IANAL but it's baffling to me that this one took so long. This has been the clearest-cut abuse of monopoly in tech for a long time. Why did they waste time trying to convince judges that "free" could be monopoly pricing, when this was in broad daylight?
Isn't part of the problem how US anti-monopoly law is worded requiring proof of "consumer harm" which is normally measured in increased costs? In the case of Apple's monopoly, its not clear how you would measure that let alone prove it to a court.
Consumer harm is pretty easy to argue, Apple doesn't tax macos programs but it does tax ios programs. That argument results in billions of dollars of consumer harm. There are many arguments against that view as well, but I just wanted to show that it is easy to argue for consumer harm.
I don't think that's enough though is it? To my mind the strong counter argument is that consumers are choosing to pay higher prices for "higher quality" (i know that often not the case with the scams on the app store) apps and if they want cheaper apps they are free to switch to android.
> I am curious though, why is the iOS version €4.99 but the Android version is free ? I've seen this a lot actually and have always wondered, I figured it might just be Apple's annual developer license fee but not sure.
Apple users are being forced to pay more for equivalent software because of Apple's tax.
Oh 100% I agree. My question/point is about how the US system treats monopolistic practices, and I worry that actually that example works in Apple's favour as they would likely argue that consumers are free to switch to android if they want cheaper apps.
If apple were to pay for the android replacement phone & perform the transfer of personal data to the new device then that might be a valid argument. As it is they do their best to lock users in to prevent them from ever switching.
US anti-monopoly law is worded requiring proof of "consumer harm" which is normally measured in increased costs?
This is more a matter of interpretation, policy and practice rather than statute and these things can change over time. The interpretation you're describing was itself an innovation at one time.
How is this even a monopoly? That's like saying "Walmart has a monopoly on selling products at its stores." There are thousands of competing phones with their own software and app stores.
They have a remarkably durable market share. Some people are in effect forced to choose apple since apps they need (in some cases medical apps!) are iPhone only as the seller just does not bother with android.
There's approximately 2 app stores, I wouldn't call that competition.
Even in the most egregious days of Microsoft's OS monopoly, you could still choose to install software. Apple makes it basically impossible to do this outside of the context of their app store, which they charge heavily for access to and have no qualms removing or preventing apps that compete with its own. If this doesn't constitute monopolistic behavior, the bar is so high I'm not sure anything would ever qualify for it.
There is one competing phone platform with a store that has conveniently decided on identical fees. It's a duopoly. But also one where you can only shop with one of them.
The comparison is this: Walmart and Target are the only two stores that exist. They've also basically agreed to set the same prices on everything. And once you buy from Target once, you must buy everything else from Target too, and if you want to switch to Walmart, you have to throw out everything you bought at Target.
It looks like roughly 60% of groceries are sold at Walmart in the US. And unlike phones, where you can choose Android easily, many regions have only Walmart to shop at.
That's the wrong metric. It should be obvious that the US market share of walmart on groceries, merchandise, and health don't conveniently sum to 100%, and that's not how you would present that data. You're looking at the % of WalMart's sales, not market share.
Tim Sweeney didn't get it done, so the US government will pick up the slack. I imagine they were waiting to see if Epic won before trying the case themselves, but Biden may have wanted to make sure it got moving before the election may take it out of his hands.
One of the most impressive successes in Epic's cases was just dragging the evidence into the open. A lot of illegal behavior is hidden in confidential agreements mostly to keep them out of regulators' view for as long as possible.
This case has very little overlap with the Epic suite other than one of the defendants being the same.
I’m also curious what illegal confidential behaviour you believe was found in the Epic case? The one count that the judge found in favour of Epic didn’t require any form of discovery as it was based on public policy.
> The Justice Department, which began its investigation into Apple in 2019, chose to build a broader and more ambitious case than any other regulator has brought against the company.
As I was reading the specific charges detailed in the article, I was thinking this case seems like a stretch and will be difficult to prove. Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice, messaging, and Apple wallet. FWIW, I am a former lawyer and spent a little time doing antitrust law for the CA DOJ, a long time ago. Just my two cents.
They will make that argument, and the government will point out that Apple is trying to charge 27% everywhere those choice decisions were taken away, pretty conclusively proving... it's all about collecting the rent.
It should be. Note that the economics word "rent" essentially refers to any and all unearned income that you acquired through raw power. Which, yes, includes real estate rent in excess of maintenance and financing costs.
Charging 30% is outrageous to me, but it also appears to be the standard used by almost all of their competitors. It'll be interesting to see how the government convicts Apple of doing something that almost all other large companies are doing.
It's a no-win situation for them. If once they established themselves as the dominant player in the cell phone market they started undercutting everyone else on fees that could also be seen as predatory.
> it also appears to be the standard used by almost all of their competitors
FWIW - this is further evidence of anticompetitive behavior. In a competitive market, entrants would be trying to drive distribution costs to 0. The fact that Apple makes its entire App Store revenue off those distribution revenues is highly telling.
It would only be considered predatory if they charging a rate below their own costs of distribution. I.E. If it costs Apple $0.10 to cover the costs of app distribution per download, then it would be completely legal for them to charge $0.11, but illegal and predatory to charge $0.09.
It's the standard used by almost all app stores, save for new entrants trying to buy their way into the market. Steam is 30% and there's nothing stopping you from installing alternatives. Nintendo's eStore is 30% and they control 100% of the mobile console market.
I'm (legitimately) curious could the fact that (almost) all of that is now open in the EU due to their laws but not the US. Would that hurt their argument since they blocked off the change from the US. Or would that all be solved by a statement along the lines of "Well, EU iPhones are now less secure."
The arguments about performance and security aren't about whether Apple could open up, but about whether they should. The changes in the EU will answer the latter, but slowly.
The EU laws allow exceptions for security, but most of the Apple shenanigans related to the DMA were walked back the minute the EU said they would launch an investigation into the matter.
So no, I would say it is absolutely about whether they can open up and still be secure. It seems that they lack confidence that the arguments they had put forward would survive scrutiny asking just that question. Heck, there are even exceptions in the law that would allow them extended time periods in order to comply with the requirements in order to ensure security. So if it is just a question of needing more time, they can get it, and if it is a question of not being possible for users to be secure when interoperable with third parties, they can get exceptions for that.
The US government has let its definition for monopolistic behavior slip so much over the last few decades I don't think you could successfully prosecute for anything short of sending thugs to break your competitors' kneecaps. The days when the DOJ would prosecute a company for including a web browser with an OS are long gone.
The facts were different in the Microsoft case. If they had built in Internet Explorer as a "free" feature in a Windows upgrade it would have been tough to prove anticompetitive behavior. But they originally sold IE as a separate product, like as boxes in retail stores. They only bundled it with Windows later and there was clear evidence during the trial that they made the change specifically to kill Netscape.
Sometimes these lawsuits are filed not strictly for legal reasons but to put pressure on companies, or as political payback to certain special interest groups (election year). Even if the case is eventually thrown out of court it may succeed in shifting Apple's behavior.
It seems easy to prove to me; anti-trust law is intentionally vague and broad to allow the government to prosecute all kinds of monopoly tactics. Apple had the option to give a warning to users that using an alternative app store may risk security. It doesn't have to block it all-together. Same with Apple Wallet.
Yes, there is a lot of discretion in what cases are brought, and if a new administration comes in next year this may be dismissed/deprioritized. Still, I doubt Tim or other Apple employees will be making many donations to Biden's challenger! (Shareholders might be a different story.)
Even if the case continues, it will be a challenge to win. Apple has asymmetric information and knows what they can use to defend the various allegations.
> Good point, although the decision to move forward with the case was made under the current administration.
The President/Administration telling the AG what to move forward on (and what not to) is generally not a thing, and when it does happen, there are often headlines:
The President selects the AG. He doesn't then have to direct every single decision. It's well known in legal circles that changes in administration affect DOJ behavior. Wall Street knows this too — it's why certain stocks pop after election surprises.
it's quite often shot down by judges as well too because of the vagueries in laws, it's a two edge sword and you're commonly at the whim of the trial jurisdiction. Just look at recent 5th circuit vs most other circuits.
Legacy decision? Would they do the same starting a new desktop OS today? Much more high risk personal data on an iPhone (e.g. health data, biometrics) requiring stricter security? Many more sensors which could be abused by nefarious actors on iOS (GPS, lots of mics, lidar, cameras, etc) and these are always with us?
Performance is less of an issue on computers because battery life isn’t as much of a concern. Also, they allow other messaging and payments on iOS just like they do on MacOS. They just don’t offer the unique payment chip access on iOS to third parties.
If a hacker got full remote access to my phone it’d be a complete and utter disaster. Especially since the phone itself is considered a two factor authentication device by several services and my employer.
And the attack vectors are more numerous. I have ten times as many apps on my phones, it’s always on, always connected, and may frequently connect to wifi networks I don’t fully trust.
The consequences and the attack vectors for a hacker to attack my laptop are fewer.
I’m on the side of wanting Apple to open up a bit more. But I it’s absolutely valid to want the iPhone to be more secure than a laptop. And I seriously hope Apple isn’t forced to let people install apps that aren’t signed and reviewed. I can guarantee you that critical services in your life will force you to install insecure and straight up dangerous apps. The banking sector in some countries is a prime example of that, especially back in the ActiveX era.
> If a hacker got full remote access to my phone it’d be a complete and utter disaster. (...) The consequences and the attack vectors for a hacker to attack my laptop are fewer.
I don't buy that argument. I have more important files on my laptop than on my phone.
PGP isn't an end-to-end encryption service; it's a public-key encryption package.
To clarify macintux's statement, you can only guarantee end-to-end encryption will both remain secure and allow your messages to be read if you control both ends. If you do not control the other end, but you give it the ability to decrypt your messages (and thus let them be read), then whoever does control the other end can save the plaintext, post it elsewhere, and generally do whatever they want with it.
To be "end-to-end encrypted", something has to actually be a service you are using, not merely a method of encryption. An end-to-end encrypted service could use PGP if it wanted (AFAIK), but PGP, in itself, is just a way for you to encrypt your messages, and then, optionally, share your public key to allow them to be decrypted by those you give it to, while also guaranteeing that those messages came from you (as long as you have kept your private key safe).
So I'm afraid your question, as it stands, doesn't really make sense, but I hope this has helped to answer the underlying questions for you.
No, his question makes perfect sense and your response doesn't really make any. End-to-end encryption doesn't imply encryption from one end of the universe to the other. It is what it says on the tin: encryption from one end to another. Your message is insecure beyond the the other end.
That is true both for PGP encrypted messages as well as iMessage messages. There's nothing on iPhones or Macs actually protecting your decrypted messages. Most of the on device security is optional and your messages, photos and files can be copied and shared anywhere in plain text.
PGP makes no claims of being an "end-to-end encrypted service", because it's not a service. It's an end-user product. It doesn't have to "solve this" problem, because that's not what it's for.
You keep saying "service" when no one asked anything about services.
The question in this thread is whether iMessage can offer secure interop. The answer is yes. They just need to use an open protocol and that protocol can use tools like PGP to encrypt messages end-to-end.
Your claim that both the sending and receiving application need to be "controlled" by some entity for it to have "real" end-to-end security is non-sense.
The statement, from macintux, was "End to end encryption can only be guaranteed if you control both ends.".
The question, from tomrod, was "How does PGP solve this?"
Nothing to do with iMessage. I was answering a specific question on a tangent thread. If you want to argue with me about iMessage, go to one of the posts I've made about that on this article. This thread is about PGP.
Well you sure know how to dodge being wrong I'll give you that. Even ignoring the thread context, your comments on end to end encryption and PGP are woefully misinformed so we can just leave it there.
I think they'll claim security for Messages. I don't have nearly enough information to know if they can win that particular issue, and it sounds like there are reasonable arguments on both sides. But they don't have a monopoly on messaging — WhatsApp is huge, Signal and others exist. I don't think Apple lets you use Siri to send messages via other services, or at least they didn't used to let you. But other than that they are granted near parity on iOS.
Siri does let you send messages with other services these days. (I think it got added in the last year or two, and those apps need to be updated to support it, but it's there!)
The messaging claim seemed to be about carrier based messaging; SMS and MMS, and I guess in theory RCS (but is that really carrier based if Google has taken it upon themselves to enroll most Android users on a Google server)
Apps that read inbound SMS may be malicious and use that ability to steal verification codes. Or they may not be actively malicious, and meerly handle the data in an insecure way that makes messages available to others.
Performance, I dunno. Maybe they could argue something about how time between user requesting an SMS be sent and it actually getting sent is very important, and similar for display, and that they're more likely to do that right. I've certainly seen some Android manufacturer provided SMS clients that do much better than others on that, although I have no recent performance notes since I no longer get massive floods of SMS from too simple monitoring systems.
In the Epic lawsuit it was shown that Apple really actually more cared about this than "security":
> “The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage ... iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016, prompting Schiller to respond that, “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”
> “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern
> Apps that read inbound SMS may be malicious and use that ability to steal verification codes. Or they may not be actively malicious, and meerly handle the data in an insecure way that makes messages available to others.
Apple can't make that argument since they allow apps that scan SMS messages for spam.
Security: there’s no cross platform E2E messaging standard they could have adopted. Given that the DoJ is already breathing down their neck for working with Google on search, using Google’s RCS extensions and servers might also be problematic.
I don’t think the government could force them to adopt RCS without new legislation or bring iMessage to other platforms.
> there’s no cross platform E2E messaging standard they could have adopted.
Could they not have made their own? I don't think they'd be required to use open standards for the argument to be made, they just need to release an iMessage app for Android.
It seems weird to degrade their own users' experience (when receiving texts from friends with Android phones), but Apple does it deliberately as a nudge to get people to use Apple products.
There's no valid technical or security reason to do this. It's a tactical decision on Apple's part.
If iMessages have benefits (they do) then there is a technical reason to show you the bubble colors - so you know the benefits apply. If sending video to a blue contact is better than sending it to green, there's a reason to know.
Does it ACTUALLY matter? Maybe not? But people really do complain about a non-iPhone "degrading" a group chat, so it is indicating something.
At the time they made iMessage at first? It was likely a real advance and only because they could control both ends. But now? They may be large enough that it's unfair use of their monopoly in one area to affect another, and get slapped or forced to interoperate.
But they already do support Android to some extent. Apple Music (don't know if you can subscribe via the Android app), Shazam, and an AirTag detector are all already available.
There are many industries in the world regulated to be interoperable. I suspect the primary reason you find the notion weird is simply because you're not used to it.
I'm guessing the plan is to cast a wide net, then hope that you can dredge up some incriminating or morally ambiguous quotes during discovery. When you have a company of 100,000+ people, there's probably some "haha we're killing the competition" in there, which you can then use to prop up the case.
And then either use that to win the trial, or force Apple into settling.
They may or may not prevail, but in the meantime they will likely have to slam the brakes on any closed feature developments. That alone is good for consumers.
The article leaves out a ton over the actual compliant // filed in Eastern NJ for a reason. They must be going for Verizon or Samsung witnesses? If the definitions set forth by the DOJ are accepted by courts, this is a slam dunk on Apple. If Apple can redefine things like 'Super Apps' and 'Mini Apps,' then this thing is a wet paper bag.
> If the definitions set forth by the DOJ are accepted by courts, this is a slam dunk on Apple.
This is a very low bar. It is of course the case that if you assume one party's definitions are accepted then they will win. The battlefield will be the definitions (just like in patent law the battlefield is the claim construction).
> Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice
That's true, but odds are they have a lot of e-mails and a lot of employees who can testify to the browser choice decision being driven by lock-in. The iMessage emails were pretty unambiguous with regards to how it is used in an anti-consumer way. (https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...) Similar stuff will exist for everything they do, because they cannot distort the reality that in 2024 their software kind of sucks, and that their customers only use it because they don't have alternatives and Apple prevents those alternatives from being viable.
There’s nothing wrong with having “words not to use.” Companies have to think ahead to some possible lawsuit in ten years where a jury might have a damning interpretation of some minor word choice.
"the reality that in 2024 their software kind of sucks, and that their customers only use it because they don't have alternative"
That's an extremely hot take. When devices are mostly just slabs of glass and the interface and what is done, is entirely the software, customers are choosing the device based on the Apple software, not in spite of it.
Yeah this stuff usually ends up "I don't like the interface" when you press people. Which is fine. However my macbooks have been perfectly serviceable and still ticking while my former asus and dell laptops died after a few years right before I switched over to mac laptops and one is 7 years old and still ticking with not too bad battery life. That said I find apple has probably overstepped their social contract as a corporation and it's likely time for a little audit
>Yeah this stuff usually ends up "I don't like the interface" when you press people.
In Apple Books, you can't decide which books you want to keep on your device. In iOS Storage, you cannot see the largest pictures/videos (you used to be able to do that, they removed it to make people subscribe to iCloud). The iOS keyboard/autocorrect is so terrible it's almost unusable. You can't even set a vibrating alarm on iPhone without enabling vibration everywhere, come on.
Did it occur to you that Apple deliberately designed iMessages in such a way as to take advantage of the inevitable tribalism to further increase adoption of their own products?
Peer pressure is one of the strongest forces in sales.
Yes, but how much software does something similar? if you are going to penalize Apple for this you will have to penalize a huge amount of companies, it's a very slippery slope, as what do you define as being anti-competitive and what do you define also being a genuine need to highlight the difference?
What are you saying Apple should have done/be made to do? Make all the messages the same colour? This causes issues for the user not being able to tell what features are available in messaging that person and then it can be even more confusing to them, you are going to have to mark it some way which is turn is going to have somewhat of the same affect. A lot of these measures from governments don't actually end up helping users, they end up just making the end user experience worse.
For Apple, this was likely a win-win, they need to show the difference and it has such knock on affect, but I think this is the problem, Apple has a way of looking at things and way of doing certain things, a lot of the things that people are upset about in this lawsuit and beyond area consequence of that, but isn't nessecery the sole purpose of why Apple is doing things this way in the first place, those people that get angry at Apple seem to miss those points or disagree with that way of doing it.
It really depends. With MacBooks, for example, many people who buy them these days do so because of things like battery life and quality of the trackpad, while quietly hating on macOS.
I'm in this camp. I find some of the UX to be really, really questionable. The default animations and sounds feel so unbefitting for a machine in a professional context. The stupid notch; when I use a screen recording app, it uses a slot on the right to stop recording once I start using the app but if there are just enough icons, that icon disappears under the notch......
If it weren't for the battery life and speed, I would not use it.
Windows is horrible, it's messy, overly cluttered and bloated. MacOS is so much cleaner and nicer, that with nice hardware is why people buy Apple devices, at least that is the same with everyone I know.
I don't know if I'm the exception, but I also think Apple's software absolutely sucks.
UX is complete and utter trash.
But the M1 and onwards hardware is so good, I put up with it.
Just off the top of my head:
- Never had a $2000+ laptop that couldn't connect with more than 2 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and drivers. And even then, it's janky AF
- Rendering on non-Apple external monitors sucks; night and day difference when I connect a Windows laptop to my Dell monitors
- Terrible with system font scaling
- Inconsistent usage of button sizes in their native dialogs
This drives me absolutely NUTS and I thought it was a me problem. Where the hell do things go when they're minimized on macos!!? There's all these questions asking about cmd+tabbing to minimized windows and the answer is to hold option while you hold cmd after selecting the minimized window and then let go of cmd.. but if there's 2 Chrome windows and one is minimized this doesn't work at all.
I agree. I've had people tell me "That's not the Mac way; use another desktop". Oh, OK; but it sure would be handy if I could somehow access my minimized windows easily with my keyboard can we have that, too?
"UX is complete and utter trash" is a bit hyperbolic — you listed a handful of nits that don't affect 99.9% of their users. On the other hand, iOS is undoubtedly more efficient, smoother, and more stable than Android. I have a Pixel phone where the Google camera app crashes about 10% of the time when I tap the shutter button. The cellular connection often gets stuck in a disconnected state, without telling me. The "Always on Display" stopped working entirely. Along the core dimensions where Apple invests their energy, their software can be pretty good.
Just my opinion -- I'm a daily MacBook Pro user; I really struggle to find one thing that Apple is doing better than Microsoft from a UX perspective. Less options for customization; tiny buttons all over the place (very abundant in the system dialogs); the notch causing some apps to disappear from top bar on the right; the spatial distance between the window and the top bar as opposed to Microsoft where the app bar is attached to the window; the poor window snapping options for organizing desktops; the childish default animations; lots of issues with Finder versus Explorer; the seemingly random organization, sizing, and placement of windows in Mission Control; the weird behavior when you CLOSE all of your windows like Chrome and then CTRL+N creates a new Chrome window -- no, you need to quit the app, too.
I don't think there's anything macOS is doing better than Windows in so far as UX goes. Put it another way: I use macOS every day and I never think "Wow, I wish Windows had this feature, too" but every day I wish I had some UX element from Windows -- just basic window management feels so clunky on macOS unless you fullscreen everything.
It's just different. Like KDE/Gnome/i3/Windows is different from each other. MacOS applications are more like services, while windows let you perform the current task you have. As an example Preview.app allows you to open PDFs and picture files. But you need to open a file to do anything to it, and when you do so, it creates a window allowing you to interact with the file. When you're done, you close the file by closing the window (which is why it duplicates the window when you chose "Save As"). The window has a 1:1 relationship with the files. The menu bar is part of the application, but the currently focused window can interact with it.
When you're close all Chrome windows, that just means you're done with the webpages, not that you're done with Chrome. Chrome dev team can set Chrome to terminate when all windows close, but they've not chosen to do so. It's there when you want to create a new window when you want to interact with a new webpage. And again it's up to the developer to choose to tie the application lifecyle to its windows.
That's all well and good, but when I've closed the interfaces with which I'm interacting with the Chrome "service", isn't it pretty clear that the intent is that "I'm done with the service"? "Chrome team chose to build it like that" -- I guess the question here is "why is this even an option at the OS level?" and "shouldn't we expect window and application behavior to be consistent?". Davinci Resolve on macOS, for example, exits when I close its window while Chrome does not. Do you not think that even having this option to create an inconsistent application interaction seems like bad design? Sometimes the app exits when I close all windows, sometimes it doesn't.
My issue with the menu bar is purely from an ergonomics and usability perspective, especially with high resolution monitors. If I have a window at the bottom right corner of the monitor, I need to move my mouse all the ways to the top left of the monitor to interact with the menu bar. If you always full screen everything, it makes total sense. But I would make the case that macOS has done a very poor job of adapting to changes in monitor resolutions. Consider ultra-wide screen monitors where I have apps side-by-side or I have 4 windows tiled. The accessibility of the menu bar becomes quite low for three out of the 4 windows.
The key stroke to access the menu bar is (do you know it?) CTRL+F2. Try that stroke yourself and see how it feels. It's not at all obvious that this allows you to access the menu bar with the keyboard.
By attaching the menu bar to the application window, the spatial locality increases usability, especially for modern ultra-wide monitors don't you agree?
I do agree that you have a point. But it’s an interaction model that works for many people and there are customization options to alleviate some of the pain points from keyboard shortcut (administrated at OS level) to 3rd parties software. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a complete reworking of the interface.
I use Windows all day and it’s garbage as well. Perhaps they are both garbage? I’m talking the latest release of Windows 10. Or maybe it’s 11. Whatever it is it sucks too
> Never had a $2000+ laptop that couldn't connect with more than 2 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and drivers
Hardware limitations that were told at launch.
> Rendering on non-Apple external monitors sucks;
It works fine with my old Dell FHD and my current 4k LG.
> Terrible with system font scaling
Apple does not do system font scaling, it applies scaling to the whole UI, not separate elements.
> Can't tab cycle through minimized windows
Different windows management model. You tab cycle through applications, and you backquote cycle through open windows. Minimized windows go to the dock.
> Windowing system sucks compared to Windows
Again above. Windows sizing is a specific concept in Mac OS interface model and there's rules that you can apply to it. I understand the OS not wanting to interfere much with that.
> I ship a PWA for one of my apps and by far Safari is the one that has the most issues with updating
I've not seen your code so I can't say much. But most people who complain about Safari really want Chrome's non-standard API to exists in Safari too.
Sure, but still silly that even an 8 year old Dell can drive 3 monitors without issue. And clearly, the hardware CAN do it since attaching it to a DisplayLink dock and adding a driver works. Fundamentally, the GPU is capable of doing it.
> It works fine with my old Dell FHD and my current 4k LG.
Oh it definitely works, but using Chrome on Windows, everything is super crisp on the same exact monitor whereas there is a noticeable softness on macOS
> Different windows management model. You tab cycle through applications, and you backquote cycle through open windows. Minimized windows go to the dock.
Yeah, an inferior one. The minimized windows go to the dock and are inaccessible by keyboard. This is clearly a flaw.
> I understand the OS not wanting to interfere much with that.
I'd argue that, you know, the purpose of the graphical user interface system in an OS in the context of UX at a very fundamental level is managing windowing.
> I've not seen your code so I can't say much. But most people who complain about Safari really want Chrome's non-standard API to exists in Safari too.
Works fine in Firefox and it's just using Vite PWA; really basic, standard PWA templates. Nothing special.
I don’t think those emails are so damning. A company should not be required to write software for its main competitor platform, just to make it easier for people to adopt its main competitor platform.
Nah, users really are dumb and really will follow steps that will result in malware getting on their devices. This happens all of the time in Android-land. Burying the setting won’t change this, people will follow tutorials to disable the security protections if they think it will get them the content they want (and, in some cases, it will, wrt pirate apps etc).
There’s no real way to square the circle: either Apple (and the state) has realtime app censorship control (nominally for malware, as well as any other thing the state or Apple’s business model feels existentially threatened by), or the user can install any app they want, with all of the associated risks. Even with notarization and self-distribution you’re still in the first category because the state can compel Apple to treat protest apps or non-backdoored e2ee messaging apps the exact same as they do malware, and prevent them from launching.
Users mostly want the former, because most users aren’t worried about government censorship or oppression. Tech people and cypherpunks and pirates and protesters usually want the latter. Tech people usually want the former for their parents/grandparents for whom they serve as device sysadmin.
I agree and I question the wisdom of it, but the idea of this aggressive antitrust enforcement, which so far has more strikes than hits, seems to be to make a grinding, years- (or even decades-) long push to shift the understanding of what antitrust is and make major changes to the landscape; kind of an inverse of what the conservatives have been able to do with various issues, where their positions were initially laughed out of the room but now have the weight of Supreme Court decisions behind them decades later.
>> I question the wisdom of it, but the idea of this aggressive antitrust enforcement, which so far has more strikes than hits
We only really take these up when they are blatant (price fixing, apple and books, MS and vendors). Or lock ins where there is NO alternative (MS and browsers). This doesn't really meet those bars.
If Apple wins this one at home, then they can quickly cry about other countries regulations being "anti competitive".
> We only really take these up when they are blatant (price fixing, apple and books, MS and vendors).
Not anymore... look at the failed action to stop MS acquiring Activision for instance. Was that "blatant"? I guess not since enforcement failed. Lina Khan's whole thing is aggressively broadening antitrust enforcement.
Every employee that joins Apple goes through a course that teaches a few case studies about Apple's culture. One of those is how Steve Jobs made the decision to kill Flash. IMHO it was a no brainer and if this sort of thing needs to be litigated in court, it's a travesty.
Since when does “the US” consist exclusively of “the Justice Department” and not, e.g., the FTC (which writes antitrust regulations within existing law) and Congress (which writes laws).
To the extent that is correct [0], that doesn't justify reinterpreting “the US should adopt regulations like X” to mean “the Justice Department and not any other part of the US government should adopt regulations like X”.
[0] Its essentially those actions where the DoJ is the agency representing the government interest, including all federal criminal cases and some federal civil cases. Civil cases by other agencies have the agency name; so the antitrust complaint by the DoJ, 15 state governments, and the District of Columbia is United States of America, et al. v. Apple, but the SEC action against Coinbase was Securities and Exchange Commission v. Coinbase, Inc., and Coinbase Global, Inc.
Perhaps this is essentially more lawfare against a party antagonistic to the political aims of Washington players. We know that our national (as well as state) law enforcement entities have been alleging for more than a decade now that Apple's encryption practices stymie their efforts to catch "bad guys." What better way to put back room pressure on a company.
This is a false narrative. iPhones back up full message history and all photos by default in a non-e2ee fashion that is easily readable by both Apple and the government unless the user and everyone they message with specifically opts into e2ee (which approximately nobody has, even in tech circles).
There is no “going dark” issue on iOS platforms. Apple has played ball in full with the USG on that front. In fact, Android backups are e2ee so the government can get more data from Apple on iPhone users than they can get from Google for Android users.
Apple has option to enable e2ee on backups now. It sort of defeats the purpose of backup though because if you lose device you lose the backup (assuming you only have one device and didn’t setup recovery keys off device)
As an iPhone user I am willing (and believe I am) paying Apple a premium for a well curated and reviewed App Store (vs android). I just wish they would stop “double dipping “ and charging far in excess of their costs (and in excess of reasonable profit) to the app sellers.
You should be allowed to stay inside Apple's walled garden while the rest of users should be allowed to leave it whenever they want (at the very minimum at their own risk).
Completely hamstringed? SMS is the standard, and yes it sucks horribly. Elevating the experience with additional software features and cloud services on one platform does not immediately entitle all smartphone users on the globe to the same experience. Google made a push for RCS, botched it, service providers either didn’t adopt it or only partially implemented it. That was upsetting to me. Do we sue Google and service providers as well?
I do agree that losing app licenses is upsetting. But this is no different than the licensing model for many softwares in the desktop market (e.g. per-user and per-install licenses).
Emails from apple executives have made clear that iMessage is purposefully used as a lock in tool. whether thats legal or not idk, what I do know is that it prevents me from switching to android and I would like the government to make apple stop.
It quite literally does not. Step one: walk into any store and buy an Android. Step two: have your phone service transferred to that Android. Step three: there is no step three.
People do this every day. Hundreds of them, at least. Every day.
Apple is using their market power to degrade their competitors product. Of course I could switch to android, but I dont want to, solely because texting iPhone users would become a much worse experience
> Of course I could switch to android, but I dont want to, solely because texting iPhone users would become a much worse experience
It's 99% the same experience - except for iMessage users your texts become green instead of blue.
On top of that, you can use many other services for texts, like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
Beyond that, I don't see why it's Apple's problem that Google and/or other carriers can't make a decent texting experience without Apple making theirs less secure or a shittier experience in the process.
If you want Fortnite then you need the Tencent...sorry the Epic Game Store. That comes with all of the PII leaks[0]. Because their game store will require permissions/privileges to install system wide apps, it won't be constrained on what data it can leak about users or what it can decide to install in the background. I for one can't wait for a dozen app stores to pop up all installing Sony root kits or Denuvo malware on people's phones.
The problem with this is that going outside of Apple's walled garden benefits 3rd parties who would prefer to do whatever they want so to use the same apps as before, everyone will have to submit to that risk. Apple's walled garden is a type of regulation.
But I thought all of Apple's users were extremely rational actors who freely chose for their experience to be restricted because they knew it was better. Surely if the alternative app stores were so inferior and dangerous all of these discerning users would reject them, and paying the 30% tax would be well worth the competitive advantage of offering your product at the only marketplace that notoriously lucrative cohort would accept. You're not insinuating that Apple's userbase isn't that sophisticated and doesn't make purchasing choices based on factors other than social vibes?
Let me explain again since it went over your head the first time.
Companies, all else being equal, will choose less regulation over more regulation. If TikTok could release outside of the App Store where no one can inspect what they do, they would only release it there. Users addicted to the app wouldn’t suddenly stop using it but now they would be exposed to whatever TikTok feels like doing. They will choose the path of least resistance, not all the paths. It’s not that hard to understand.
So what. If iOS doesn't suck, their apps won't be able to do anything malicious so no added risk. If a kid in China with an iPad testing the app for 3-4 minutes is a real security benefit, I'm Tim Cook.
> There is a plethora of evidence that this is not the case.
Do you have actual evidence for this claim? Because it's pretty widely accepted that the App Store has higher standards and quality, and you just cited a single case.
Are you seriously implying Apple catching 17 malware apps in 2022 means the App Store isn’t safer than being able to download whatever you want from the internet?
No, I just provided more examples as requested in an attempt to reduce confusion over which parts of the ecosystem are actually providing security. Apple app store is plagued by malicious apps as much as any other place on the internet, but what's making the difference - why these malicious apps are primarily engaging in ad fraud rather than stealing all of your personal data, is OS-level security.
All Apple can do is revoke app certificates and pull the app from the store after someone else discovers their malicious nature. That's a very low bar that can be met by nearly every app store in existence and it would be a reasonable security requirement for anyone who's operating an alternative app store on iOS.
The rest of it is just theater as there's no security-focused special sauce that Apple is providing in this area, despite prevailing beliefs. This is further demonstrated by their acceptance of an obvious impersonator like "LassPass".
It's always easy to show that something isn't perfect: just find a counterexample.
It's also easy to multiply that tactic by insinuating that this means that it isn't good, or isn't better than the competition. Which is what you're doing here.
That used to be my stance as well, but the App Store has gotten so bad in recent years. These days if there’s an app I want to install, it’s much easier to find the app store link on the developers page than to search in the App Store. At this point the “user experience” argument isn’t really there beyond easy payments and subscription management.
As long as I have to pay Apple a yearly developer fee so that I can load my own software (that no one else will use) on to 'my' phone, it does not belong me. Yes I know you can reload it every week. Not my phone.
I do not understand why Microsoft stepped out of the mobile market.
It's a pity really. The phones were quite good. But they failed for the exact issue under discussion: app store compatibility! They didn't have access to either Android or iOS apps.
It's understood that you can install random APKs from anywhere. As a hobbyist developer, I want to be able to set up a GitHub pipeline and then just download my APKs from that without fighting Apple or paying for an Apple developer account.
I'm actually open to buying an iPhone as well, iPhones are much better when it comes to music production, by understand I have to abide by Apple's rules and not be able to install my own software.
When the iPhone App Store first launched, Steve Jobs claimed[0] the 30% was to cover the cost of certifying software as functional, well-designed, and nonmalicious. Part of it was an ego thing too: he didn't want people fucking up apps and making his pet project look bad, so early App Review focused on a lot of UI polish things in order to make people think iPhone software was just inherently better than Android.
Even a few years in there's already evidence that Apple was entirely aware of how much of a cash cow owning the distribution market for your apps is. There's an internal letter asking about reducing the percentage because someone was worried about the Chrome Web Store (?) eating their lunch. Today, App Review is far too inadequate for the level of software submissions Apple gets, and they regularly let garbage onto the store that's specifically supposed to be curated.
I occasionally hear people complain about how Tim Cook "ruined the company" and that Jobs would never do the kind of control freak shit that he literally pioneered and is literally the selling proposition of the Mac all the way back in 1984. The only thing Tim Cook did was scale the business from "luxury compute" to it's inevitable conclusion as a monopolistic nightmare. The way that the App Store business game is played is specifically that you don't keep spending all your money on better app review. Once you have users and developers mutually hooked on one another, you siphon money out of them for your other projects (or your shareholders).
At one point, you were paying a premium for a better App Store, but not anymore. The business relationship just doesn't work out that way long-term.
[0] I personally think this belief was genuine at first.
To add more evidence to your point: SJ loved wall gardens and consistently fought against extensibility. The Apple II only got extension slots because the other Steve insisted. All of the compact Macs have very limited to no extensibility.
It's so ironic that Apple was pushing the (open) Web apps in the early days of the iPhone (out of necessity of course).
Jobs loved excellent user experiences, and, rightly or wrongly, saw walled gardens as an important part of providing them. Sometimes.
The counterexample is the iPod, with its advertising slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn.". The first iPod used Firewire and was Mac-only, every edition since then used entirely industry-standard technology, USB and MP3. The value proposition was, as the slogan illustrates, easily taking your CDs and putting the music on the iPod. That too was in pursuit of an excellent user experience.
Later, Jobs fought the entire music industry for the right to buy digital music, not just rent it. And won.
Perhaps a hardware engineer can help me out here, but I don't think Apple makes an unreasonable margin on the iPhone. Overall they make 26% [0]. Really quite reasonable considering highly-developed proprietary software is bundled with the device
They make a lot of money because they sell * a lot * of iPhones.
You're right - I didn't think of the App Store. That's a proper monopoly. "Services" are 23b out of 120b in total sales for them last quarter, but at a much higher margin. It cost them 6b to provide those services, but 58b to make 96b worth of hardware.
Looks like 1/3 of their gross comes from services.
Only some of the services are App Store - some of that money is from Apple TV and iCloud storage.
App Store income looks to be app fees and also advertising.
Which is itself another area where Apple forces consumers to use it.
You can't back up your iPhone to Google Drive or Dropbox. So here's your 5GB of space for any and all Apple devices you own, make it last or pay us monthly.
For practically any hardware startup if their margins aren't >33% they will fail to scale, wither on the vine, and die.
My employer makes space hardware and our overhead R&D expenses are so high that if we made 26% margin we would be bankrupt in a year.
So I think ~30% is probably a minimum floor to shoot for.
Just looked it up and Samsung Electronics has a margin that has ranged from 30% to 46% over the last couple of years.
I think the majority of people on HN are software guys who are completely oblivious to the challenges of building physical items that exist in the real world which is why your comment is downvoted.
That and beyond its stated purpose it seems that HN exists to allow people to complain about Apple in a public forum.
What makes all of this so strange is that large software vendors often have astronomical profit margins that hardware companies can only dream of. SAP (~70%) MSFT (~70%) TEAM (>80%)
Perhaps it is good that software companies have such high margins because if they didn't HN would be flooded with stories about how every company they get hired at goes out of business and management is clueless.
How do you think Apple will differentiate their case from United States v. Microsoft Corp., where Microsoft was implicated for almost identical monopoly misconduct?
The complaint literally says verbatim, "But after launching the iPhone, Apple began stifling the development of cross-platform technologies on the iPhone, just as Microsoft tried to stifle cross-platform technologies on Windows."
On the browser front, it’s easy. iPhones have batteries so battery life is a concern. That’s why Apple treats them differently than Macintosh computers, which you can choose your own default browser engine for.
The argument would be that they didn’t want iPhone users, especially with early models, to end up choosing other engines that were much worse on battery life and that would hurt the image of the iPhone. Back then, there was no battery settings where you could see what was eating your battery. It was all opaque and could make people think the device had lousy battery life.
And yeah, I think it’s unlikely someone could have made a more efficient browser than Apple since they didn’t give public access to all of their functionalities. And that might have been partly for security reasons, if there were less-secure aspects to hidden functions, for example.
The counter-argument is that they should have opened everything up, but Apple will say they were going as fast as they could responsibly go, and that’s why there were limitations that have been relaxed over time.
That feels like an argument that could apply to bar any category of apps to compete with Apple ones on the phone.
For instance giving a special placement to Apple Music and not allowing other apps to get the same privileges, because music playback needs to be efficient, and a bad music experience would hurt the iPhone's image. Same for movies, same for ebooks, same for spreadsheets (including needing to execute macros, so security risk is through the roof)
I feel I could get paid by Apple to come up with excuses for each app they need any.
The real justification for browser engine restrictions is not battery life but security.
If you look at any iOS vulnerability reporting, Safari is a big weakness and often the source of zero day attacks. Browsers are hugely complex pieces of software with a lot of attack surface. A large part of Apple’s value proposition is being secure. It sounds like the new approach (in the EU only) that allows additional browser engines requires specific security measures to be taken.
Rightly or wrongly device security is going to be a strong defense Apple has against some of these allegations.
Then by the same argument, it should be ok for Microsoft to prevent users from installing any other browser on Windows besides Edge because it could make that person’s device less secure…
No, a user should be allowed to take the security risk of installing whatever they want on their computers. Security-conscious users will have clean phones, and ordinary users will have phones full of viruses like their computers.
The user is choosing the Apple ecosystem and is happy to make these rules. They allow games because some people like to spend their battery power on games.
The user is choosing an iphone because their friends have one. Do you actually think the average person thinks about these things before buying a phone? No. They are just told by apple "you don't get to do that" once they realize they want to try it.
The user is choosing out of an artificial lack of better options, which Apple can only get away with by having a big share in the US market. In markets where they are not dominant, the consumer benefits.
I'm the user and I know what I'm doing. I'm not being tricked into anything. I'm trying to avoid a certain type of personality that thinks they are saving the world.
I think Apple’s argument would be that making choices as to what you sell and for what price more or less is the core of what running a company is. If users don’t like the choices they make, they can shop elsewhere. That’s capitalism 101.
That brings us back to the question whether they’re a monopoly. The justice department seems to say they have a monopoly on iOS, so that users cannot shop elsewhere.
If such a thing can exist, of course they have a monopoly on iOS, just as Coca Cola has one on Coca Cola, Mercedes has one on Mercedes cars, etc. Next question would be whether they misuse that monopoly.
Apple will argue that ‘a monopoly on iOS’ doesn’t make sense as a concept and that, if you want to run Firefox or Chrome on a smartphone, there’s plenty of choice in the market, and even if there weren’t, there’s no obligation for them or any company to make a product that users want.
In the end, the outcome of this will depend less on logical arguments than about what ‘the people’ want. Laws and their interpretation will change if the people want that. That, I think, is what Apple should be worried about.
Battery life is more of a concern on mobile devices because if your phone dies you can't call 911, get an uber, navigate with maps, or message a friend. There's more reason to protect mobile batteries than laptop batteries.
yes safari is preinstalled but on an iphone you aren't allowed to install another browser (in this jurisdiction) so there's technically no precedent yet
Currently, anyone can create a new iPhone browser, but with one huge restriction: Apple insists that it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari. [0]
And currently you can also delete Safari from your iOS device. An example of this is Firefox [1].
This is an artificial distinction. A browser normally comes with its own rendering engine.
In my experience, Firefox does not work as well on the iPhone as does Safari. It's obviously a rendering issue, because large pages will reload on their own over and over again while I'm trying to read them. My guess is it's a sneaky broken part of webkit which Apple knows how to fix in Safari and deliberately leaves broken for the other browser makers to suffer the consequences. Because, that's just the kind of bullshit which Apple is down for.
> This is an artificial distinction. A browser normally comes with its own rendering engine.
You're right that a browser normally comes with its own rendering engine, but I don't think it's an artificial distinction. There are plenty of components that most programs call out to the OS for—form elements, drop downs, save/load windows, file system access, and whatnot. The rendering engine is a much larger component, but I don't think it's cut-and-dried that it is categorically different.
> My guess is it's a sneaky broken part of webkit which Apple knows how to fix in Safari and deliberately leaves broken for the other browser makers to suffer the consequences
"Apple sabotages webkit for other Browsers" is a different—and to me at least, much stronger—argument than "Apple requires other browsers to use Webkit".
> There are plenty of components that most programs call out to the OS
Sure - user input handling, raster graphics, text formatting... HTML rendering and browser technology though? Apple made WebKit using FOSS desktop libraries, and then turned around to deny users FOSS desktop-grade competition. They TiVoized your browser.
Apple is going to have a tough defense, if they decide to steelman that particular point. The writing is on the wall, competition is coming with or without Apple's approval.
> "Apple sabotages webkit for other Browsers" is a different—and to me at least, much stronger—argument than "Apple requires other browsers to use Webkit".
One of the big factors was that Microsoft were doing things like paying OEMs to not include other browsers. This was also the crux of the issue in Epic v Google recently.
Or operating systems: things like BeOS, OS/2, and Linux couldn’t be offered on a given model without paying for a Windows license or giving up volume pricing for the entire line.
That's still the case. Its still almost impossible to buy a Linux laptop from one of the big vendors. Even the rare models that they do sell, like the Dell XPS Developer edition, are hidden so deep in their website that they're almost impossible to find unless you're sure it exists.
That’s Dell’s management problems. What I was referring to was the policy Microsoft had in the 90s of, say, telling Dell that they could license Windows for the XPS line at, say, $10/unit if it was on every device sold or list price if they offered a different OS. That was very effective at making it cost more not to use Windows and did exactly what they intended.
A whole generation of people who don't know how horrible Microsoft was. Two decades later, people are still bitter. The amount of great tech that got stifled.... SMH.
iOS started out closed and stayed that way for various reasons. Windows OS started with the ability of users to make various choices. One of those choices had to do with web browsers. MS's crime was "the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs."
Is Apple even a monopoly though? In the Microsoft case Microsoft had 90+% of desktop market share. (And propped Apple up to create even a semblance of competition.) They were accused of leveraging that position to prevent manufacturers etc from getting out of line.
Apple, on the other hand shares the market with Android. Globally it's a minority share. Yes, in the US, Apple has a bigger market share than it has globally, but Android is a real competitor even there. So I'd suggest the two situations are quite different.
If it's not a monopoly (which would be fine by itself anyway), it's hard to make the case that they are leveraging that monopoly in unhallowed ways.
All that said, clearly the DOJ think they have a case, and I imagine they've spent a LOT of man-hours thinking about it and forming an argument. More than the no-time-at-all I've spent thinking about it.
Is it though? On the hardware side sure but on the software side I don't see any competition. Both stores have close to identical practices and do not look like they compete over to get developers onboard. The only pricing change ever made was also made in reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied verbatim.
While not a strict monopoly, the lack of competition in this area between the only two players seems obvious.
This is maybe the first interesting/novel point I've read on this topic. (this Apple debate has mostly been beat to death and the whole thread here looks to be full of the same talking-point style arguments repeated ad nauseum by people on both sides who don't seem to be engaging any critical thinking).
I think Apple is clearly anti-competitive and is definitely powerful enough to warrant regulatory action given past standards, but the same exclusivity deals like consoles (and even audiobooks) have is certainly not a common thing (outside of Apple's first-party apps of course, but I would agree that isn't really what we're talking about here). I think this deserves some explanation, as it does seem like an obvious anti-competitive move that Apple could make but doesn't.
I tend to think Occam's Razor applied here is that Apple realizes their vulnerability to regulation and didn't wish to serve their critics evidence on a silver platter. I think that's why they announced that they will (finally) add (an inferior implementation of) RCS to the iPhone after many years of refusing and telling people to buy their mom an iPhone if they want to text her. Or the (inferior) implementation of PWAs. This is very much speculation of course, and I'd love to hear other theories.
What is meant by "monopoly" has been evolving, and a majority share acquired through anticompetitive means could be enough to warrant government action.
You use the term Android like it is a corporation or a brand. Are you comparing iOS to Android OS or Apple to Samsung, Google etc.? I agree that Apple commands a relatively small share of the US mobile ecosystem, but where do the competitors stand?
I didn't say Linux was especially good competition for iOS.
But unless you can demonstrate that it sucks because Apple is doing something which qualifies as restraint-of-trade, which I would suggest is obviously not the case, that doesn't matter.
The doctrine is that you can't exercise monopoly power in certain ways. Monopoly power is an empirical question, and does not turn on merely whether it is possible to describe a market in which another product exists, but whether that is a real market in which the products are in fact competitive.
But even if you have monopoly power, if you aren't illegally exercising it, you aren't in trouble. So you aren't punished for being an empirical monopoly.
You're correct, it is a brand. The point stands though. Comparing "Apple" to "Android" does not work. Perhaps a comparison between iOS App Store and Google Play Store would be more apt, but that is another discussion.
iPhone is not a monopoly since z lot of companies sell phones, and with significant market share.
iOS is not a monopoly since at least one other major operating system exists, with significant market share. (Whether Linux is or isn't a competitor is irrelevant.)
A monopoly by itself is not a problem. Only behavior ancillary to that monopoly is. But to get there you have you have a monopoly. I don't see how you make the case. Clearly consumers have choice.
Now, there's a case to be made for bad behavior, but its weak. Apple will argue that consumers have choices.
But I am not a lawyer, so I'll leave it up to the lawyers on both sides to earn some fees discussing it.
Apple is competing against multiple companies, all of which are minorities relative to the iPhone's market share. These companies use derivatives of Android, but still compete against one another and Apple all the same. Android and Linux aren't competing companies, they're operating systems that are forked by OEMs and manufacturers to provide an OS.
So, now let's introduce iOS into the equation. Apple can differentiate their product, but how much is considered acceptable before regulators complain? The DOJ was quite straightforward today, accusing Apple of using iMessage to degrade user experiences through exclusion. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's probably a...?
Do they have pricing power? You can select any boundaries you want for markets to come up with any market share number you want, but the key empirical test is is there actual substitution effect or does Apple have the ability to charge monopoly rents. One of the major points of walled gardens is to create vendor lock-in and prevent price conpetition, and Apple has been masterful at that.
In their App Store they absolutely have pricing power. They take a high tax, which is higher than most actual taxes, on nearly every single application installed despite doing basically nothing. Things like denying a application the ability to even mention services can be bought elsewhere are the worst offender of their misconduct and other offenses would be forcing apps to use their payment system, again with an extremely high fee, even on recurring subscription charges. Normally a payment processor takes 2 to 3 percent, not 30 %.
Sony (PlayStation store), Microsoft (Xbox store), and Valve (steam) all take 30%. No one can speak on what Nintendo takes due to NDA. Why are they never brought up?
Those stores can be abusing their monopoly position as well. Apple has the greatest sales of all of those stores though so it should rightly be targeted first. They flew under the radar for far too long. People are literally going back to using websites rather than apps because of their decision, but Apple even tried to kill progressive web apps recently - which are basically just shortcuts to websites on the Home Screen.
You're mixing the literal definition of monopoly with anti-trust laws. They have over half the market as a single company and the rest of the market is actually a fragmented zone of other companies so yes I think they are. You don't have to own the entire market to run afoul of monopoly laws they don't require there to be literally only one choice in the market.
Not a lawyer (let alone one specializing in antitrust law), but it looks like the relevant legal standard is "dominant position". Basically, it's legal to have a dominant position, but that position can be abused through certain categories of actions. By contrast, under the Sherman Act it's nominally a felony to even attempt to become a monopoly (although the application of this by courts has apparently been both complex and contentious).
If the relevant market is found to be "Apps on iOS", or "Flagships phones in the US", Apple is more likely to be considered having a monopoly position than if the market is "phones in the world". The courts will have to decide on what the market is before deciding if Apple has monopoly power or not.
Why do the app store policies and prices look so similar between iOS and Android? What competitive forces are going to change a duopoly with soft collusion?
Given the discovery both Apple and Google went through in their Epic trials, I would think that any collusion would have been documented by now. You don’t need collusion to have price convergence, just market forces. Are you arguing that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are conspiring to fix the prices of console video games? All of them have fairly similar licensing requirements.
But we know the cost of providing app store services is quite low, so the convergence price is as high as the other party willing keep it at. If Apple lowered its cut to 8% tomorrow, Google would follow suit because it is still enough money to run the Play Store with. For video game consoles, the margins are slim (or negative), so the current cut is the natural price that lets developers sell games for a profit and the hardware companies to subsidize consoles to a level that people can afford them.
> But we know the cost of providing app store services is quite low, so the convergence price is as high as the other party willing keep it at.
Or what the developers would bear. Although I think the actual costs are higher than some people would like to think (with human reviewers and stuff, not just infrastructure).
> If Apple lowered its cut to 8% tomorrow, Google would follow suit because it is still enough money to run the Play Store with.
Would they? Apple changing their fees has no effect on Android. Android suffered from the stigma of being a second-class citizen for a while, when apps were developed for iOS first. If it is as you say, why did they not drop their fees back then?
> For video game consoles, the margins are slim (or negative), so the current cut is the natural price that lets developers sell games for a profit and the hardware companies to subsidize consoles to a level that people can afford them.
Right, but that’s a moral argument, not a legal one. Negative margins on hardware is a business decision. The law does not discriminate depending on your business plan. If 30% is extorsion, then whatever you do on the side does not make it stop being extorsion.
Apple has a monopoly though it's AppStore on over 2 billion devices though which it conducts $90,000,000,000 a year. That's more than a lot of countries GDP combined.
Saying Apple doesn't have a 90%+ share of phone market is irrelevant.
The question though, is if Apple as the Platform (phone) provider, maintains it's monopoly (AppStore) though anti-competitive means.
Epic's sentiment certainly resonated with the European Commission, and apparently the DOJ as well. Do any of us really believe Apple's App Store control is harmless?
Because unlike the Microsoft case, you have the option to buy a smartphone from a company other than Apple. 1990s Microsoft was quite literally a monopoly, nothing like what is going on today.
Apple is not stopping their competitors from making good phones, just like how Apple is not stopping you from buying a phone that wasn't made by Apple. Microsoft was doing both of those things, Apple isn't. The cases aren't even close really.
Phone sales are hardly the issue here. iOS policies are the issue.
And you could absolutely buy alternatives to Microsoft Windows in the 90s, from Apple or IBM or others. But that's immaterial. The availability of an alternative says nothing about the market power Apple has or how it's wielding that power. This is why we have anti-trust cases, to determine if that power is being abused.
It's reasonably clear why the Microsoft case was different
> The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the web browser market for Windows, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.
Microsoft made deals with other companies to restrict competition. Apple doesn't need to make up a contract to prevent NFC payments as they just don't offer it in the first place. The Microsoft case actually has a lot more similarities to why Google lost the Epic case, by Apple won.
It looked surprisingly pretty weak to my non lawyer eyes. I mean I fully understand that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software but its almost a feature for their system and you buy it knowing that.
It feels like it goes back to Android vs Apple approach to their ecosystem.
> that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software
To me, this is the crux of modern antitrust, and the EU absolutely got it correct at a high level.
In simplest form -- doing certain things as an almost-monopoly and/or extremely large business should be illegal, while doing them as a smaller company should not be.
The scale of global businesses, in low-competition industries, allows them to engineer moats that are deeply injurious to fair competition, to their own profit and the detriment of everyone else.
> you buy it knowing that.
I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.
I don't consider myself an Apple fan, but Apple users definitely buy into the idea that "it just works" compared to Android or Windows, which the highly integrated software is a key component of.
I’m an Apple user (own iPad, iPhone, Mac Studio, among other devices) since the 90:s and I buy into that. But I _also_ think Apple has grown way too much into a bully and way too much into disallowing third party developers to do things Apple allows themselves to do with competing apps.
The “it just works” should be allowed to extend into the entire ecosystem.
Same, I like Apple hardware and while the OS experience has suffered recently, it’s great as a tool to get things done. But making Music.app and other services part of the ecosystem has not been a great move. Some things should allow for interoperability so that the user can make his choices. I think Apple has been too heavily handed in imposing its services to users.
In my opinion, Apple have a choice. They go down the "just works", tight integration and lower the fees for other developers OR they open up for competition and keep the fees.
At the moment they're double dipping. They're saying they have to be the only app store for security and UX AND then charging high fees. If they're really providing a service for end users, they shouldn't be taking such a large cut from developers.
> If they're really providing a service for end users, they shouldn't be taking such a large cut from developers.
Bingo. If they're making an argument that they have to retain so much control because it's good for the users, then why are their margins so big?
I'm not saying companies shouldn't be able to run successful, highly-profitable businesses.
I'm saying they shouldn't be able to (a) have significant market share, (b) have significant size / market cap, (c) have high margins, AND (d) claim "but we're so efficient for our users!" as a defense against anti-trust.
One of those things is bullshit, and 3 out of 4 are facts...
But doesn't the higher fees on dev help to keep the riff raff out? Sure, it's a nice profitable margin-padding fee but how else do they keep out the bottom feeders? Do Apple users what to pay a premium to get more useless noise?
Note: I'm not defending Apple. But the higher dev fees do serve a purpose other than revenue.
If high fees (with high margins) are there to ensure the integrity of the store, then Apple could invest more of that margin into ensuring the integrity of the store.
Back in the day you used to have to pay a bunch of money upfront to buy the software that allows you to develop software for a particular platform, then you were free to distribute your software as you wish.
If Apple is really concerned about keeping out the riff raff they could raise the annual flat developer fees.
But we all know that's not what they're actually concerned about - the app store is estimated to have 80% margins right now. They're just charging what the market will bear, and the market will bear quite a lot right now as they're part of a duopoly on smartphones.
I doubt that a regular user has any opinion on whether Safari "just works". Some developers care about Safari vs Chrome vs Firefox browser engine features, but the average end user at most is just going to think some website sucks if it doesn't work. (And, personally, I don't see any problems in day to day usage, so I doubt it comes up much to those less technical than myself.)
To the extent that they care, they seem satisfied by being able to switch to other iOS browsers that under the hood use the WebKit engine, but give them the ecosystem-integration with their desktop browser that they want. Shared Chrome bookmarks and tabs matter 1000x more to a random user than details of browser engines.
"It just works" except I have to remember to not pay inside the app to get the cheapest price because the app price is 30% higher to pay the Apple tax. I need to open my laptop to buy a Kindle book instead of continuing to use my phone.
Small, minor, annoying issues as a customer that make me think slightly less of Apple while continuing to be in awe of their hardware.
But how would you know to do this if they're gagged developers from informing users about Apple's cut, cheaper prices elsewhere, or from giving them a link.
I'm sure people will pay a bit more to use Apple pay and not get kicked out to a browser and possibly fiddle with re-logging in and re-typing in their payment info to a sketchy site.
Very few will pay 30% more though, because even the people that love Apple pay will be forced to acknowledge it's an obvious ripoff, in no way commensurate to the value provided.
I know because I compare the price on the vendors website versus the app. And I know that because I am up and up on how these things work, and I do not expect everyone else to be.
However, I was just making a factual statement that anyone can pay using their browser on iPhone or iPad on the vendor’s website, just the same as they can using their laptop.
I bought an Air (M1) at the same time and felt like the air was the better value. For one, the fact that you can't hit a button to volume up/down, but instead have to activate the Touchbar, click the sound icon, try to move the volume left or right to desired location is too many steps, not precise and a pain.
I bought another Air this year (M2), and again, it's a far better value.
>I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.
I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.
I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut. If I even set my stall up on the street I have to pay for permits, certification, suppliers.
Not saying I agree with the App Store tax because I actually don't but I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal when it's completely abnormal compared to all personal computing up to that point, which maybe was an anomaly? Hope not.
Arguably phones are becoming less like stores and more like a significant part of life. This is especially true as more and more of modern life demands a smart phone and apps.
And the only options are to take the deal -- modifiable at any time by the platform owner -- or burn down your digital life and start over on the only other practical competitor.
Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either.. or any of my 'smarttvs' etc.
Would this mean that anyone must be able to load any software into any platform that runs on software, or are we just picking on apple because they are popular. And got popular while doing all these things.. if people didn't want it they wouldn't have bought into it in the first place.
Apple convinced us that only they could keep us safe. Turns out their argument is specious - they can't keep us safe either. They haven't been able to keep malicious apps off of their App Store.
> are we just picking on apple because they are popula
Well, yes, antitrust law specifically, by design, focusses more on large market players, not small ones (there are some aspects still relevant to any participant, though.)
That's kind of central to the whole problem it is intended to solve.
You could have initially responded with that instead of reasoning that apple is being focused due to being a large player while dismissing other large companies being brought up.
sorry i can sideload my xbox and playstation. Just because they've been dinged for antitrust in other areas (i don't think sony has .. but certainly microsoft in my lifetime)..
Nope, 100M consoles in an internet of several billion where Apple has literal billions of devices in market are not at all the same thing and bringing that up suggests you don't think very hard before you post or you're trying to derail those who do.
I’m sorry that me asking a question is so emotionally upsetting to you that it leads to you attempting to insult me. I’ll try not to ask anymore question about Microsoft the 3.19 trillion dollar company, Sony the 113 billion dollar company, and Nintendo the 10 billion dollar company. I hope my question didn’t hurt these mom and pop businesses. You also made me completely aware of the fact that these aren’t the big three players in the console market which is a pretty fair comparison to this situation. Thanks again for your wonderful contribution.
They are probably not monopolies in the legal sense, since there are three of them with comparable market share and they also compete with the PC, which is open. I suspect there would be more pressure to do something about it if those weren't the case.
Apple sells something like 70% of phones in the USA due to network effects that might not be apparent to users in other countries - social shaming for not using iMessage. The European equivalent is WhatsApp, which the EU is forcing to open up.
> Or any nintendo or playstation or xbox. I can't just sideload games into any of them either
Homebrew is a thing, and you should be able to use whatever software you want on a device that you paid for. I have no doubt that there are people who own an iphone and wish they could have a different browser, or wish they could use a game streaming app.
They absolutely can. I can compile and install anything i want on my iphone, have to have a dev account is all. Also i think there are still iphone jailbreaks to be had.
I would love all hardware to have an "open option" that disables all security keys, doesn't let you run signed software, whatever, but lets you "hack" the device.
I'm also fine with Nintendo selling games via their store and physically, and taking whatever cut they can bear of it.
(80% of App Store revenue is "games" anyway, so it's a much closer analogy than people might expect. They may end up opening everything except games and only cost them 20% of revenue.)
Meanwhile you can get full advantage of the iPhone ecosystem "for $100/yr" which is nearly free, including App Store distribution, etc. If anything, Apple should be charged with dumping in those cases.
This is a framing issue. I think your comment is a great comment and probably does reflect a popular understanding. A farmer can't just set up shop in a supermarket without first paying and submitting to some vetting by the store owner. The problem here is that Apple doesn't just own the store or the platform for publicity and distribution. They also own the platform on which the software is run. It is analagous to Walmart also owning your house and not allowing you to buy home goods from any store except Walmart. I don't believe an average consumer would find that to be an acceptable business practice.
> I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut.
Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.
Regular people understand the idea of "I bought a thing, and now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on", see printers.
Apple is no more entitled to a cut of everything I put on my iPhone anymore than Walmart is entitled to a cut of everything I put on my table simply because they made the table.
I don't think so. It seemed very strong about "Even if they would know, they still wouldn't care". Which I think is absolutely false. See people constantly complaining about having to buy expensive inkjet cartridges.
> Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.
I don't know if that's inherently correct in people's eyes. For a counterexample, note that video game consoles are very popular, and I don't see any widespread opposition to the idea that e.g. Nintendo is controlling what you can play on a Switch.
Rights are things that you cannot choose to give up. You explicitly cannot trade them away since the poorest people would be forced to do that in order to afford anything.
I assert that I have rights under the first sale doctrine which let me do whatever I want with the things I own. Apple has no more of a right to dictate what I put on my device than Walmart has a right to dictate when I put on my table simply because they sold it to me.
Well the more important question is are you entitled to that functionality, or can it be taken away on a whim?
But those are more "advanced" questions. We still haven't even established the fact that I should indeed own the thing I purchased (see music or movies or anything). So we have a while to go before we get to questions of transference of services.
The point of the suit is, they should be free to make that choice on their iPhone. No one is going to remove the app store, and if you love sucking from the teat of Apple so much, you can continue to do so in an environment where there are competing app stores
Your point is fine but you have to at least acknowledge the dynamic that users are takers of software and companies have every incentive to take their popular apps off the app store.
It's gonna be the first thing Facebook does, and maybe that's fine but it's going to reduce consumer choice. You won't be able to have the Facebook but with the tracking restrictions anymore because it's bad for their bottom line. I don't really know if there's a good answer for how to strike this balance but it seems drastic that people want it to be illegal to offer a platform where all participants have to play by the platform's rules.
What tracking restrictions do you refer to that are implemented through app-store policies that are not (or cannot) be implemented through OS level restrictions?
Anecdotally, the people I know who do console gaming are really fed up with the lack of backwards compatibility; New console comes out, all your old games are now incompatible.
Now PC games often lose backwards compatibility when upgrading OS versions, but patches, compatibility modes, and even VMs are realistic options and ones that people will use.
While interest in doing so on handhelds has lessened a little due to phones almost always being more capable, wanting to be able to run custom software on consoles is common enough that lots of effort is spent on the cat and mouse game between console hackers and console makers.
You might think that, but at least back during the PSP and PSVita days (when I was into consoles), a large chunk of it was about the homebrew. For a decent chunk of the Vita's existence you only could do homebrew and emulators. Piracy is always just a service problem, with most other pirates being people who weren't going to be customers anyway.
The consoles are the most obvious example, but there are other things, too.
Perhaps the "best" counter argument is the Mac App Store and Steam - both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.
People care much more about what is or is not permitted, not where the money goes.
> both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.
This isn't true. You cannot bypass the stream 30% fee from the consumer side.
Because of practices that stream does, which are arguably anti-competitive, I cannot buy the same exact game, from the game developer's website, and receive a 30% discount.
If such discounts were possible, and it was clearly advertised that I could just get the game for cheaper from a different location, customers would absolutely take that option almost always.
You can bypass the Steam fee as the publisher. Steam's rule is that you can't sell a Steam key for your game somewhere else consistently cheaper than it's sold on Steam. You're free to go wild with pricing, so long as it's on a completely separate distribution platform.
(At the very least, if they're trying to do a most-favored-nation rule, they're not listing it in their policies and are enforcing it through back-channels.)
Plenty of people complain vocally if you don't release your game on Steam, same deal when a musician doesn't release their music on Spotify.
I think a lot of developers will be surprised how many customers actually side with the convenience of the platform over the actual person creating the value.
Steam value to customer is huge - and it's understandable why people just go to Steam and "don't have to think about it" even when you can get the same item elsewhere, perhaps even cheaper.
I've been a loyal iPhone user since what? the iPhone 3.
The moment Apple is forced to "open up to the competition", all Meta apps are going to magically move to the Meta Store, where they'll likely be able to shove all sorts of tracking garbage down my throat.
Same for Alphabet, same for Samsung, same for Microsoft.
The experience will turn into a hopeless struggle against EULAs and consents, unless one refuses to install any third-party spyware and do the digital equivalent of moving into a forest cabin. The oddball, while everyone else sheepishly complies.
Evenyone loves to hate Apple, everyone forgets that the first commercial music store to sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's. The rest was "squirting" tunes on Zune or inflicting Realmedia on their paying customers.
I don't think your points about Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Firstly. If they are doing things we don't want them to do, the solution is regulations, not a monopoly.
So if you're unhappy with their behaviour, that should be made illegal.
Secondly. Apple's protection against tracking comes from the OS level. The OS stops them from accessing my contacts and my GPS location, not apple's 30% tax.
> sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's.
So what. How unencrypted are those audio files now? They've since moved on to FairPlay.
Where are all these hostile apps on Android?
Even the Facebook example, last I checked it's still on the Google's App Store.
Cause there's plenty of examples of Apple's store filled with spam and outright fraudulent phishing apps. There's a big difference between the image Apple advertises for the App Store and what it's actually like.
As an iPhone user, if I wanted a phone with Samsung, Amazon, Epic and Huawei stores, 3 different preinstalled browsers and my workflows depended on sideloading some obscure app for a website in Turkey, I'd go with Android. Such an option exists for people who are into that.
But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden. Now some other corporations like Epic, who want to have a cake and eat it too, are going to ruin one of the platform's key selling points.
> my workflows depended on sideloading some obscure app
And if your workflow did require an obscure app, who is Apple to decided that you cannot install it on your own phone?
> But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden.
People like this walled garden since apple promises that it's safe and they deal with all of the problems for you. But time and time again we see that their App Store features outright scams and mountains of knockoff garbage apps.
People buy into the marketing of the walled garden, not the reality of it.
>People like this walled garden since apple promises that it's safe and they deal with all of the problems for you.
I get the "safety" argument, but it's also about the user experience. What if now Microsoft makes me install Microsoft store to use M365 apps, Amazon makes me install whatever store to use their products, etc? What do I win here as a consumer?
I buy iPhone specifically for what it is. I get that some people don't like walled garden approach, so they have Android at their service. Apple is not a monopoly.
What is the point of buying a phone knowing what you are getting, and then complaining about something you knew full well it doesn't have?
> What is the point of buying a phone knowing what you are getting, and then complaining about something you knew full well it doesn't have?
Because the thing the company is offering is a behaviour that overall is not one we as a society want (Apple being allowed to dictate what businesses will and will not succeed by either locking them out of 1/2 of the major mobile OS, or by taking a 30% tax from their revenue and then competing against them).
>Apple being allowed to dictate what businesses will and will not succeed by either locking them out of 1/2 of the major mobile OS, or by taking a 30% tax from their revenue and then competing against them
All app stores (and most real-world markets and stores) do that. This is a business model. And as a store owner who invested billions of dollars to build it, and the entire platform and infrastructure around it, you are in your full right to decide the rules on what is allowed there and what is not, and how much to charge. If your rules are unfair or disadvantageous to the competition, sellers and customers simply will not come. But as we can see, App Store is the most successful app marketplace on the planet, both for developers and consumers.
Just as Google is the most successful search engine on the planet for advertisers, website owners and consumers, regardless of the fact that Google can fully dictate what appears in its search results or what advertisers can put in their ads, and how much Google charges for it.
So I don't quite understand what exactly the argument here.
This this different argument than allowing sideloading apps (that one is quite fair, I'll admit).
It is related to side loading. Apple for a long time disallowed side loading (even now it barely counts). So if you wanted to sell anything to iPhone users you had to go through Apple's store and potentially compete with them at a 30% tax disadvantage.
Even with the current side loading changes, which are EU only, they still take a major cut and still dictate who can and cannot run a store.
So I agree with you that the App Store, like other stores have the right to dictate what they do and do not sell. They do not, however, have the right to say that they're the only store allowed, or that any new store must pay them money.
Also, I'd be hesitant of using Google's behaviour, certainly its current behaviour or current market position, as justification for what is okay for others to do.
How can you know that it’s the most successful store in the absence of any competition at all? You don’t have a choice. The App Store app comes preinstalled on iPhones and iPads and you cannot choose any other store, so no wonder it’s successful. The only conclusion that you can draw from that is the iPhone and iPad owners like to buy apps.
But this is why the eu case made more sense? It went after Apple for not allowing side loading of app stores vs this one which seems to be going after what Apple does on its own store?
"Being able to do exactly what you want with a thing you paid for" is a very different angle of argument to "knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers"
I was tackling why I don't think that argument holds water with the average person.
"now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on"
With printers this is very tangible to the customer, with the App Store what you're describing here isn't as tangible because nothing on the App Store is actually expensive, it's either free or relatively cheap and it's more a case that the user pays little or nothing, Apple gets a cut for doing close to nothing and the dev gets screwed, printers is more the customer gets screwed.
> I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal
The App Store was not a business innovation by Apple to set expectations, it's how all cell phone software that preceded it worked. Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.
General computing on a mobile device was never mainstream, or even common, before the iPhone. Smartphones are much closer to laptops than pre-smart phones, IMO.
Sure, but that doesn't change the point. The App Store exists as it is because the iPhone was a phone and that's how things were done on phones. Apple didn't create the model, they just continued it.
The iPhone is a computer, but unlike past computers it introduced a walled-garden App Store.
Also, software on phones before the iPhone was also gate-kept by carriers. Apple was not maintaining the status quo. They were changing it for their benefit.
>> Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that ring tones cost an arm and a leg, that "apps" were awful (I know I designed one)... You had to pay to get your app on a phone even if it was free.
Walmarts cut is largely based on their costs to stock and sell the item. Appstores costs are not related to the cut they take as they have >80% profit margin.
Most consumers are not even aware of how restrictive iOS is - for the same reason why they aren't aware game consoles do the same thing but way worse. All they know is where to buy compatible software.
If you told them "you have to pay 30% to the person who invented books every time you write something" they'd scream censorship and call for an armed revolution.
Authors often receive much less than that for each book they sell - the best you can get is self-publishing on Kindle or something where you can net 70%: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634560
People generally know this, and they generally don't care.
Anyone can buy a laser printer, print any book, sell it, take 100% profits, and anyone can buy and read it.
But you can't do that with a mobile app because only Android users can use it, while anyone with an iPhone can't use the app unless you submit to Apple's rules.
> I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.
Who is arguing it should be free? Why create a false dichotomy where it's either the status quo (30%) or nothing (0%)?
I'm sure most people would accept a reasonable fee. It's hard to put an exact number on this because it would have emerged organically if Apple actually allowed fair competition in app stores. In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
And don't forget that Apple receives enormous benefit from these apps being in their store. If not, consider what would have happened had Apple not allowed any apps in their store. Hint: Android would have eaten the world.
>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.
Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).
Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?
The thing with Steam that makes it different to me is the access control and gatekeeping. For example Steam hardware is so open that you can immediately install a different OS on it without even booting it. Steam hardware will happily run any third-party app store you want, including Epic Games their main rival. Steam also (AFAIK) don't do exclusivity BS like the consoles often do. So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware) I would have absolutely no problem with 30%. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with 90%, because if they weren't providing that much value then a competitor would come in and take it from them.
That would be an interesting way for Apple to side-step the whole question: unlock the bootloaders and make it clear how you could do whatever you wanted with it (except run hacked iOS).
The number of people buying iPhones to run even a slick version of Android would probably be quite small.
>> So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware)
I can buy android devices that are as good as the iPhone or better in their own way and have all those features (side loading other app stores). Is that not the free market in action?
I don’t know where this idea that 30% is an unreasonable monopoly-sustained fee comes from. Stripe’s fee is 2.9% plus 0.30, so it would be way more than 3% on small purchases, which I assume are a lot of App Store transactions. Steams is 30% even though there’s compition (Discord tried to run a store with a 90/10 split and shut it down very quickly). Google Play is the same as Apple’s, and they allow other payment processors (for non-games). On the other hand, Audible has no competition, and they have a 75% fee (as in they keep 75%).
Most App developers aren’t even paying 30%, they’re paying the lower 15%.
In my view, my phone is MYDEVICE. It is most definitely not "Google/Apple's platform"!
Google is merely manufacturing my phone, and I intend Google to have no rights or control whatsoever regarding my phone, and merely have the obligation (not right, obligation) to manufacture it correctly and provide open-source software for it that works correctly and properly provides Android interfaces (obviously, I don't use an Apple phone since Apple doesn't offer that, while Google does since they provide devices with unlocked bootloaders that run open-source OSes).
It only runs Android because Google with Android happened to win the adoption lottery and it would run PodunkOS by ACME if PodunkOS by ACME had been the one that managed to gain critical mass.
Again it is absolutely not even remotely close to "Google/Apple's platform", and I have no intention for Google to interfere in my use of it and certainly not interfere in any relations I might have with people providing software for my phone like taking a cut of the transaction or deciding how that software should behave.
Normal people don't think that deeply about it or understand even 10% of the terms you just reeled out.
I'm talking about the normal persons perception of the situation, not what is right in terms of how a technically savvy person would look at the situation.
It's pretty simple: "it's my phone, I do what I want with it, just like my house or car".
Which includes "go to any website and run any app I can download from it, regardless of whether it's illegal or against any rules or against the interests of the phone maker" and "change any aspect of functionality that I don't like (e.g. apps being able to show ads) and that I can find out on the web how to change".
It doesn't include "Google or Apple make rules about what I can do with my phone that I can't override".
Bear in mind that the article mentions other issues, such as preventing third party banks managing your NFC wallet, degrading interoperability with non-Apple products, etc.
Also, I'm not sure why you favor the App Store. It's not safe. Apple is unable to keep malicious apps off of it, and there is no warranty if you lose money due to a malicious app. People think there is some implied safety in the App Store. There is no such thing.
Safety comes from not giving permissions to apps which don't need them.
>> I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.
> I’m a heavy and loyal Apple user AND an app developer.
Do you really think you're representative of the average iphone customer? A heavy, loyal user AND an app developer? I don't think so. And even if you were, your personal situation isn't a rebuttal
Monopoly law needs to be reinterpreted in light of network effects.
It's not merely the integration which is a problem, it's how that + network effects gives apple undue market power to dictate terms to its users, devs, etc.
Being a middleman between users and devs, say, takes on a different character when you're a 2-3T biz at the heart of the economy.
Since market cap is a determinant in behavior (the speculative value of a secondary market) where's the case for forcing nVidia to open up CUDA or for Microsoft to let Nintendo open a store on the Xbox?
Exactly. From my point of view, nobody needs to be a lawyer to see that this can't stand as it is. There are two major operating systems for each form factor. In the last ten years, no other vendor has been able to successfully place a new OS on the market. If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened. And this appears mainly to be due to network effects and the high complexity of the underlying systems.
You don’t need to be a lawyer to see that there’s a duopoly, but duopolies aren’t illegal. The DOJ has to prove illegal conduct, which is harder than just showing a lack of widespread competition.
So if there are 3 competitors and one drops out, the other two are now guilty of something? In all my years studying economics and law, I never heard anyone suggest anything remotely this draconian.
Ugh, this entire thread will be a frustrating exercise in folks insisting their feel-feels are the law of the land because they hate Apple and that takes precedence over facts and reality.
> So if there are 2 competitors and one drops out, then it's hardcore illegal, but otherwise it's a-okay?
No, it is absolutely not. There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in the US. The government even explicitly and purposefully creates and grants monopolies pretty often. Natural monopolies are not illegal. Abusing your government-granted or natural monopoly is the illegal behavior.
I'm curious to see how they even construe a duopoly as a monopoly under current law, because this will have some profound impacts to the entire economy if they succeed.
> Ugh, this entire thread will be a frustrating exercise in folks insisting their feel-feels are the law of the land because they hate Apple and that takes precedence over facts and reality.
Typing this on one of many Apple devices I own. I don't hate Apple. But, you're right, comments like yours make this a frustrating exercise indeed.
> No, it is absolutely not. There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in the US.
Yes yes, it may technically not be illegal per se, but then again, it's a problem. I am not a lawyer and I don't care about the details of the law. That's for other people. I am looking at this from a perspective of a consumer who feels actively harmed by what the tech industry has become. And as a member of society who cares for other people. If one company accrues that much by making it hard for others to compete, then they will rightfully be forced to give back if they don't do it out of their own free will.
Your point is not based on laws though, you're just wishing the laws were different. Which is fine, but the process here should be to change the laws first instead of warping the current laws' definition to punish Apple first, collateral damage be damned.
>then it's hardcore illegal
You aren't a lawyer, you don't care about the laws as written, yet make false statements about what the law says according to how you feel anyways then back pedal when called out that it's not actually illegal. I think you've said everything you can.
> Monopoly law needs to be reinterpreted in light of network effects.
This is the context of this discussion. If you think dragging me into details of the current law will distract me, sorry, no it won't. This thread is not about that.
> yet make false statements about what the law says
Now you are making false statements. I didn't say that the law says that. What's more, you dragged that piece of a sentence out of its context to make it appear as if it wasn't part of a question. But it was. So it's not a statement. It's a question. Is it a false question, maybe? Sounds a bit laughable to me.
> So if there are 3 competitors and one drops out, the other two are now guilty of something?
Well, Microsoft eventually got all but forced to port Office and, for a time, Internet Explorer to macOS to evade getting sanctioned by the EU.
In a similar vein, if the market is not healthy any more, the duopolists may be forced by regulatory authorities to make life easier for potential startup competitors: open up file format specifications, port popular applications with network effects (iMessage, Facetime, Find My in the case of Apple) to other platforms or open up specifications to allow others access/federation.
> Well, Microsoft eventually got all but forced to port Office and, for a time, Internet Explorer to macOS to evade getting sanctioned by the EU.
I have seen some people assert this a few times in the last couple of weeks and I don’t know where this comes from. This is not at all what happened.
This was part of an agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, long before any EU decision. Microsoft bought some Apple shares and agreed to support office on MacOS for a few years, and Apple made IE their default browser.
One can argue whether they did it to improve the optics in their (American) antitrust lawsuit (and there are several details that do not make sense if it were the case), but it certainly was not forced on them by any court.
Considering in the Google antitrust case it came out that the companies were working hand in glove for years, what were have is a duopoly where the participants collude. This is also the case in broadband where ISPs carved up neighborhoods between themselves to reduce competition.
So sure, duopoly of real competitors is one thing, but that’s rarely the case once players realize they can set prices and divide the spoils.
> Considering in the Google antitrust case it came out that the companies were working hand in glove for years, what were have is a duopoly where the participants collude.
But then, the problem is that you have a cartel, not a duopoly. That’s the thing: you can only punish companies for their actions. A duopoly is a fact, in itself it does not imply any particular behaviour from either company. If there is collusion, then it’s anti-competitive behaviour, abuse of their dominant positions in the market, etc. Things that are already illegal and should be enforced.
> This is also the case in broadband where ISPs carved up neighborhoods between themselves to reduce competition.
The reason there is only 1 broadband ISP is because people are not willing to pay sufficiently more for fiber to offset the costs to install fiber to the home, especially in places with buried utilities.
Therefore, the existing coaxial connection is the only economically viable option.
Also, it rarely makes sense for 1 home to have multiple physical infrastructure connections, so they lend themselves to natural monopolies. If a house has access to fiber, it makes no sense to spend resources to run another fiber to the house.
Which is also why ISPs should be utilities, but that is not comparable to personal devices.
> is because people are not willing to pay sufficiently more for fiber to offset the costs to install fiber to the home
Which might be the case if, through taxes, we hadn't collectively paid for a lot of that in the way of subsidies and grants to those ISPs to do exactly that, subsidies and grants which resulted in, generally, more dividends, bonuses and stock buybacks than they did miles of fiber being laid.
The term “HHI” means the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, a commonly accepted measure of market concentration. The HHI is calculated by squaring the market share of each firm competing in the market and then summing the resulting numbers. For example, for a market consisting of four firms with shares of 30, 30, 20, and 20 percent, the HHI is 2,600 (302 + 302 + 202 + 202 = 2,600).
The HHI takes into account the relative size distribution of the firms in a market. It approaches zero when a market is occupied by a large number of firms of relatively equal size and reaches its maximum of 10,000 points when a market is controlled by a single firm. The HHI increases both as the number of firms in the market decreases and as the disparity in size between those firms increases.
The agencies generally consider markets in which the HHI is between 1,000 and 1,800 points to be moderately concentrated, and consider markets in which the HHI is in excess of 1,800 points to be highly concentrated. See U.S. Department of Justice & FTC, Merger Guidelines § 2.1 (2023). Transactions that increase the HHI by more than 100 points in highly concentrated markets are presumed likely to enhance market power under the Horizontal Merger Guidelines issued by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. See id.
>In the last ten years, no other vendor has been able to successfully place a new OS on the market.
How much of this is because of evil monopoly forces, and how much of it is because users prefer iOS and Android? It's not like the mobile device market snapped into existence overnight, both Android and iOS beat out Blackberry and managed to fend off Microsoft.
Most of it was because of the channels. People buy a phone from their carrier. They don't buy from an OS manufacturer. They don't even buy from a phone manufacturer. They get a plan and it comes with a phone. Carriers only distribute phones from a few proven vendors, and that decision involves a lot of games of golf and karaoke nights on company tabs.
Turns out the phone cartel is the phone company cartel in a trench coat.
Before either iOS or Android existed, you could get phones running Windows CE from carriers. Why didn't that stick around? Especially since those primitive smartphones gave carriers a lot more control over their app stores.
> If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened.
I...don't think that's sufficiently self-evident to stand on its own.
Fundamentally, it's hard to have a world with more than a very small number of operating systems for the major form factors of device—unless those operating systems are mandated to interoperate in significant ways.
Creating a new operating system for phones also requires some things that are not at all easy to get:
1) You need hardware. This means that either you're creating an OS for an existing hardware platform (in this case, Android or iOS) or you're building your own phones. Given the legal frameworks that existed over the past decade and a half (as distinct from the particular dominance of one platform or another), that basically means you're building your own phones. Some people have tried to do that, but it adds hugely to the up-front cost of getting an OS going.
2) You need to get a critical mass of people using it. Until and unless this happens, what you've created has to live or die based on the apps and services that you build for the phone. No one's going to dedicate their own time, effort, and money to creating software for a phone that only 10,000 people have ever bought.
Now, I can see a pretty strong argument for a new legal framework that would make #1 much easier—specifically, requiring all hardware platforms (possible "all hardware platforms over X sales") to provide a fully-open specification for third-party OS makers to use (with appropriate clauses about dogfooding the open API to prevent the hardware maker from just using a bunch of private APIs to preference their OS). This would allow people to create their own OS for the iPhone without Apple's interference.
But that's not what we've had since 2007, so your bold but unsupported statement that the lack of third choices for mobile OSes in and of itself proves that Apple is a monopoly (or at least that Apple/Google together make up an abusive duopoly) does not hold up to scrutiny.
We need proactive antitrust laws that break up companies beyond a certain size criteria. There are many markets beyond the tech sector that need a breakup. But no, lets wait until there is enough outrage before the DoJ laggardly assembles a case against them.
Though the average hackernews reader knows all this, it is not my impression that the average apple consumer is aware of it. Anecdotally, many of the people in my social vicinity choosing apple, are the same people who make their choices based on what they presume the 'cool kids' believe is the 'in' choice. I don't experience iphone users as tech-savvy, as much as I seem them be 'anxious to be cool'.
I think most people just like how simple the products are overall. I prefer that my family, who tends to need a lot of basic tech support, have iPhones because they’re able to figure most things out and there’s no real risk of them messing anything important up. I’ve also noticed this strange phenomenon that the majority of people who complain about iPhones and the apple ecosystem don’t even use them. If someone doesn’t like what the company offers, they’re not forced to buy any of their products. I hate the idea of needing to deal with multiple app stores in the future because people who don’t even use the products have some sort of issue with it.
the new form of corp + government collusion does these weak investigations and charges, tying up the space for years and ultimately losing. It allows politicians to claim they are doing something, while securing access for intel agencies and insuring pro status quo election messaging.
These charges also undercut the next administration's leverage to negotiate with Apple, now that the threat of anti-trust charges are taken off the table.
The problem with a software moat is that it's infecting physical objects. Hardware, sure. But things like your tractor refusing to work if you use a non-vendor approved component. Not sued, just bricked.
It is a feature, interfaces between pieces of software is some of the most expensive and challenging parts of writing it. When every piece of software is written specifically with that interfacing in mind it will just run better. Now Apple hardware is starting to do the same thing?
I am pretty bullish on Apple right now and could easily see a future where Windows isn't even used for gaming anymore. When Macbook Airs start to be capable of running high end games what is the point of getting a huge Desktop running Windows jammed with bloatware from 100 different companies?
Finally. It was about time that this would happen.
Google got one anti-trust lawsuit, Meta should get another one (by owning too many social networks with billions of users each) and after the failed anti-trust lawsuit that Epic tried to sue Apple under, this time the DOJ is finally going after Apple.
Good.
I'm really looking forward to the United States v. Apple Inc. anti-trust lawsuit that will actually make some changes to stop the 30% commission scam once and for all.
Google could use another pass to put a stop to their aggressive cross-promotion of Chrome, which is difficult if not impossible to compete with given how many Google products people use on a daily basis. Every time I visit Google, YouTube, etc with a fresh non-Chrome browser profile there’s a barrage of, “Download Chrome!” popups to dismiss, not to mention how Google iOS apps use link taps as opportunities to promote Chrome or all the random third party Windows software that has Chrome bundled with it.
> that will actually make some changes to stop the 30% commission scam once and for all.
No. The change they should make is to allow sideloading. I don't care if the developer pays less than 30% when Apple can still censor what I run on my phone.
I cannot say that it will, though in theory the businesses that want to compete would want to pass the savings to the consumers while staying profitable. But I can say with certainty that increasing the commission will increase the prices. Companies do not pay this fee/commission out of their own pockets.
> in theory the businesses that want to compete would want to pass the savings to the consumers while staying profitable
This is the app market, not the wheat flour market. Most of the time the apps aren't interchangeable. At least those that provide some value *. So... they will charge what the market will bear.
Do you see Apple reducing their commission from 30% to 5% and changing the 0.99 price to 0.79? I don't.
* ok, not flashlight and TODO apps.
Edit: actually Apple reduced the commission from 30% to 15% for some apps. Did you see any app at 0.84 in the app store? Didn't think so...
Apple has about 60% of the smartphone market in the US, and about 25% globally. That's a pretty big stretch to call it a monopoly. There are many non-apple phone options that many consumers easily avail themselves of. And at least one other OS choice as well. All of these are fully supported by the entire ecosystem of telcos.
Seems like bullying to score political points to me.
Apple has about 60% of the smartphone market in the US, and about 25% globally.
This case is about the US marketplace, globally is irrelevant.
And it is about more than just marketshare. Apple's tactics restrict the entire marketplace --- not just Apple captives.
Whole classes of apps are simply not practically possible on Android without paying monetary tribute to Apple.
For example, universal messaging is not possible without paying the Apple gatekeeper. Few people will use a messaging app if it can't communicate with 60% of their friends. And the only to make this happen is to pay Apple.
The fact that people are shallow is not a reason to break up companies. Some social circles will kick you out if you don't wear luxury clothes, but you don't see the government forcing those companies to lower prices.
I'm not talking about teenagers. If you think that your social life is the same with and without imessage you're wrong, regardless of how old you are.
Using any other app just adds friction - obviously your best friend isn't going to stop talking to you because of it but weaker relationships might not survive.
And in my circle, my home address, the kind of car I drive, the universities I attended, and the places I vacation all affect -- subtly and sometimes more blatantly -- my relationships. Are you arguing for absolute uniformity across all choices in life?
>>universal messaging is not possible without paying the Apple gatekeeper
There is in fact universal messaging - it's called SMS. You don't need to pay Apple to use it. If you would have added secure to your example then yes that would be correct.
Standard oil was at 64% when it was broken up in 1911. Absolute market share isn't the only factor that goes into determining monopoly. You also get different numbers from different definitions. Apple controls 100% of the iOS market, or ~80% of the mobile subscription market, etc.
This is like saying Y Combinator controls 100% of the Hacker News market, or that Amazon controls 100% of the AWS market. It's a non-sensical argument.
Of course it's non-sensical, right up until that thing grows to be a large part of the US economy.
I have no idea what the numbers are, but if 80% of all commerce on mobile is going through Apple's devices then yes, it's likely that the Government will want to ensure there is "fairness" in that eco-system.
On the contrary, it's exactly on the spot. EU used the term "gatekeeper" for such a market position, where you can dictate the terms of the market (and have oversized influence over other participant's behviour), while dodging classification of "monopolist" on technicality. It's exactly the point.
Yeah! Microsoft owns 100% of the Windows market, so users shouldn't be able to install software on their Windows devices unless they use the Microsoft store. Installing your own software from the internet or writing your own code would be non-sensical because Microsoft owns that.
You used the phrase “Windows deceives” to mean “general purpose PCs”, and I think it’s worth noting this because Windows Phone was a Windows device. I acknowledge that this is not cognitive dissonance if you also believe PlayStation is a monopoly.
Not sure I get your point since I'm not super familiar with the Windows phone. If the argument is that the Windows phone was locked down and could only load software from a Microsoft store, then I'm glad it died. Same way I'm glad Internet Explorer as the default on Windows had government action taken against it. Let me use my machine for my code. I don't care if you are Apple or Microsoft or whoever. I do not care if you "own" your company, the fact is that if you sell me a device, I want to to own my device by running whatever I want.
Okay, so you're an absolutist about this. I think that's fine, but it doesn't jive with my experience that not everyone wants to be (or is even capable of being) their own IT department. This quote by Benedict Evans resonated with me:
"It sometimes just amazes me that people who actually work in the tech industry, and are in their 30s and 40s, claim that it would be just fine if smart phones had the same app security and privacy model as the Mac or Windows, and that there is no benefit at all from additional controls. Where have these people been for the last 30 years? You seriously want to let any developer do whatever they want to a device that billions of people carry around every day?"
I would honestly be fine if Apple was at least as lenient as Android in terms of sideloading. Doesn't seem like a big ask to me, given that just about every other phone manufacturer in the world except for Apple does it and the world hasn't ended. Apple has other issues beyond the software thing, but saying that you shouldn't be allowed to actually own a device you purchased because "apple owns 100% of iphones!" is very silly to me.
“Apple controls 100% of the iOS market” as an argument sounds like satire lol. What point does this make?
Is the implication that Apple should allow iOS on non-Apple devices? There is not a single hardware company in the world that would integrate iOS to the degree that Apple does. A requirement like this would immediately enshittify Apple’s brand.
They're using emotional arguments, not rationale ones. Like calling Apple's cut of app sales a "tax", as it is literally not a tax but a normal part of doing business. Similarly the lawsuit claims that iPhone users somehow are "undermined" from messaging other phones, when in reality there are zero restrictions on messaging to and from any phone. None of these arguments are based on the reality of the situation, but some emotional response to it.
I wasn't implying anything of the sort. I was simply trying to illustrate that market share is relative to the definition of "market" you use with extreme examples. Frankly, I'm not even saying that defining iOS/the app store as a market unto itself is a good definition.
>> Standard oil was at 64% when it was broken up in 1911. [...] Apple controls 100% of the iOS market [...]
I find it maddening that a lot of people replying to your fair point have chosen to ignore the first half and decided to exclusively focus on the latter, when that part was clearly meant as an example of how market definitions can have an impact.
A fairly recent example of the latter being a commonly mischaracterized or (by members of the public) outright dismissed concern was MSFTs dominance in the Cloud Gaming market, which was often met either with "but MSFTs share of the gaming market overall is less" or the even less applicable "but nobody uses Cloud Gaming anyway", even though neither should count towards whether something rises to anti-competitive behavior in a given market.
It's bikeshedding. People respond to the parts that they can, and ignore the parts they can't. Even if everyone else has already responded with the same thing.
> That's a pretty big stretch to call it a monopoly
The word "monopoly" needs to be banned from these types of discussions because it always derails the conversation into pointless semantic bickering. There is no definition of that word that will make everyone happy. Even if Apple had 99.999% marketshare, as long as there's some hacker selling DIY linux phones under a bridge somehwere, someone's going to say Apple CAN'T be a monopoly because they have a competitor.
There are many reasons why antitrust laws exist, and these lawsuits tend to be really complex. There's not a simple `if(company.is_monopoly()) sue(company);` program that the FTC and DOJ use to decide when to sue.
The FTC is perhaps a biased source, but they say [1]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.
The US doesn't have antitrust authority for the world, only for the US. iPhone has had 60% market share (or similar) for a long time now, so it's fair to consider that Apple has significant and durable market power in mobile phones.
Is it a complete monopoly? No, but it doesn't need to be.
From a very brief skim of the claims, the clearest one that stands out to me is the one about smartwatches. If Apple does provide better integrations to Apple Watches than 3rd party watches, that's pretty clearly 'tying' which is prohibited when using a market dominant product to create market dominance in a new market (smartwatches). OTOH, it wouldn't have been a big deal if the Microsoft Band had better integrations than other watches on Windows Phone, because tying is allowed without market dominance.
>that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
Apple doesn't have this power though. If they raised prices they'd lose sales. And they haven't been able to exclude competitors, there is a robust ecosytem of Android manufacturers.
There's a reason the FTC has been losing almost all of their cases recently. They internalized the idea that a large successful company is inherently bad and focus on that rather than any objective legal standard.
Samsung has a similar ecosystem if one wants to buy it. Plenty of people have macs and android phones, or windows computers and iphones.
Certainly other companies can't be in Apple's walled garden, but in antitrust exclude means exclude from the market. Apple hasn't done that, there's a vibrant market in phones, computers, tablets, smartwatches, etc.
> iPhone has had 60% market share (or similar) for a long time now, so it's fair to consider that Apple has significant and durable market power in mobile phones.
It has market power, but it's not significantly larger than its competition. It's not 60% for iPhone, and 10% split up amongst 4 other competitors. It's 60% vs 40%... and probably more like 58% vs 42% [1].
Does 8% truly make Apple "dominant" to the point that integrating their software with watches in a better manner is illegal? I find that wildly difficult to believe.
> that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
Apple has been able to raise its own prices, but it hasn't been wildly out of line with competitors.
And Apple both makes phones and the software on them. They might be excluding or making competitors to their software have a harder time, but excluding? Not really - they have only excluded other large companies who have distinctly decided to run afoul of their guidelines (specifically, Epic).
Is Google doing any of the things the DoJ complaint alleges against Apple?
a) supressing super apps
b) supressing cloud streaming apps
c) restricting capabilities of 3rd party messaging apps, specifically carrier based messaging (SMS)
d) restricting the best smartwatch integration to only their own devices
e) something I don't grok about digital wallets
There's maybe a case that Google is doing c; I think they made it harder to get the permissions for reading and writing SMS. And I don't think they allow non-Google, non-manfuacturer apps to do RCS, if RCS counts as carrier-based messaging and not yet another Google messaging service.
I don't understand the complaint about Digital Wallets, so I don't really know if Google is doing it.
I don't follow smartwatches, but I thought the Android ecosystem was pretty agnostic there? Back when Google Wear was Google Glass, they did let Google push notifications from a phone with Bluetooth, but everyone else had to push through Google servers, but I think when they moved it to wrists, that changed and everyone can push direct from the phone to the watch.
I haven't heard any drama over super apps or gaming streaming apps being blocked from Google Play... And worse case, developers can serve apks from their website directly.
I'm sure there's room to find things Google does with Android that could be market manipilation, but Google does seem to be aware of the risk and try to avoid crossing the line.
> It's not 60% for iPhone, and 10% split up amongst 4 other competitors
That is basically what it is though. Google is not the 40%, it's Google, Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc. Yes Google Play Store is on 40% of those devices, but they can ship with other stores and some do.
1. It is not Apple iPhone vs Samsung, LG, Pixel Android. But Apple iOS vs Android.
2. The 60% of Apple iPhone / iOS Market "usage" share ( incase people want to be pedantic and refer it as shipping market share ), commands over 70% if not 80% of purchasing power in Apps or other sub market sector. That is a huge difference in market power.
People seem to miss the concept of "market power" vs sales numbers. Apple loyalists love to brag about the fact that Apple users spend something like 7x more on Apps and other services than Android users. They don't brag about that so much when anti-trust comes up - on a weighted basis that would suggest Apple has about 95% of market share and should be treated in the same category that late 1990's Microsoft was.
Serious question. Why is it though, despite forming over 40% of the smart phone market in the US, Android users only spends 5% of the money? It can’t simply be about control, otherwise Nokia or BlackBerry should’ve accomplished that in their hay day.
I'm guessing because outside the Apple ecosystem apps are primarily free.
Apple App Store is $99 annually + cost of owning a Mac, compared to a one time $25 Google Play Store (develop on PC or Mac, with the possibility to avoid the Play Store). More people own PCs (even within the developer community) so this leads to more apps in the PC and Android ecosystem. More competition, means lower prices.
I've also heard Apple is much more strict about what they allow on their App store, which further restricts supply and keeps prices high. I don't think this is an accident, Apple intentionally wants high prices on their platform, because it keeps the illusion alive that Apple devices are luxury devices and a status symbol.
There is no way that developer costs of $100/year + a $2k Mac is the reason why all the money gets spent on iOS.
“Keep prices high”. The top grossing iOS apps are all like $1-2. That is not high. In fact, from what I could tell on sensortower.com, apps from the same developers were priced identically between stores, and the average prices of Android top grossing apps were higher. Probably because of the LOW VOLUME, not related to overhead.
You’re trying hard to find reasons to blame Apple for an active marketplace. What exactly do you want to achieve?
The PlayStore on iOS? The free market doesn’t work. It’s a myth. I’d much rather pay $10 for a good app here or there than have a store full of “free” or $0.05 trash where it’s not worth anyone’s time to invest in building something good.
But if was to guess, I would say that Android users fall into two camps primarily. One is high end tech-savvy users who want it because it's more open, powerful and flexible. These people don't buy apps and services because they are "smart" and use their tech knowledge to solve the problems those things are solving cheaper ways (or for free).
Then there are a second group of Android users who simply buy it because it is cheaper, or they just have absolutely no interest / affinity for Apple's branding. These users aren't going to buy things because their primary motivation in the first place was to not spend excessive money on something they don't care about (or they just don't have the money).
I'd also suggest that perhaps the 7x is a bit exaggerated. It's just harder to account for the revenue from Android apps because it's more driven by off-market streams. But I totally believe iOS is much much more. It might just not be 7x.
I've seen this quoted multiple times now and I do not think it is the slam dunk people think it is. A literal monopoly is 100% market share, of course that is not required for antitrust law to apply. But the people who quote this intend to imply that 60% market share is sufficient to declare Apple a monopolist in violation of antitrust law, and that does not actually follow from a careful reading of this quote.
I will reply with a separate quote from the DOJ discussing what thresholds of market share are likely to be considered monopoly power:
> In determining whether a competitor possesses monopoly power in a relevant market, courts typically begin by looking at the firm's market share.(18) Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred,"(19) they have demanded a dominant market share. Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly; it is doubtful whether sixty or sixty-four percent would be enough; and certainly thirty-three per cent is not."(20) The Supreme Court quickly endorsed Judge Hand's approach in American Tobacco Co. v. United States.(21) Following Alcoa and American Tobacco, courts typically have required a dominant market share before inferring the existence of monopoly power. The Fifth Circuit observed that "monopolization is rarely found when the defendant's share of the relevant market is below 70%."(22) Similarly, the Tenth Circuit noted that to establish "monopoly power, lower courts generally require a minimum market share of between 70% and 80%."(23) Likewise, the Third Circuit stated that "a share significantly larger than 55% has been required to establish prima facie market power"(24) and held that a market share between seventy-five percent and eighty percent of sales is "more than adequate to establish a prima facie case of power."(25)
My reading of this is that below 50% is very unlikely to be considered monopoly power while above 70-80% is very likely. 60% appears to sit somewhere in between where it is possible but not likely. Historically, I have not seen any major cases where monopoly power was found at the market share level that Apple currently holds.
It is worth noting that the DOJ in their filing does not seem very confident in being able to prove that Apple's 60% of the smartphone market constitutes monopoly power either. They have instead opted to define a narrower market of "performance smartphones" where Apple apparently holds 70% market share, putting it above the thresholds quoted above. Whether this artificially narrowed market definition will be accepted by the courts will likely determine the outcome of this case.
You realize the world market is irrelevant. If some company has a monopoly in France, they don't care whether or not that company has less market in other countries. Apple has a monopoly in the USA and so the USA is going to try to break that monopoly. Google has already been sued and lost on it's app store market share. Apple's is larger.
If my water provider said "We're the only water provider so we're raising rates 1000%, take it or leave it", you would still say that's a monopoly even though i could move house to an area with another water provider.
Apple has a 100% monopoly though it's AppStore on 2 billion devices though which $90,000,000,000 in trade is conducted. If that's not a market big enough to be considered for Anti-Competitive practices and illegally maintaining a monopoly then i don't know what is.
That's more trade than the entire GDP of Luxembourg!
Friends will still talk to you. But they won't include you in group messages because apple purposely sabotages group messages with anyone outside the garden.
Unsurprisingly, a lot social planning and banter happens in those group messages.
Not really. They have ties to specific platforms, just that the platform is not tied to hardware. So it's either installing the app, or losing the connections, same as with the iPhone.
Easier, maybe, but the users are still married to the platforms, now with the added annoyance that there is no cross-talk between the apps at all. Network effect is a huge thing, and the only difference between iMessage and Whatsapp for example is that Whatsapp doesn't have the hardware to lock the users into.
So getting back to the original point, OP bemoans that in order to communicate with some people, one has to have an iPhone. With other apps, you just need to have the specific app. Maybe not as bad, we could say, but the phenomenon is the same: in order to contact some people, you have to install their specific app. No other way in.
Here's the first paragraph of the actual lawsuit. So no, I feel like they probably didn't miss the point that Android exists:
COMPLAINT
In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Appl
e’s then-CEO about an ad for the new
Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman
who was using her iPhone to buy and read books
on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Androi
d smartphone and continues to read her books
using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “
message that can’t be missed is
that it is easy to switch from
iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.
” Jobs was clear in his
response: Apple would “force” deve
lopers to use its payment system
to lock in both developers
and users on its platform. Over
many years, Apple has repeat
edly responded to competitive
threats like this one by making it
harder or more expensive for its
users and developers to leave
than by making it more attr
active for them to stay.
The actual complaint leads off with the iBooks thing, which is a terrible start. Apple lost that case and it shouldn’t have; to this day, that result enables Amazon’s effective monopoly on paid ebooks.
I just want to code and sideload my own silly little apps that aren't important enough to be in the App Store. I can do this on my Mac and it doesn't seem to explode because of it.
If Apple's iPhone "monopoly" is illegal then sue Google for continuing to make Android worse. That's why I switched to iPhone and have no desire to switch back.
Apple's crime here is they made a good product and continued to iterate on it, while Google has churned for years, reinventing and rebranding every app, service, and product multiple times a year and only making them worse so POs can get promotions.
Google was already found by a jury to have a monopoly on Android app distribution. And if Google has one, Apple's monopoly on iOS app distribution is clearly stronger and more harmful in the US given their larger market share and complete prohibition of alternatives.
Google's crime was not having a charismatic leader who could store all the mens rea solely in his own head and then conveniently die before legal scrutiny started over their App Store racket.
All of Google's monopolistic intent was conveniently detailed out in loads of e-mails. They were caught failing to retain these e-mails, which in a civil suit where the 5th Amendment does not apply, means the judge gets to just assume the worst (make an "adverse inference").
To make matters worse, Google promised openness and then tried to privately walk it back. Legally, this is admitting that the "Android app distribution market" already exists and is the appropriate market definition for a monopoly claim. It's harder to argue that an "iOS app distribution market" should exist when Apple is using power words like "intellectual property" - aka "we have a right to supracompetitive profits."
My personal opinion is that the DOJ probably will succeed where Epic failed, however, because of one other critical thing: standing. Epic did reveal market harms that are almost certainly cognizable under US law, but none of those harms were things Epic was allowed to sue over.
I mean, you're not wrong, but the lawsuit isn't about the quality of the end product. It's about the economic leverage Apple has over other businesses by virtue of owning the chokepoints - i.e. the OS software and the signing keys it trusts.
I personally would love to switch to iPhone if Apple wasn't so much of a control freak about the software you run on it.
I've heard all arguments against Apple's practices, and to me, they all basically come down to 'it's unfair that so many people like to live inside the Apple walled garden'. When it comes to the law, Apple is not a monopoly. When it comes to competition on the market, Apple is competing with Android and Windows, and the vast majority of the world's middle and upper class willingly choose Apple products. Even if you literally tried to block people from buying Apple products, people will find a way. So, obviously, Apple customers are having a great time in the Apple warden garden and made Apple a $3T company. But for some reason, other companies and regulators feel like Apple and its customers are having too much fun and need to call the cops on their party.
Apple is no different than Google search. Even if you drowned people in search choice popups, 99% of the time people choose Google. Regulators say Google is doing something nefarious when in reality, their product is loved by billions of people. In these situations, like Apple products and Google search, we need to realize that both companies have won the game in certain markets they operate because they made products that people really enjoy using.
They're not the same. The critical difference is people CAN choose not to use Google Search while keeping their same computer/phone, something you can't do with iPhone and the App Store/Wallet/etc laid out in the article. That's the critical difference that takes it from simply creating a superior product to monopoly, when you use your advantage in one space to lock in customers in a related space.
I think Google search and apples ecosystem are extremely different. Google search is trivial to leave, any one can switch to bing by just typing a different address in the URL bar. Switching off of apple products is painful and difficult and it's by design. My wife and I switched from iphone to Android over a year ago and we're still fighting with apple to stop routing some text messages to iMessage when it should be going to our phones over sms.
From a legal perspective, monopoly just means holding undue market power. People seem to really focus on the "mono" part, it's irrelevant from a US legal perspective.
I think the position oft the European Union is a good approach. It classifies companies like apple not as a "monopoly" but as a "gate keeper".
I don't have a very deep understanding of that topic, but it's possible to regulate those companies a bit. In the EU similar things were already done for the car industry. The manufacturers are required to allow third party repair shops the same access to documentation, diagnostics software and parts like their own shops (not for free, but for a reasonable price). And repairs at a third party shop doesn't void the warranty.
For computers, cloud providers and smartphones similar regulations could improve everybody's life by giving us more flexibility and cheaper products by creating more competition.
In the end apple is collecting a lot of money and seems to just put it on huge piles in their bank accounts. I don't see any reason to increase competition by introducing regulations. Give startups and smaller companies a chance!
I feel like there's a difference between the car regulation you state and the regulation approach being taken in the EU. Specifically the ability of third parties to limit end user choice.
With vehicle repair, I can still choose to use the manufacturer operated/approved repair shops. I truly am gaining additional choice and can continue to service my car as I always have.
The EU regulations allow third parties to remove my choice to live in the walled garden if they wish. So while it could enhance competition for developers I don't know if it greatly improves the users choice, or experience.
I'm not so sure. We are fully bought in to the Apple Ecosystem (Apple One, Apple Fitness, Music, everything). In most cases (like Apple Home), I did enough research and found that it was much more well thought out security-wise and was good enough, compared to the wild west that is the Google/Amazon smart home ecosystem. Again, for the most part, the walled garden is way superior to what I see outside the garden.
Even the app store, I have all my complaints about Apple's arbitrary enforcement of App Review guidelines as an iOS developer. However, as a consumer, I love that I can spend _less_ time worrying about my non-tech loved ones finding garbage in the app store. Yes there's coercive "buy this game" garbage, and tons of it, but I'm less concerned about financial scam apps than I would be for third party app stores.
However, in certain cases (like only Apple Music supported on the HomePod speakers, or Apple Watch only sending fitness data to Apple Fitness), we feel kind of "forced" to use the Apple product when there are superior competitors, because of the (manufactured) ease of use of full integration.
Just FYI, HomePod actually supports multiple music services, and Apple Health (the data store for Fitness) supports integrations with other providers (both input and output).
That seems like something they'd be willing to fix. They allow users to select Ecosia, an extremely niche search engine. Kagi should be on that list too.
This is correct for one side of Apple's market but not the other. You're right that Apple doesn't have monopoly power on the consumer side because there are alternatives and if you cared a whole heck of a lot you could create your own. It's capital intensive sure but being expensive to enter a market and having a moat doesn't mean you have a monopoly. If all your friends hung out on Discord then you're gonna have to use Discord to talk to them, if all your friends play a Windows exclusive game then you're gonna need a PC to play with them, the green bubble thing is nonsense.
But Apple does wield real monopoly power on the other side of their market which is app developers. I don't think large developers have any real choice but to bite the bullet and take whatever terms Apple offers and be on iOS because that's where your users are. Developers aren't choosing Apple as the better product in the way consumers are.
If Apple wanted to, they could drag this out for a decade. In the end, there are probably some details of what they've done with Imessage or the store that you could convince a jury are "unfair."
It's good to know that with everything going wrong on this administration’s watch, they’ve got their laser focus on vacuums, video games, and phones.
The dating argument seems outlandish but it's a legit problem that Android phones ruin group messaging functions that iMessage offers so they'll be left out.
The article is chock full of examples where Apple prevents competition on their platform or in connection with their platform.
Apple's argument is generally that they are making the platform safer for their users, but I was just on the App Store looking for the Google Authenticator, and the first item listed was a scam third party authenticator which was intended to fool users looking like the Google Authenticator. This would be the easiest possible thing for a giant corporation like Apple to catch. The fact that it is Google's customers which are being scammed could be part of the reason why Apple doesn't prioritize safety in this case.
What we're dealing with here is a really duplicitous company. Their marketing is world class. The battery life of their products is world class. Everything else - not so much.
Pretty sure that's an ad and yeah, it is misleading.
However, there's no comparison between the Apple app store and Android stores. There is an outrageous amount of straight-up malware on Android. FFS, one actually needs third-party antivirus/malware scanners on Android it's so bad.
The government does not want people to have secure devices. Whether or not Apple's are currently secure is not the point; that they are working to make them so is enough to make sure it doesn't happen.
On the contrary, secure computational infrastructure furthers national security. US happens to have a very large footprint of vulnerable infrastructure as compared to other nations that tightly regulate their Internet. Believe it or not, more secure devices are actually good for the US. There have been several articles and discussions around it and the government has been working closely with the industry for years to improve the security posture.
There's also a news article every few months talking about how the FBI or some other government agency wants to make encryption illegal and how iMessage is a boon to pedophiles all over the world and protects criminals. So, not sure how you can confidently say "On the contrary!"
> By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field where it grants its products and services access to core features that it denies rivals.
Once I read this I was not shocked. Apple is already pushing people to buy their separate apps that should have came in for free, with the purchase of the Iphone or at least make a bundle Apple users could buy. Disgusting Apple totally deserved.
TV and Music comes with the OS. iMovie is a free download. Apple Arcade is a subscription to games made by companies other than Apple.
No way in hell would Apple TV+, a premium video service, be free. And in what world would Final Cut Pro be free? I'd love it if they threw in Ableton Live and Pro Tools, but that's also not happening.
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[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 432 ms ] thread> I am curious though, why is the iOS version €4.99 but the Android version is free ? I've seen this a lot actually and have always wondered, I figured it might just be Apple's annual developer license fee but not sure.
Apple users are being forced to pay more for equivalent software because of Apple's tax.
This is more a matter of interpretation, policy and practice rather than statute and these things can change over time. The interpretation you're describing was itself an innovation at one time.
Even in the most egregious days of Microsoft's OS monopoly, you could still choose to install software. Apple makes it basically impossible to do this outside of the context of their app store, which they charge heavily for access to and have no qualms removing or preventing apps that compete with its own. If this doesn't constitute monopolistic behavior, the bar is so high I'm not sure anything would ever qualify for it.
The comparison is this: Walmart and Target are the only two stores that exist. They've also basically agreed to set the same prices on everything. And once you buy from Target once, you must buy everything else from Target too, and if you want to switch to Walmart, you have to throw out everything you bought at Target.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/252678/walmarts-net-sale...
It looks like roughly 60% of groceries are sold at Walmart in the US. And unlike phones, where you can choose Android easily, many regions have only Walmart to shop at.
The answer is more like 25%: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/20/most-popular-grocery-stores
One of the most impressive successes in Epic's cases was just dragging the evidence into the open. A lot of illegal behavior is hidden in confidential agreements mostly to keep them out of regulators' view for as long as possible.
I’m also curious what illegal confidential behaviour you believe was found in the Epic case? The one count that the judge found in favour of Epic didn’t require any form of discovery as it was based on public policy.
As I was reading the specific charges detailed in the article, I was thinking this case seems like a stretch and will be difficult to prove. Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice, messaging, and Apple wallet. FWIW, I am a former lawyer and spent a little time doing antitrust law for the CA DOJ, a long time ago. Just my two cents.
Which is not illegal.
It's a no-win situation for them. If once they established themselves as the dominant player in the cell phone market they started undercutting everyone else on fees that could also be seen as predatory.
FWIW - this is further evidence of anticompetitive behavior. In a competitive market, entrants would be trying to drive distribution costs to 0. The fact that Apple makes its entire App Store revenue off those distribution revenues is highly telling.
It would only be considered predatory if they charging a rate below their own costs of distribution. I.E. If it costs Apple $0.10 to cover the costs of app distribution per download, then it would be completely legal for them to charge $0.11, but illegal and predatory to charge $0.09.
So no, I would say it is absolutely about whether they can open up and still be secure. It seems that they lack confidence that the arguments they had put forward would survive scrutiny asking just that question. Heck, there are even exceptions in the law that would allow them extended time periods in order to comply with the requirements in order to ensure security. So if it is just a question of needing more time, they can get it, and if it is a question of not being possible for users to be secure when interoperable with third parties, they can get exceptions for that.
https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
The golden era of anti-trust was 1940s-1970s, but faded with the rise of the Chicago School of Economics.
It does indeed seem to be coming back more now.
Even if the case continues, it will be a challenge to win. Apple has asymmetric information and knows what they can use to defend the various allegations.
The President/Administration telling the AG what to move forward on (and what not to) is generally not a thing, and when it does happen, there are often headlines:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/18/will...
Then why, for the sake of the argument, do they allow third party browsers, messaging and payments on MacOS ?!?
Apple makes it sound like MacOS is horribly insecure.
And the attack vectors are more numerous. I have ten times as many apps on my phones, it’s always on, always connected, and may frequently connect to wifi networks I don’t fully trust.
The consequences and the attack vectors for a hacker to attack my laptop are fewer.
I’m on the side of wanting Apple to open up a bit more. But I it’s absolutely valid to want the iPhone to be more secure than a laptop. And I seriously hope Apple isn’t forced to let people install apps that aren’t signed and reviewed. I can guarantee you that critical services in your life will force you to install insecure and straight up dangerous apps. The banking sector in some countries is a prime example of that, especially back in the ActiveX era.
I don't buy that argument. I have more important files on my laptop than on my phone.
To clarify macintux's statement, you can only guarantee end-to-end encryption will both remain secure and allow your messages to be read if you control both ends. If you do not control the other end, but you give it the ability to decrypt your messages (and thus let them be read), then whoever does control the other end can save the plaintext, post it elsewhere, and generally do whatever they want with it.
To be "end-to-end encrypted", something has to actually be a service you are using, not merely a method of encryption. An end-to-end encrypted service could use PGP if it wanted (AFAIK), but PGP, in itself, is just a way for you to encrypt your messages, and then, optionally, share your public key to allow them to be decrypted by those you give it to, while also guaranteeing that those messages came from you (as long as you have kept your private key safe).
So I'm afraid your question, as it stands, doesn't really make sense, but I hope this has helped to answer the underlying questions for you.
That is true both for PGP encrypted messages as well as iMessage messages. There's nothing on iPhones or Macs actually protecting your decrypted messages. Most of the on device security is optional and your messages, photos and files can be copied and shared anywhere in plain text.
The question in this thread is whether iMessage can offer secure interop. The answer is yes. They just need to use an open protocol and that protocol can use tools like PGP to encrypt messages end-to-end.
Your claim that both the sending and receiving application need to be "controlled" by some entity for it to have "real" end-to-end security is non-sense.
The question, from tomrod, was "How does PGP solve this?"
Nothing to do with iMessage. I was answering a specific question on a tangent thread. If you want to argue with me about iMessage, go to one of the posts I've made about that on this article. This thread is about PGP.
Apps that read inbound SMS may be malicious and use that ability to steal verification codes. Or they may not be actively malicious, and meerly handle the data in an insecure way that makes messages available to others.
Performance, I dunno. Maybe they could argue something about how time between user requesting an SMS be sent and it actually getting sent is very important, and similar for display, and that they're more likely to do that right. I've certainly seen some Android manufacturer provided SMS clients that do much better than others on that, although I have no recent performance notes since I no longer get massive floods of SMS from too simple monitoring systems.
> “The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage ... iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016, prompting Schiller to respond that, “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”
> “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern
Apple can't make that argument since they allow apps that scan SMS messages for spam.
I don’t think the government could force them to adopt RCS without new legislation or bring iMessage to other platforms.
Could they not have made their own? I don't think they'd be required to use open standards for the argument to be made, they just need to release an iMessage app for Android.
There's no valid technical or security reason to do this. It's a tactical decision on Apple's part.
Does it ACTUALLY matter? Maybe not? But people really do complain about a non-iPhone "degrading" a group chat, so it is indicating something.
At the time they made iMessage at first? It was likely a real advance and only because they could control both ends. But now? They may be large enough that it's unfair use of their monopoly in one area to affect another, and get slapped or forced to interoperate.
That might be worth letting the user know about it.
And then either use that to win the trial, or force Apple into settling.
If this case is thrown off how long can it take for them to make another antitrust case with a different set of stronger arguments ?
Given that they started in 2019 for this one, if lost there is real risk of waiting another 5 years for any meaningful change.
Personally I see avenues for both outcomes.
This is a very low bar. It is of course the case that if you assume one party's definitions are accepted then they will win. The battlefield will be the definitions (just like in patent law the battlefield is the claim construction).
That's true, but odds are they have a lot of e-mails and a lot of employees who can testify to the browser choice decision being driven by lock-in. The iMessage emails were pretty unambiguous with regards to how it is used in an anti-consumer way. (https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...) Similar stuff will exist for everything they do, because they cannot distort the reality that in 2024 their software kind of sucks, and that their customers only use it because they don't have alternatives and Apple prevents those alternatives from being viable.
That's an extremely hot take. When devices are mostly just slabs of glass and the interface and what is done, is entirely the software, customers are choosing the device based on the Apple software, not in spite of it.
In Apple Books, you can't decide which books you want to keep on your device. In iOS Storage, you cannot see the largest pictures/videos (you used to be able to do that, they removed it to make people subscribe to iCloud). The iOS keyboard/autocorrect is so terrible it's almost unusable. You can't even set a vibrating alarm on iPhone without enabling vibration everywhere, come on.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
that is a society issue, not an apple issue, the different messages should be different colours, so you understand the difference.
Peer pressure is one of the strongest forces in sales.
What are you saying Apple should have done/be made to do? Make all the messages the same colour? This causes issues for the user not being able to tell what features are available in messaging that person and then it can be even more confusing to them, you are going to have to mark it some way which is turn is going to have somewhat of the same affect. A lot of these measures from governments don't actually end up helping users, they end up just making the end user experience worse.
For Apple, this was likely a win-win, they need to show the difference and it has such knock on affect, but I think this is the problem, Apple has a way of looking at things and way of doing certain things, a lot of the things that people are upset about in this lawsuit and beyond area consequence of that, but isn't nessecery the sole purpose of why Apple is doing things this way in the first place, those people that get angry at Apple seem to miss those points or disagree with that way of doing it.
If it weren't for the battery life and speed, I would not use it.
Windows is horrible, it's messy, overly cluttered and bloated. MacOS is so much cleaner and nicer, that with nice hardware is why people buy Apple devices, at least that is the same with everyone I know.
UX is complete and utter trash.
But the M1 and onwards hardware is so good, I put up with it.
Just off the top of my head:
- Never had a $2000+ laptop that couldn't connect with more than 2 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and drivers. And even then, it's janky AF
- Rendering on non-Apple external monitors sucks; night and day difference when I connect a Windows laptop to my Dell monitors
- Terrible with system font scaling
- Inconsistent usage of button sizes in their native dialogs
- Can't tab cycle through minimized windows
- Windowing system sucks compared to Windows
- Whatever is happening here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnGT041xkGE
- I ship a PWA for one of my apps and by far Safari is the one that has the most issues with updating
This drives me absolutely NUTS and I thought it was a me problem. Where the hell do things go when they're minimized on macos!!? There's all these questions asking about cmd+tabbing to minimized windows and the answer is to hold option while you hold cmd after selecting the minimized window and then let go of cmd.. but if there's 2 Chrome windows and one is minimized this doesn't work at all.
I don't think there's anything macOS is doing better than Windows in so far as UX goes. Put it another way: I use macOS every day and I never think "Wow, I wish Windows had this feature, too" but every day I wish I had some UX element from Windows -- just basic window management feels so clunky on macOS unless you fullscreen everything.
Hardware is great, though.
When you're close all Chrome windows, that just means you're done with the webpages, not that you're done with Chrome. Chrome dev team can set Chrome to terminate when all windows close, but they've not chosen to do so. It's there when you want to create a new window when you want to interact with a new webpage. And again it's up to the developer to choose to tie the application lifecyle to its windows.
My issue with the menu bar is purely from an ergonomics and usability perspective, especially with high resolution monitors. If I have a window at the bottom right corner of the monitor, I need to move my mouse all the ways to the top left of the monitor to interact with the menu bar. If you always full screen everything, it makes total sense. But I would make the case that macOS has done a very poor job of adapting to changes in monitor resolutions. Consider ultra-wide screen monitors where I have apps side-by-side or I have 4 windows tiled. The accessibility of the menu bar becomes quite low for three out of the 4 windows.
The key stroke to access the menu bar is (do you know it?) CTRL+F2. Try that stroke yourself and see how it feels. It's not at all obvious that this allows you to access the menu bar with the keyboard.
By attaching the menu bar to the application window, the spatial locality increases usability, especially for modern ultra-wide monitors don't you agree?
Hardware limitations that were told at launch.
> Rendering on non-Apple external monitors sucks;
It works fine with my old Dell FHD and my current 4k LG.
> Terrible with system font scaling
Apple does not do system font scaling, it applies scaling to the whole UI, not separate elements.
> Can't tab cycle through minimized windows
Different windows management model. You tab cycle through applications, and you backquote cycle through open windows. Minimized windows go to the dock.
> Windowing system sucks compared to Windows
Again above. Windows sizing is a specific concept in Mac OS interface model and there's rules that you can apply to it. I understand the OS not wanting to interfere much with that.
> I ship a PWA for one of my apps and by far Safari is the one that has the most issues with updating
I've not seen your code so I can't say much. But most people who complain about Safari really want Chrome's non-standard API to exists in Safari too.
> - Windowing system sucks compared to Windows
Checkout: https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos solved most of my pains with it.
However nobody buys it besides their most loyal customers.
This one seems different at first glance,
There’s no real way to square the circle: either Apple (and the state) has realtime app censorship control (nominally for malware, as well as any other thing the state or Apple’s business model feels existentially threatened by), or the user can install any app they want, with all of the associated risks. Even with notarization and self-distribution you’re still in the first category because the state can compel Apple to treat protest apps or non-backdoored e2ee messaging apps the exact same as they do malware, and prevent them from launching.
Users mostly want the former, because most users aren’t worried about government censorship or oppression. Tech people and cypherpunks and pirates and protesters usually want the latter. Tech people usually want the former for their parents/grandparents for whom they serve as device sysadmin.
We only really take these up when they are blatant (price fixing, apple and books, MS and vendors). Or lock ins where there is NO alternative (MS and browsers). This doesn't really meet those bars.
If Apple wins this one at home, then they can quickly cry about other countries regulations being "anti competitive".
I have to wonder if this political on some level.
Not anymore... look at the failed action to stop MS acquiring Activision for instance. Was that "blatant"? I guess not since enforcement failed. Lina Khan's whole thing is aggressively broadening antitrust enforcement.
This feels like a vastly different case, and not one that they'll likely be able to win against Apple.
[0] Its essentially those actions where the DoJ is the agency representing the government interest, including all federal criminal cases and some federal civil cases. Civil cases by other agencies have the agency name; so the antitrust complaint by the DoJ, 15 state governments, and the District of Columbia is United States of America, et al. v. Apple, but the SEC action against Coinbase was Securities and Exchange Commission v. Coinbase, Inc., and Coinbase Global, Inc.
Didn't work in Europe. The alternative browser growth in Europe is massive. Literally, an industry revitalized overnight.
There is no “going dark” issue on iOS platforms. Apple has played ball in full with the USG on that front. In fact, Android backups are e2ee so the government can get more data from Apple on iPhone users than they can get from Google for Android users.
if you weren’t anticompetitive to get to that place, thats been good enough?
You can, though? Just go buy an Android. There are a billion different options there.
Heck, you can also still buy old-school type flip phones at Walmart.
I do agree that losing app licenses is upsetting. But this is no different than the licensing model for many softwares in the desktop market (e.g. per-user and per-install licenses).
People do this every day. Hundreds of them, at least. Every day.
It's 99% the same experience - except for iMessage users your texts become green instead of blue.
On top of that, you can use many other services for texts, like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
Beyond that, I don't see why it's Apple's problem that Google and/or other carriers can't make a decent texting experience without Apple making theirs less secure or a shittier experience in the process.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
Companies, all else being equal, will choose less regulation over more regulation. If TikTok could release outside of the App Store where no one can inspect what they do, they would only release it there. Users addicted to the app wouldn’t suddenly stop using it but now they would be exposed to whatever TikTok feels like doing. They will choose the path of least resistance, not all the paths. It’s not that hard to understand.
There is a plethora of evidence that this is not the case. See this recent example: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/08/a-fake-app-masquerading-as...
(Yes, it was pulled, but that was _after_ the public noticed and LastPass had to issue a warning)
> I just wish they would stop “double dipping “ and charging far in excess of their costs (and in excess of reasonable profit) to the app sellers.
That quarterly growth has to come from somewhere! Line goes up!
Do you have actual evidence for this claim? Because it's pretty widely accepted that the App Store has higher standards and quality, and you just cited a single case.
7 malicious apps (2022) https://lifehacker.com/great-now-the-apple-app-store-has-mal...
18 malicious apps (2019) https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fr...
Up to 4000 malicious apps (2015) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34338362
All Apple can do is revoke app certificates and pull the app from the store after someone else discovers their malicious nature. That's a very low bar that can be met by nearly every app store in existence and it would be a reasonable security requirement for anyone who's operating an alternative app store on iOS.
The rest of it is just theater as there's no security-focused special sauce that Apple is providing in this area, despite prevailing beliefs. This is further demonstrated by their acceptance of an obvious impersonator like "LassPass".
It's also easy to multiply that tactic by insinuating that this means that it isn't good, or isn't better than the competition. Which is what you're doing here.
Just 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685272
I do not understand why Microsoft stepped out of the mobile market.
Because they failed. And not just once!
It's understood that you can install random APKs from anywhere. As a hobbyist developer, I want to be able to set up a GitHub pipeline and then just download my APKs from that without fighting Apple or paying for an Apple developer account.
I'm actually open to buying an iPhone as well, iPhones are much better when it comes to music production, by understand I have to abide by Apple's rules and not be able to install my own software.
With an iPhone 15 you could probably hook up a full blown audio interface and record lyrics as well.
Even a few years in there's already evidence that Apple was entirely aware of how much of a cash cow owning the distribution market for your apps is. There's an internal letter asking about reducing the percentage because someone was worried about the Chrome Web Store (?) eating their lunch. Today, App Review is far too inadequate for the level of software submissions Apple gets, and they regularly let garbage onto the store that's specifically supposed to be curated.
I occasionally hear people complain about how Tim Cook "ruined the company" and that Jobs would never do the kind of control freak shit that he literally pioneered and is literally the selling proposition of the Mac all the way back in 1984. The only thing Tim Cook did was scale the business from "luxury compute" to it's inevitable conclusion as a monopolistic nightmare. The way that the App Store business game is played is specifically that you don't keep spending all your money on better app review. Once you have users and developers mutually hooked on one another, you siphon money out of them for your other projects (or your shareholders).
At one point, you were paying a premium for a better App Store, but not anymore. The business relationship just doesn't work out that way long-term.
[0] I personally think this belief was genuine at first.
It's so ironic that Apple was pushing the (open) Web apps in the early days of the iPhone (out of necessity of course).
The counterexample is the iPod, with its advertising slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn.". The first iPod used Firewire and was Mac-only, every edition since then used entirely industry-standard technology, USB and MP3. The value proposition was, as the slogan illustrates, easily taking your CDs and putting the music on the iPod. That too was in pursuit of an excellent user experience.
Later, Jobs fought the entire music industry for the right to buy digital music, not just rent it. And won.
They make a lot of money because they sell * a lot * of iPhones.
[0] https://valustox.com/AAPL
Looks like 1/3 of their gross comes from services.
Only some of the services are App Store - some of that money is from Apple TV and iCloud storage.
App Store income looks to be app fees and also advertising.
Which is itself another area where Apple forces consumers to use it.
You can't back up your iPhone to Google Drive or Dropbox. So here's your 5GB of space for any and all Apple devices you own, make it last or pay us monthly.
My employer makes space hardware and our overhead R&D expenses are so high that if we made 26% margin we would be bankrupt in a year.
So I think ~30% is probably a minimum floor to shoot for.
Just looked it up and Samsung Electronics has a margin that has ranged from 30% to 46% over the last couple of years.
I think the majority of people on HN are software guys who are completely oblivious to the challenges of building physical items that exist in the real world which is why your comment is downvoted.
That and beyond its stated purpose it seems that HN exists to allow people to complain about Apple in a public forum.
What makes all of this so strange is that large software vendors often have astronomical profit margins that hardware companies can only dream of. SAP (~70%) MSFT (~70%) TEAM (>80%)
https://ycharts.com/companies/SAP/gross_profit_margin
https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/gross_profit_margin
https://ycharts.com/companies/TEAM/gross_profit_margin
Perhaps it is good that software companies have such high margins because if they didn't HN would be flooded with stories about how every company they get hired at goes out of business and management is clueless.
The complaint literally says verbatim, "But after launching the iPhone, Apple began stifling the development of cross-platform technologies on the iPhone, just as Microsoft tried to stifle cross-platform technologies on Windows."
Are we ruling out the possibility that competitive browsers could offer better battery performance, too?
And yeah, I think it’s unlikely someone could have made a more efficient browser than Apple since they didn’t give public access to all of their functionalities. And that might have been partly for security reasons, if there were less-secure aspects to hidden functions, for example.
The counter-argument is that they should have opened everything up, but Apple will say they were going as fast as they could responsibly go, and that’s why there were limitations that have been relaxed over time.
For instance giving a special placement to Apple Music and not allowing other apps to get the same privileges, because music playback needs to be efficient, and a bad music experience would hurt the iPhone's image. Same for movies, same for ebooks, same for spreadsheets (including needing to execute macros, so security risk is through the roof)
I feel I could get paid by Apple to come up with excuses for each app they need any.
If you look at any iOS vulnerability reporting, Safari is a big weakness and often the source of zero day attacks. Browsers are hugely complex pieces of software with a lot of attack surface. A large part of Apple’s value proposition is being secure. It sounds like the new approach (in the EU only) that allows additional browser engines requires specific security measures to be taken.
Rightly or wrongly device security is going to be a strong defense Apple has against some of these allegations.
No, a user should be allowed to take the security risk of installing whatever they want on their computers. Security-conscious users will have clean phones, and ordinary users will have phones full of viruses like their computers.
Let people choose.
If they are so concerned with not letting their users drain the battery if they wish, why do they allow games on their store?
Remember, you (nor apple) are not their parent.
Other people should still be able to decide for themselves.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010701/apple-app-store-...
That brings us back to the question whether they’re a monopoly. The justice department seems to say they have a monopoly on iOS, so that users cannot shop elsewhere.
If such a thing can exist, of course they have a monopoly on iOS, just as Coca Cola has one on Coca Cola, Mercedes has one on Mercedes cars, etc. Next question would be whether they misuse that monopoly.
Apple will argue that ‘a monopoly on iOS’ doesn’t make sense as a concept and that, if you want to run Firefox or Chrome on a smartphone, there’s plenty of choice in the market, and even if there weren’t, there’s no obligation for them or any company to make a product that users want.
In the end, the outcome of this will depend less on logical arguments than about what ‘the people’ want. Laws and their interpretation will change if the people want that. That, I think, is what Apple should be worried about.
They should not be free to prevent others from selling (or providing for free) apps for the computing device that consumers bought.
The problem is that user's can't shop elsewhere, because apple locked the operating system down to prevent that from happening.
It might prove to be a significant difference in terms of how it affects competitors as a product.
Currently, anyone can create a new iPhone browser, but with one huge restriction: Apple insists that it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari. [0]
And currently you can also delete Safari from your iOS device. An example of this is Firefox [1].
0. https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/
1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i...
A browser is a product, and you can install many other browsers.
A HTML rendering engine is a software library, and you can not install another HTML rendering engine.
The justice department definitely cares about products. It's not clear to what degree it cares about software libraries.
In my experience, Firefox does not work as well on the iPhone as does Safari. It's obviously a rendering issue, because large pages will reload on their own over and over again while I'm trying to read them. My guess is it's a sneaky broken part of webkit which Apple knows how to fix in Safari and deliberately leaves broken for the other browser makers to suffer the consequences. Because, that's just the kind of bullshit which Apple is down for.
You're right that a browser normally comes with its own rendering engine, but I don't think it's an artificial distinction. There are plenty of components that most programs call out to the OS for—form elements, drop downs, save/load windows, file system access, and whatnot. The rendering engine is a much larger component, but I don't think it's cut-and-dried that it is categorically different.
> My guess is it's a sneaky broken part of webkit which Apple knows how to fix in Safari and deliberately leaves broken for the other browser makers to suffer the consequences
"Apple sabotages webkit for other Browsers" is a different—and to me at least, much stronger—argument than "Apple requires other browsers to use Webkit".
Sure - user input handling, raster graphics, text formatting... HTML rendering and browser technology though? Apple made WebKit using FOSS desktop libraries, and then turned around to deny users FOSS desktop-grade competition. They TiVoized your browser.
Apple is going to have a tough defense, if they decide to steelman that particular point. The writing is on the wall, competition is coming with or without Apple's approval.
> "Apple sabotages webkit for other Browsers" is a different—and to me at least, much stronger—argument than "Apple requires other browsers to use Webkit".
Strong is an appropriate word for it. Many developers are starting to lose their nerve: https://mozilla.github.io/platform-tilt/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Apple, on the other hand shares the market with Android. Globally it's a minority share. Yes, in the US, Apple has a bigger market share than it has globally, but Android is a real competitor even there. So I'd suggest the two situations are quite different.
If it's not a monopoly (which would be fine by itself anyway), it's hard to make the case that they are leveraging that monopoly in unhallowed ways.
All that said, clearly the DOJ think they have a case, and I imagine they've spent a LOT of man-hours thinking about it and forming an argument. More than the no-time-at-all I've spent thinking about it.
Is it though? On the hardware side sure but on the software side I don't see any competition. Both stores have close to identical practices and do not look like they compete over to get developers onboard. The only pricing change ever made was also made in reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied verbatim.
While not a strict monopoly, the lack of competition in this area between the only two players seems obvious.
I think Apple is clearly anti-competitive and is definitely powerful enough to warrant regulatory action given past standards, but the same exclusivity deals like consoles (and even audiobooks) have is certainly not a common thing (outside of Apple's first-party apps of course, but I would agree that isn't really what we're talking about here). I think this deserves some explanation, as it does seem like an obvious anti-competitive move that Apple could make but doesn't.
I tend to think Occam's Razor applied here is that Apple realizes their vulnerability to regulation and didn't wish to serve their critics evidence on a silver platter. I think that's why they announced that they will (finally) add (an inferior implementation of) RCS to the iPhone after many years of refusing and telling people to buy their mom an iPhone if they want to text her. Or the (inferior) implementation of PWAs. This is very much speculation of course, and I'd love to hear other theories.
But unless you can demonstrate that it sucks because Apple is doing something which qualifies as restraint-of-trade, which I would suggest is obviously not the case, that doesn't matter.
Theoretical competition is not sufficient to demonstrate absence of a monopoly.
The doctrine that it's your fault if your competitors suck makes no sense. It's weaponized tall-poppy syndrome.
The doctrine is that you can't exercise monopoly power in certain ways. Monopoly power is an empirical question, and does not turn on merely whether it is possible to describe a market in which another product exists, but whether that is a real market in which the products are in fact competitive.
But even if you have monopoly power, if you aren't illegally exercising it, you aren't in trouble. So you aren't punished for being an empirical monopoly.
iOS is not a monopoly since at least one other major operating system exists, with significant market share. (Whether Linux is or isn't a competitor is irrelevant.)
A monopoly by itself is not a problem. Only behavior ancillary to that monopoly is. But to get there you have you have a monopoly. I don't see how you make the case. Clearly consumers have choice.
Now, there's a case to be made for bad behavior, but its weak. Apple will argue that consumers have choices.
But I am not a lawyer, so I'll leave it up to the lawyers on both sides to earn some fees discussing it.
So, now let's introduce iOS into the equation. Apple can differentiate their product, but how much is considered acceptable before regulators complain? The DOJ was quite straightforward today, accusing Apple of using iMessage to degrade user experiences through exclusion. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's probably a...?
Do they have pricing power? You can select any boundaries you want for markets to come up with any market share number you want, but the key empirical test is is there actual substitution effect or does Apple have the ability to charge monopoly rents. One of the major points of walled gardens is to create vendor lock-in and prevent price conpetition, and Apple has been masterful at that.
If the relevant market is found to be "Apps on iOS", or "Flagships phones in the US", Apple is more likely to be considered having a monopoly position than if the market is "phones in the world". The courts will have to decide on what the market is before deciding if Apple has monopoly power or not.
Or what the developers would bear. Although I think the actual costs are higher than some people would like to think (with human reviewers and stuff, not just infrastructure).
> If Apple lowered its cut to 8% tomorrow, Google would follow suit because it is still enough money to run the Play Store with.
Would they? Apple changing their fees has no effect on Android. Android suffered from the stigma of being a second-class citizen for a while, when apps were developed for iOS first. If it is as you say, why did they not drop their fees back then?
> For video game consoles, the margins are slim (or negative), so the current cut is the natural price that lets developers sell games for a profit and the hardware companies to subsidize consoles to a level that people can afford them.
Right, but that’s a moral argument, not a legal one. Negative margins on hardware is a business decision. The law does not discriminate depending on your business plan. If 30% is extorsion, then whatever you do on the side does not make it stop being extorsion.
Apple has a monopoly though it's AppStore on over 2 billion devices though which it conducts $90,000,000,000 a year. That's more than a lot of countries GDP combined.
Saying Apple doesn't have a 90%+ share of phone market is irrelevant.
The question though, is if Apple as the Platform (phone) provider, maintains it's monopoly (AppStore) though anti-competitive means.
Just like you have an illegal monopoly of 100% of the market of people posting on HN with the username "InsomniacL".
2. people posting on HN with the username "InsomniacL" is not a 'market' in any sense
> Market: an area or arena in which commercial dealings are conducted.
I don't know the details of Epic's case, they may have lost the battle but seems they might not have lost the war...
Apple is not stopping their competitors from making good phones, just like how Apple is not stopping you from buying a phone that wasn't made by Apple. Microsoft was doing both of those things, Apple isn't. The cases aren't even close really.
And you could absolutely buy alternatives to Microsoft Windows in the 90s, from Apple or IBM or others. But that's immaterial. The availability of an alternative says nothing about the market power Apple has or how it's wielding that power. This is why we have anti-trust cases, to determine if that power is being abused.
It's reasonably clear why the Microsoft case was different
> The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the web browser market for Windows, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.
Microsoft made deals with other companies to restrict competition. Apple doesn't need to make up a contract to prevent NFC payments as they just don't offer it in the first place. The Microsoft case actually has a lot more similarities to why Google lost the Epic case, by Apple won.
It feels like it goes back to Android vs Apple approach to their ecosystem.
To me, this is the crux of modern antitrust, and the EU absolutely got it correct at a high level.
In simplest form -- doing certain things as an almost-monopoly and/or extremely large business should be illegal, while doing them as a smaller company should not be.
The scale of global businesses, in low-competition industries, allows them to engineer moats that are deeply injurious to fair competition, to their own profit and the detriment of everyone else.
> you buy it knowing that.
I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.
The “it just works” should be allowed to extend into the entire ecosystem.
At the moment they're double dipping. They're saying they have to be the only app store for security and UX AND then charging high fees. If they're really providing a service for end users, they shouldn't be taking such a large cut from developers.
Bingo. If they're making an argument that they have to retain so much control because it's good for the users, then why are their margins so big?
I'm not saying companies shouldn't be able to run successful, highly-profitable businesses.
I'm saying they shouldn't be able to (a) have significant market share, (b) have significant size / market cap, (c) have high margins, AND (d) claim "but we're so efficient for our users!" as a defense against anti-trust.
One of those things is bullshit, and 3 out of 4 are facts...
Note: I'm not defending Apple. But the higher dev fees do serve a purpose other than revenue.
If Apple is really concerned about keeping out the riff raff they could raise the annual flat developer fees.
But we all know that's not what they're actually concerned about - the app store is estimated to have 80% margins right now. They're just charging what the market will bear, and the market will bear quite a lot right now as they're part of a duopoly on smartphones.
Well, that's another conversation then isn't it? If that's the case, then Apple and Google (Play) should be named then, yes?
It doesn't keep malware from getting in. If it's hurting people by limiting their choices and it isn't keeping people safe then what good is it?
I'd suspect most users aren't going to venture outside the garden.
To the extent that they care, they seem satisfied by being able to switch to other iOS browsers that under the hood use the WebKit engine, but give them the ecosystem-integration with their desktop browser that they want. Shared Chrome bookmarks and tabs matter 1000x more to a random user than details of browser engines.
Small, minor, annoying issues as a customer that make me think slightly less of Apple while continuing to be in awe of their hardware.
You can buy in iOS Safari and not have to open your laptop.
I'm sure people will pay a bit more to use Apple pay and not get kicked out to a browser and possibly fiddle with re-logging in and re-typing in their payment info to a sketchy site.
Very few will pay 30% more though, because even the people that love Apple pay will be forced to acknowledge it's an obvious ripoff, in no way commensurate to the value provided.
However, I was just making a factual statement that anyone can pay using their browser on iPhone or iPad on the vendor’s website, just the same as they can using their laptop.
My M1 MacBook Pro is probably the second worst computer I've ever bought, and might have been the most expensive I've ever purchased.
I bought another Air this year (M2), and again, it's a far better value.
I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.
I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut. If I even set my stall up on the street I have to pay for permits, certification, suppliers.
Not saying I agree with the App Store tax because I actually don't but I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal when it's completely abnormal compared to all personal computing up to that point, which maybe was an anomaly? Hope not.
And the only options are to take the deal -- modifiable at any time by the platform owner -- or burn down your digital life and start over on the only other practical competitor.
Would this mean that anyone must be able to load any software into any platform that runs on software, or are we just picking on apple because they are popular. And got popular while doing all these things.. if people didn't want it they wouldn't have bought into it in the first place.
"Popularity" is a precondition to running afoul of antitrust law, yes..
Well, yes, antitrust law specifically, by design, focusses more on large market players, not small ones (there are some aspects still relevant to any participant, though.)
That's kind of central to the whole problem it is intended to solve.
Apple sells something like 70% of phones in the USA due to network effects that might not be apparent to users in other countries - social shaming for not using iMessage. The European equivalent is WhatsApp, which the EU is forcing to open up.
Homebrew is a thing, and you should be able to use whatever software you want on a device that you paid for. I have no doubt that there are people who own an iphone and wish they could have a different browser, or wish they could use a game streaming app.
I'm also fine with Nintendo selling games via their store and physically, and taking whatever cut they can bear of it.
(80% of App Store revenue is "games" anyway, so it's a much closer analogy than people might expect. They may end up opening everything except games and only cost them 20% of revenue.)
Meanwhile you can get full advantage of the iPhone ecosystem "for $100/yr" which is nearly free, including App Store distribution, etc. If anything, Apple should be charged with dumping in those cases.
I don't use my Playstation or Switch for banking, ordering taxis, my actual job, so there is a bit of a difference.
Although consoles are another good example of how a locked down platform can make an experience hassle free and how that becomes a selling point.
> I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut.
Apple's App Store might be Walmart, but the phone I bought is not Walmart.
Regular people understand the idea of "I bought a thing, and now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on", see printers.
Apple is no more entitled to a cut of everything I put on my iPhone anymore than Walmart is entitled to a cut of everything I put on my table simply because they made the table.
I don't know if that's inherently correct in people's eyes. For a counterexample, note that video game consoles are very popular, and I don't see any widespread opposition to the idea that e.g. Nintendo is controlling what you can play on a Switch.
I assert that I have rights under the first sale doctrine which let me do whatever I want with the things I own. Apple has no more of a right to dictate what I put on my device than Walmart has a right to dictate when I put on my table simply because they sold it to me.
Unfortunately, it's a tricky question, because it's more akin to compelling speech when the content is served by another party at a future time.
If I get a device that uses cloud functionality... is whoever I sell that device to entitled to that functionality?
But those are more "advanced" questions. We still haven't even established the fact that I should indeed own the thing I purchased (see music or movies or anything). So we have a while to go before we get to questions of transference of services.
It's gonna be the first thing Facebook does, and maybe that's fine but it's going to reduce consumer choice. You won't be able to have the Facebook but with the tracking restrictions anymore because it's bad for their bottom line. I don't really know if there's a good answer for how to strike this balance but it seems drastic that people want it to be illegal to offer a platform where all participants have to play by the platform's rules.
(My money is on "I already have this computer for work" being the single biggest factor, with "the graphics can be better on the PC" being #2.)
Now PC games often lose backwards compatibility when upgrading OS versions, but patches, compatibility modes, and even VMs are realistic options and ones that people will use.
Perhaps the "best" counter argument is the Mac App Store and Steam - both of which take a big cut, both of which can be "easily" bypassed for many apps, and both of which customers don't really seem to care about from a monetary point of view.
People care much more about what is or is not permitted, not where the money goes.
This isn't true. You cannot bypass the stream 30% fee from the consumer side.
Because of practices that stream does, which are arguably anti-competitive, I cannot buy the same exact game, from the game developer's website, and receive a 30% discount.
If such discounts were possible, and it was clearly advertised that I could just get the game for cheaper from a different location, customers would absolutely take that option almost always.
See: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
(At the very least, if they're trying to do a most-favored-nation rule, they're not listing it in their policies and are enforcing it through back-channels.)
I think a lot of developers will be surprised how many customers actually side with the convenience of the platform over the actual person creating the value.
The moment Apple is forced to "open up to the competition", all Meta apps are going to magically move to the Meta Store, where they'll likely be able to shove all sorts of tracking garbage down my throat.
Same for Alphabet, same for Samsung, same for Microsoft.
The experience will turn into a hopeless struggle against EULAs and consents, unless one refuses to install any third-party spyware and do the digital equivalent of moving into a forest cabin. The oddball, while everyone else sheepishly complies.
Evenyone loves to hate Apple, everyone forgets that the first commercial music store to sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's. The rest was "squirting" tunes on Zune or inflicting Realmedia on their paying customers.
Nope.
So if you're unhappy with their behaviour, that should be made illegal.
Secondly. Apple's protection against tracking comes from the OS level. The OS stops them from accessing my contacts and my GPS location, not apple's 30% tax.
> sell unencrypted and hugh fidelity AAC files was Apple's.
So what. How unencrypted are those audio files now? They've since moved on to FairPlay.
Both are problems, both need solving.
removing/decreasing apples ability to police apps before regulation means you are opening users to hostile apps.
adding regulation and setting standards for apps and data tracking and then removing/limiting apples ability to police apps does not.
these are not the same thing?
Cause there's plenty of examples of Apple's store filled with spam and outright fraudulent phishing apps. There's a big difference between the image Apple advertises for the App Store and what it's actually like.
Ever heard of the expression “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”?
But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden. Now some other corporations like Epic, who want to have a cake and eat it too, are going to ruin one of the platform's key selling points.
And if your workflow did require an obscure app, who is Apple to decided that you cannot install it on your own phone?
> But I chose iPhone (and I think many other customers do) specifically for it being a walled garden.
People like this walled garden since apple promises that it's safe and they deal with all of the problems for you. But time and time again we see that their App Store features outright scams and mountains of knockoff garbage apps.
People buy into the marketing of the walled garden, not the reality of it.
I get the "safety" argument, but it's also about the user experience. What if now Microsoft makes me install Microsoft store to use M365 apps, Amazon makes me install whatever store to use their products, etc? What do I win here as a consumer?
I buy iPhone specifically for what it is. I get that some people don't like walled garden approach, so they have Android at their service. Apple is not a monopoly.
What is the point of buying a phone knowing what you are getting, and then complaining about something you knew full well it doesn't have?
The lawsuits is literally about this.
> What is the point of buying a phone knowing what you are getting, and then complaining about something you knew full well it doesn't have?
Because the thing the company is offering is a behaviour that overall is not one we as a society want (Apple being allowed to dictate what businesses will and will not succeed by either locking them out of 1/2 of the major mobile OS, or by taking a 30% tax from their revenue and then competing against them).
All app stores (and most real-world markets and stores) do that. This is a business model. And as a store owner who invested billions of dollars to build it, and the entire platform and infrastructure around it, you are in your full right to decide the rules on what is allowed there and what is not, and how much to charge. If your rules are unfair or disadvantageous to the competition, sellers and customers simply will not come. But as we can see, App Store is the most successful app marketplace on the planet, both for developers and consumers.
Just as Google is the most successful search engine on the planet for advertisers, website owners and consumers, regardless of the fact that Google can fully dictate what appears in its search results or what advertisers can put in their ads, and how much Google charges for it.
So I don't quite understand what exactly the argument here.
This this different argument than allowing sideloading apps (that one is quite fair, I'll admit).
Even with the current side loading changes, which are EU only, they still take a major cut and still dictate who can and cannot run a store.
So I agree with you that the App Store, like other stores have the right to dictate what they do and do not sell. They do not, however, have the right to say that they're the only store allowed, or that any new store must pay them money.
Also, I'd be hesitant of using Google's behaviour, certainly its current behaviour or current market position, as justification for what is okay for others to do.
I was tackling why I don't think that argument holds water with the average person.
"now the greedy company won't let me do what I want with it unless I buy their overpriced add-on"
With printers this is very tangible to the customer, with the App Store what you're describing here isn't as tangible because nothing on the App Store is actually expensive, it's either free or relatively cheap and it's more a case that the user pays little or nothing, Apple gets a cut for doing close to nothing and the dev gets screwed, printers is more the customer gets screwed.
The App Store was not a business innovation by Apple to set expectations, it's how all cell phone software that preceded it worked. Apple's change was to lower the fees and open up access to everyone.
The iPhone is a computer, but unlike past computers it introduced a walled-garden App Store.
Also, software on phones before the iPhone was also gate-kept by carriers. Apple was not maintaining the status quo. They were changing it for their benefit.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that ring tones cost an arm and a leg, that "apps" were awful (I know I designed one)... You had to pay to get your app on a phone even if it was free.
It's both of course, but I think they price based on the value rather than on the cost. (ie: percentage of sales, not per shelfspace)
If you told them "you have to pay 30% to the person who invented books every time you write something" they'd scream censorship and call for an armed revolution.
People generally know this, and they generally don't care.
But you can't do that with a mobile app because only Android users can use it, while anyone with an iPhone can't use the app unless you submit to Apple's rules.
Who is arguing it should be free? Why create a false dichotomy where it's either the status quo (30%) or nothing (0%)?
I'm sure most people would accept a reasonable fee. It's hard to put an exact number on this because it would have emerged organically if Apple actually allowed fair competition in app stores. In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
And don't forget that Apple receives enormous benefit from these apps being in their store. If not, consider what would have happened had Apple not allowed any apps in their store. Hint: Android would have eaten the world.
Why is this number so bad? Steam: 30% https://medium.com/@koneteo.stories/how-much-money-does-stea...
>> In the absence of fair competition, the best comparison I can think of is credit card processing which is about 3%
Sure 3%, + a flat fee of .02 to .10 per transaction. that flat portion is going to be HUGE if your charing under $5 for something. You get none of that money back for chargebacks, or refunds. And if your charge backs are high your going to pay more as a % or get dropped so your going to have to hire CS people to answer emails or phones, and say nice things to angry people. You're going to pay someone to pay cc compaines to give money back.
Meanwhile you're small, you have no clue if the person on the other end is a refund scammer. Apple (and Steam) have this habit of telling people to "fuck off" if they refund scam. They have the weight with CC processors to do that. you will not. They also have customer trust, because if your product (game/app) is shitty they give customers money back (See Epic 1/2 billion settlement for being bad about this, and kids).
Is 30 percent high. It is. Is it unreasonable... meh maybe not?
The thing with Steam that makes it different to me is the access control and gatekeeping. For example Steam hardware is so open that you can immediately install a different OS on it without even booting it. Steam hardware will happily run any third-party app store you want, including Epic Games their main rival. Steam also (AFAIK) don't do exclusivity BS like the consoles often do. So when it comes to Steam they are clearly competing fairly and evenly in a free market. If Apple were the same (iPhone could run 3rd party app stores, or you could install Android on you Apple hardware) I would have absolutely no problem with 30%. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with 90%, because if they weren't providing that much value then a competitor would come in and take it from them.
The number of people buying iPhones to run even a slick version of Android would probably be quite small.
I can buy android devices that are as good as the iPhone or better in their own way and have all those features (side loading other app stores). Is that not the free market in action?
Most apps are free and are things like 2fa, chat apps, kindle, etc.
Would I be sad if the entire App Store shut down? Probably. Would it be enough to move me to Android? Uncertain, probably not.
Most App developers aren’t even paying 30%, they’re paying the lower 15%.
Amazon seems to inexplicably get away with a lot of anti-competitive behavior. I don't know why.
I'm not, I'm pointing out for the first 50 years of computing it literally was free.
In my view, my phone is MY DEVICE. It is most definitely not "Google/Apple's platform"!
Google is merely manufacturing my phone, and I intend Google to have no rights or control whatsoever regarding my phone, and merely have the obligation (not right, obligation) to manufacture it correctly and provide open-source software for it that works correctly and properly provides Android interfaces (obviously, I don't use an Apple phone since Apple doesn't offer that, while Google does since they provide devices with unlocked bootloaders that run open-source OSes).
It only runs Android because Google with Android happened to win the adoption lottery and it would run PodunkOS by ACME if PodunkOS by ACME had been the one that managed to gain critical mass.
Again it is absolutely not even remotely close to "Google/Apple's platform", and I have no intention for Google to interfere in my use of it and certainly not interfere in any relations I might have with people providing software for my phone like taking a cut of the transaction or deciding how that software should behave.
I'm talking about the normal persons perception of the situation, not what is right in terms of how a technically savvy person would look at the situation.
Which includes "go to any website and run any app I can download from it, regardless of whether it's illegal or against any rules or against the interests of the phone maker" and "change any aspect of functionality that I don't like (e.g. apps being able to show ads) and that I can find out on the web how to change".
It doesn't include "Google or Apple make rules about what I can do with my phone that I can't override".
I couldn’t care less about alternative App Stores. I don’t want them, I don’t need them.
I am very happy the way it is.
Also, I'm not sure why you favor the App Store. It's not safe. Apple is unable to keep malicious apps off of it, and there is no warranty if you lose money due to a malicious app. People think there is some implied safety in the App Store. There is no such thing.
Safety comes from not giving permissions to apps which don't need them.
> I’m a heavy and loyal Apple user AND an app developer.
Do you really think you're representative of the average iphone customer? A heavy, loyal user AND an app developer? I don't think so. And even if you were, your personal situation isn't a rebuttal
However, let’s not assume what the majority of iPhone user thinks. To that end, I thought it is interesting to add my very personal perspective.
Anyone arguing for Apple's side is akin to saying we should all be serfs for the King, because he takes care of us well and protects his kingdom.
It's not merely the integration which is a problem, it's how that + network effects gives apple undue market power to dictate terms to its users, devs, etc.
Being a middleman between users and devs, say, takes on a different character when you're a 2-3T biz at the heart of the economy.
They should be.
> So if there are 2 competitors and one drops out, then it's hardcore illegal, but otherwise it's a-okay?
No, it is absolutely not. There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in the US. The government even explicitly and purposefully creates and grants monopolies pretty often. Natural monopolies are not illegal. Abusing your government-granted or natural monopoly is the illegal behavior.
I'm curious to see how they even construe a duopoly as a monopoly under current law, because this will have some profound impacts to the entire economy if they succeed.
Typing this on one of many Apple devices I own. I don't hate Apple. But, you're right, comments like yours make this a frustrating exercise indeed.
> No, it is absolutely not. There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in the US.
Yes yes, it may technically not be illegal per se, but then again, it's a problem. I am not a lawyer and I don't care about the details of the law. That's for other people. I am looking at this from a perspective of a consumer who feels actively harmed by what the tech industry has become. And as a member of society who cares for other people. If one company accrues that much by making it hard for others to compete, then they will rightfully be forced to give back if they don't do it out of their own free will.
You know that I have a point.
>then it's hardcore illegal
You aren't a lawyer, you don't care about the laws as written, yet make false statements about what the law says according to how you feel anyways then back pedal when called out that it's not actually illegal. I think you've said everything you can.
> Monopoly law needs to be reinterpreted in light of network effects.
This is the context of this discussion. If you think dragging me into details of the current law will distract me, sorry, no it won't. This thread is not about that.
> yet make false statements about what the law says
Now you are making false statements. I didn't say that the law says that. What's more, you dragged that piece of a sentence out of its context to make it appear as if it wasn't part of a question. But it was. So it's not a statement. It's a question. Is it a false question, maybe? Sounds a bit laughable to me.
Well, Microsoft eventually got all but forced to port Office and, for a time, Internet Explorer to macOS to evade getting sanctioned by the EU.
In a similar vein, if the market is not healthy any more, the duopolists may be forced by regulatory authorities to make life easier for potential startup competitors: open up file format specifications, port popular applications with network effects (iMessage, Facetime, Find My in the case of Apple) to other platforms or open up specifications to allow others access/federation.
I have seen some people assert this a few times in the last couple of weeks and I don’t know where this comes from. This is not at all what happened.
This was part of an agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, long before any EU decision. Microsoft bought some Apple shares and agreed to support office on MacOS for a few years, and Apple made IE their default browser.
One can argue whether they did it to improve the optics in their (American) antitrust lawsuit (and there are several details that do not make sense if it were the case), but it certainly was not forced on them by any court.
So sure, duopoly of real competitors is one thing, but that’s rarely the case once players realize they can set prices and divide the spoils.
But then, the problem is that you have a cartel, not a duopoly. That’s the thing: you can only punish companies for their actions. A duopoly is a fact, in itself it does not imply any particular behaviour from either company. If there is collusion, then it’s anti-competitive behaviour, abuse of their dominant positions in the market, etc. Things that are already illegal and should be enforced.
The reason there is only 1 broadband ISP is because people are not willing to pay sufficiently more for fiber to offset the costs to install fiber to the home, especially in places with buried utilities.
Therefore, the existing coaxial connection is the only economically viable option.
Also, it rarely makes sense for 1 home to have multiple physical infrastructure connections, so they lend themselves to natural monopolies. If a house has access to fiber, it makes no sense to spend resources to run another fiber to the house.
Which is also why ISPs should be utilities, but that is not comparable to personal devices.
Which might be the case if, through taxes, we hadn't collectively paid for a lot of that in the way of subsidies and grants to those ISPs to do exactly that, subsidies and grants which resulted in, generally, more dividends, bonuses and stock buybacks than they did miles of fiber being laid.
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index
The term “HHI” means the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, a commonly accepted measure of market concentration. The HHI is calculated by squaring the market share of each firm competing in the market and then summing the resulting numbers. For example, for a market consisting of four firms with shares of 30, 30, 20, and 20 percent, the HHI is 2,600 (302 + 302 + 202 + 202 = 2,600).
The HHI takes into account the relative size distribution of the firms in a market. It approaches zero when a market is occupied by a large number of firms of relatively equal size and reaches its maximum of 10,000 points when a market is controlled by a single firm. The HHI increases both as the number of firms in the market decreases and as the disparity in size between those firms increases.
The agencies generally consider markets in which the HHI is between 1,000 and 1,800 points to be moderately concentrated, and consider markets in which the HHI is in excess of 1,800 points to be highly concentrated. See U.S. Department of Justice & FTC, Merger Guidelines § 2.1 (2023). Transactions that increase the HHI by more than 100 points in highly concentrated markets are presumed likely to enhance market power under the Horizontal Merger Guidelines issued by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. See id.
How much of this is because of evil monopoly forces, and how much of it is because users prefer iOS and Android? It's not like the mobile device market snapped into existence overnight, both Android and iOS beat out Blackberry and managed to fend off Microsoft.
Turns out the phone cartel is the phone company cartel in a trench coat.
I...don't think that's sufficiently self-evident to stand on its own.
Fundamentally, it's hard to have a world with more than a very small number of operating systems for the major form factors of device—unless those operating systems are mandated to interoperate in significant ways.
Creating a new operating system for phones also requires some things that are not at all easy to get:
1) You need hardware. This means that either you're creating an OS for an existing hardware platform (in this case, Android or iOS) or you're building your own phones. Given the legal frameworks that existed over the past decade and a half (as distinct from the particular dominance of one platform or another), that basically means you're building your own phones. Some people have tried to do that, but it adds hugely to the up-front cost of getting an OS going.
2) You need to get a critical mass of people using it. Until and unless this happens, what you've created has to live or die based on the apps and services that you build for the phone. No one's going to dedicate their own time, effort, and money to creating software for a phone that only 10,000 people have ever bought.
Now, I can see a pretty strong argument for a new legal framework that would make #1 much easier—specifically, requiring all hardware platforms (possible "all hardware platforms over X sales") to provide a fully-open specification for third-party OS makers to use (with appropriate clauses about dogfooding the open API to prevent the hardware maker from just using a bunch of private APIs to preference their OS). This would allow people to create their own OS for the iPhone without Apple's interference.
But that's not what we've had since 2007, so your bold but unsupported statement that the lack of third choices for mobile OSes in and of itself proves that Apple is a monopoly (or at least that Apple/Google together make up an abusive duopoly) does not hold up to scrutiny.
I don't see how Apple and Android's competitors failing is any sort of fact about Apple or Google, at all.
* tin foil hat on *
That may be by design. If the outcome of this is "no monopoly", then it's a win for Apple.
These charges also undercut the next administration's leverage to negotiate with Apple, now that the threat of anti-trust charges are taken off the table.
I am pretty bullish on Apple right now and could easily see a future where Windows isn't even used for gaming anymore. When Macbook Airs start to be capable of running high end games what is the point of getting a huge Desktop running Windows jammed with bloatware from 100 different companies?
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...
Google got one anti-trust lawsuit, Meta should get another one (by owning too many social networks with billions of users each) and after the failed anti-trust lawsuit that Epic tried to sue Apple under, this time the DOJ is finally going after Apple.
Good.
I'm really looking forward to the United States v. Apple Inc. anti-trust lawsuit that will actually make some changes to stop the 30% commission scam once and for all.
After that, now do Microsoft (again)
No. The change they should make is to allow sideloading. I don't care if the developer pays less than 30% when Apple can still censor what I run on my phone.
I think you, as the consumer, are the one who pays.
And you somehow think reducing the commission to, say, 5%, will reduce prices?
This is the app market, not the wheat flour market. Most of the time the apps aren't interchangeable. At least those that provide some value *. So... they will charge what the market will bear.
Do you see Apple reducing their commission from 30% to 5% and changing the 0.99 price to 0.79? I don't.
* ok, not flashlight and TODO apps.
Edit: actually Apple reduced the commission from 30% to 15% for some apps. Did you see any app at 0.84 in the app store? Didn't think so...
How the pie gets divvied up is no skin off my nose. None of my business.
Seems like bullying to score political points to me.
This case is about the US marketplace, globally is irrelevant.
And it is about more than just marketshare. Apple's tactics restrict the entire marketplace --- not just Apple captives.
Whole classes of apps are simply not practically possible on Android without paying monetary tribute to Apple.
For example, universal messaging is not possible without paying the Apple gatekeeper. Few people will use a messaging app if it can't communicate with 60% of their friends. And the only to make this happen is to pay Apple.
I would love to not use Discord, but I'd lose messaging with about half my social circle.
Next you can sue designer clothing companies for not handing their products out for free to poor teens.
Using any other app just adds friction - obviously your best friend isn't going to stop talking to you because of it but weaker relationships might not survive.
Yes --- unless they've been anointed with a special "friends and family" exemption offered in select cases.
WhatsApp Business is a subscription product. The fruit deity demands 30% tribute for this from any ordinary developer.
There is in fact universal messaging - it's called SMS. You don't need to pay Apple to use it. If you would have added secure to your example then yes that would be correct.
This is like saying Y Combinator controls 100% of the Hacker News market, or that Amazon controls 100% of the AWS market. It's a non-sensical argument.
I have no idea what the numbers are, but if 80% of all commerce on mobile is going through Apple's devices then yes, it's likely that the Government will want to ensure there is "fairness" in that eco-system.
"It sometimes just amazes me that people who actually work in the tech industry, and are in their 30s and 40s, claim that it would be just fine if smart phones had the same app security and privacy model as the Mac or Windows, and that there is no benefit at all from additional controls. Where have these people been for the last 30 years? You seriously want to let any developer do whatever they want to a device that billions of people carry around every day?"
Is the implication that Apple should allow iOS on non-Apple devices? There is not a single hardware company in the world that would integrate iOS to the degree that Apple does. A requirement like this would immediately enshittify Apple’s brand.
“AlotOfReading” controls 100% of your HN posts.
I find it maddening that a lot of people replying to your fair point have chosen to ignore the first half and decided to exclusively focus on the latter, when that part was clearly meant as an example of how market definitions can have an impact.
A fairly recent example of the latter being a commonly mischaracterized or (by members of the public) outright dismissed concern was MSFTs dominance in the Cloud Gaming market, which was often met either with "but MSFTs share of the gaming market overall is less" or the even less applicable "but nobody uses Cloud Gaming anyway", even though neither should count towards whether something rises to anti-competitive behavior in a given market.
The word "monopoly" needs to be banned from these types of discussions because it always derails the conversation into pointless semantic bickering. There is no definition of that word that will make everyone happy. Even if Apple had 99.999% marketshare, as long as there's some hacker selling DIY linux phones under a bridge somehwere, someone's going to say Apple CAN'T be a monopoly because they have a competitor.
There are many reasons why antitrust laws exist, and these lawsuits tend to be really complex. There's not a simple `if(company.is_monopoly()) sue(company);` program that the FTC and DOJ use to decide when to sue.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.
The US doesn't have antitrust authority for the world, only for the US. iPhone has had 60% market share (or similar) for a long time now, so it's fair to consider that Apple has significant and durable market power in mobile phones.
Is it a complete monopoly? No, but it doesn't need to be.
From a very brief skim of the claims, the clearest one that stands out to me is the one about smartwatches. If Apple does provide better integrations to Apple Watches than 3rd party watches, that's pretty clearly 'tying' which is prohibited when using a market dominant product to create market dominance in a new market (smartwatches). OTOH, it wouldn't have been a big deal if the Microsoft Band had better integrations than other watches on Windows Phone, because tying is allowed without market dominance.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Apple doesn't have this power though. If they raised prices they'd lose sales. And they haven't been able to exclude competitors, there is a robust ecosytem of Android manufacturers.
There's a reason the FTC has been losing almost all of their cases recently. They internalized the idea that a large successful company is inherently bad and focus on that rather than any objective legal standard.
Yes, that's true for every company. So monopolies don't exist?
There are lots of inexpensive phones on the market
Where does your mind drift off to when you read the phrase "walled garden"?
Certainly other companies can't be in Apple's walled garden, but in antitrust exclude means exclude from the market. Apple hasn't done that, there's a vibrant market in phones, computers, tablets, smartwatches, etc.
It has market power, but it's not significantly larger than its competition. It's not 60% for iPhone, and 10% split up amongst 4 other competitors. It's 60% vs 40%... and probably more like 58% vs 42% [1].
Does 8% truly make Apple "dominant" to the point that integrating their software with watches in a better manner is illegal? I find that wildly difficult to believe.
> that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
Apple has been able to raise its own prices, but it hasn't been wildly out of line with competitors.
And Apple both makes phones and the software on them. They might be excluding or making competitors to their software have a harder time, but excluding? Not really - they have only excluded other large companies who have distinctly decided to run afoul of their guidelines (specifically, Epic).
1. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users
a) supressing super apps
b) supressing cloud streaming apps
c) restricting capabilities of 3rd party messaging apps, specifically carrier based messaging (SMS)
d) restricting the best smartwatch integration to only their own devices
e) something I don't grok about digital wallets
There's maybe a case that Google is doing c; I think they made it harder to get the permissions for reading and writing SMS. And I don't think they allow non-Google, non-manfuacturer apps to do RCS, if RCS counts as carrier-based messaging and not yet another Google messaging service.
I don't understand the complaint about Digital Wallets, so I don't really know if Google is doing it.
I don't follow smartwatches, but I thought the Android ecosystem was pretty agnostic there? Back when Google Wear was Google Glass, they did let Google push notifications from a phone with Bluetooth, but everyone else had to push through Google servers, but I think when they moved it to wrists, that changed and everyone can push direct from the phone to the watch.
I haven't heard any drama over super apps or gaming streaming apps being blocked from Google Play... And worse case, developers can serve apks from their website directly.
I'm sure there's room to find things Google does with Android that could be market manipilation, but Google does seem to be aware of the risk and try to avoid crossing the line.
That is basically what it is though. Google is not the 40%, it's Google, Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc. Yes Google Play Store is on 40% of those devices, but they can ship with other stores and some do.
2. The 60% of Apple iPhone / iOS Market "usage" share ( incase people want to be pedantic and refer it as shipping market share ), commands over 70% if not 80% of purchasing power in Apps or other sub market sector. That is a huge difference in market power.
Apple App Store is $99 annually + cost of owning a Mac, compared to a one time $25 Google Play Store (develop on PC or Mac, with the possibility to avoid the Play Store). More people own PCs (even within the developer community) so this leads to more apps in the PC and Android ecosystem. More competition, means lower prices.
I've also heard Apple is much more strict about what they allow on their App store, which further restricts supply and keeps prices high. I don't think this is an accident, Apple intentionally wants high prices on their platform, because it keeps the illusion alive that Apple devices are luxury devices and a status symbol.
“Keep prices high”. The top grossing iOS apps are all like $1-2. That is not high. In fact, from what I could tell on sensortower.com, apps from the same developers were priced identically between stores, and the average prices of Android top grossing apps were higher. Probably because of the LOW VOLUME, not related to overhead.
You’re trying hard to find reasons to blame Apple for an active marketplace. What exactly do you want to achieve?
The PlayStore on iOS? The free market doesn’t work. It’s a myth. I’d much rather pay $10 for a good app here or there than have a store full of “free” or $0.05 trash where it’s not worth anyone’s time to invest in building something good.
But if was to guess, I would say that Android users fall into two camps primarily. One is high end tech-savvy users who want it because it's more open, powerful and flexible. These people don't buy apps and services because they are "smart" and use their tech knowledge to solve the problems those things are solving cheaper ways (or for free).
Then there are a second group of Android users who simply buy it because it is cheaper, or they just have absolutely no interest / affinity for Apple's branding. These users aren't going to buy things because their primary motivation in the first place was to not spend excessive money on something they don't care about (or they just don't have the money).
I'd also suggest that perhaps the 7x is a bit exaggerated. It's just harder to account for the revenue from Android apps because it's more driven by off-market streams. But I totally believe iOS is much much more. It might just not be 7x.
I will reply with a separate quote from the DOJ discussing what thresholds of market share are likely to be considered monopoly power:
> In determining whether a competitor possesses monopoly power in a relevant market, courts typically begin by looking at the firm's market share.(18) Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred,"(19) they have demanded a dominant market share. Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly; it is doubtful whether sixty or sixty-four percent would be enough; and certainly thirty-three per cent is not."(20) The Supreme Court quickly endorsed Judge Hand's approach in American Tobacco Co. v. United States.(21) Following Alcoa and American Tobacco, courts typically have required a dominant market share before inferring the existence of monopoly power. The Fifth Circuit observed that "monopolization is rarely found when the defendant's share of the relevant market is below 70%."(22) Similarly, the Tenth Circuit noted that to establish "monopoly power, lower courts generally require a minimum market share of between 70% and 80%."(23) Likewise, the Third Circuit stated that "a share significantly larger than 55% has been required to establish prima facie market power"(24) and held that a market share between seventy-five percent and eighty percent of sales is "more than adequate to establish a prima facie case of power."(25)
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...
My reading of this is that below 50% is very unlikely to be considered monopoly power while above 70-80% is very likely. 60% appears to sit somewhere in between where it is possible but not likely. Historically, I have not seen any major cases where monopoly power was found at the market share level that Apple currently holds.
It is worth noting that the DOJ in their filing does not seem very confident in being able to prove that Apple's 60% of the smartphone market constitutes monopoly power either. They have instead opted to define a narrower market of "performance smartphones" where Apple apparently holds 70% market share, putting it above the thresholds quoted above. Whether this artificially narrowed market definition will be accepted by the courts will likely determine the outcome of this case.
One non-apple phone option. Or you're somehow deluded into thinking the hardware matters any more?
If my water provider said "We're the only water provider so we're raising rates 1000%, take it or leave it", you would still say that's a monopoly even though i could move house to an area with another water provider.
Apple has a 100% monopoly though it's AppStore on 2 billion devices though which $90,000,000,000 in trade is conducted. If that's not a market big enough to be considered for Anti-Competitive practices and illegally maintaining a monopoly then i don't know what is.
That's more trade than the entire GDP of Luxembourg!
Choice already exists.
Unsurprisingly, a lot social planning and banter happens in those group messages.
The rest of the world is on cross platform apps and couldn't care less what their friends type from.
Also, most of the US doesn't use text messages either, they use platform dependent iMessage. Hence the lock in.
Not really. They have ties to specific platforms, just that the platform is not tied to hardware. So it's either installing the app, or losing the connections, same as with the iPhone.
It somehow was a lot easier than migrating my data to an Android phone, for example.
So getting back to the original point, OP bemoans that in order to communicate with some people, one has to have an iPhone. With other apps, you just need to have the specific app. Maybe not as bad, we could say, but the phenomenon is the same: in order to contact some people, you have to install their specific app. No other way in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Can't even blame Facebook, I've had whatsapp before they bought it. I even paid the 0.99 they were charging iOS users before 2016 *.
* year pulled out of Gemini so may be inaccurate.
COMPLAINT In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Appl e’s then-CEO about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Androi d smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “ message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch. ” Jobs was clear in his response: Apple would “force” deve lopers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform. Over many years, Apple has repeat edly responded to competitive threats like this one by making it harder or more expensive for its users and developers to leave than by making it more attr active for them to stay.
I think they would have won if they hadn’t colluded to set prices.
Right now my preferred approach is to make web apps, but Apple already tried to take PWAs away in Europe...
Apple's crime here is they made a good product and continued to iterate on it, while Google has churned for years, reinventing and rebranding every app, service, and product multiple times a year and only making them worse so POs can get promotions.
All of Google's monopolistic intent was conveniently detailed out in loads of e-mails. They were caught failing to retain these e-mails, which in a civil suit where the 5th Amendment does not apply, means the judge gets to just assume the worst (make an "adverse inference").
To make matters worse, Google promised openness and then tried to privately walk it back. Legally, this is admitting that the "Android app distribution market" already exists and is the appropriate market definition for a monopoly claim. It's harder to argue that an "iOS app distribution market" should exist when Apple is using power words like "intellectual property" - aka "we have a right to supracompetitive profits."
My personal opinion is that the DOJ probably will succeed where Epic failed, however, because of one other critical thing: standing. Epic did reveal market harms that are almost certainly cognizable under US law, but none of those harms were things Epic was allowed to sue over.
I personally would love to switch to iPhone if Apple wasn't so much of a control freak about the software you run on it.
Yes, Apple has exactly one competitor in the phone space and their offerings are lower quality so you get an iPhone.
So... they have a dominant market position... and they abuse it.
Apple is no different than Google search. Even if you drowned people in search choice popups, 99% of the time people choose Google. Regulators say Google is doing something nefarious when in reality, their product is loved by billions of people. In these situations, like Apple products and Google search, we need to realize that both companies have won the game in certain markets they operate because they made products that people really enjoy using.
I don't have a very deep understanding of that topic, but it's possible to regulate those companies a bit. In the EU similar things were already done for the car industry. The manufacturers are required to allow third party repair shops the same access to documentation, diagnostics software and parts like their own shops (not for free, but for a reasonable price). And repairs at a third party shop doesn't void the warranty.
For computers, cloud providers and smartphones similar regulations could improve everybody's life by giving us more flexibility and cheaper products by creating more competition.
In the end apple is collecting a lot of money and seems to just put it on huge piles in their bank accounts. I don't see any reason to increase competition by introducing regulations. Give startups and smaller companies a chance!
With vehicle repair, I can still choose to use the manufacturer operated/approved repair shops. I truly am gaining additional choice and can continue to service my car as I always have.
The EU regulations allow third parties to remove my choice to live in the walled garden if they wish. So while it could enhance competition for developers I don't know if it greatly improves the users choice, or experience.
Even the app store, I have all my complaints about Apple's arbitrary enforcement of App Review guidelines as an iOS developer. However, as a consumer, I love that I can spend _less_ time worrying about my non-tech loved ones finding garbage in the app store. Yes there's coercive "buy this game" garbage, and tons of it, but I'm less concerned about financial scam apps than I would be for third party app stores.
However, in certain cases (like only Apple Music supported on the HomePod speakers, or Apple Watch only sending fitness data to Apple Fitness), we feel kind of "forced" to use the Apple product when there are superior competitors, because of the (manufactured) ease of use of full integration.
FYI, this hasn't been the case for a while. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/homepod/apd3399d3179/1...
Spotify has elected to not support this API, presumably because of their beef with Apple.
But Apple does wield real monopoly power on the other side of their market which is app developers. I don't think large developers have any real choice but to bite the bullet and take whatever terms Apple offers and be on iOS because that's where your users are. Developers aren't choosing Apple as the better product in the way consumers are.
It's good to know that with everything going wrong on this administration’s watch, they’ve got their laser focus on vacuums, video games, and phones.
I need a drink.
Apple's argument is generally that they are making the platform safer for their users, but I was just on the App Store looking for the Google Authenticator, and the first item listed was a scam third party authenticator which was intended to fool users looking like the Google Authenticator. This would be the easiest possible thing for a giant corporation like Apple to catch. The fact that it is Google's customers which are being scammed could be part of the reason why Apple doesn't prioritize safety in this case.
What we're dealing with here is a really duplicitous company. Their marketing is world class. The battery life of their products is world class. Everything else - not so much.
this is conspiracy bordering on paranoia. apple has problems, but willingly abusing customers who use the competitors is not one of them
However, there's no comparison between the Apple app store and Android stores. There is an outrageous amount of straight-up malware on Android. FFS, one actually needs third-party antivirus/malware scanners on Android it's so bad.
> By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field where it grants its products and services access to core features that it denies rivals.
Once I read this I was not shocked. Apple is already pushing people to buy their separate apps that should have came in for free, with the purchase of the Iphone or at least make a bundle Apple users could buy. Disgusting Apple totally deserved.
No way in hell would Apple TV+, a premium video service, be free. And in what world would Final Cut Pro be free? I'd love it if they threw in Ableton Live and Pro Tools, but that's also not happening.