says they don't think IAP is good, and Apple should actually work on building something that companies want to use.
But it's not guaranteed to be, which is a huge loss for the app store IMO.
* lower IAP to 15% with an option to pay a higher dev license fee to lower it to maybe 7-10%.
* require that any IAP has an _option_ to use Apple’s IAP system within day 20% of the offsite price
* physical goods stay on the same system, but potentially offer some kind of carrot to implement Apple Pay
In my opinion not in this specific case. As an iOS user I WANT a system where everything conforms to certain guidelines. I do NOT want to fiddle with some weird custom in-App payment dialog which does it's own thing again.
It'll be interesting to see how this court order will be "implemented", my guess is that not much will change for now.
Apple couldn’t previously require payment flow through Apple’s payment systems, as evidenced by apps like Audible where you have no purchasing in the app and just have access to the content that you purchased through their website. Since Apple couldn’t outright force app vendors to monetize through Apple payment channels, their cudgel has been to ensure that app vendors have no way to link to external purchase options in the app, and hope that this was inconvenient enough for app vendors that they would choose to integrate with Apple’s payment channels. And it worked for most, but not all of them. Some apps, like Audible, just chose to live with having no way to sell anything from the app.
If Apple can’t even do that, they lose the ability to provide for their customers a consistent payment experience across apps.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/8/21506995/apple-forced-in-...
> “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”
> Today, Apple confirmed to us once again that the rule is more lenient than it sounds: “free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool” don’t need to use IAP as long as the apps themselves don’t offer purchases, and as long as the apps themselves don’t ask users to make purchases outside the app.
Apple pay is like a credit card, usable like one. IAP is the method by which apple forces app developers who sell through their app to pay the apple tax.
And developers will have the right to offer a cheaper non-centralized in-house IAP payment system, of course.
Depends what you mean. The subtlety that is always lost in these conversation on HN is how deep does the competition have to go? I don't think anyone seriously argues that iPhones do not have viable competition in the smartphone market. And yet, if I as a consumer want to use a smartphone which places strong restrictions on third-party developers (which is one of the most significant reason I use iPhones and recommend them to friends and family), somehow those restrictions are considered "anti-competitive." If these restrictions are lifted or prohibited, that clearly removes one of the key differences between iPhones and their competitors (mostly Android phones), and it baffles me that this could be construed as a more competitive smartphone market for consumers.
Malware isn't under the probe here; IAP is. Apple's behavior has been objectively awful specifically concerning the subject being discussed. Broadening the argument to Apple's desirable curation process is a misrepresentation of the issue.
People will continue to be able to enjoy the convenience of Apple IAP. Savvy users might seek better prices externally - but convenience does hold immense value. Developers can now also, as a pertinent example, ask for donations for open source projects without being taken down.
> Apple's behavior has been objectively awful specifically concerning the subject being discussed.
Certainly not objectively. I would very strongly prefer an Apple ecosystem with no in-app purchases at all!
Had third party app stores/sideloading been allowed to happen as epic demanded, that would have made it impossible for any app sufficiently large enough to demand it from their users.
The risk here was very much a return to the Google/FB “gift cards for root access” scheme, minus the gift cards of course, if they had prevailed they would have just blocked web access to iOS and just demanded you root yourself for them if you want to use their service.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
Mayne then we would have PWAs that work the same way everywhere.
The existence of competition might even motivate Apple themselves to adopting new video codecs and image formats that weren’t invented inside of Apple Hq.
The plaintiff here is a developer, not a fan of any specific device.
"Just don't develop for the phone, then."
Great, who's going to pay out the lost sales?
Also, assuming I "just don't buy an Apple device," I can [legally] develop an app on my Windows or Linux device?
Only Google?[1]
In addition, there's a very steep slippery slope in use here. It is currently possible to sideload on Android, and has been since day one, and yet we don't see the kind of end result you have predicted.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/06/apple-hulu-special-api-...
Do you think the banks are going to foot that bill? Of course not: it's us, the consumers.
Are you willing to have everything be a bit more expensive, for everyone, so that you, apple users, can have something a tiny bit more convenient?
Some businesses in my town still do this. When I see it, the only thing I think is "they must be committing light tax fraud". Maybe it's wrong, but I know what merchants pay for CC transactions and it doesn't justify the whining from business owners who have been accepting cards for decades and suddenly decided CC transactions were unprofitable because business is slumping /rant.
It is fairly common in geographies where CC providers can't litigate/enforce easily . It is not a penal crime, only a contract violation between two private parties and settled in arbitration/civil courts .
[1] Such Merchants also may commit tax fraud if they don't declare the cash income for tax purposes, that however is not directly related to Credit Cards or payment medium and usually even if they do commit tax fraud, they don't pass on their tax benefits for GST/VAT or Income Tax (10+% in most countries) to the customer.
> A PCN cannot stop you from offering your customers a discount or another incentive for using a certain method of payment, as long as you offer it to all your customers and disclose the offer clearly and conspicuously. For example, you can offer your customers a discount or a coupon if they pay with cash or a debit card rather than a credit card.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/new...
Stripe (which charges 2.9% + $0.30) is willing to eat this fee, presumably because of the benefits of vastly lower fraudulent transactions and chargebacks.
Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see the ruling as forcing Apple to lose money.
If I were Apple, I would have gone nuclear early on, and eliminated all % fees but made the annual fee per app of $X to each developer (whatever $ makes sense) and then you can collect money however you want. This would likely kill a lot of small app developers, but the big ones would not care. The ruling makes Epic a big winner, but everyone else loses in the long run, because Apple (and Google) will find a way to recover lost revenue.
Some people also want to have 1000 app stores allowed. Good luck with that one... imagine having to build an app store just for your app, or supporting 25 different app stores.
Do you not buy things online currently? Do you not use Amazon, or Lyft, or Netflix, or Spotify?
(I'm sure there will be some people upset at that kind of interfering overreach, but it's the kind of interfering overreach most of us would actually like.)
At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning signs that all is not well.
I prefer to subscribe to services through in-app purchases over the service's website itself because it's always easy to cancel subscriptions made through Apple, and I never forget I'm getting charged because I get payment receipts.
Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system, but I don’t play mobile games so I’m probably not representative of who this impacts the most.
The judge commented on that
>> "Apple created an innovative platform but it did not disclose its rules to the average consumer. Apple has used this lack of knowledge to exploit its position.
---
> Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system
You, as a consumer, will now have a choice, which you'll get to exercise! You will be able to send a market signal for products (either the service you might subscribe to, and Apple) to get better and attract more developers/users. This sounds like a win!
Not if I wasn't interested in having the choice to begin with. Now some apps will not be purchasable by me unless I go through their account flow, which I don't want to. It's strictly worse (for me).
They’re either already not on Apple’s IAP (Netflix or Spotify) or they are very sensitive to optimising conversions, and would pay a premium to give users an easier option (which Apple is now incentivised to lower)
App developers were mad about Apple's egregious 30% cut for doing payment processing. If Apple wants everyone to accept Apple IAP, it can simply lower its fees to competitive payment processing rates.
Apple has never characterized the 30% as "payment processing" -- it's it's always characterized it as a commission, which the court affirmed and explicitly mentioned that Apple is allowed to pursue that commission, even if the developer chose to use another payment provider. Apple's IAP has been an enforcement mechanism for that 30% cut.
IAPs are only indirectly a product that app customers get a choice in; the primary customer is app developers who have vastly different interests. There may have to be a shift on some of these axes for Apple to compete on price.
IIRC, Epic was offering their in game currency more cheaply outside of the App Store, which Apple didn't like.
I bet plenty of people would use an alternate payment method to save money..right now they don't have that choice.
Every mobile game with a cash store would instantly give you a discount to go through a different provider.
Honestly, yeah. I'm way more likely to click "subscribe at $5/mo using your normal payment flow" than go through a whole new account creation flow and wonder how cancellation will work somehow down the line or how trustworthy this vendor is with my data.
Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service. It's consistent as well, which means I don't have to keep hunting through your site to find it because you hid the location of canceling behind "Please contact us to cancel" type crap.
Do I think Apple is charging too much for their cut? Yea, I do. But as a consumer, the benefits outweigh it. As a potential business owner, yea... I would be upset too.
This means that competition is working, because you would choose apple's IAP, over the third party, even if it was more expensive.
Aren't you heavily assuming these developers would even bother integrating apple's IAP? This ruling will allow the developers to completely go around apple and never use apple's IAP at all.
This doesn't require Apple's payment monopoly. IAP would just need to make an API call to some 3rd party API. Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?
This does not get you out of your contractual obligation to pay, if you have one. You could end up getting an annoying surprise from a debt collection agency a few years down the road. An important thing that Apple was able to provide that a credit card processor suspending payment can’t is to force the vendor to let you actually cancel the subscription, not just the payment.
Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.
They can’t remove them, but they can prevent them from existing in the first place. It’s their platform, and they can and do make it a requirement that the app vendor’s subscription contract conform to a standard where ending the subscription from within Apple’s subscription management UI actually terminates all future obligations for the customer. This is why many subscriptions that are otherwise quite hard to end and involve deliberate inconveniences like requiring calling in during business hours can just be cancelled from the subscription page if they were started via the app.
> Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.
This is just not correct. Vendors do this all the time, credit companies don’t care and have no policies against it, since it’s the customer’s responsibility to have a legal justification to tell the credit company to refuse charges, and the PR blowback is demonstrably nonexistent.
If I'm paying for a cross-platform service, I can happily use their own methods, but if I'm paying for an app-store only application which either runs only on iOS or macOS, good luck to them. I won't subscribe via their methods, because it makes my life more complicated.
This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing. The iOS App Store is filled with cheap apps, to the point where many people react to a one-time price of $9.99 as disturbingly expensive. Apps and games that are literally identical on iOS to other platforms are frequently cheaper in their iOS releases because that's what the market expects. So in practice, the 30% cost is usually being eaten by developers, not passed on to consumers. There's a lot of good arguments to be made for cutting that 30% share down to 15% for everyone across the board, but "now you'll only be charged $4.99 instead of $5.99 for this game you would have paid $14.99 for on the Switch version" just isn't one of them.
It's not an argument, it's a question. Some people have clearly answered it as yes, yes they would. This shows some distinct value provided to them by Apple. Value that's worth something, though perhaps not 30%.
Apple's next step is to provide a compelling enough offering that developers and consumers alike pick it over the soon-to-be competing offerings. Wouldn't that be awesome if they pull it off?
This makes what is, IMO, an unjustified assumption: that competition in the payment scene will drive prices down for the same item based on payment method.
Instead, I think we'll see the same thing we see with the cash/credit card split: The same price regardless of your payment method, with price differences lining the publisher's pockets.
Most in-App purchases are in the range of 1-5$. If I pay a couple of cents more to have a unified experience, yeah sure.
It'd be interesting to see how much users spend on in-App purchases. For me it's almost nothing, maybe 1 purchase a year? The big money is probably in the free2play market where players spend a lot to buy booster packs or "gold".
> Judge seems alarmed at the extent to which impulse spending by "exorbitantly high spending gamers" drives App Store revenue.
> Says it's outside the scope of antitrust but says issue is "worthy of attention"
[1] https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1436365652164493317
> "in most economic ways...the App Store is primarily a game store and secondarily an 'every other' app store"
[2] https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1436365985800507394
I think this is a fair argument, and I believe also shows that if options are available, that is where us as a consumer have our freedom. I also personally like the ability to quickly pay when needed for things using Apple, but in return - if I was able to pay for it because another offer, or option, or something was presented to me that was easier, I would totally take that that too. However, I can see how that would be a loss for the people writing and maintaining the app and the associated services.
The problem I see is that this swinging at the moment between a single payment gateway and every payment gateway out there is a huge pendulum that is swinging to the extremes of both, neither side actually gets anything good out of it.
It would be lovely in a world where the option was to use Apple + an external, and letting users decide what they feel safe with. Some will be happy going direct with Apple, some would be happier with <insert payment style here>.
I think it is mentioned below, I can see larger companies immediately dropping the Apple method because it loses them the extra profit, and just making the ecosystem harder. People lose faith in paying for services, and then another service comes along, charging 30%, and we are back where we started.
So yeah, IMHO, it is good it is being recognised, but at the same time, its going to be a bumpy ride.
Eventually Apple will get down to make the Amazon not turn profit out of iOS IAP and then you will be left with two choices.
It's your government's job to make sure that you have faith in financial institutions and trust the infrastructure through which financial transactions happen.
If not, corporates like Apple will continue to exploit your misplaced trust by charging you 30% - 50% on every transaction. The solution isn't Apple or Google or some other corporate, but your government and better regulations.
Everyone: so could I get some regulation on [literally any exploitative startup practice”
HN, creepy smiling face: “haha eat shit”
The reaction to GDPR, or the Cali privacy law, or the Uber employee classification, or literally any other regulation* shows how hollow those words are. When anyone tries to regulate these sorts of things you’ll shriek like a banshee about how unfair these regulations are.
In all likely hood things will get worse for consumers. I will definite not buy apps requiring custom payment platforms. Hopefully it’ll settle on stripe companies will offer multiple payment methods rather than trying to force their own.
I look forward to it making Apple lower its IAP fees for everyone. I’d still like to use their infrastructure, but without the enormous fees (15% for small devs is still huge).
Lowering prices increases the number of jobs available, and the only cost is that Apple loses some amount of it's astronomical profits.
I would absolutely take all the savings from the fee drop and hire as many people as it allowed, napkin calculations says that’s between four and five for me.
Apple will probably pivot quickly to allowing you to use Apple Pay for this. A small commission and metadata is better than nothing at all.
I do think this will have some effect that you describe (e.g. perhaps Epic suffers a breach in their payment system) on the end user side but it’s not as bad as the android store situation. if anything it will make iOS users more attractive to devs as they can now keep a larger percentage of IAP sales.
But when IAP costs less than 30% I expect all paid apps to go the IAP route.
If App A requires you to use their payment gateway and App B uses apple pay, use App B.
I imagine this will cause a sort of race to the bottom where apple will lower its own fees to match.
Customers can choose what they want to succeed, but none of the choices should have strong moral implications. I shouldn’t have to choose between destroying the env. or not, or support crushing rival businesses or workers rights or not, etc.
So no, I don’t think it’s customers burden to have companies behave. Except if by “burden” you mean suing the companies collectively.
this is not an unresolvable issue though. Apple could force developers to make their payment option as the default payment option similar to how they forced devs to use Sign in with Apple (when they have third party login). Big companies like PayPal could provide an SDK which can be used by devs to complete trasaction similar to web. I could think of many more ways to solve this issue.
When you sell something through Apple, depending on the location of your user, Apple will act as Agent or as a Commissionaire. This makes everything easy, even for a solo developer. Sold an in-game coins in France? Apple collected the money, paid the VAT to the French government. If you do this through your own means, you will need to establish a relationship with the French government so that you can pay them the VAT that you have to collect from your users.
This will ultimately benefit large companies who can jump through the hops of managing all this, putting the independent developers in a disadvantaged position due to the high barrier of entry into improved margin(compared to Apple Store where everyone gets the same cut) payments. In some places you can be required to send a printed receipt to the user.
It would not be fun to watch, let's say Zynga, collecting their low cost payments across all their portfolio by making users sign up once and having indie games instantly losing a payment or falling back to high commission options because users are tired of entering payment info for each game.
Sad day for the little guy. Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission or is it Epic, Netflix, Spotify who will benefit from this? Unless you do low margin commission work (like platform where you take a cut, i.e. online tutoring) the %30 commission is a non issue.
Game crystals don't really have a cost, so %5 cut or %30 cut doesn't really matter that much. However, one company having access to the %5 and other not having access to it will change the landscape because the large company will be able to advertise more thanks to its better margins, wiping out the rest.
They will add something like a bonus if you choose the alternative ones. I'm baffled why people expect that the margin will go to the user. Do you think that Epic sued Apple because altruism? To help users save money? They are are after the margins.
Because of the "Your Local payment" option, binary sizes will grow(Uber has this problem, they need to ship the framework of numerous payment providers on every market) or you will start maintaining different binaries for each country.
Also, each payment provider will come with its own rules. One will say "this is too close to gambling, no unless put this text next to the price to clarify" the other will be like "is this related to crypto, you can't do that", the next one will be "I think you must provide 3 months refund guarantee. Also, coins allowed boxes not allowed".
Then you will have to do the legal work for each country separately or work with publishers who do that for you for a hefty cut.
The business side of things is a full time job. That's why when you publish a book or release a song you tend to get tiny amount of the price payed.
I am afraid, this fragmentation has the potential to turn the App&Game business into Books&Music business where you don't make money unless you are superstar.
> Today, we’re also introducing a new way to pay on iOS and Android: Epic direct payment.
> When you choose to use Epic direct payments, you save up to 20% as Epic passes along payment processing savings to you.
https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/news/the-fortnite-mega-dr...
That's normal business behavior. Why would it have to be "charity" or some kind of fake "PR stunt"?
Do some do it right? Sure! A lot will pocket the extra profit.
If it was 30% you would absolutely see gas stations advertising a hot deal 20% lower cash-only price to draw in customers.
As a result, unless you are a huge publisher you don't actually have a realistic chance to sell over alternate low-cost methods. This is not because you can't put the code there but because it will make the user experience so bad that a fraction of your users will proceed.
It's not about being technically possible but it's about being feasible. It doesn't matter that you can technically do it if not enough people want to play along and deal with it.
Then don't add the friction! Just continue to use Apple's payment system.
Nobody is forcing app developers to use different payment processors.
> but because it will make the user experience so bad that a fraction of your users will proceed.
Then don't use it! Just use Apple.
If you are an indie, you don't have access to the 180 million people, which creates uneven competition.
When the only payment in town is Apple IAP, you and Epic have the same margin. Suddenly, Epic has %28 more margin with at about the same level of friction. If you need to match Epic's margin, you need to introduce friction.
Are there App devs on this site anymore? It feels like arguing with people who have no idea.
Yes they will... They will have access to same exact Apple In App Purchases feature that they had before.
> Suddenly, Epic has %28 more margin
Ok, so then it is not about you having access to the exact same thing that you had before.
Instead, it is that other developers, have more money, and don't have to pay an Apple fee.
Thats pretty different.
You are not complaining about losing something. Instead, you are complaining that other developers, have to pay a lower fee than they had before. But you still have exactly the same thing as you had before.
Generally speaking, lowering costs are not something to complain about.
Lower costs are good.
It's simply not good for the smaller developers. How more clear I can be? Tough luck, go be a large corp then you say?
That is very different from companies paying less money to a multi trillion dollar company. Companies paying less to a multi trillion dollar company is a good thing.
It is dishonest to equate that to necessary government services being underfunded.
Lower costs are good. So no, I reject that this is bad for small developers.
It is most bad for apple, as they get less money.
> Tough luck
There is no tough luck. Smaller developers can continue to pay the same amount as they were paying before.
It’s so frustrating.
The only different is that now, some companies, have the ability of no longer having to pay large amounts of money to a multi-trillion dollar company (apple).
That is a win.
The fact that less companies have to pay many millions and millions of dollars, to one of the most valuable companies in the world, is a win.
And small companies, still have access to the same exact programs that they had before.
It sounds like you should be using some kind of service that does that for you, maybe even provided by Apple?
> Do you see independent Devs cheering for the %2-%3 commission
Independent devs seemed pretty happy overall with the 15% concession they already got as a result of the legal scrutiny on Apple. No doubt they'll enjoy further improvements to the terms once there is an actual threat of switching.
The lower the commission, the better. That should be obvious, but it is not better if it comes at cost that is potentially much higher than the reduction of commission.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have gotten greedy...
This is the problem with major companies that think they can just control everything. Then when the government steps in they say what they were doing is anti-competitive and suddenly the consumers now have to bear the brunt of the negative aspect of full on competition. Had Apple just been reasonable and not charged egregious fees from the get go, this wouldn't have been an issue.
Another interesting part of this ruling.
I guess the question is does Mobile gaming cover handheld game device like Switch? If so, it may impact Steam Deck as well.
https://www.polygon.com/22579033/valve-steam-deck-handheld-e...
This has more interesting implications for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft consoles.
Valve even prevents developers from linking to their own website, if said website includes ways to buy content independent of Steam payment.
See Rimworld. https://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/RimWorld/
Sidebar has link to visit the website. https://rimworldgame.com/ You can buy directly with Credit Card or Paypal.
Fantasy Ground is the same way: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196310/Fantasy_Grounds_U...
[1]:https://www.warframe.com/buyplatinum
IAPs are different: here Valve actually require you to process payments through steam when game is running via Steam. But even in this case a lot of games can be launched independently after installation through Steam.
Also on top of this Valve already decreased it's comission from 30% for large publishers.
If you don't want to pay Steam's cut, or follow their restrictions you have plenty of other options. You are not restricted in the sense you are with iPhone + App Store.
It turns out the little guys were right all along. It's surprising that it took legal action for apple to realize that, when you invite millions of third parties in your marketplace, you should treat them with some respect. And when this leads to prices of purchases going down, how are people going to keep justifying apple's position.
I think the biggest win is that micropayment services will grow which is good for all developers (not just in iOS)
The alternative would alienate some of their best developers -- who knows, maybe they'd leave?
> It seems their max app gaming revenue lost would be 64 * 70% * 30% = 13.4B for 2021
It is my understanding that the injunction is not limited to games. It applies to all apps.
Secondly, this is such an easy way to increase your take by 20+% that I would imagine almost every publisher is going to be offering their own payments platform, not just the biggest ones like Epic.
Even if the Epic lawsuit goes completely off the rails and Apple is forced to allow external app stores on iOS, they can still maintain a profitable app store if they provide the best experience to end users. Building an app store is very hard, and convincing people to install an alternative store is even harder, so I doubt they'll lose much there.
The app store is so ludicrously profitable that the exclusivity they enjoy can't possibly be the only reason it's making them money. This cut into Apple's (and Google's) profits, but it certainly won't mean the end of app stores as we know them.
I don't think they can. Their DNA on this evolved as a monopoly. They won't be able to compete, they will be slow and boring while clever people will overpower them.
My grandma isn't going to use any alternative store, she probably doesn't even understand the concept of different app stores. I think Apple will be fine, at least until competitors somehow gain a MASSIVE usability advantage.
It doesn't kill it much more then it killed the android store in the past when it wasn't (roughly, in practice) enforcing the same thing.
It's a revenue cut, but at least for the beginning it won't be a problem at all for apple, this might change at some point, but stocks have no reason to majorly drop now they still can do so in the future if it makes sense.
Google drive and Dropbox didn’t kill iCloud.
Apple can and will still reject any apps they feel like.
Apple now cannot reject apps because they have "Buy" links that redirect users elsewhere. And that's still a big deal.
If new laws/regulations are made which are clear about this, then potentially very soon.
For such thinks sadly "making more clear laws" is sometimes faster then "enforcing not fully clear laws".
Stripe ( and others) have products right from incorporation (Atlas?), identity verification, custom reporting, fraud/risk, Charge backs, Tax reporting/ filing and even PoS terminals etc.
Most businesses have to deal with multiple channels (Android, web, iOS and others), custom reporting, and different risk/compliance will need solutions well beyond what Apple is offering
>>
permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app.
>>
But I did not think that Epic had a particularly strong chance of getting an injunction like this.
I hope that the takeaway people take from this is "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case", and not, "the judge was always obviously going to issue this injunction." I still personally think knowing what I know now, if I went back to the start of this case I still wouldn't be able to confidently predict this injunction.
But maybe other people are better at reading court signals than I am.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-12/epic-appl....
It's not a surprising outcome whatsoever if you followed the trial.
Apple's recent concession on this was reading the room and realising this is the likely outcome.
I didn't read a "compromise" as indicating that an injunction was particularly likely, and most of the commentary I read on HN at that time didn't read it that way either.
I think people are looking back with the benefit of hindsight at something that was not by any means a generally assumed outcome, even from people who were covering and talking about the trial on HN itself or on other social media sites I followed.
A hint that the judge is curious about finding middle grounds in a lawsuit is definitely not a promise of a permanent injunction.
I had multiple discussions, with many commenters on hacker news, where people were way too certain about the court case, when clearly it could have gone many different ways (Thus, I agree with you that "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case" ).
I would be surprised if Apple ends up keeping the fee at 30%. If this injunction holds up, I think they will drop it within the year.
Apple isn’t required to reinstate Epic, and it actually also enforces damages for the breach of contract during the time when Epic was stiffing Apple for the fees.
Despite a lot of reporting about how this is some big win for Epic, the court is siding with Apple there, the ruling is Epic was in the wrong (breach of contract) and needs to pay up, and if Apple decides they don’t want to do further business with epic then oh well, “play stupid games…”
Next time you want to try and negotiate a lower contract rate, don’t breach a legal and valid contract and then try to use the courts to do your dirty work. The courts are not your sales rep.
But since Apple is known to refuse store submissions for opaque reasons, what would stop them from retaliating against apps that provide links to external payment processors with vague unrelated reasons? I would not put that past them.
Also, I hope the anti-monopoly part gets picked up at the federal level; no one can deny Apple & Google are de-facto duopoly.
I wonder how Apple will respond to dealing with the bandwidth costs of free apps with large bandwidth requirements.
Hopefully they just get rid of free apps, and require customers to pay upfront so that they don’t have to deal with as many advertisements.
Also they earn money from AppStore advertising (which apps out of the millions should the small screen show); so maintaining AppStore should not be a problem.
I don't know about the bad-actors part though.
Why not?
That's a bizarre question.
They'd be in contempt of the court.
https://www.upcounsel.com/legal-def-contempt-of-court
The judge could sent Tim Cook or any number of Apple execs to prison.
They can, but it has a high probability of additional adverse consequences.
Which...is obviously true. I mean, it would be nice if people could not commit murder, but they can and do.
Rather than that, they will use legal means such as appealing the ruling. They are a 2T$ company, and they will try their best to use their money to change this decision in their favor.
"Apple must allow the use of third party payment processors" does not mean "Apple cannot enforce any other rules against apps using third party payment processors". If they decide to go on a harassment campaign of petty violations against third party payment using apps or put undue requirements on them, those parties can complain to the courts and likely succeed. If the third party payment provider is stealing credit cards or obviously malicious behavior in some other area, Apple would likely prevail when pointing to that as the reason they banned them.
In addition to whatever penalties are available in law for the act outside of the ruling, they would also face additional consequences for contempt of court. And its generally easier to prove a violation of the order than a violation of the law justifying the order.
>If any part of this Order is violated by any party named herein or any other person, plaintiff may, by motion with notice to the attorneys for defendant, apply for sanctions or other relief that may be appropriate.
The penalty for contempt of court is often incarceration. Note that the order enjoins not just Apple the corporation but also Apple's officers. It would be highly unusual for the CEO of a major corporation to openly and defiantly flout a court order, but if it happens, he can expect to be arrested for contempt.
What would be swell is an open device you fully control which doesn't spy on you. Turns out that cuts off most of the ways to make big bucks.
Gotta be a bit of tinkerer to set that one up though, not something for grandma.
Heck, I'm a developer and tech enthusiast that owns numerous Apple devices, and I honestly can't remember the last time I made a financial transaction through the iOS App Store or IAP.
> n the counterclaim, in favor of Apple on the counterclaim for breach of contract. Epic Games shall pay (1) damages in an amount equal to (i) 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic Games collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Epic Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus (ii) 30% of any such revenue Epic Games collected from November 1, 2020 through the date of judgment, and interest according to law.
> On the counterclaim, in favor of Apple on the counterclaim for breach of contract. Epic Games shall pay (1) damages in an amount equal to (i) 30% of the $12,167,719 in revenue Epic Games collected from users in the Fortnite app on iOS through Epic Direct Payment between August and October 2020, plus (ii) 30% of any such revenue Epic Games collected from November 1, 2020 through the date of judgment, and interest according to law.
The big picture here is that Epic lost the case - they were ruled to be in clear breach of contract and Apple was determined to not have acted anticompetitively except in one specific respect (the anti-steering clause).
Epic gets no third party App Store - meaning ”platform” app stores are not anticompetitive, a ruling that 30% app store fees are not anticompetitive, a ruling that Epic still owes the money during the time when they were knowingly and willfully breaching their contract, a ruling that they have to pay apple’s lawyers for the frivolous suit, and no requirement for Apple to reinstate Epic’s account after all these shenanigans.
Oh yeah and anti-steering clauses are probably illegal. Big win for Epic there.
Despite newspapers racing to frame this as a big loss for Apple, it’s really Epic who lost here (and that’s why they get to pay the lawyers, pay the breach of contract, etc). It’s completely consistent with the rest of the ruling, because that’s what happens when you lose a suit.