HN comments for: Epic vs. Google: Google Loses

For anyone curious why Google lost:

Epic v. Google [...] hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.

Without finding the same thing in Apple, I doubt this will affect Apple's case much, but of course I should mention I'm not a lawyer; I'm perfectly happy to be schooled if someone more knowledgeable comes along!

Apple doesn't need to strike secret deals to keep out alternative app stores because they've made alternate app stores completely impossible.

If the result of this case is "you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down", that's terrible!

If the result of this case is "you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down", that's terrible!

Monopolies aren’t illegal. Only the abuse of a monopoly position to advance your interest in other markets is illegal.

E.g. It’s not illegal to be the only seller of gasoline in the country. It is illegal though to bundle laundry powder with gasoline sales to corner the laundry powder market.

Monopolies aren’t illegal. Only the abuse of a monopoly position to advance your interest in other markets is illegal.

So for example, if you had a dominant market position for a particular category of phone operating systems, and you wanted to advance your interest in the market for app distribution...

Seems like you could make that apply to any product right? If you can define the market as literally just your own product? Like if Joe's Coffee has a dominant market position in selling Joe's Coffee it would be monopolistic to use that to advantage to sell donuts?

There is a difference between selling donuts in the coffee shop and preventing anyone who drinks your coffee from buying a competitor's donuts.

They aren't preventing anyone from buying a competitor's donuts. At one point I had both an Apple and a Google Android phone. Apple preventing other app stores on iOS is more like Starbucks preventing Peet's from coming into its stores to sell its coffee. That's not monopolistic behavior.

I think it is more lake the mayor allowing his son to open a Starbucks in the city but preventing everyone else from opening a Peet's because he is concerned about how that might negatively affect the image of the city in the eyes of coffee enthusiasts as he has no control over coffee prices and quality there.

IMO this isn't the correct take. Starbucks' stores are their own property and as long as they follow applicable laws regarding public accommodations, health and safety and the like they're free to run their stores however they want to. Where I live, we've got a plethora of Starbucks but we've also got Peet's and a whole bunch of small coffee roasters/shops that seem to be doing just fine. To me, Apple's App Store is the same way - it's Apple's property, run by Apple and branded by Apple. Everyone who develops for it knows the rules and (for the most part) follows them, because Apple makes sure you read the rules in multiple different places.

I'm not asking to be the mayor of the App Store, just the mayor of my own phone.

If you want to have an analogy along those lines, Apple is more like a Starbucks prohibiting coffee bean providers other than the ones it has agreements with from coming into Starbucks locations to sell their coffee beans.

No but it's not just going to a competitor's donut shop, it's losing your family group chat, cloud storage, apps you've paid for, integration with your laptop, tablet, earbuds, smart watch, etc, etc. Apple has on purpose (there are verified transcripts of execs talking about it) built a walled garden ecosystem that is incredibly hard to leave.

Yes, the other coffee shop doesn’t remember my name and my regular morning order. I’ll have to start afresh.

Seems to me the analogy holds.

You mean your existing shoes, pants, or shirt won't let you enter the other coffee shop, and the expensive coffee mug you bought at the old shop (which was the only place they would allow you to buy one) won't hold coffee from any other brand so you have to ditch that too. Now you're getting closer

So is Apple the building that contains a Starbucks or the business known as Starbucks? It seems like it’s both — that is a problem. Is Starbucks charging its customers steep costs for entering the building? Where does the existing App Store with its large transaction fees and restrictions around billing fit into this analogy?

There is a difference between selling donuts in the coffee shop and preventing anyone who drinks your coffee from buying a competitor's donuts.

Isn't the resolution the same in each case? If you have an iPhone and you want to install an app from another store, you have to buy another phone. It's the same with these deals with Android, just overt.

In most cases I can buy a donut from a competitor's and eat inside the coffee shop as long as I buy some product from the said coffee shop.

Apple prevents that I bring an outside donut from competitor's, while Android allows it. That is basically the difference.

I don't know what restaurants you frequent, but I can't think of anyone being okay with bringing outside meals or beverages. Probably you are just not kicked out because staff is not noticing or apathetic.

I only know of the concept of Corkage, where you pay the restaurant a fee if you bring your own wine to drink:

https://www.webstaurantstore.com/blog/2626/corkage-fee-guide...

A corkage fee is the price charged to guests who choose to bring their own bottle of wine to a restaurant. Corkage fees usually exist at restaurants that already serve wine. The practice of allowing guests to bring their own wine is considered a courtesy to guests. … The average corkage fee ranges from $10 to $40 per bottle but may be as high as $100 or more.

Probably you are just not kicked out because staff is not noticing or apathetic.

Or you know, they don't care as long you're a paid customer.

BTW, I didn't say anything about restaurants. Coffee shop in general have much more of a lax atmosphere, so they generally don't care too much.

And, to extend the analogy, paying the coffee patrons you think might consider opening a competitive donut shop next door to avoid that from happening (ie Google).

"Coffee patrons" would be consumers - literally paying consumers to not shop at your competitor is just offering extremely low (i.e. negative) prices, which may be perfectly legal depending on the context.

Paying off gamedevs would be analogous to paying off dough-makers (or doughnut bakers?) to only supply your store, and not your competitor, which would be super illegal. AMD sued Intel for very similar activity, and won.

Wouldn't Epic be paying game developers to only put games in their store? Don't console exclusives work this way all the time?

Epic already does that and has a number of exclusives to their store, like Alan Wake 2. They also will pay devs to have it exclusive to their store for a year.

Maybe we should ask, how many people make a living through that market?

People that are not employees of the company that holds dominant market position.

This sort of argument is exactly why good programmers are usually not good lawyers (and vice versa, of course).

especially if you created a product that a large part of the world's population at the time of creation agreed was something new and defined a new category so much that a new category was created in general language to describe things like your product and other products came along later from competitors and defined themselves using that same category name - for example if someone came up with a phone that was smarter than other phones and coined the term smartphone for that then yeah, it would be like that.

This exact same argument works for Nintendo, Sony PlayStation and the Xbox

They all have closed application ecosystems and don’t allow third party stores.

This isn't a gotcha; consoles should be required to support homebrew games as well.

Interesting question - since they charge a flat fee and revenue sharing model based on sales it is not like Google who had a secret deal with Spotify and Netflix.

Honest questions: I thought Playstation and Xbox had "secret" deals? They have their own studios, they buy exclusives, timed exclusives, special promotions, games optimized for platform A but not for B etc?

Also Nintendo is a player - funny how Epic did not take Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo to court over their closed ecosystems.

I mean...I agree, but as things stand, they aren't.

It's one thing to say "this is how the law should be, so that Apple should have to open their platform"; it's quite another to say "as the law is right now, Apple should have to open their platform."

US antitrust laws are nominally extremely broad and are basically down to the courts to interpret, so what the law is right now is whatever you can convince the judge, which largely a matter of making a convincing argument that what they're doing is bad.

If the courts get it wrong then you have to go to Congress, sure. But then you're in the same place -- convince Congress that it's bad.

Either way we're having a debate about whether it should be allowed. And the answer is no -- this business model is anti-competitive, for any business, and if existing interpretations of the anti-trust laws don't currently prohibit it, they should.

I don't think they should be allowed to lock things down either, but if given the constraight of what is instead what ought to be, then Apple should market the iPhone then as a specialized console, not as a general purpose device

So for example, if you had a dominant market position for a particular category of phone operating systems, and you wanted to advance your interest in the market for app distribution...

Except the App Store was added to the iPhone before it reached its current level of ubiquity.

I believe Apple views the App Store as a feature of the iPhone that contributes to its value - the huge variety of apps available definitely contributed to the iPhone’s success; see the Windows phone for an example of a phone without a good App Store.

the huge variety of apps available definitely contributed to the iPhone’s success

fwiw I completely agree, but isn't this the inverse of the argument people make for why Apple deserves 30% of app revenue? Do app devs deserve a huge chunk of iPhone revenue since they contributed to its success?

Both those things can be true at the same time: it's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I agree, which is why I think its a silly moral justification for the 30% split.

definitely they view it that way, as well as viewing the app review process as something that adds customer value. I mean they were quite clear on all that from day 1, that they thought they were solving customer problems. And of course when you think you have solved customer problems you expect to get rewarded, and then some years down the road your solution isn't that great anymore but you just don't want to let go of any of that sweet, sweet reward.

100% correct. I was involved in the Netscape Microsoft anti trust case and this is specifically the finding that led to their loss (way too late for us)

The jury found that Google has a monopoly on the Android platform. That would extend to Apple and iOS, but I’ll be shocked if that finding is turned into a legal precedent that is upheld on appeal.

For one thing, the jury is probably more technically savvy than the judges that will ultimately decide this case.

Monopolies are not illegal. It’s leveraging the monopoly to exert force on adjacent markets that is. In the case here googles foul play is making side deals for preferential treatment against other app stores given their control over the handset operating system. Apple doesn’t offer an App Store market and never has nor ever represented otherwise, the app store is and always has been part of the operating system. This isn’t true for Google. Maybe for you and I this is splitting hairs, but splitting hairs is 99% of the law.

According to https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol... it does not have to be about adjacent markets. Maintaining a monopoly alone can be illegal, depending on the means.

Blocking all other means of distributing apps in a reasonable way absolutely should have been enough to get Apple sanctioned. Blocking alternatives with economic incentives is now forbidden, but blocking the access using code is allowed. This is stupid.

But sure, jury trial. And also US judges in this area are especially broken, with their warped understanding of when a monopoly is harmful.

---

Of course the other part of this is stupid as well. It should be illegal to have a monopoly, and it's the job of the government to break monopolies to enable competition. The US has it completely backwards here, and this is a big reason why that country is failing in key areas of economic development and infrastructure.

The US actually had it right when the antitrust laws were written. The Libertarian Party and Austrian Economists fucked it up for the rest of us by convincing everyone that "no, actually, antitrust is just about prices and consumer welfare, not control". This interpretation was ahistorical and illiberal, but it became history regardless, like to the point where Originalism as applied to antitrust law is derided as "hipster antitrust".

America's failings in economic development and infrastructure are not strictly caused by monopolization of the economy. South Korea's economy is run by like three chaebols[0] but they have working infrastructure. The problem with America is that we have a government that doesn't like to spend money, plus a group of illiberal, antidemocratic NIMBYs who make budgeting impossible by jacking up the cost of projects after they've already been estimated and committed to.

Since I already shat on the Libertarian Party, let me shit on the Democratic Party next. California and New York have legal climates that are unusually hospitable to NIMBYism. They figured out how to weaponize environmental review laws, to the point where actual reports about environmental infrastructure necessary for mitigating or surviving climate change say that we can't build the infrastructure because it'll get tied down in NIMBY red tape. In California this manifests as delays, cancellations, and massive wind farms in Wyoming; in New York it's cost overruns as bribes are paid to whoever can look the other way to get things passed through. Either way we can't build shit in our most populated states.

If there's a root cause for all of this, it's "vetocracy". In a democracy, when a decision is made, the people on the losing end of this decision agree to lose. However, since at least the 1970s, there has been several parallel movements to roll back decisions already made and form new mechanisms to prevent new decisions from being implemented. Antitrust was a rollback, NIMBYism was a new mechanism, but in either case, we're being dragged out of our brief experiment with liberal democracy by people who stand to gain from it.

[0] The Korean for Zaibatsu[1]

[1] The Japanese for Chaebol[0]

The Libertarian Party and Austrian Economists fucked it up for the rest of us by convincing everyone that "no, actually, antitrust is just about prices and consumer welfare, not control".

This is not really what the courts said (and to my knowledge the people who said it weren't members of the Libertarian Party or Austrian Economists).

The actual quote from the Supreme Court is, "It is competition, not competitors, which the Act protects."

The idea here is that, for example, if Walmart can undercut you on price and you go out of business, that's harm to competitors but not competition, because Walmart is only able to do that by offering the same product for a lower price. They can only do it by competing, and only for as long as they continue to outcompete the alternatives. As soon as they tried to raise prices or reduce quality, competitors could spring up to take the market from them.

That isn't what Apple is doing. If you want to offer an app store for iOS that only takes a 5% cut, Apple will actively interfere with you -- and then they take a larger cut despite the existence of prospective competitors willing to take less. That's not consumers choosing the incumbent because they're the most competitive, it's the incumbent preventing consumers from having a choice. It's harm to competition.

If you define a market small enough literally everyone is a monopoly and preventing competition. Apple has competition from other Android manufacturers. This is like complaining that Walmart has a monopoly on who can put shelves up in their stores. If Apple and/or Google were preventing other Smartphone OSs from getting developed or used, by abusing a monopoly position, then this could be considered a monopoly. But that is not what these cases are about. It's almost literally the shelves in walmart example

The way you define the market is by considering whether there are viable substitutes.

For example, two parking garages across the street from each other are strong substitutes. You can easily pick either one based on e.g. which has the best price. But a parking garage in New York and a parking garage in Boston aren't in the same market, because you can't reasonably park your car in New York and get out and walk to your destination in Boston.

You can easily have viable substitutes for app distribution on any given platform. Windows has a first party store but you can also install apps with Steam or download them from the developer's website. The Windows store and Steam are in the same market, so neither of them has a monopoly on distributing Windows apps. The same as two parking garages across the street from each other, or a Walmart and Target in the same mall.

If the operating system prevents competing app distribution methods, there is no longer any viable substitute for the official one. This is what the OEM wanted, right? No competition for their app store -- no substitutes, a monopoly. But then that's just what it is. You don't have to monopolize markets ancillary to your primary one, but if you do, you have.

They can only do it by competing, and only for as long as they continue to outcompete the alternatives. As soon as they tried to raise prices or reduce quality, competitors could spring up to take the market from them.

But once four or five different competitors have tried, had Walmart drop prices again to undercut them, and gone out of business, no one else is going to try because they'll know they're doomed to fail.

Competitors are required in order to have competition. The Chicago School interpretation of antitrust is as intellectually bankrupt as it is morally.

But once four or five different competitors have tried, had Walmart drop prices again to undercut them, and gone out of business, no one else is going to try because they'll know they're doomed to fail.

Suppose Walmart has the lowest price for batteries. The local hardware store goes out of business. Now Walmart doubles the price of batteries.

The local grocery store is going to start selling batteries. Walmart has to lower their price again or people will buy them there instead. If they do, the grocery store will still eventually sell their stock to customers who value convenience over the lowest possible price. They may not restock them unless Walmart raises the price again, but as soon as they do, batteries are back at the grocery store.

If Walmart never raises their prices the grocery store may never start carrying batteries, but then Walmart can never raise their prices.

Just to defend the libertarians briefly, no legal bullying tactics means trusts have a significantly harder time forming and maintaining their monopolies.

Not sure how you reconcile (il)legality of something with libertarianism - by definition bullying is legal there?

I mean that without IP laws, a whole lot of things become a lot harder to bully smaller companies with.

Mafia foes not need legal tactics

> we're being dragged out of our brief experiment with liberal democracy by people who stand to gain from it.

There's a name for that condition: corruption

It is a societal disease that is vicious and hard to get rid of. It makes bad situations worse even when everyone says that they agree on a solution and want to make it happen.

Antitrust laws are one way to prevent and maybe even remove corruption, but they only work if the people writing the laws and enforcing the laws are not corrupt.

South Korea's economy is run by like three chaebols[0] but they have working infrastructure.

Some parts of that infrastructure seem to be having serious problems now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167

Thanks for the footnotes, made my day! :lol:

we have a government that doesn't like to spend money

Lol, what?

I'm from Northern Europe, where running a 3% deficit is seen as edgy and daring.

"In FY 2023, the federal government spent $6.13 trillion and collected $4.44 trillion in revenue"

Blocking alternatives with economic incentives is now forbidden, but blocking the access using code is allowed. This is stupid.

I don't think that's stupid. Blocking access using code is an honest act. Everyone knows the rules and can build their business accordingly. Blocking alternatives with economic incentives is manipulative. It gives the impression that the platform is open to competition, when it isn't.

Blocking access using guns is an honest act. Everyone knows the rules and can build their business accordingly.

Therefore, I support the Mexican drug cartels

Just a slight clarification. The first Apple iPhone did not have an app store.

I think what they meant could be rephrased as, "for as long as there's been an App Store, it's been part of the OS. "

What does thad mean "part of the OS"? It is not built into the kernel, and is therefore no part of the OS. I do not see why the same would not apply to Apple. But maybe the US legal system is just totally broken ...

There's plenty of parts of an OS that aren't the kernel.

You are playing semantics - "He is not a slave, he is an endantured servant, nothing wrong here"

I'm rephrasing another person's statement to clarify what (I believe) they meant.

Separately, that's kind of a gross choice of comparisons.

Which I believe is also false. The jailbroken appstores predate the apple appstore.

It was added to the original iPhone with iPhone OS 2.

Apple doesn’t offer an App Store market and never has nor ever represented otherwise, the app store is and always has been part of the operating system.

"Apple doesn't offer an App Store market" is just assuming the conclusion. Nobody expects you to get competing app stores from Apple -- you get them from Apple's competitors. What Apple ought to be in trouble for is interfering with their operating system customers' ability to patronize competing app stores.

What Apple ought to be in trouble for is interfering with their operating system customers' ability to patronize competing app stores.

This isn’t illegal. Equivalent to a “No outside food and drink” sign or not letting randos sell things in your own storefront

It’s not illegal just because you don’t agree with the philosophy of a closed ecosystem

Obviously not equivalent.

This isn’t illegal. Equivalent to a “No outside food and drink” sign or not letting randos sell things in your own storefront

In that case, someone else owns the storefront. I own my phone, not Apple.

If Apple would like to claim that I merely lease my phone, they need to update all their marketing so it isn't misleading. They should also be on the hook for repairs (without AppleCare), and all the other responsibilities that typically accompany a leased product.

But it wouldn’t because I don’t think that’s what it means.

They appear to have ruled that Google has a monopoly because they’ve been squashing everyone else who should have been able to make an App Store by Google’s policies.

Apple isn’t squashing anyone, they just don’t allow it in the first place.

So I don’t think this would apply to Apple because of the line of reasoning. I know most people on hacker news think Apple should be forced to allow alternate app stores, but I don’t think this ruling can be used for that. It appears you would need something else.

Apple actively squashes attempts to jailbreak the phone which allows for additional app stores. The fact they aren’t mainstream alternatives is because Apple takes actions to stop the competition.

Only the abuse of a monopoly position to advance your interest in other markets is illegal.

Two markets ARE at play for consumers: mobile phone hardware (with OS) and mobile app stores/apps. Apple is using it's monopoly in the former to create/enforce a monopoly in the latter.

You can tell there are two separate markets because you, the consumer, make (at least) two separate purchases to participate.

In the case of Apple, it's the same market. Because the only way to get access to the App Store is through an iPhone bought from Apple. And the only way to run an iOS app is with the same iPhone.

Yes, but this is only because Apple designed the phone that way. Apple should not be immune from antitrust law purely because they decided not to allow competition.

They do allow competition. Build your own phone and your own app store.

So by that argument if MS would have disallowed installation of any other browser it would have been OK, because competitor could just build their own operating system.

The whole argument is that Apple is leveraging the position in one market (hardware) to gain advantage in another market. Your answer is "competitors can always build their own hardware" don't you see that this is a nonsensical argument?

If it was from the start, yes. Just like they don’t support replacin explorer.exe, the network stack. If you allow competition, but use leverage to stiffle it, it’s bad.

sigh That's not what I meant.

Apple decided where the boundary of competition lies by deciding to bundle their phone, their operating system, their app store, and their code signing policies into a package deal. A thicket of copyright laws forbid you from unbundling any combination of these. For example, I can't legally run iOS on my Pixel 8 Pro. It is legal to run Android on an iPhone, except the hardware boot ROM is designed to reject anything not signed by Apple, and Apple won't sign Android. You can circumvent that by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in the boot ROM[0], and that's legal, too, but you can't legally tell anyone about those vulnerabilities because telling people how to break copy protection is a felony.

This same logic applies to application software. It's legal to jailbreak[1] your phone to install non-App-Store apps, but illegal to provide the jailbreak tool necessary to install those apps. If Epic had decided to release a jailbreak to install the Epic Games Store, instead of releasing a hotfix for third-party in-app billing and suing for antitrust, Tim Sweeney would have been thrown in jail for violating 17 USC 1201.

In copyright law, there's a concept of copyright misuse, which is what the courts call using copyright to break antitrust law. Copyright allows you monopoly control over your work, but you are not allowed to use that control to maintain an illegal monopoly that's outside of the copyright bargain. In other words, you don't get to opt-out of forms of competition you don't like. Congress decides those.

So no, "build your own phone and app store" is not enough. And letting Apple dictate the conduct of their competitors is effectively giving them antitrust immunity.

[0] Which are, BTW, once-in-a-decade. We've had a grand total of two bugs that can be used to install alternative operating systems on an iPhone.

[1] Jailbreak bugs aren't as scarce as boot ROM bugs, but they've been getting scarcer over time. This is not because Apple is doing a good security job, but because the NSA is hoarding all the good bugs for themselves.

That's like saying that everything in the US is legal, since you're perfectly able to renounce your citizenship and move to Somalia where there aren't any laws.

Hmm making the argument that apple has a monopoly on the phone market is not easy though.

I my opinion the two markets are: Providing apps on iPhone, and offering payment processing for apps on iPhone. Apple is using its absolute monopoly on providing apps to also entrenched itself in the market of providing payment for apps.

E.g. It’s not illegal to be the only seller of gasoline in the country. It is illegal though to bundle laundry powder with gasoline sales to corner the laundry powder market.

I mean, it's far more than that. Most importantly:

Historically they have been held to include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing.

While IANAL - even as a plebe I can pretty easily tie refusing to allow third party app stores to both refusing to supply an essential facility, and product tying.

Why should my choice of hardware or OS dictate the apps I'm allowed to install? That's 100% product tying. It would be one thing if third parties just had no interest in supplying an alternative app store. It's another thing entirely to lock them out via your monopoly on the ecosystem.

Why should my choice of hardware or OS dictate the apps I'm allowed to install?

Do you own an iPhone? I suspect that the vast majority of people complaining about Apple's "lock down" are people who don't even use an iPhone.

If you do own an iPhone ... why the heck did you buy one knowing its limitations. It's like buying a pink shirt when you hate pink, despite the availability of shirts of other colors, then going to the manufacturer to complain about the color.

I can't speak for others, but I'm an iPhone user, and I'm complaining!

why the heck did you buy one knowing its limitations.

Because:

• Almost everyone I know uses iMessage exclusively.

• I very strongly dislike Android's UI design.

• I strongly prefer iPhone hardware.

Any two of these would be insufficient to offset how furious I am that I can't decide what code runs on my own damn phone! But taken together, Android just doesn't make sense.

I jailbroke my iPhone for years, despite the many inconveniences of running an outdated version of iOS, but Apple's security has just become too good.

Some specificity is required when discussing legal concepts like tying and essential facility.

For tying, while not a firm ‘rule’ the most common application of tying is limited to the ‘tied’ product being from another market when compared to the ‘tying’ product. Also, the current appellate court standard (worded semi-informally) is that a tying of products raises antitrust concerns when it restricts competition AND provides no benefit to consumers.

As to essential facility, the most impactful factor for the plaintiff (as in the hardest burden for the government to overcome to establish monopolistic abuse) is as follows: the plaintiff is REQUIRED to prove that the compelled permission to competitors to utilize the “facility” does not interfere or allow for detrimental effects of the dominant firm’s ability to serve its own customers.

Apple’s historic marketing speak and other ‘on the record’ statements about the app store’s exclusivity ensuring tight control for the security of Apple’s customers is directly written to advance defenses to these two claims.

You can certainly argue that Apple’s conduct is characterized as abuse of monopoly, but there arguments against that can also be compelling.

The above IS NOT and should not be considered legal advice.

Monopolies aren’t illegal. Only the abuse of a monopoly position to advance your interest in other markets is illegal.

It should be though. Unchecked monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies are antithetical to a free market economy - they stifle competition and make the market un-free as well:

- for employees, they're bad because monopolies (or cartels) suppress their freedom to go to a better employer. The best case to look at is actually the tech sector, where large corporations colluded to keep compensation down [1], but there's also more evil cases like WalMart that go as far as underpay their employees so badly that they can only survive on food stamps [6].

- for suppliers, they're bad (in the correct term of a monopsony) because having only a few (or only one) buyer depresses their ability to get fair prices for products, e.g. in agriculture [2], or in WalMart [3][4]

- for customers, they're bad because they can't (realistically) go to alternatives, especially if the monopoly in question has extinguished competitors by advantages of scale - again, WalMart is a nasty example [5].

- for society as a whole, they're bad because, again, large actors like WalMart can devastate vibrant community centers like malls, leading to dereliction of entire neighborhoods in a domino effect [7], and eventually the erosion of local tax bases, leading to funding issues for basic government services.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] https://usceconreview.com/2022/07/06/america-where-even-sust...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/wal-marts-suppliers-feel-pre...

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-ratchets-up-pressure-o...

[5] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/walmart-effect.asp

[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/20/how-mall-closings-in-america...

It should be though. Unchecked monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies are antithetical to a free market economy - they stifle competition and make the market un-free as well

Some markets only support a natural monopoly though. If you forcefully break up every monopoly you'll always be in court, because after winning the case and breaking up a company, the next natural monopoly will form within a few years.

The best compromise is to only go after them if they're abusing their position. I agree the standards for that are too low though.

Agreed, particularly in agriculture and other rural scenarios it's very common that there is effectively one seller/purchaser for entire classes of goods. But there is barely any government oversight authority to watch over these or where any affected party can raise grievances.

Except the US government is constantly opening antitrust cases and successfully prosecuting violators on a monthly basis, you probably just never hear about it.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings

If we see fair competition reducing fees massively in android vs Apple, Apple’s abuse will be clear

This. It isn't productive to think about this like "Google lost, Epic won" or "Google lost, Apple won".

Rather think about this as Google lost, Android won. If this ruling goes trough, Android becomes an more open platform by default. Think about it: Steam, itch.io and GOG stores on Android.

Unless Apple has a most favored nation clause—another legal practice that should be outlawed

What we will see is that you will need a different app store for every game on android, while on iOS you can get them all from the App Store.

The only thing that will be clear is that Apple got it right the first time by not allowing other app stores.

They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too.

Just this part alone would applies to Apple the same way

And the Judge found in Epics favour on that point. Apple have a temporary reprieve, but there is an injunction ordering them to allow developers to advertise other means of payment.

I mean sure, but in a practical sense the company becoming the only seller of gasoline happened through anti-competitive behavior and not just because they have a superior gasoline product. I think that two app stores controlling 100% of distribution and setting their rates similarly feels pretty anti-competitive.

If two companies end up in that situation without breaking the law, then there’s nothing wrong with it legally by definition.

It becomes an issue for the legislature to fix. Not the courts.

There has been several prominent cases where Apple removed some app from the store just to bring out an app in the same space. Also Apple products don't have the same restrictions as others when in comes to ads, api etc. To me that sounds quite clearly like like they are abusing their monopoly position.

Perhaps, but that is not what Epic vs Apple was about.

That doesn't make the premise any less ridiculous; it's only illegal to pressure people not to make a competitor, if you make it technically impossible to have a competitor, that's all fine.

Being charitable, these are two different juries. It's a little annoying that, in a country where iOS is the dominant OS, the iOS monopolist is exonerated and the non-iOS monopolist is recognized- nonetheless this is still a big win for consumer rights.

Monopolies aren’t illegal.

I think there are a lot of laws about this. Guys get nicknames like "The Trust Buster" for going after them.

ipso facto, if the monopolist doesn't even let a market exist then by definition they're not abusing it.

What about this landmark case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

I don't get it, so no company can provide a walled garden? Or at least, not if they're successful? That doesn't make sense to me, why is that not an acceptable and desirable feature for some people?

You don't have to buy an iPhone, this isn't like a railroad or a telecom that owns all of the possible infrastructure. If you want a walled garden get an iPhone. If you want freedom with all that implies, go Android.

I don't get it, so no company can provide a walled garden

You can provide a walled garden. But that's not Apple does.

Instead, Apple is a mafia that shakes down all the vendors for the right to sell in their semi-open market square.

If Apple iOS were a walled garden, it would have contained only Apple applications.

When someone comes to your store and says "I'll wreck your store unless you cut me 30% of your revenue" that's the mafia.

When someone comes to your store and says "I made the streets and regulate the power, water supply, sewer, and everything else in this place, cut me 30% of your revenue in taxes" that's the government.

And you'd do well to not confuse those so haphazardly. Apple didn't come to your app and with no cause blackmail you to get your money. They created an ecosystem that did not exist before, and they have to maintain it. Paying for it is completely rational.

When someone comes to your store and says "I'll wreck your store unless you cut me 30% of your revenue" that's the mafia.

That's exactly what Apple does. If you make a mobile app (for example, a presentation manager) you _have_ to support iOS, or you will go out of business.

As a developer, you simply don't have a choice. You have to either support iOS, or get out of mobile apps entirely.

You have to either support iOS, or get out of mobile apps entirely.

What? That’s not true. There are plenty of Android-only developers.

Any example of a major Android-only app for the US?

Beeper Mini, Fortnight, several Google apps.

Keyword: major.

Fortnight is the only example, and it's on its way to SCOTUS. Google apps, which one?

Fortnite has an iOS version. They just stopped being able to update it because of Epic's shenanigans.

Not gonna lie, all of these examples are pretty weak because all of them are in circumstances that 99% of developers are never going to be in.

Beeper Mini replicates native iOS functionality - it's obvious why it can only exist as an Android-only app.

Fortnite is the product of a massive studio, whose decision of not publishing it on iOS was deliberate as part of their anti-monopoly lawsuits. They can easily afford to do it because Epic Games has other revenue sources, alongside with running Fortnite on pretty much every other platform imaginable.

Google doesn't really cash in on their more niche apps, publishing them on iOS is unlikely to change anything for them. However, not choosing to publish them gives Android - their own product - a tiny boost in appeal due to exclusive functionality.

You said "As a developer", not "As a major developer".

You could, however, give as much of the product away as you can for free (less $100 a year for developer account) and then Apple is basically paying you to distribute it on their platform. That's definitely not the mafia.

If you want to charge money, Apple will collect it for you and take a cut. If you don't want that deal, you can still distribute your app for free, you just can't charge money for it in the app. You can still charge money for the service, but you have to do that on your own website and infrastructure (a la Netflix, etc.), not Apple's.

If you want to charge money, Apple will collect it for you and take a cut. If you don't want that deal, you can still distribute your app for free, you just can't charge money for it in the app

Basically, you can't make money. Duh. You can't even place a link for a third-party payment system (the case to allow that is on its way to SCOTUS).

Apple is a mafia.

"They want money from my app when I want money from their store! Therefore I'm a victim and they're a mafia."

Seems to me you're not noticing the Kremlin levels of cognitive dissonance in your statement here. With this severe lack of self-awareness, if you were in Apple's place you'd be way worse than they are right now.

You realize that free apps still have to pass all the Apple rules in order to get in the store right? If they disagree with anything about your app, then you're blocked. I think that's a good thing for consumers (or at least it would be if they allowed sideloading for people who don't want to be controlled) but that doesn't change the reality that as a developer, Apple is the mafia.

I'm not up to date on Apple's current rules, but for years they have strictly forbidden you from directing users to your website to complete a purchase. You weren't even allowed to mention any other payment options in the app.

Apparently you read only half the comment. Do you understand the distinction between destruction and construction or don't you?

By your logic there would be no towns, cities, countries, unions, companies, any kind of organization at all. Because any time you need to pay for something, you feel like it's the mafia.

- Is it the mafia when it comes time to pay time for rent. "I HAVE to pay rent or I'll be kicked out on the street!"

- Is it the mafia when it comes time to pay your bill at a restaurant. "I HAVE to pay my bill or I'll be hungry!"

No one owes you anything. You ask for money for your apps, don't you? Because why are you complaining otherwise? 40% of $0 is $0, isn't it? But you require money, despite maybe someone could be like "you're mafia unless I can play your game for free".

Things cost money. Grow up and start acting like an adult.

Apparently you read only half the comment. Do you understand the distinction between destruction and construction or don't you?

Are you a part of mafia? How else would you defend Apple that is bent on destruction?

Isn’t this site supposed to have at least semi-intelligent people?

I don't think likening Apple's stranglehold on users to the authority of a government helps your case.

I don't think likening Apple's authority over its own platforms to the government's stranglehold on citizens helps your case.

Am I doing this right?

I didn't liken Apple to a government, you did.

Am I doing this right?

No.

Likening it to a government given every company has a domain over its own products and services, makes a lot more sense than likening it to a mafia which doesn't come to contribute, but only to take.

Apple allows you to ship infinite amount of apps at no cost, if you don't in return ask the store for money.

What kind of a mafia works like that?

Wait a second are you saying Apple is a government unto itself?

They have more money and effective power than most governments worldwide.

They govern the iOS platform.

There's some nuance to the 30% fee. Under $1M in revenue it's 15% and after a year it's 15%. No fee for free apps. No fee for physical things.

30% is way too high. 15% seems high as well without knowing the costs or benefits of the App Store.

I don't think stores have an obligation to carry your products, it isn't like supermarkets are breaking the law because they don't have an open-door policy on products. You don't have some intrinsic legal right to use someone else's infrastructure to sell your own stuff, on your terms. Framing this as a legal or ethical issue leaves me cold, when the reality is just... you'd PREFER higher margins. I get it! I'm not saying that's wrong, it just isn't a legally enshrined right.

I don't think stores have an obligation to carry your products, it isn't like supermarkets are breaking the law because they don't have an open-door policy on products.

I agree. However, consumers have the right to go to a different supermarket, without selling their house.

However, consumers have the right to go to a different supermarket, without selling their house.

Consumers bought this house with their eyes wide open knowing that they can only access one supermarket.

I'd challenge you on that. I think 95%+ of iPhone buyers have no idea that Apple places restrictions on what they are allowed to install.

You’d lose that bet handily. People like Apple because of the curation and the ecosystem. A mainstream complaint about Apple is not that they place restrictions, but rather that they let too much low-quality stuff in.

Citation needed. (Citation also would be good for GP's claim, but they did specify "think" and were clearly speculating, whereas you make your assertion with certainty).

There are billions of iphones out there. Unless you're working with data (which you should share) then your anecdotal experience from talking with other tech literate people is so ridiculously non-representative that it's hard to even visualize.

My iPhone users don't know that they're being "taxed" 30% on every single app purchase.

One of the biggest economic theories that has been demonstrably proven wrong is that consumers act perfectly logically and with full information. The opposite is true. I really wish it weren't because economics becomes much simpler and more intuitive when you assume perfect information and logicality, but if wishes were fishes and all that.

And supermarkets have no obligation to build expressways to their competitors!

We can take these analogy absurdities wherever — the harsh reality is that nobody is stopping someone from building an open ecosystem phone. But there isn’t enough demand.

As a consumer, why should I care? As a company, unless I’m building my own walled garden for company phones, why should I care? What’s the market here?

the harsh reality is that nobody is stopping someone from building an open ecosystem phone.

The harsh reality is that manufacturing capacity and network effects actually prevents building an open ecosystem phone. You will never be able to purchase the best chips and displays.

I think we need to stop pretending that regulating competition is a bad thing. Competition is what makes capitalism work as an economic system. Without competition capitalism is inefficient and harmful. If we can inject more competition into the system as a whole, wherever possible, it's going to be good for consumers.

We can take these analogy absurdities wherever — the harsh reality is that nobody is stopping someone from building an open ecosystem phone. But there isn’t enough demand.

I don't think there's too little demand, I think there's too much profit incentive in the other direction.

Only a tiny number of companies on earth have the resources to build a successful mobile platform. If you are lucky enough to be one of those companies, you're not going to leave money on the table.

Speaking as someone who's gotten more than one tech illiterate relative an iPhone and iPad, the walled garden is WHY I bought in. It's literally Apple's biggest selling point, not having to worry about fake apps and malware and scams.

10 years ago that might have been true, but nowadays Apple doesn't give a single flying shit about fake/scammy apps on the iOS app store.

It's to the point where you can't look up local government apps here without getting some advertising garbage in the results first because Apple started selling app space.

I don't get it, so no company can provide a walled garden

Apple doesn't have multiple competing stores. It has ONE store.

And if you are a software vendor that makes mobile apps, you HAVE to support Apple or you will go out of business.

Because consumers value the Apple ecosystem and UX, both of which you can take advantage of as a developer. What is the problem?

The problem is that after a decade, my choices are to continue to spend money at Apple, or spend even more money and time to leave Apple, go somewhere else, and buy all the apps I already own, all over again.

When I first started, I used to think of Apple as the best option available to me. Now I think about it as the least bad option. The cost of leaving involves so much time and money, that it’s not a realistic option.

That's... life.

DVDs come out. Now I have to rebuy all my VHS movies on another platform...

No you don't, you can buy a VHS player and keep using it without throwing out your TV. Or buy a combined DVD/VHS player. The only reason to buy DVDs is because the quality is better. You're getting additional value for your purchase, beyond the artificial restrictions of a mega corporation.

This is a poor analogy, because there is no coparable access to build other app stores, as this is not the same kind of ecosystem for a market.

The mafia shakes down people who don't interact with them, apple does not.

How do I develop a mobile app which a majority of people in the US will be able to use without interacting with Apple?

a mobile app which a majority of people in the US will be able to use

Even using Apple, you can't do this, because you need a separate Android and iOS app already.

Big picture though, I don't think you really have a "right" or entitlement to just access everyone.

You're not entitled to use someone else's business, even if it's a good one. You can't just go and sell your product in the AT&T store, you need to agree to their terms. Even if you make a phone that only works on the AT&T network, you still need to agree to their terms.

You can't sell in Target or Walmart or Costco or even Amazon just because you want to. Oh and you may be quite disappointed to discover many of them take >30% cut too.

Apple thinks of the iOS App Store as another storefront, and you need their permission to put your product on their "shelves". The courts agree.

Even if you make a phone that only works on the AT&T network, you still need to agree to their terms.

Prior to the 1980s, AT&T, as the dominant telephone service provider in the United States, had a policy that only allowed customers to use telephones that were leased from them. This policy was rooted in the belief that non-AT&T equipment could harm the telephone network. Does that sounds familiar?

Several legal cases (and the eventual breakup of AT&T) eventually opened up the AT&T network to third party phones and consumers rejoiced.

Phones aren't infrastructure, the telecom network is.

I don't think you really have a "right" or entitlement to just access everyone. You're not entitled to use someone else's business, even if it's a good one.

And yet you can literally pick up a phone, dial some numbers, and reach everyone else who has a phone number.

And yet you can literally pick up a phone, dial some numbers, and reach everyone else who has a phone number.

And yet you can literally pick up a [product engineered to a phone company’s specifications], dial some numbers [assigned by a phone company] and reach everyone else who [also agreed to the phone company’s TOS] [as long as you and them have paid a large monthly fee].

This isn’t freedom. Companies still decide how you can use their services.

Part of Epic's argument was that they wanted Apple and Google to distribute Epic Games Store, which makes your argument valid. However, the commenter you were replying to likely isn't aware of this and does not care about how they install EGS, only that they are able to do so if they do not want to deal with Apple or Google.

The sneaky part of Apple's counterargument is that they try to apply your argument not to their own App Store, but to the entire OS. This is a land grab - the App Store is their service, but I own the phone, so the OS should respect my decision to circumvent Apple's curation if I so choose. If I'm not allowed to sell in Target or Walmart, I'm allowed to open my own store and people can circumvent Target to go to me directly. This is how it works for every other form of computer except phones and tablets.

This is how it works for every other form of computer except phones and tablets.

But only because macs existed before they were able to get away with this. I would bet a huge amount of money that if macs were invented/created after the iphone, they'd be locked down exactly the same way. And many of the same people who love it on the phone would love it on the computer, even though now they would say that it's a general purpose computing device not an appliance like the phone is.

Figure it out lol. That’s what Apple had to do. Why are you expecting a free pass to do what took them decades?

Because decades ago, "figuring it out" entailed visiting a website and downloading a software installer. Why is Apple expecting everyone to forget about that and pay them the difference instead?

You create a web app or website.

Nah, they shake down everyone they can.

They can't shake down someone out of their reach.

They can identify them though ( green icon... )

Instead, Apple is a mafia that shakes down all the vendors for the right to sell in their semi-open market square.

I think they actually have a monopsony since you can only sell to apple. If there were other app stores, you could sell to them instead.

"In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

(And they probably have a monopoly wrt iphone customers)

Walled garden is fine. Charging exorbitant fees because you've strong armed any and all competition out of the game isn't.

A reasonable fee with 0 competition would be fine. No fee, while hiking the prices of the devices would be fine.

How can you seriously say "any and all competition" when Android and Google exist?

You're looking at it from the user's perspective, this case is about B2B.

Imagine you're working on a hardware product that can communicate with your other devices over Bluetooth. How exactly do you avoid Apple in this scenario?

You can't, or you won't be in business for very long. You need to develop an app because Apple intentionally gimps their browser, and to release the app you must agree to their terms.

They're in a dominant position that allows them to dictate unfavorable terms to the rest of the industry which, among other things, stifles innovation.

Imagine you're working on a hardware product that can communicate with your other devices over Bluetooth. How exactly do you avoid Apple in this scenario?

I can't think of nothing that is paired over Bluetooth that couldn't be done better with some other medium. Even Apple use a superset of Bluetooth to get its devices working properly together.

I don't get it, so no company can provide a walled garden? Or at least, not if they're successful?

Exactly. If you take US antitrust law as written, once you're close to being the dominant player, you can't have a walled garden.

So the law says that once your city reaches a certain size you must let in the barbarian hordes? In this case the barbarians are the malicious apps that would have been stopped by app store vetting. Seems like a bad deal for the average citizen of that city.

I think tech savvy users should be able to (after jumping through a few hoops) do whatever they want with their phones, without any fear of reprisal from software and hardware manufacturers. If Apple and Google insist on strangling this market then Tim Sweeney has the money to develop a competing phone ecosystem, it could be a great business opportunity if a large number of users and developers are actually not being well served. But he may find that this underserved population is a quite small slice of the total addressable market, and that walled gardens actually do a good job for the vast majority of users, protecting my oblivious grandma who clicks on everything from a horde of scammers.

no company can provide a walled garden? Or at least, not if they're successful?

Yes. Why are we so ok on giving up our rights like this? "no company is allowed to inside trade/use slaves/have a monopoly" - yes!

I don't get it, so no company can provide a walled garden? Or at least, not if they're successful?

Framing things as you have leads to the impression that, by analogy to oppressing a person, restricting a large company is bad. But a company is not a person. Companies are legal constructs that exist because they are useful to society. A monopoly distorts markets and stifles innovation by disadvantaging potential competitors. This is not beneficial to society and so should not be permitted. So yes, a sufficiently large company should not be permitted to do things that might be permissible for a smaller company.

I think a lot of this stems from "take backsies" on a long term subconscious level.

The HN audience in particular is not just tinker-friendly, but the vast majority surely lived through the era of Apple where Jobs pitched the iPhone as more of a gateway to the internet in your pocket, web apps were even mentioned as being a major feature/philosophy.

Not to mention the "old world" of premobile OSes which still have the basic understanding that I can install programs programmed for this platform, without "protection" and the "protection fees" associated with a centralized monopoly, an old world of which macOS could never shed in the name of profits, but iOS and beyond has become the battleground for redefining the computing experience to the mainstream: is it supposed to be a bladerunner 2049 esque experience of hitting the predetermined icons on my pocket vending machine, infantilizing and commodifying people's lifestyle for wealth concentration of a company that uses it's wealth to...hmm.

It is, at the very least though, a bit of a betrayal to those used to the old ways.

At the worst, it's part of a larger regression against individualism.

Having a walled garden is fine. I use iPhone and apple products from day 1. That said, charging 30% of subscription in the App Store seems ridiculously high if you put yourself in the 3rd party vendor place.

For comparison, Amazon charges 15%. AWS marketplace charges <10%.

I think a company going around saying "we are a open system you can do what you want with our product" and then making secret deals to limit that openess is worse than a company from day one saying we are selling a 100% locked down solution, take it or leave it.

It really doesn't matter who is worse morally here, just both situations are bad for consumer choice. I find it amazing that Apple things it is okay to attempt to take 15% of Audible revenue if they allowed you to buy books in the app, for example.

It's 30%. It's only 15% after 12 months of a customer rebilling which is statistically insignificant number, and it was only done as a carefully orchestrated PR move to make people think 15% when it's really 30 - as you have demonstrated

Is it statistically insignificant? My guess would be that sooner or later most subscribers are long term customers.

Depends on what type of subscription business it is. I've heard meal kit companies like Hello Fresh lose 90% of their customers in less than 12 months, as the generous new customer discount vouchers tail off.

(Not that meal kit companies would be paying Apple 30%)

Meal kit companies don’t pay the 30% because the payment is for a service that is delivered outside the app. Uber doesn't pay it either. It’s a stupid loophole apple built in that all but proves the 30% cut is ridiculous and would never work in the real world.

Curious what B2C business sectors take less than a 30% cut?

Exactly. The whole argument about security and people needing a central payment system for things to be safe user friendly is patently ridiculous given that said approach is working just fine for all the “physical items” apps.

It’s statistically insignificant because churn rates on subscription services are higher than you’d think.

A typical customer lifetime might be somewhere between a year and two years, unless you happen to be a giant like Netflix.

Let’s say you expect your customer to churn after 14 months, so that means you only enjoy 2 months of Apple’s reduced royalty rate. Your total average rate is 27%.

This concept is why many sunscription services are able to offer lifetime subscriptions. They have already figured out what one customer is worth based on churn rate, so the lifetime subscription is set up to be a price that matches or exceeds that number.

If it wasn't significant in terms of Apple's profits why would they not just charge 15%...

As a dev, I absolutely prefer Apple’s model of locked-down walled garden. HN has no idea about all the grandmas and people who are busy with their jobs and kids, aka majority of the population. I can’t imagine the magnitude of digital fraud and scams that would happen if Apple devices weren’t a walled garden. My only dissatisfaction is that I can’t develop for iOS without buying a Mac and a developer account, but I also understand I’m not entitled to it just because I want.

How does allowing 3rd party app stores negatively affect the elderly? Just like Android the ability to install 3rd party apps and stores would likely be off by default and you'd need to enable it in the settings. And even after enabling it installing something gives you a pretty clear warning that what you're doing could be dangerous.

If that's not enough warning for someone then they probably shouldn't have a smart phone, or if they do it should have strict parental controls on it (blocking 3rd party installs, most sites, and phone calls/texts).

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/the-screen-started-mo...

There have been many such cases.

I can’t imagine the magnitude of digital fraud and scams that would happen if Apple devices weren’t a walled garden.

I can, and I don't mind. Let it happen. Computer freedom is more important than preventing scams and fraud. Just have the corporations and banks eat the losses instead. God knows these trillion dollar corporations can afford it.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

- Ben Franklin

Apple could still be a gate-keeper of 3rd party stores. They could dictate the security and protections that need to be in-place to be listed.

The PKI industry is a good example of this.

The Certificate authorities have to abide by standards and any misbehaving Certificate Authorities can be removed.

I'd argue the integrity of the PKI industry is just as important, if not more so, than App Stores and they have managed to maintain a device agnostic market with healthy competition.

Both are bad for consumers, but one is worse.

A locked garden is a locked garden. But a locked garden that you go into knowing it's a locked garden is better than a locked garden that advertises itself as open and then locks you in. Both are locked gardens; one is also false advertising.

Gotta agree with you. I originally chose Android because it was relatively open but Google wiped out our freedom with hardware remote attestation. Now my bank app refuses to work if I modify my device in any way.

If I must be in a walled garden, I'm choosing the better kept one. Android is quite simply inferior, I tolerated it because it gave me relative freedom but there's no reason to tolerate it any longer.

Yea. I'm on Samsung s22 ultra myself. I'm thinking to move to Iphone and Apple Watch because at least with apple I know I'm being locked down up front.

But a locked garden that you go into knowing it's a locked garden is better

Out of curiosity, say that I'm not a techie that knows all about Apple vs alternatives ... and say I'm interested in buying Apple because I like the aesthetics of the device or something. Is there anything actually explicit in Apple's marketing that makes it clear to the consumer that they are buying into a "locked garden" ?

Part of this discussion has to do with definitions and what we're talking about, specifically. It's common in other industries to find yourself with some degree of vendor lock-in for "compatibility." I bought some high end Canon camera lenses, for example, so I have zero expectations that I can use those lenses with a Sony or a Nikon. I tend to buy Dewalt tools because I own Dewalt batteries etc.

Here we're talking about the "App Store." I don't know that it would register on the average non-techie's mind to assume they would have options ... but us techies know that the "locked garden" tends to mean "you're buying into the Apple ecosystem of products and will likely be stuck only buying Apple products for compatibility sake." Non techies might assume that because they assume that everything works that way. But is Apple making this extremely clear in their marketing so that people who don't assume would know up front? I'm genuinely curious since I don't buy Apple products.

Agreed, and also worth pointing out that Apple has rules for apps in the app store that they aren't allowed to tell you about Apple's cut and point you to a different place to buy. That is the absolute opposite of informing the user. Apple is preventing anybody from informing the user.

I don't think it's false advertising to say that Android has alternative app stores. I primarily use apps from an alternative store and it works well.

I agree but not enough to get the government involved

What's your solution?

Who else can regulate markets?

They aren't "taking revenue" they are providing a service. If audible don't want to use that service they don't have to.

Except they want their cut whether or not you use their service.

Apple offers the same kinds of deals (see Netflix discussions) though there the rationales are different, which leads to sweatier "Apple has to offer deals because their value add is so bad, and having alternative app stores would help"-style arguments... I don't really know of a good legal argument there.

Is Apple's deal with Netflix anticompetitive though?

Google is paying hardware manufacturers to use their search and for exclusivity with their store. Both of those are more or less explicitly to keep out competition.

Apple cut a deal with Netflix but what competition does it squash?

These are just different issues.

Is Apple's deal with Netflix anticompetitive though?

Towards other streaming services?

Yes.

Giving preferential treatment to one customer at the expense of other customers is not anticompetitive behavior as defined by any law I'm aware of.

The law doesn't say you have to give everybody the same deal just because it's "unfair" to others.

The monopoly/antitrust/etc. laws are about misusing a position of power for your own benefit at the expense of competitors. Apple doesn't have to be "fair" to Netflix vs Max vs Disney Plus.

Plus, Netflix isn’t even Apple’s customer. It’s actually kinda the other way around: Apple’s customers are what Netflix wants access to, as a source of potential Netflix customers.

When you’re a marketplace, especially a big one, both the people buying in your store and the people selling in your store start to look like customers, both paying you for access to the other. For the sellers is obviously more implicit, but still often explicit like grocery stores getting paid to put specific products on aisle end caps and such.

The whole 30% fee is premised on providing services to app makers for money.

But Apple stated all got the same deal and had to pay the same.

But they lied.

It’s very likely they have special deals too.

Without saying too much, I have personally witnessed such a deal at company with a measly 2-3 million app downloads. We had a physical product in the Apple Store that was doing very well. Our sales guy somehow negotiated lower IAP fees in exchange for higher cut or exclusivity of our retail product. Everything is negotiable if you have leverage.

Considering Apple has its own streaming service, this may in fact be the opposite of monopolistic.

It squashes competition with Netflix

But Apple didn’t decide that only Netflix could be on their platform. And they didn’t take money to cause problems for other streaming video services.

That’s what Google did according to the verdict. They paid money to stop competitors.

In fact Apple negotiated that deal to keep Netflix on the platform because Netflix wasn’t happy paying 30% (surprise). It’s not good that they’re playing favorites secretly, but it’s not the same thing

Did other streaming services get the same deal?

That doesn't matter. Businesses aren't required to make the same deals with everyone.

But if one service gets a better deal than it's competitors then it's market impediment.

And Apple had previously explicitly stated in its defense that everyone got the same deal.

I agree the issues are different! I do believe there’s a subtle argument to be made about how Apple can use its customer base to “pick winners” (combo of huge user base + App Store being the only entry point), on top of things like offering sweetheart deals to certain apps. Meta being allowed to get away with so much “against the App Store rules” stuff is legit IMO.

Anticompetitive behavior can be downstream of stuff like this, even if Apple isn’t actively quashing something but merely making it way easier for certain places to absorb the costs (especially if the deal was only offered to Netflix but not to other platforms).

Its not a ironclad argument by any means but its something

From 2018:

Netflix stops offering in-app subscriptions for new and returning customers on iOS

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159373/netflix-in-app-...

Apple allows companies that have a free app used to access subscription content to sell the subscriptions on their own website without giving Apple a cut.

Netflix used to allow you to pay though Apple to reduce the sales friction of needing to set up billing through the Netflix website, but they stopped letting users pay through Apple years ago.

Maybe they stopped new subscriptions, but I'm still paying for Netflix through Apple.

If the result of this case is "you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down", that's terrible!

The rule of thumb, in a very simplified way, is indeed that you can have a monopoly as long as you don’t actively leverage that power to stifle competition.

That’s not a result of this case but a result of all the jurisprudence leading up to this case.

And to a certain degree, that makes sense. The alternative, making all monopolies illegal, would cause too much havoc because it would affect almost everyone putting out a product.

Say, for example, you’re a newcomer in the market of smart thermostats. By definition, you have a monopoly on your thermostats. If monopolies are by definition illegal, regardless of circumstance, you’d have to allow Nest to put software on your thermostat advertising their products.

That’s an undesirable outcome, if only because it makes it harder for you to compete in that market.

I don't think this relates to Apple case.

Apple doesn't allow other stores to exist on their ecosystem. That's a problematic monopoly, because competitors can not exists.

That's different from what you are saying: other companies are allowed to create smart thermostat and compete against Nest

By the same logic, other phonemakers can come over and make phones. The definition of what is a "market" is arbitrary and subjective. Google may be a monopoly in internet search, but only a small player in "global advertisement". And anyone anywhere is a monopolist in the very narrow definition of the market that includes their own ten customers.

What's really important is the power play: your company should strive to hold a comfortable and stable monopoly position in a meaningful market (meaningful to you), while the government's role is to watch over all the businesses so that large numbers of people are not under heavy influence of external forces and not made unhappy. If any product exploits its monopoly by shifting the power from the government or making people sad, then gov steps in and interprets the rules in the way to correct this. Or, the gov is corrupt and helps keep that monopoly going :-)

How about a _market_ is anything where there exists a _marketplace_? Doesn't seem like a wild stretch. Now why should Apple have a monopoly on accepting payments on its platform?

To your second point: people are sad that we can’t have cheaper and better software on iOS. It’s a poor UX when an app makes me go on my desktop to sign up for their paid service. It negatively impacts consumers and only exists because Apple is wielding its monopoly.

How about a _market_ is anything where there exists a _marketplace_?

So every store is a monopoly? You are going to have to be a bit more rigorous than adding “-place” and call it a day.

No, I’m saying that almost everyone has a monopoly over something just by creating a new market.

This is why monopolies aren’t illegal per se, and it requires a couple of components for it to venture into unlawful territory.

One is that the monopoly is powerful enough that it can be exerted to pressure other parties in an anti-competitive way, and another is that that power is actively used. There are more, but for the sake of simplicity, these are the important ones in this debate.

Disallowing competitors to exist, in this case, means passively making it possible for competitors to exist.

The omission of an act (passive) will never be as substantial as an indicator as an active act to quash competition.

The App Store hasn’t changed much since its inception. Commission rates have decreased since its inception, making it harder to argue that Apple is squeezing developers now that it has more power.

The analogy with the thermostat hypothetical is accurate. If I create a new smart thermostat startup, I create a new market, the software distribution on the thermostats I manufacture.

This is analogous to the market definition people use to argue that Apple is violating antitrust laws. If it makes it easier to grasp what I'm saying, then instead, imagine I start manufacturing a new smartphone.

They launched the iPhone and, by doing so, created a new market, the iOS app distribution market.

The only difference is that the iOS app distribution market has grown exponentially, but the relevant legal realities are the same. The law currently doesn’t have a mechanism to say, “Ok, now you’ve grown, so now it’s illegal.”

Instead, it looks at abuse of power, where acts weigh heavier than the omission of acts.

The main difference between the Google and Apple’s case is that the former went out of its way to stifle competition by making demands and setting requirements (akin to Microsoft back in the day).

Some now say that the only reason this difference exists is because Apple doesn’t have to pressure others like Google did, but that’s not a difference to be shrugged away. It’s an essential difference.

It makes the difference between one giant who throws its weight around and another who never had to do that because the terms have been the same from the get-go (however favorable it was for them).

It is for that very reason that the Google case won’t have much bearing on the Apple case.

Why would a monopoly being illegal force you as a newcomer to brand your product as Nest? Makes Ero sense

you're saying, in a very simplified way, you can have a monopoly if you already have a monopoly..

I don’t think that’s even close to the spirit of the law. Monopolies are bad because they artificially limit consumer choice and market dynamics resulting in a product that’s more expensive and generally lower quality. If you intentionally limit competition where there would otherwise be a healthy ecosystem, you’re a problem, even if you have a cult of believers.

Apple is horrible, but Google isn't blameless.

Google and Apple are a duopoly that controls one of the most essential devices of our time. Their racket extends more broadly than Standard Oil. The smartphone is a critical piece of modern life, and these two companies control every aspect of them.

  - Tax 30%
  - Control when and how software can be deployed
  - Can pull software or deny updates
  - Prevent web downloads (Apple)
  - Sell ads on top of your app name or brand
  - Scare / confuse users about web downloads or app installs (Google)
  - Control the payment rails 
  - Enforce using their identity and customer management (Apple)
  - Enforce using their payment rails (Apple) 
  - Becoming the de-facto POS payment methods (for even more taxation) 
  - Partnering with governments to be identity providers
  - Default search provider
  - Default browser
  - Prevent other browser runtimes (Apple)
  - Prevent browser tech from being comparable to native app installs (mostly Apple)
  - Unfriendly to repairs
  - Unfriendly to third party components (Apple) 
  - Battery not replaceable 
  - Unofficial pieces break core features due to crytographic signing (Apple) 
  - Updates obsolete old hardware 
  - Green bubbles (Apple) 
  - Tactics to cause FOMO in children (Apple)
  - Growth into media (movie studios, etc.) to keep eyeballs on their platforms (Apple) 
  - Growth into music to keep eyeballs on their platforms

There are no other companies in the world with this level of control over such an important, cross-cutting, cross-functional essential item.

If we compared the situation to auto manufacturers, there would be only two providers, you could only fuel at their gas stations, they'd charge businesses every time you visit, they'd display ads constantly, and you'd be unable to repair them without going to the provider.

There need to be more than two providers. And if we can't get more than two providers, then most of these unfair advantages need to be rolled back by regulators.

This is horrific.

Battery not replaceable

You might be able to blame Apple for starting this and continuing it on their phones, but I don't think Google is pushing Android handset makers to do this at all, just like I don't think Google is pushing Samsung (and maybe some others) to eliminate 3.5mm headphone jacks on their phones. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those things where the whole industry is just copying each other. Non-removable batteries are better for manufacturers for various reasons, but bad for consumers, and they've conned consumers into accepting it.

Unfriendly to repairs

Same here. Nothing is keeping Android phone makers from being repair-friendly.

Updates obsolete old hardware

This is Apple-only. The Android counterpoint is "Updates simply cease after 2-3 years, leaving you with security vulnerabilities that won't be fixed", but here again it's the fault of the handset makers, not Google: they're just too lazy, and Google is too stupid and short-sighted to force them to support their phones longer-term to improve the Android brand image.

Hey, re-read the dude post you are replying, there are parentheses to signal which specific actor or none for both. Perhaps they weren't there when you answered.

For what it is worth, Youtube's tax is around 70%, but people get to see non-monetized videos for free. Similarly, the Google Play Store lets people download software at no cost when no price has been attached to it by the developer, despite having to do the work of distributing it.

Also, the OS developer acting as a gatekeeper is necessary to prevent malware from getting onto devices. Without that, you have Windows where black hats trick the average user into installing malware constantly.

Almost everything you list is actually a positive thing, although I would be wasting my time to explain it to people who should take the time they put into complaining into developing their own competing platforms that align with their ideals. Please do put your energy into making a competing platform. We need more choices at the operating system level, and nothing people hope these lawsuits would accomplish would give us that.

This discussion is as old as PC vs console gaming. Point being this horrible walled garden also provides ease of use, makes some features even possible in the first place, and I don't need to worry that my mother is installing keylogger or malware.

The way you put it—"FOMO in children," really does it justice. The way Apple uses their messaging service is almost psychological manipulation of children to increase their market share.

It's so sad that a company that resorts to those kinds of tactics to increase their market share, as opposed to, just selling more of their product because it's a superior product.

I think the difference here is that Apple locks things down on Apple hardware running Apple software.

On the other hand, Google is trying to manipulate the market to gain an advantage over competitors on non Google hardware running Google software.

On the Apple side of things, the full vertical is Apple. That is not the case for Google.

Ok so Google is punished for being more open in the first case? Sounds fishy to me ...

Especially since Google had always had the AOSP as a reasonable way of demonstrating their commitment to the industry as a whole disjoint from the places where they thought the Google ecosystem provided extra value (which they admittedly require you to take wholesale)

AOSP has effectively been dead for a long time. You need Google Play services for almost everything now and more and more creeps into the proprietary portion.

No you don't. Writing an app to use google services is a choice. There's MicroG for silly apps that require google services, and there's also life without using silly apps that require google services.

Please note how you dismiss apps requiring Google Play services as "silly," when most people who use those services use them as part of the hardware root of trust programs for work apps, or other device attestation for banking apps. Putting demeaning adjectives in front of the things you're arguing against isn't a compelling argument, I think you'll find, and "life without" banking and work apps leads to a lower quality of life for a lot of people.

If the result of this case is "you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down", that's terrible!

One could hope people would despise such a company and the market would fix it, but humans have proved the opposite. I've stopped trying to educate people and lost all faith in humanity. Most of them just don't care, as long as they've got their shiny stuff.

This is precisely my experience as well. I think what's happening is that everybody wants authoritarian control, and in fact prefers it, right up until the authority makes a decision that runs counter to their needs. But by then it's too late.

It reminds me of the Newburgh Letter, suggesting that George Washington be declared king after winning the revolutionary war. It's like they missed the whole point of the exercise.

Apple has published research on using AI to clone apps. It can't get worse source: https://blog.ml.cmu.edu/2021/12/10/understanding-user-interf...

I read the paper. That's very cool research! I've never thought of representing UI as a graph before. Their code generation clearly leaves much to be desired (see the figure at page bottom).

IANAL, but it's my understanding that courts like to stick to what they know. Apple's arguments about iOS security are rooted in abstruse technical concepts that a judge probably prefers to avoid ruling on directly, while Google's backroom wheeling and dealing is the kind of conventional skulduggery that is immediately recognized as an offense.

I don’t think it’s because Apple conned them over.

Google said you could start your own App Store and then secretly undermined people who tried to start their own App Store.

That’s what they got in trouble for. There is no evidence of Apple making backroom deals to prevent people from doing things Apple said they could.

What’s to stop Google from locking theirs down, too, at this point?

Or would that be illegal since it was originally open?

It's not that Android is open or locked down. Google can do whatever they want with own handsets, like Apple does, but Google is using their influence to affect the software market on other handsets.

Alternatively if you can’t have a closed ecosystem, there’s no incentive in creating the next generation of consoles and console gaming is dead.

How is Apple a monopoly? They have a huge competitor in the mobile phone market: Google/Android. I could see arguing that Apple and Google are a duopoly.

Apple will start allow sideloading, at least in the EU, because they are kind of forced to now by EU regulation.

If the result of this case is "you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down", that's terrible!

I guess part of the result is "you can't lock your ecosystem while pretending it's open". As for Apple's situation, it's different enough to warrant a separate lawsuit.

Will that not change with the new EU rules?

"you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down"

No. It’s you can have a monopoly if you treat everyone equally and don’t make secret deals with anyone.

This is a generally accepted and non controversial practice in certain areas.

Of course not saying that this should be the case for app stores or that Apple is actually treating everyone equally..

Or it”s a great feature depending on your one’s opinion.

It was shown that Apple does have secret deals though. Part of it was that Apple could actually be hurt if some of the bigger players left - Amazon, Netflix, etc. Netflix had a really sharp deal if I'm not mistaken, like 10% compared to the 30% everyone else paid.

I agree, but consumers have spoken with their wallets and overwhelmingly prefer a big corporation to have full control.

Can you really say that was why they lost? A jury found Epic’s case compelling against Google while a judge did not with Apple.

Is it a specific reason or a difference of opinion?

They are completely different cases because Apple controls the manufacturing process of every iOS devices in every phase. But Google does not control the whole product lifetime of the every Android phone out there.

On the latter monopoly abuse is bigger problem.

But if you make, build, control and design everything from bottom to top on the product, then it is less about monopoly abuse. It is just single total product.

I and I think many others disagree. Apple's case seems more egregious. Who are they to tell me what I can and can't do with my phone? Walled gardens may be a value add for some but it also spits in the face of first sale doctrine.

I don't like the idea of not owning my own phone either, but you are not exactly forbidden to do whatever you like with your phone. It is more about what are you capable of.

This cap of capability has been increasing drastically with technology. Even if you had an old, repairable car, not everyone has capabilities to repair it or modify it to something else in the past. But now even less likely.

The question is that how much they hinder on purpose? In the case of Apple, many times it might have been hindering on purpose, but some choices have also valid points.

If you remember the old times of Android (and still), Android provides extra-ordinary attack surface for malware what iOS has never had.

The distinction between Google and Apple is that you might think that with Android, as there are many manufacturers and brands, you have a choice, but it is just an illusion, if Google "abuses" it's market place with other manufactures.

In the case of Apple, it's just Apple. Apple can do whatever they please but is unlikely affecting any other manufacturers or brands. If they want to compete with Apple, they need to be better than Apple.

Of course, there is the value of user base. All the companies must try to adapt with the social behavior of people, and if they choose to use iPhone for playing games and listening music, companies must bring games and music on those platforms to be competitive. It is hard to get this userbase.

The biggest issue of this particular case with Google were the deals. And other manufactures and companies since Google is not manufacturing the phones itself, but instead makes secret deals about the Play Store and other software. This goes to line of monopoly abuse, since it affects other companies and the illusion of choice, and also hinders innovation.

Well can do whatever you want with your phone. Apple however has no obligation to make it easy for you to run third party software or support this at all. After all that would be an additional feature which they never claimed their devices have.

Without finding the same thing in Apple, I doubt this will affect Apple's case much

it sounds like the EU is going to slowly push on Apple t do the very thing Epic wants regardless. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/08/apple-admits-thir...

So I guess Epic had the right idea but the wrong angle (or simply the wrong judges in the US. Probably a bit of both).

Epic's angle was to get discovery so they could embarrass the shit out of regulatory agencies and legislators by pointing out how they were sleeping on an obvious, decades old antitrust case. It worked. The DMA wouldn't have been a thing without Epic suing.

It should be noted that this was a jury decision. Juries are instructed on the relevant law, but ultimately they can give back whatever answer they want, for whatever reason they want. So while we can speculate why the answer came back as it did... and that speculation may be correct if the jury was following instructions, we won't know for sure unless someone on the jury chooses to come forward and explain their decision.

Have you ever heard of a judge telling a jury that they are free to think for themselves and give the answer they want? If I recall, there is a term for that, called jury nullification and judges reportedly become upset if attorneys tell their juries about it.

If you hear of a judge that encourages juries to think for themselves and answer as they think, rather than prescribing how to think to them, let me know.

Epic v. Apple did find some limitations to Apple's policies, but also found that Epic specifically didn't prove the abuse of monopoly power they wanted to.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/12/22667694/epic-v-apple-tri...

And the fact Epic lost so handily against Apple for the same thing is pretty chilling for the future of open devices. Lock down your platform tight as a drum and you may employ all manners of anticompetitive practices because you legally forbid the existence of competitors and you're "curating your experience" but open yourself up to any competition and your behavior becomes anticompetitive.

And is it possibly because Android has a global dominance in market share well apple does not?

No, this was not a court case about if Google has a phone OS monopoly. This was about if Google has a monopoly within the android ecosystem when it comes to app distribution. The jury ruled that they have a monopoly within android, and that they used this monopoly to stifle competition. They cited that Google used its influence as the makers of android to get phone manufacturers to not preinstall third party app stores, and paid off companies to not compete with Google Play

um but does Apple not have a monopoly on the iOS distribution system? if anything, Android is open to competition against Google. I'm baffled

Google lost this lawsuit because they were engaging in anticompetitive behavior on android by paying off companies to not produce third party app stores (like Riot) and paying phone manufacturers to not ship third party stores

Google, as evidenced by their own internal docs and company deals, had no interest in having any real competition for the Google Play store.

It’s really hard to see these deals when Google is the arbiter of android and anything but extremely anti competitive

... anticompetitive behavior on android by paying off companies to not produce third party app stores

What if they didn't just pay off, but forcefully forbid it, wouldn't it be anticompetitive? Basically, as Apple does on iOS.

User safety seems like a much more compelling justification for anti-competitive behavior than money.

There's no extra "safety". It's money in both cases.

I don’t claim to understand their actual reasoning, and I’m 100% willing to believe that Apple actually is not being honest and could handle alternative stores. But, by not opening up for any amount of money, they at least have remained consistent with their claim.

The non-US world overwhelmingly uses Android more than iOS, and yet everyone's personal security has not crumbled into dust. I will absolutely agree that Android's security posture (both in the OS itself and its app ecosystem) is worse than Apple's, but that doesn't seem to make all that much of a practical difference, does it?

I think my comment was maybe ambiguous.

I have no idea if iOS or Android is better (or maybe if iOS is actually worse on some basic level, but they can rely on the single store to reach parity).

But, their justification is at least plausible. Do I think they actually telling the truth? I think it at least is a case of financially motivated reasoning. But they haven’t completely given it away.

Google has by being willing to open up as long as some financial requirements are met.

Read the complaint against Microsoft from back in the day - https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp

Consider how many of those items apply to Google's behavior and how many apply to Apple's.

That Apple is the only way to get the hardware or software for their products (compare to getting Google software licensed on Samsung) is a very important distinction.

I don't see why the Microsoft case is all that relevant; it's not like Microsoft is the archetypal definition of monopoly behavior in hardware/software, and only companies that do things the Microsoft way should be punished.

I personally don't think the distinction you point out should actually be important at all. The end result is an anti-competitive platform, and that's all that should matter.

If we go by the oft-used test of consumer harm, consumers get harmed in exactly the same way on both platforms, with higher prices (due to percentage fees that you can't opt out of) than if the market were more open.

At some point in time, the only way to get a phone hardware was Bell Telephone Company. That did constitute a monopoly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

If other manufacturers were licensing the OS. Like Microsoft and Internet Explorer back in the day

The mental gymnastics outplay here are wild.

Google is anticompetitive because they allowed users to install third party apps, but paid big players not to develop app stores.

But if they had just done what Apple does, and just ban third party installs all together, that'd be what? Hyper competitive and fair?

It absolutely pains me to see Google essentially punished for having the only phone platform that allows users to install their own apps.

Couldn't agree more. It's bizarre to think that one company should be punished because they theoretically had a competitive platform, but did some shady business deals to keep it noncompetitive; but another company is completely in the clear making a platform that is noncompetitive by design, with technical measures in place to ensure it can't be.

I kinda get how it plays out that way in a legal sense, but it still baffles me that so many people can simultaneously support this ruling against Google and continue to praise Apple's practices. Cognitive dissonance (and the Jobsian RDF) is a thing.

The difference being that Apple isn't strong arming other companies into using their App Store. Google opens itself up to scrutiny because they both offer the ability to compete but then actively use their influence to try to stop that competition.

The difference being that Apple isn't strong arming other companies into using their App Store.

They do. It's either Apple store or you go out of business, if you are developing a mobile app.

They don't. Apple is selling both the services and the hardware. They're not asking anyone to develop apps for them and no one is entitled to build an app store for their hardware.

But if I'm an Android phone manufacturer and Epic wanted to build an app stores for my devices, but I refused for no other reason than Google's money or pressure, there's a case for anti-competition. If Apple licensed iOS to other manufacturers, the same case would apply.

They're not asking anyone to develop apps for them and no one is entitled to build an app store for their hardware.

You are clearly missing the point on purpose. Imagine that all roads in the US belonged to Apple and you had to pay 30% of the cost of your goods to Apple for the privilege of transporting them.

This would be OK, because you'll still be able to walk or maybe even use rail transport.

Apple's ecosystem is _unavoidable_ if you are making mobile applications (not games). You HAVE to support iOS, or you'll go out of business. No alternatives.

Imagine that all roads in the US belonged to Apple

If you go this route, not all roads would have belonged to Apple. People would use Apple's roads because they're well built, the majority of cars are nice ones and drivers drive well because enforcement is harsh. Maintenance is usually done on schedule and if people want hassle free travel, it's the best choice even if they're boring and uniform.

There exists other roads for every (start, destination) pairs. But only the new ones are maintained. Drivers do whatever they want and even enforcement wants to stop at every turn. Sometimes you're not even sure what exactly are alongside you on the road.

Here you come trying to create a taxi service (But you did not build any road yourself) and both companies ask you for the same fee. But you know you can probably get your cars on Google's road and bypass the fee with some hassle. But Apple's won't let you do that. People has paid a high fee to get access to these road and they don't want random cars on it. But you know these people has money and you want some of it.

I could go on and on with this.

Apple's ecosystem is _unavoidable_ if you are making mobile applications (not games).

If you're a business, why would you care for 30%? Apple is providing the whole SDK for free, and your users' platform is getting updates for free. You are not doing any of that. the 99$ yearly fee is peanut.

If you're building things for yourself, Apple has never advertise that iOS was something to tinker with.

To give you another example: imagine if cable Internet companies decided to require you to pay 30% of your gross income to them if you use Internet for work-from-home.

After all, without their generous service, you wouldn't be able to earn money. Right? What's that puny 30% of your income to you? It's really nothing!

If you go this route, not all roads would have belonged to Apple.

Yes, some backwoods roads would belong to Android. Maybe around 30%.

If you're a business, why would you care for 30%?

Because it's a lot. Apple is triple-dipping:

1. You have to pay for Apple computers.

2. You have to pay for the SDKs.

3. You have to give the MAFIA shakedown 30%.

And before someone tries to refute this part of your argument: sure, Android is an alternative... if you have a very niche app that somehow only caters to Android users, and somehow caters to the comparatively small percentage of Android users who are willing to actually pay for apps.

Ultimately if you're a sizeable company that wants to operate in the US, and a mobile app is something you need to offer, you have to build one for iOS. If you don't, you'll fail.

I would say these days you aren't going to do quite as well if you don't also build an Android app, but you can probably get away with it in quite a few markets if you really didn't want to.

Heh, I remember when Instagram was iOS-only, and that was the case for... at least a year? More?

They're not asking anyone to develop apps for them

Building a mobile app SDK and an app store is very much asking a lot of people to develop apps for them.

But as a mobile app developer, I don't have to sell my app on the Apple app store.

If you want to build a successful, growing business in the US, yes, you absolutely do.

Certainly the definition of "success" differs depending on who you ask, but if we're talking about a player like Epic, they absolutely have to sell their app on the Apple app store. They absolutely should also sell on the Google Play Store, but it's still table stakes (at least in the US) to have an iOS app.

I agree that Apple does have that monopoly. I guess the difference is that Google actually does technically allow third-party app stores, but used their monopoly position to squash them, at least in the realm of pre-installs?

I'm not sure why this should matter, though. I don't see why it's somehow better to use technical means to refuse to allow there to be a competitive market, than to use shady business deals to ensure a competitive market doesn't grow.

Google created the opportunity for "markets" of android alternative app stores and alternative in-app payments, but then leveraged their control of other areas (such as OEM distribution of android and play services, revenue sharing, marketing) to squash competition in these areas.

Apple on the other hand has tried very hard to make sure such perceptions of markets do not exist; for instance, the requirements they gave to Microsoft for shipping a game subscription service on iOS is that the games themselves had to be in Apple's App Store, pass App Store review, and take payments for DLC or currency via in-app purchase.

This is also IMO why Apple will never actually lock down macOS so that things are only available in the Mac App Store. Whether or not it is a good idea, they can't defend it legally.

Apple has global dominance on market profits

The government does not (and legally cannot) give a darn on "dominance in market profits." If it isn't hurting consumers or illegally propping up market share, that's just called good business. As it should be, otherwise you end up with very bad incentives.

For example, what's stopping Samsung then from using the world's most inefficient and old manufacturing techniques, and then complaining Apple's more efficient (but expensive to research) techniques are propping up their profits? Nothing. It would even be easier for Samsung to do that, and then use their competitor's own cost-cutting innovations to take them down.

Ok but apple is hurting consumers with their 30% fee. I would not have bought an iPhone if I knew about that. Now Im locked in.

A. That's not exactly secret information, so your ignorance is not an excuse when you could have easily found that information if you cared. It's not a secret contract.

B. Android also charges 30%. Developers making under $1M per year pay only 15% (initially announced by Apple, copied by Google). You can't argue you'd save a penny going to Android.

C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.

D. It is no secret that the 30% fee has nothing to do with consumers, but will instead be used to increase the developer's profit margins. Expect to pay the exact same after the fees are lifted.

I could not disagree more.

B. Android also charges 30%. It's actually better on iPhone, because developers making under $1M per year pay only 15%. On Android, everyone pays 30%. So you'd be paying more to Google on Android than on iPhone.

Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.

Will I get refunded for the apps I bought? What about the macbook I bought because I entered the apple ecosystem?

How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?

Well, we can agree to disagree, but call it a prediction - in three years, prices will be exactly the same as they are now. No business, especially in this economy, gets an opportunity like this to raise margins without affecting sales.

Yes, and literally nobody will install it. And the few app stores that are available - Aurora will get your Google account banned, while F-Droid re-signs all apps with itself, meaning you are opening your device to serious security risks. A middleman in F-Droid would mean every app you install from them could be compromised with fake developer signatures. Fun.

How about paying attention since the 30% commission was announced at the iPhone App Store launch in 2008, literally by Steve Jobs on stage when iPhoneOS 2.0 was announced? There's no legal requirement to advertise every possible detail to cover every possible person's perspective - especially when it's old hat announced a decade and a half ago with fanfare.

https://youtu.be/WUrzjLjP4UQ?t=217

Edit for the comment below about iPhone being anti-competitive (because I'm "posting too fast"):

Well, here's the problem with trying to investigate the iPhone.

Remember how I showed that announcement in 2008? iPhone market share, at the time, was less than 5%. Almost the entire smartphone market was split between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

Now look at where iPhone is now, despite the fee. That demonstrates, to a regulator, that it is a competitive product, and the market preferred it, despite the fee which was implemented at the beginning. Apple didn't build the iPhone to where it is now and then lock it down - developers signed up right when it was beginning and didn't care then, so they can't care now that it's a success.

Apple has basically an ironclad argument for competitiveness. If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored. This came up in the argument with Epic - Apple argued, successfully, that the market chose them and their "anti-competitive practices" despite them having almost no clout, which can only be the result of market support for being a competitive product.

Edit 2 (same issue, thanks @dang):

What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?

The iPhone took off because of third-party support, any market analyst will tell you that. If it didn't have third-party support from the App Store, it would have died.

Why was that third-party support there? Previously, on almost all other cellphones, every carrier had their own App Store. With their own policies. And a 50/50 split at best. Some only gave the developer 30% with the carrier taking 70%. With the developer paying for your own credit card fees and hosting fees. Many carriers had severe upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars to get a half-functioning SDK. The 70/30 deal with one App Store was revolutionarily competitive for the time. Developers flooded Apple's scene because it was, by far, the cheapest and most profitable App Store available at the time. They can't claim, high on the success that Apple gave them, that Apple's the problem now when Apple did not even change the deal that they initially signed for. At least, not legally easily.

F-Droid is strictly more secure than the Apple App Store. The same MITM attack works on Apple, but since the App Store doesn't have reproducible builds, you have no way to detect it. The App Store is the least secure of the mobile app stores that most HNers use. You've been sold a bill of goods.

Aurora isn't an app store. It is an unauthorized client for the Play Store.

I don't disagree with your overall point, I don't think, but having reproducible builds doesn't -- alone -- make a distribution method more secure. I can publish an app with a bunch of security holes and maybe even some obfuscated malicious behavior, but if the F-Droid maintainers don't notice, it doesn't matter one bit that a user could reproduce the build they made.

Of course, I don't know if we can say that Apple's app store approval process filters out more or fewer security issues or malicious apps than F-Droid's vetting process does.

If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored.

I don't really get this point. Internet service providers are all anti-competitive, but they're doing quite well, because there are no alternatives. When the iPhone was released, so so so many people immediately saw it as completely in another class above all previous phones, and there were no alternatives in the same class. (Obviously there were trade offs: I personally know quite a few Blackberry people who scoffed at the iPhones lack of physical keyboard.) Even barring all that, the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field was still going strong at that point. The iPhone was cool. (And at that point, there wasn't even an App Store, and no SDK for third parties to build apps.)

Most people don't realize that they're negatively impacted by anti-competitive behavior until it's too late. They've already bought into the ecosystem. Sometimes they don't even know things could be more innovative or cheaper or whatever, because they have nothing to compare it to. To revisit my ISP example, a simple reason I'm mad at Comcast's anti-competitive behavior is because I know it can be so much better, based on people I know who live in other places and have an order of magnitude faster internet connection for a fraction of the price. If I had no other examples that suggested that 1200/35 for $90/mo was a bad deal, I might think that was just how it had to be in order to provide the service.

Or maybe I can just assume that the government will enforce anti competitive laws and not waste all my time trying to sus out whether a product has some anti competitive trick going on.

I also think youre mixing up your markets here. The app store is not the same thing as the iPhone. The iPhone was a very competitive product that has an anti competitive market in it and some consumers are willing to look past that. Doesnt make it acceptable.

It is no secret that the 30% fee has nothing to do with consumers, but will instead be used to increase the developer's profit margins. Expect to pay the exact same after the fees are lifted.

I think it's a little more complicated than that. I agree that developers are unlikely to lower prices if the 30% fee is eliminated or reduced. But it seems reasonably likely that the next time they look into raising prices, they may raise them less, or decide not to raise them at all.

I do agree with the underlying point: prices are not set based on cost, but are set in line with what the market will pay. If the market will pay $10 when the developer has to pay a 30% fee, the market will still pay $10 if that fee disappears.

But still, consider that for many apps there's going to be a tension between what the market will pay, and the minimum the developer needs to keep the lights on. The developer might settle for a lower per-sale profit if they get a bunch more users that more than offsets the lower per-user revenue.

Let's say a developer sells at a $10 price point, which nets the developer $7 (after Apple's 30% cut), and that they need $6 to keep paying their other costs; they'll get $1 in profit after all is said and done. But maybe they can only make 100,000 sales at that price point, or $100,000. Kill the 30% fee, and they make $4 per sale, or $400,000. Great! Instant 4x profit! But maybe they'll be able to make 150,000 sales if the price were $9, which would give them $450,000 in profit. That's a compelling reason to drop prices. Or at least not raise them even when their other costs go up from $6 to $7.

Obviously these numbers are made up; maybe dropping the price to $9 only nets them an additional 5,000 sales, so it's not worth it. But we can't just flat-out say that no developer will do the math and decide that dropping prices can actually help them.

But it seems reasonably likely that the next time they look into raising prices, they may raise them less, or decide not to raise them at all.

What absolute unsubstantiated nonsense.

Hurting consumers? Apps are dirt cheap.

If anything, they’re hurting developers, but even that may be hard to argue. Developers still flock to the platform.

Even if those developers can’t make a living doing that (and many likely can’t), that’s not an argument for Apple’s fee being too high. There’s no right to be able to make a living in the way you want.

Yes, they are hurting consumers by banning competing app stores. Just because they offer an acceptable product doesnt mean they can hamstring competitors. There is a right to be allowed to compete.

There is a right to be allowed to compete.

You can always build your own phone and setup your own app store. Samsung does.

How is this different from telling people to move to a different town when their town bans walmart? I've invested considerably money into the apple ecosystem. I have a bunch of media on their cloud. Switching is a pain in the ass, why cant the gov just enforce anti competitive laws?

How is this different from telling people to move to a different town when their town bans walmart?

I generally agree with your point, but this is a weird argument: towns can and do ban big-box stores, and yes, "move to a different town" is exactly the only remedy people have, if they want to live close to those kinds of stores. And frankly we generally see that as a good thing! Big-box stores tend to kill downtowns.

I've invested considerably money into the apple ecosystem.

This confuses your Walmart analogy quite a bit, because there's no such thing as "investing money into the Walmart ecosystem". Walmart doesn't have an ecosystem. If your Walmart closes down and other stores pop up to replace it, you just start shopping at those other stores, and likely don't really notice much of a difference.

And that's precisely the point of the issue with Apple. If I've been an iOS user for years and years, and suddenly Apple changes the terms to something I really don't like, it'll cost me a lot to switch to another platform.

Im investing the money and time into my house which you are now forcing me to sell.

No one is forcing you to sell. There are lots of people that are perfectly happy in the Walmart free town. There are people that are coming because it has no Walmart. And there were no contract signed that there would be a Walmart in the vicinity.

If you want Walmart products, you better follow Walmart.

Locked in? You can't buy another phone? Would you have been able to buy the apps you use without Google taking 30% as well?

Sure, they can buy an Android phone, and then have to re-buy all those apps again, probably at considerable expense.

And yeah, Google taking 30% as well also sucks. Just because Google does it, it doesn't mean it's fine Apple does too.

Which isn't really "a thing" legally. The fact that there's so much money to be made on iOS for 3rd party app developers and more than Android is evidence of a competitive market in a broader sense. A company employing anticompetitive practices would drive those profits to zero.

The fact that there's so much money to be made on iOS for 3rd party app developers and more than Android is evidence of a competitive market

No, the opposite, it is evidence that Apple is a monopoly, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten away with taking 30% with no repercussions. It should have driven their profits to 0 in the appstore market since why would users pay such a massive markup for everything? But it didn't due to their anti-competitive measures.

A company employing anticompetitive practices would drive those profits to zero

No, that isn't how it works, they weren't anti competitive towards other apps, just towards other app stores. Their massive tax on those apps is the result, you can still be profitable even with a massive tax.

Problem is that Google tried to have it both ways. Android is technically much more open, but then they would make deals to squash any other competition. It’s exactly the un-openness that Google’s gotten in trouble for.

This article lists a bunch of the special deals Google made with various companies in order to prevent competition https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...

One Google Play exec boasted she got Riot to halt development on its own app store by promising the company $10M in marketing.

Another Google exec suggested that sharing revenue with Samsung would be “better at disincentivizing other app stores from being preloaded.”

Google wanted to offer a 16 percent Google Play revenue share to key Chinese OEMs to “secure Play exclusivity” — and wound up giving them 20 percent.

A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android’s app store fees

Apple made significantly less of these deals - they have their rules that you can either follow or not participate. I do think that some of those rules limit competition and make worse products for consumers.

Do we know for a fact Apple made fewer deals like these? I don't think we do.

Apple makes a lot of deals. A lot. I'd expect them to be about even.

There was a whole trial about this. If Apple had these deals, it would have come out. Google and Apple ran things differently.

or perhaps Apple just had a stronger policy to not create documentation around these

I mean a lot of it just doesn’t apply. Google was caught paying off Samsung to encourage them not to put alternate app stores on their devices. Squashing competition where it should exist.

Apple makes the devices, so they aren’t making others squash competition. They’re exactly what they say.

Apple made deals to set the default search engine and the default maps app, and rejected other app stores. As bad as Google is, Apple is even worse, setting worse terms for deals and rejecting other deals outright to favor their own products.

Your second sentence is not even remotely supported by the first.

Details on some of these came through in the Epic v Apple case, but they were very light https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/5/22421734/apple-epic-netfli...

Google just has more types of companies in the ecosystem to make deals with. Apple’s iOS OEM deals can’t be found anticompetitive because they don’t have those deals to begin with.

It’s interesting that none of the desperate arrangements were lower fees; the closest being ability to upsell preexisting subscribers (off apples platform)

Apple was pretty careful not to make deals. For instance Microsoft and Epic both publicly complained about not getting deals.

Supposedly, the 15%-after-first-year rule for subscriptions that they instituted was because they were trying to entice Netflix to continue to take in-app payment for subscriptions. Rather than a sweetheart deal, they rolled it out as a platform change.

There are areas which I think are more questionable, such as their Apple TV partnerships with Amazon and a few others.

We know that Epic asked and were refused prior to the lawsuit.

Beyond that there’s no evidence one way or another that there are any sweetheart deals. None of the public documents from the trials showed that.

Anything beyond that is speculation.

Apple didn't need to make as many deals as they're the only OEM. There's no real way to have a separate app store on Apple phones.

Smartphone makers need app store revenue to make the handsets competitively priced. It would really hurt Android market share if all non-Google Android phones were say 10-20% more expensive to compensate for that. Or alternatively if you had a fragmented ecosystem with a separate app store per OEM.

I'm not saying that it's a good thing, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to share app store revenue with the OEM making the device.

Can't speak to the deals with particular app developers like Riot or Spotify

That does not refute the point. Google gives you a choice of A or B and then incentives you to choose A. And then Apple gives you one choice which is A. Now tell me which is worse.

The way that the stock apps in AOSP are barebones and have been practically abandoned in favor of nicer closed Google-branded counterparts is also suggestive of them trying to have their cake and eat it too.

significantly less

But even one deal is enough.

To be fair, that's literally called a video game console.

What is?

Lock down your platform tight as a drum and you may employ all manners of anticompetitive practices because you legally forbid the existence of competitors and you're "curating your experience"

That's what a video game console is, technically speaking. It's a completely locked down environment which is curated tightly.

but open yourself up to any competition and your behavior becomes anticompetitive.

That's called the antitrust investigation into Microsoft Windows; or the complaints about Apple's "sherlocking."

Edit: I'm actually OK with this, even legally, because I view devices as being means to an end for an experience, which is also how I think most consumers view devices. When viewed that way, we really have three major "buckets" of devices if you will: "Computers", "Gaming", "Phones".

The "Computers" market is a race in most minds between Windows and Mac (and thus Windows gets hit with antitrust investigations). The "Phones" market is once again a 2-cart race between Android and iPhone (and this time, Android gets the antitrust investigations). The "Games" market is a 4-cart race between 3 console manufacturers and the PC, with 2 additional smaller carts called Cloud Gaming and the Smartphone (which, themselves have 3 and 2 carts respectively) - thus, no interest in investigating anyone there. However, if gaming didn't exist on the PC and was strictly Sony v. Nintendo, it would totally be investigated.

If Microsoft discontinues Windows and stops partnering with all personal PC manufacturers to produce computers/laptops... while simultaneously pushing the xbox as 'more than a gaming console', introducing 'portable xbox' like laptops, etc. but keeps them otherwise extremely restricted... what happens? no antitrust?

They are never going to do this.

Doesn't matter, I ask because the industry will (and is actively) trending towards this. It won't be Microsoft, it'll be whoever replaces Microsoft in the long term. My question remains: what will happen in that case and what do we want to happen?

or the complaints about Apple's "sherlocking."

And they get away with it because Apple isn't competing with anyone within their own ecosystem; it's not a market.

Really is a neat little bit of lawyering, iOS and all apps within aren't competing with each other hence the rule about too many apps with similar features, they're competing as a unit with other computing platforms.

The message I got is that everything is corrupt. I hope Google execs and shareholders also got that message.

Now finally some big guys are getting a sense of the issue with centralization. There can only be one government-ordained winner and it's not the one who plays fair and square who wins. It's usually the biggest political manipulator.

Google is in a weak position now due to the perceived risk of AI disrupting its business. When you show any weakness at all, the law starts working against you in the most blatant ways and it becomes self-fulfilling.

Are you suggesting that Google lost this lawsuit because the government decided they don’t matter anymore because they don’t have good enough AI on the market?

No. I'm suggesting that Apple won theirs because they are more important in the eyes of the corrupt government and that's what it takes to win. There can only be one winner. Second place is a loser.

Just wait 10 or 20 years. Watch the system concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and people blame everything under the sun except the design of the system. I think the winner will probably be either Microsoft or Oracle because they are the most corrupt.

Seriously, does Microsoft or Oracle do anything useful these days? No, they just extort money from the government via overpriced proprietary software licenses, lock-ins and contracts obtained through corrupt practices. That's what winners do.

How exactly does this work, in your opinion? Does "The Government" (one entity) somehow decide on something like this and forces a specific judge to rule in a certain way? If something like this was uncovered, it'd be way bigger than this lawsuit.

And while you have a bit of a point about Oracle being stagnant... Microsoft? They own and develop tons of things. Microsoft isn't just Windows and Office.

It's just moneyed interests manipulating things behind the scenes. They can influence which judge will be assigned to a case, they can lobby politicians to add special loopholes to new legislation which suits them preferentially. Big companies have hundreds or sometimes thousands of lawyers with plenty of time to oversee every small detail of every case they're involved in and every law that affects them. They will offer loyal politicians and judges fancy jobs after they finish office.

I don't think this will be uncovered because you need money to have a voice in this system and as this serves the bigger moneyed interests, anyone who has an incentive to cry foul will find that their cries fall on deaf ears. Also, PR firms will manufacture narratives to spin things to make the people who are complaining seem like a lunatics. They will also gaslight individuals who raise alarms to lower their confidence. In many cases, they can dig up dirt on whistleblowers and have them jailed. In some cases they can manufacture dirt on whilsleblowers (e.g. Julian Assange) to have them jailed to send a message to future whistleblowers. So they can hold the fort for a very long time.

I think it is pretty easy to review google’s deals with phone manufacturers to stop them from shipping third party app stores presintalled and quickly come to the conclusion that Google was using its market position to prevent competition between the Google play store and others on android.

Google, as evidenced by their own internal documents put into record in this trial, was not interested in creating a platform where they had any real completion with the Google play store

Finally. I'm glad this caught up to them. I used to have a lot of warm fuzzies for Google, but they've become downright despicable in so many respects. The app store has leaned toward unfair for publishers (and users) for years, I hope something good comes of this.

I fail to understand how HN and the court system do not think the same against Apple

HN does generally feel the same about Apple. 30% cut is egregious especially when they give favors to certain app owners.

“Court System” is very contextual: the Texas Supreme Court just blocked a woman getting an abortion for a non-viable pregnancy.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I want to discuss how deviously literal the Supreme Court decided to be in order to avoid letting anyone establish any precedent about what was or wasn't a legal abortion.

The original filing said "It is also Dr. Karsan’s good faith belief and medical recommendation that that the Emergent Medical Condition Exception to Texas’s abortion bans and laws permits an abortion in Ms. Cox’s circumstances, as Ms. Cox has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from her current pregnancy that places her at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of her reproductive functions if a D&E abortion is not performed. Dr. Karsan is unsure how close to death her patients need to be before abortion is permitted under Texas law. As has been the case with prior patients over the last two years, Dr. Karsan is unsure if Ms. Cox’s current medical condition counts as close enough to death under Texas law for the Emergent Medical Condition Exception to apply." (clauses 139,140)

The Texas Supreme Court said "The pleadings state that Ms. Cox's doctor believes Ms. Cox qualifies for an abortion based on the medical-necessity exception. But when she sued seeking a court's pre-authorization, Dr. Karsan did not assert that Ms. Cox has a 'life-threatening physical condition' or that, in Dr. Karsan's reasonable medical judgement, an abortion is necessary because Ms. Cox has the type of condition the exception requires."

In short, the court decided that Dr. Karsan described the statute, and that Dr. Karsan stated that the statute applied, but Dr. Karsan did not actually say "the patient had a life-threatening physical condition," but only that the patient WOULD have a life-threatening condition if an abortion were not performed. Or at least that's probably the argument; it's not explained very well. Therefore, the Court cannot not rule on whether the abortion is legal or not. After all, only a doctor could make that determination, not a court (you can read the smirk).

Truly an amazing decision, and if there's an award in Hell for achievements in pedantry, that court would have a real shot. Sadly, the Court would probably be disqualified for such an award as they technically lied (Dr. Karsan did in fact say "Ms. Cox has a life-threatening physical condition"), and one presumes Hell's Pedantry Awards interpret such rules quite strictly.

What I never understood is how Republicans can be for one type of abortion say before 6 weeks but not for 15 weeks? What is their rationale? If Bible says that abortion is murder, and life begins at conception, then how can they allow abortion at 6 weeks and vote for that?

This is a tangent within a tangent, but it's basically a political strategy. Abortion bans are deeply unpopular, even in many Republican-majority states. By framing it "after six weeks", they're attempting to project the image that they're the reasonable ones. After all, women would have had six whole weeks to make up their mind! And it will allow an escape hatch for women in rape or incest situations.

As a practical matter, they know that many women won't realize they're pregnant until it's too late to feasibly schedule the procedure. They're minimizing the number of abortions while moving what the American public sees as reasonable from 24 weeks to 6. Once everyone's used to six, they can reduce it even more.

Why are politicians trying to pass a law that is, "deeply unpopular?" Do they want to lose elections, or something?

The religious beliefs that underlie these laws are the driving force. The people who hold these beliefs see the political system as a means to an end, and future losses do not matter if the goal is reached.

I grew up in an ultra conservative religious community, and as a kid, stuffed envelopes for a pro-life candidate’s campaign without fully understanding what it was I was doing, because I was a kid. I’ve seen the mindset up close, and it’s very worrisome.

Do think it’s ultimately short sighted because of the likely pendulum swing. But there is certainly a lot of damage to be done before that happens.

Interesting. Coming from a progressive european coutry, this sounds outrageously absurd. The idea of enacting laws based on the bible seems not just archaic but almost surreal. Are they stuck in the middle ages?

I can only speak for the bubble I grew up in, but almost everyone in that circle came from some kind of traumatic background. Vietnam vets, victims of sexual assault and other forms of abuse, etc.

These ultra religious groups provide a sense of community, and the highly restrictive rules and policies they espouse give them a sense of control - something that many of them have lost in various ways. It’s as sad as it is dangerous.

The bible doesn't say anything at all about abortion. It wouldn't matter if it did though, because they have no problem ignoring plenty of things that actually are in it when it would conflict with political success.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” — Jeremiah 1:5

If anything, that sounds like it's saying life begins _before_ conception, not at conception. By that logic, it's also murder to wear a condom or pull out

Untrue.

Numbers 5 gives a process for distilling a “bitter water” and circumstance under which to induce an abortion with said water.

In case you’re curious it’s simply if a husband has “a jealousy” and fear that his wife has “laid with another man.”

There's a large sect that believes that abortion should never be performed. However, the vast majority understands the pragmatism behind the six week restriction: forcing women to carry rape/incest/coerced babies incentivizes the raping/incesting/coercing parties to do so knowing that their actions will pay off. Allowing abortion before six weeks dissuades such behavior.

More practically, it allows you to claim what Jimbo here is describing without any practical loss. At two weeks pregnant, you likely haven't even had sex yet. A pregnancy test might not be positive until week five or so, and there are only a couple of abortion clinics in conservative states, so you've potentially got a window of just a couple of days between finding that you need one and getting one. So a six week ban is more of a PR move than an actual thing that people believe in.

Because Republicans are trying to curry favor with everyone. Hard-liners like myself believe that abortion at any stage is morally equivalent to homicide—only acceptable if the life of the mother is also at risk. The 6 week ban doesn't actually solve the problem, just delivers a pyrrhic victory to win votes.

But that argument goes both ways? Why should abortion be legal at 9 month but killing a born infant being one day older is murder? And if it is not then what is the cutoff point? The previous schelling point of viability (which was moved earlier over time by medical progress) also is unconvincing.

Time limits can be a pragmatic and tested solution. I think most European countries use 12 to 15 weeks.

It's because this lets them perform lipservice to respecting women's rights and not being a theocracy.

Jesus, that's the exact kind of reasoning that happens in Catch 22. When did reality become more farsical than parody?

I'd laugh, if it wasn't a situation with so much real harm to real people.

Apple charges 30% on your second $million. For many of us, their fee is 15%. And for a lot of people it’s more like 25%.

I don't think this is the glowing review that you think it is.

I don’t think any of you remember that AT&T and friends wanted 70%. Seventy.

The old protection racket taking your entire arm if you didn't pay isn't an argument that the new one only taking a couple fingers is reasonable

So what’s the right number? 0%? Any number would elicit moaning from the peanut gallery. Look at retail store gross margins on the products they sell (I.e. their cut of the retail price), and the terms they set for their wholesalers.

The right number is decided by competition. Different payment processors vie for customers by offering better deals until profit margins stabilize at a reasonable level. That's impossible with a monopoly.

Absolutely this. I don’t understand why is it such a hard concept to grasp.

Thank you for this. People seem to get bogged down in what percentage is right or wrong (something that reasonable people can very reasonably disagree about), but ultimately the problem is that there's no competitive marketplace.

Did you just compare the markup of a retailer after negotiation with their supplier to the fee of a monopolist of the means of distribution on someone else's offered price? Because it seems to me those are very different things.

Yeah, I'm aware, but for the entities who have the revenue that justifies taking Apple or Google to court, it's 30%. Which is fairly egregious for a glorified package manager.

And in Apple's case an extremely restrictive package manger. Want to send encrypted notifications? Got to request the entitlements.

Sorry but I don't want random apps spaming me with junk. If they want to send me notifications, then yes they should request my (the user's) permission.

Oh I fully agree.

I meant the Hidden Notification Entitlement. By default iOS requires you to display a notification when you receive one.

But that conflicts with the idea of encrypting notifications. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38545984

You can send encrypted notifications without any entitlement. I assume you are talking about sending notifications without displaying the notification to the user.

Apple charges 30% on your second $million

Not exactly. That would be a purely progressive tax like US income taxes. With the Small Business Program, what you say is only true the first time you cross 1 mil. Assuming your revenue never goes down (you can appeal if it does), in all future years you pay the full price. So if your app makes a consistent $1.5 mil / year, you’re paying the full tax on all of that revenue, not just $.5 of it.

Maybe pick an analogy that isn’t picture perfect for starting a flame war? I don’t think it edifies anyone to bring that debate into a discussion about intellectual property rights.

"The court system" is not a collective entity with a shared set of thoughts. Different judges, different arguments, in one case (but not the other) a jury, these things make a difference.

The appellate process and the system of binding precedent goes with it serves to somewhat make things more consistent overall than individual trial court processes would when considered over a longer time and a larger number of cases, but cases very close in time ending up with different trial court decisions despite broadly similar fact patterns are not really surprising.

So they dont look at precedents in court system in USA ?

I literally described how that impacts things: "The appellate process and the system of binding precedent goes with it serves to somewhat make things more consistent overall than individual trial court processes would when considered over a longer time and a larger number of cases".

Its funny how "binding precedent" doesnt apply to the same court that gave both decisions. It is the Northern district Court of california. Thus precedents mean nothing and Jury is free to give arbitrary decisions.

Juries are free to give arbitrary decisions, that is unrelated to precedent, which has more to do with how a judge interpreted a law.

Lookup "jury nullification" if you're curious to learn more about juries giving arbitrary decisions.

Nullification only applies to criminal cases (the discussion here is about civil, not criminal, law) and only in one direction. Lookup "directed verdict of acquittal", "judgement as a matter of law", and "judgement non obstante veredicto".

This is true in one sense (that the jury doesn't always have the final word) but does not seem to actually argue against the point made in loaph's comment.

I think what loaph is saying is that a jury, when making a decision, can make any decision it wants, without consequences (except in exceptional cases, e.g. jury tampering).

The jury might never get to actually make a decision, and a guilty verdict can be overruled by a judgment notwithstanding the verdict (or as a result of an appeal, etc.), but legally, when a jury has made a decision, they can't be punished for making it, even if they were unreasonable in reaching that verdict.

How did whether juries are punished become germane? I thought the question at issue was just consistency vs capriciousness of the courts taken as a whole.

Its funny how "binding precedent" doesnt apply to the same court that gave both decisions.

I dunno, the fact that precedent is only binding when it is from a higher appellate court to a court subordinate to that appellate court isn't what I'd describe as "funny", just rather sensible.

Thus precedents mean nothing

Not that I've seen any inconsistent legal ruling offered between the two cases. The fact that the broad outline of the case is similar doesn't mean the decisive legal questions are, but, yes, precedent from a trial court decision isn't binding (same or different court), only, at best, persuasive, and then only if it is a citable (published) decision in the first place, which most trial court decisions are not.

Jury is free to give arbitrary decisions.

Well, no, the jury is "free" to give answers that the trial judge finds to be reasonably supported by the evidence to the questions the trial judge poses to the jury.

And that's not directly affected by precedent anyway, precedent only governs questions of law, not fact, and juries don't answer questions of law, only fact.

I don’t think this deserves t be downvoted. It’s just a misunderstanding. What you’re thinking of is a different concept in the US legal system called res judicata or issue preclusion.

It does deserve to be downvoted, it seems to ignore the second paragraph of the post it responds to. That’s annoying.

I don’t think the parent is particularly clear about what it’s referring to or why the Apple decision would be binding. It just looks like two ships passing in the night over precedent vs estoppel.

District courts don’t set precedent; appellate and supreme courts do.

“Trial” inatead of “district”, and “supreme” is unnecessary, since in the cases where it is right in US court systems it is redundant with “appellate” and its wrong in New York, where “the Supreme Court” is one of many kinds of trial court (but where there are also appellate divisions and appellate terms of the Supreme Court which serve as intermediate appellate courts, with the ultimate appellate court—equivalent tothe Supreme Court in most other US jurisdictions—being the Court of Appeals.)

They do, but not proactively. You have to bring a case before the court for the precedent to get considered.

Lots of things that are legal/illegal are only so because they haven't been tested in court. Precedents are also specific and sometimes the details of a case make it different enough that the precedent does not apply.

More of HN uses iOS than Android.

Oh, does the site report this kind of info? That’s interesting, where? It would also be neat to know mobile vs desktop, and how’s the Linux population doing here.

I'm making some reasonable inferences based on overall tech.

Not sure that's reasonable. A quick search suggests current US market share is 58% iOS to 41% Android. If we assume HN readers are a representative sample of US mobile phone owners, then sure, you'd easily be right.

But of course there are plenty of HN users from outside the US. Another quick search suggests Android is around 66% in Europe, and iOS is only at 33%. Asia is ever more tilted toward Android, at 79% to 20%.

Even then, that assumes HN users' mobile OS preference mirrors that of the country/continent they are from, which feels a little unlikely to me; my gut feeling is that HN users to prefer Android at a greater rate (even if by not that much) than the rest of the people where they live.

But let's go back to assuming that HN's readership mirrors the mobile OS market share from country/continent they're from. It's not hard to drop that US 58% iOS number below 50% by subtracting US users from the total and adding users from literally anywhere else, where iOS usage is much lower.

Regardless, though, I think even if somehow the iOS numbers are still higher than the Android numbers, I think it's probably not that case that obviously everyone who uses an iPhone would side with Apple in this matter. Many/most would, but still likely not enough for it to be accurate to say that more than 50% of HN are a bunch of Apple apologists who will side with them in a legal matter and against Google in the exact same legal matter.

Oh. Well, now I am sad.

Anecdotal and also not sure how reliable this info can be but I am the developer of HACK which is available on both iOS and Android and I have a significantly larger user base on iOS than android.

That's the closest thing to hard data we have. The only difference would be if there's some difference in tendencies between iOS and Android users to use the web versus an app.

"The same against Apple" is very broad so I'm not sure what you're referring to, but Apple is presently less evil than Google.

* Google started out pure good and turned pure evil.

* Amazon started out mostly decent and turned mostly sleazy.

* Apple started out sort of in the middle and stated there.

"Middle" for Apple includes extremes in both directions. They do some pretty bad things with DRM, locking down devices, anti-repair, government corruption. They do some very good things with privacy, security, long-term support, and similar.

If it's a specific litigation (Epic v. Apple), courts are random. Very random. Legal processes have little grounding in any sort of objective anything, and kind of resemble a chaotic die roll.

PageRank was at least partially funded by the intelligence community via the MDDS program. "Started out pure good" is revisionist. They definitely started out as the darlings of the tech world, but "don't be evil" was always ironic.

If it's a specific litigation (Epic v. Apple

It's probably this that GP is confused over

It's addressed, if not in this article, then others - the Apple trial wasn't a jury trial. Google lost the motion to not have a jury trial

What government corruption are you talking about?

Talking about app store specifically, the difference according to many on HN would seem to be that Apple can have a monopoly because they use it to protect you, but Google should not because they use it to exploit you. This sounds pretty silly to me but it seems to be pretty popular.

If Google has the monopoly, Apple, by definition, cannot.

Google only has the monopoly in Android app distribution. Apple has it in iOS app distribution.

That’s like saying Porsche has a monopoly on all red mid-engine German sports coupes. Apps run on pocket computing devices with phone and data connectivity. Two operating systems compete in that space.

No, that's not like that at all. Can we stop making really poor car analogies that don't actually represent the issue at hand?

Regardless, at this point you're arguing against the court here. Google lost; they have a monopoly on Android app distribution. Maybe that'll get overturned on appeal, but I hope not.

that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets...

Your derision is misdirected. It's literally what the court case was about.

Apple is just as sleezy as Google but doesn't have as much power and reach. If I don't want to, I don't have to interact with Apple at all. Google is much harder to avoid, impossible in some domains like email.

You have plenty of non-Google email options, including iCloud mail from Apple.

Good luck only emailing people who don't use Gmail.

I use Fastmail, but nearly everyone I send/receive email to/from has an @gmail.com address.

Google still has the content of all of my email. Well, I guess except for the transactional stuff that comes from automated sources.

Because apple is not even considered here. They are more closed I guess. Android shopport open source and Linux based also maybe the case.

You may be missing some context; there was a similar court case between Apple and Epic, and Apple won. While opinions on HN were mixed, I seem to recall more people coming out praising Apple and demonizing Epic.

Apple is very much considered here.

Different people on HN, different judges, judge vs jury

Apples case was not a jury trial iirc, it was decided by a singular judge which can make for a very different outcome.

Haha yes...All pretending Apple to be some different entity in a holy universe.

Selective standards and lobbying

I've never cared for Apple as they've always had a more closed ecosystem approach than others.

I don't know about the court system, but on HN many people do think the same about Apple, although obviously not everyone.

Like I've been saying. We're not incentivizing the stewardship of open platforms. Apple will die before they open their garden.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37731541#37732596

I don't want to be pithy and low-effort here. I'm confused on why Google lost while Apple won.

As other comments have said, Google's was a jury trial, Apple's not. And, even if neither were jury trials, as another another comment said, the justice system is not a hivemind: the way your case goes can and does depend on the judge/jury passing judgement.

That being said, Apple isn't stupid: they probably know as of now, even if they managed to believe it didn't before, that this monopoly on distribution has a shelf life. So I'm interested to see how they expand iOS app distribution to counter the claims of monopolistic behavior in the future, not unlike the way Microsoft supported other browsers financially for years to stop the FTC suing them into the dirt over Internet Explorer.

I'm generally an Apple fan, and to be totally honest, if there was another app distribution system on iOS, I doubt I would touch it. I appreciate the baseline level of quality and curation in the App Store and have no desire to leave it. I see the low-effort dreck of the Play store by comparison as undesirable. That being said, I don't grudge anyone for pointing out Apple's position in that space is uncompetitive. It is. I have no interest in alternatives but that doesn't mean alternatives shouldn't exist.

How is this not all true for Apple and its app store?

Well, it’s common law, not civil law. So lawyers, juries, judges and so on all heavily influenced the Epic Games v Apple outcome, as they did in Epic Games v Google.

The next time someone sues Apple for this, there will be precedent. But then again, Epic Games v Apple might be used as precedent in Google’s appeal.

EDIT/correction: Apparently, only appellate and higher courts can set precedent for case law. So it might take a bit longer for Epic Games v Google to set a precedent, while Epic Games v Apple has already been dealt by a higher court. The next time someone sues Apple, there might not yet be precedent set by Epic Games v Google.

In theory. I’m not an expert on this. But this doesn’t happen as often in civil law countries I lived in (EU), where the law doesn’t apply before it’s written, and when it’s written, it applies universally.

Things will even out in the US over time, I think. There will be case law for what’s allowed and what is not for everyone.

The next time someone sues Apple for this, there will be precedent.

Trial courts don't set precedent, only an appellate court or higher can set a precedent, and that precedent is only binding on lower courts.

Since trial courts are the lowest courts, their decisions are not binding on any future trial and as a general matter do not set any kind of precedent.

It's kind of wild to see someone confidently posting legal analysis while obviously lacking an understanding of - uh - precedent.

I clearly stated “I’m not an expert on this” and publicly corrected my mistake to not mislead readers.

Don’t fulminate, my brother, see comment guidelines on HN for more info. There’s need to act like this and your comment doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion.

There’s need to act like this and your comment doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion.

Does yours?

I mean that in earnest, not as a dig. You're posting legal analysis without even rudimentary legal knowledge, and I think that's worth noting and responding to.

It's also worth noting you only admitted you were not an expert once your initial post was debunked, and that in your corrigendum you manage somehow to add many additional substantive legal claims. Without any apparent additional legal knowledge.

If you did the same on a programming topic, there'd be an army of people ready to downvote you, because most of the wonderful folks here on HN are versed in programming, and could easily see through that. But this doesn't hold true for law, and you're in a position to mislead. Noting that contributes to the discussion by helping a reader discriminate signal from noise.

It's also worth noting you only admitted you were not an expert once your initial post was debunked

No, that was in the original comment. I added only the paragraph prefixed with EDIT.

My friend, you are just picking a fight on the internet. You don’t actually know what the comment was and yet you say you do. Please do not.

Alternatively, please tell me how my comment is misleading now, if there truly exists an argument in your comment beyond an ad hominem. That would be more useful.

Appellate courts set binding precedent, but district courts routinely look to eachother for guidance on how to rule on questions where there is no circuit/SCOTUS ruling.

Similarly, a judge in one circuit may look to the decision of a different circuit court when their own circuit has yet to rule on an issue, even though a different circuit’s opinion does not bind them.

In this case, however, the issue was ultimately put before a jury which doesn’t produce the kind of written decision that other judges would look to when deciding similar cases.

Ah, thanks for the additional knowledge. I’ll edit my comment for clarification.

Epic Games v Google is going to appellate now, though, isn’t it?

Be mindful that in practice there is very little difference between civil and common law systems: the ceremonies appear different but the spirit is the same: past decisions heavily impact future decisions since that's the only way to keep things fair, society changes decisions in a softly evolving jurisprudence in both systems, juries are consulted but not all powerful since they can be driven by revenge sentiment etc.

Like you I was born and raised in civil law (France) and now have been living for 10 years in common law (Hong Kong), and the difference is almost invisible: Judges obey parliamentary decisions in both, whether you call that laws or constitutional amendment or even political pressure. They also ensure consistency of decision when needed but are ready to launch a little revolution if they feel society has changed (gay marriage in Hong Kong is in the air, for instance)

Yes, ultimately our morals, culture, and sense of justice gets enshrined in law. But I did feel a big difference between living in a common law country and a civil law one.

There was a sense in business circles in the latter that what is not legally a crime, one cannot be punished for. So there was a bit of a drive to exploit that for profit. If something becomes forbidden by law, it’s “verboten”. It cannot take place, no matter how ethical it might be.

It’s much less clear in common law countries, where you could be tried and be unable to defend yourself for immoral things. Or you could break the laws but have such a strong moral argument for it, it is possible to defend. So generally, people and business are more considerate of each other, less stone cold bureaucratic. But that invites ambiguity in the legal process, even if the ultimate forces shaping it are similar to civil law. And you can get different outcomes in similar cases, like Epic Games v Apple and Epic Games v Google. These cases started out very similarly.

In civil law countries, if something was prohibited by a code, then it would be penalized, there wouldn’t be much debate in the courts. I think this is why the EU keeps fining these large tech companies all the time, it’s like a non-event, whereas it’s much more difficult in the us.

That is what I observed. Of course, what you say is also true.

Things will even out in the US over time, I think.

Note, US Supreme Court recently overturned 50 years of precedent of Roe vs. Wade.

I think Madeofpalk’s comment explains the (possible) issue very well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608075

Apple has always been “here’s the rules, follow or go away”. Google was “we’re open!” except they kept undermining that.

It doesn't matter for US legal system how their marketing call that. It's either legal or not.

Presumably there was a practical side to the difference in approach beyond marketing.

Right. Apple never undermined any competitive App Store, they just didn’t allow them.

That is legal according to the ruling on the Epic vs Apple trial.

It did matter to the jury, though.

there is no sanction in the US for monopolies if the market chooses that, you just cant do anticompetitive things in the process or while you have one

so simply being in the exact same position is not enough, the details of exactly how you navigate it are more important

with that in mind, Apple is still vulnerable based on their behavior, but its not a slam dunk by mere nature of being in the same position

for example, revenue splits were always high in app stores, they didnt jack them up higher and in fact have come down periodically as if there was competition, and the market still chose to use them. app stores have always had heavy handed selective moderation approaches, it didnt get worse its gotten better in some regards. makes it very hard to prove antitrust just because the market kept subjecting itself to these

But they are not in the exact same position - Apple has a much tighter grip on their App Store than Google, and they don’t even need to: they make money selling the devices.

I'm sure that's how Google feels! "Unfairly competing in the 'Android app distribution market'?? We are Android!!"

This is one of those legal situations I really can't wrap my head around, though. The point is the situations are different enough it would have to be a different legal framework for Apple's situation, and a different day in court.

I think a ruling like this is good. We need more checks on Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.

Apple’s app store policies product users. One thing Apple has done which is very good is regulate iPhone app decelopers.

Epic vs Apple was decided by a judge. (The judge suggested a trial by jury but both Epic and Apple declined.) Since the judge decided it there's a written record and rationale for the decisions. Epic's argument was "Apple has a monopoly on the Apple App Store market". Apple's argument was "we don't have a monopoly on the games market". The Judge's decision was: "Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the digital mobile gaming transaction market". This was later appealed and the ruling was upheld.

Epic vs Google was decided by a jury and God only knows what they were thinking. (All jury notes, doodles, etc are destroyed afterwards).

The jury

These cases always goes like this. Jury awards 1 billion dollars etc. It always gets revised by the judge later on. Is this any different?

The judge cannot override the jury's ruling, so unless Google's appeal succeeds, the ruling stays.

A judgement notwithstanding the verdict allows a judge to throw out a jury verdict.

The Court technically can if Google asked for JMOL prior the case going to the jury.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_50

Yes, as your own comment points out. Juries determine questions of fact. That can't (for the most part, there are of course exceptions) be revised by a judge. The applied penalty is a very different thing, and can be and usually is revised by the judge.

Usually what happens is a point of law gets appealed and one of the chances of action gets thrown out and the penalty that was tied to it.

The jury was only finding guilt, penalty has not happened yet so we don’t know what kind of fines or whatever Google will have to deal with.

Epic didn’t sue for damages. They sued to get the rules changed. The jury did not award Epic any money. The judge will be deciding how Google must remedy the situation

Google has already appealed this.

I imagine the Supreme Court will probably rule on this case. I’m not looking forward to whatever boneheaded precedent they’ll set in the process.

The current Supreme Court is primarily concerned with constitutionality and clearing "legal debt" (decisions outside the scope of the Court as chartered) from previous courts. I would be surprised if they take this one up.

>"Android and Google Play provide more choice and openness than any other major mobile platform." —— Wilson White, VP, Government Affairs & Public Policy

That's the most he can say? Pretty damn low bar to beat Apple's walled garden at 'openness'. Sheesh

With losing on EVERY point, there may not be a lot of room to appeal, as appeals rarely overturn findings of fact. But it will create delay.

Maybe we'll ultimately get some relief.

Someone needs to go after Amazon for their monopoly in the Amazon Prime Video distribution market.

Most likely outcome is probably a consent decree like Microsoft's. Google agrees to publicly document all APIs for Android app store capabilities, and to refrain from certain kinds of business deals, and some mechanism of enforcement, perhaps embedded monitors at Goog or an onerous reporting regime.

Then, with a level playing field we see if Google's Play Store can compete with other app stores, and whether Google can give Android a great app store management experience to end users.

Epic already lost the trial in the Apple case. Courts in the US and other countries have treated Google differently as an OS provider to OEMs than Apple as a single vendor.

Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?

God I hope so.

It would be terrible for consoles.

They would not be able to recover their costs early enough in the lifecycle. Which means that the time between console releases would be much longer than it already is.

It also would put Nintendo in an untenable situation since they rely on low price hardware as their differentiation.

The would be the end of consoles.

At this point consoles have very few advantages to PC. If they got "opened up" it would be zero.

It's just look a lot more like a standardized PC. Which they they probably should by this point.

Sure. But there would be zero incentive for Sony, Nintendo etc to build one.

Because Acer, Asus etc could simply come along and undercut them on price and still have access to the exact same game catalog. And then they would each decide to add more proprietary features or add more performance.

And so you've just recreated the PC gaming market again.

What's the issue with that?

Really? What’s the issue for not having a known target to optimize for?

That hasn't been a serious issue for 20 years. The overwhelming majority of big games are now being released for PC on day one, the only exceptions being platform exclusives and Rockstar games.

Developers certainly have no problem making PC games.

I can go to a store today and buy a Sony PS5 and know that it will play every game designed it for with the same quality as any other PS5.

Can you say the same about buying any PC? Will that be true for any game you buy for the next five years?

You’re right. I can’t wait until I can’t play games on my PlayStation because I forgot to install audio driver update 2.367 which conflicts with rendering update 7.829.

That will be a much better experience for me as a consumer.

There is no need to open up consoles. You don’t have to buy them. The PC is incredibly healthy as a gaming platform.

Please let people like me who want to gaming appliance have it without screwing it up.

Opening up a platform doesn't mean that it suddenly has to be cross-compatible with everything else. It just means that software that is written for your platform is no longer under full control of the manufacturer. Why wouldn't you want things like accessible emulators, some control over the OS, more games in general (since developers no longer have to invest thousands into licensing and proprietary software) and much more?

Besides, even if someone somehow forced, say, PlayStation to be cross-compatible with other platforms for some reason - it's not like the issues you described are exactly plaguing PCs nowadays. With very rare exceptions (like ancient or heavily modded games), the experience is pretty much "Press 'Play' on your launcher of choice -> Play game".

Perhaps Steam Deck model is actually the future of the consoles...

A beautiful future

That isn't a bad thing for customers.

I don’t think Nintendo has ever sold consoles at a per-unit loss. It would actually probably help them since it would raise the cost of Sony and Microsoft’s offerings even higher over theirs

No but they make a lot of money through licensing and Nintendo Store sales.

That would all disappear if you could side-load any content.

Does "side-load any content" mean unlimited piracy? Otherwise I don't understand your argument at all. But adding side-loading does not enable unlimited piracy.

Piracy isn't the issue here.

It's the fact that Nintendo, Sony etc wouldn't be able to enforce any licensing revenue since users could just install any game directly.

For Nintendo it would decimate the company since it's their primary revenue stream.

Nintendo makes a ton of money on first-party games, and they could easily continue releasing their games exclusively on their consoles. They'd lose very little.

Random sideloaded games are just irrelevant when people are buying the systems for Zelda and Pokemon.

They'd lose very little

Nintendo charges 30% on the sale of every game sold.

Looking at the current best sellers [1] they would stand to lose a significant amount of money.

Easily in the billions based on current revenue.

[1] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/best-sellers/#sort=d...

Look at all the games that are sold through Steam, just for convenience and stability.

I think the benefit of being in the Nintendo store is far higher than that, and they'd do fine. And they have lots of first party games too.

All I’m hearing is we’d significantly reduce ewaste and force consoles to compete to keep themselves relevant by not allowing them a monopoly.

And this is why posters on HN make horrible lawyers.

How is a market with three competitors, four if you count PCs and even more if you count phones “a monopoly”?

Btw, the judge in the Apple case said that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in game distribution

So Google is punished because they made their platform more open.

Well, that certainly will bode well for the future.

They got punished for paying companies off to not compete on their open platform

But they are the ones that allowed those companies to compete in the first place. And I'm not saying that they should have won. Both Apple and Google losing would have been the best outcome. However, Google losing and Apple winning is the worst. Because its makes open platforms even less attractive to businesses.

Unfortunately, apple’s position as both phone manufacturer, iOS manufacturer, and App Store maintainer resulted in them being able to successfully argue that their control over the App Store was a feature that was expected by users and was needed to maintain a smooth and secure operating ecosystem

Google, on the other hand, just got pilloried because they are not the phone manufacturer (for the most post), but instead were using their position as the producers of android to pressure phone manufacturers and companies to not compete. Their own internal docs showed the extreme lengths they were willing to go to stop companies from producing third party apps stores. It was this stifling of completion that just got them reamed by the court

if you zoom out you find that Google got published for allowing other manufacturers into their Android system while Apple benefited from keeping ios closed to themselves. how does this serve the consumers ultimately

Google got punished for paying off companies to not compete with the Google Play Store.

You are in this hyper dense loop of just repeating the same thing, which is adding 0 here.

It's quite literally impossible for apple to be do the same, because they've banned installing apps at all on their platform. Clearly the right move for Google would have been to do the same 15 years ago and saved themselves the headache.

Yes because we see how well that Google has been at selling hardware

Well seeing that consumers in the US prefer iOS to Android and pay more than twice as much for the privilege, may they care about different things than side loading?

Google was punished for making deals to limit competition on their ‘open’ platform.

Apple doesn’t really make these deals, so they weren’t punished for that.

So Google should have never allowed competition to begin with like Apple. That doesn't seem like a great answer to me.

No, Google shouldn’t have given Riot Games $10m in marketing to prevent launching a competing android store, or give OEMs 20% cut of Play revenue to prevent them from bundling competing stores. Or cut a special deal with Spotify where it pays 0% while still using Play Store billing.

You mean just like Epic got special marketing deals from console manufacturers?

Right - a co-marketing deal isn’t the illegal thing. It’s the "limiting competition" part that gets them in trouble. This case was entirely about figuring out when a ‘good business deal’ becomes anti-competitive. This is also playing out now with Google paying Apple for default search engine.

If it was revealed that Sony gave Epic a special marketing deal to prevent Epic from launching a console, then yeah that would be pretty dodgy!

Epic shouldn't get special pricing either. Even Epic will say that.

They did not allow competition, they made illegal deals to keep their App Store installed on other devices.

If they left it alone and all OEMs chose to keep Google play store and billing, nothing would’ve happened.

No, they’re getting punished because they faced a jury instead of a judge.

It sounds like Google chose a jury, which means someone badly miscalculated how popular they were with people in SF:

https://www.wired.com/story/jury-will-decide-if-googles-play...

Why shouldn't they?

I know for sure that if it were possible to sideload software onto my Switch or PS5, that would definitely benefit me as a consumer. The fact that I have a reasonably powerful computer attached to my TV but can't install software on it without convincing Sony to sell me a janky dev kit for way too much money is just wasteful.

Just about the only objection I can imagine is "piracy", but the locked-down nature of these platforms has surely not stopped piracy from occurring. Nor has piracy caused the failure of Valve's game store or the downfall of their gaming hardware.

If only you could buy a “powerful computer” to attach to your TV where you could download software from anywhere…

But that’s not something you get through a jury. There are no laws saying that’s necessary.

You need a new law to say that.

Google got in trouble for saying that you could do something and then secretly undermining it. Whether or not third-party app stores were allowed on devices was not the core issue.

Epic vs Apple is not over, it's being appealed to the US Supreme Court. And this Google case is likely to end up there as well.

I suspect they'll end up ruling in favor of Epic, in some limited fashion. But let's see!

Highly doubt the conservative court rules against an American company in favor or a foreign owned entity.

All three of the companies involved are American companies

It looks like the world before app stores. Anybody can develop software and sell it to anyone, who can then install it on any compatible device.

You couldn't easily install software on phones before smartphone app stores; the app developer had to make a deal with individual carriers to allow it.

Downloading an APK from a website is just as easy as installing an exe on windows from some site, and millions of barely tech-literate people do that every day

Yes and they get viruses, malware, and ransomware from doing so.

My mom searched for a printer driver and ended up installing some third party crap wars on her computer

Then Mom needs more training on how to differentiate between legitimate sites and non-legitimate ones.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, as many times as people need to hear it: There is no such thing as, "I'm just not a computer person!" We're over and done with that era of human history. Just like we're over and done with, "I just can't read and write!" Too bad. You live in a world were reading and writing is required just to exist. It's been that way for about 100 years, give or take depending on who you ask.

Now you need to have basic understanding of computers and the Internet. That's the world we're living in now.

And how has that worked for the last 40 years?

It worked pretty well.

Should we ban cars since there are people who cannot drive?

Have you really been paying attention to everything going on with the typical PC?

Well for the first couple of hundred thousand years of our existence as modern humans, we didn't teach everyone to read and write. It's been essentially the past 400 years, give or take some decades. And as it happens, it's turned out beautifully, in my estimation.

Yes we should force everyone to “learn to code” so they can disassemble the code of all of their software before they run it.

And malware has never existed in the Google Play store, right?

The point is that if you are the owner of the device you get to choose what to do with it, not Google. If the trade off for that freedom is an increased risk of malware then so be it. The people that want to only use the Google Play store as their source of software are free to do so, that's the beauty of your device being /your/ device.

And this is why people on HN make horrible product designers

I assume by being on HN you work in the tech industry. Assuming so, you owe your career and livelihood to the openness of the systems that came before you and the people that built them. Locking everything down in the name of safety and convenience is also a great way to prevent innovation and competition.

Yes I have had computers since 1986 that I programmed and could because of their oneness. I’ve also had none open devices - my first being the Atari 5200.

I’ve also known since then that if I wanted an open device, I bought one and not complained about a device that I knew going in that I couldn’t program.

Not really. At least Windows Mobile and PalmOS let you install anything very easily. It was just difficult initially finding apps.

It was POSSIBLE. Was it easy enough for the average user?

I saw plenty of people who never installed anything because it was PITA.

There’s a reason the App Store revolutionized things.

I really meant before smartphones and the way software works on desktops/laptops.

Not really, if you consider Symbian pre-smartphone OS.

Honestly not much different to today.

a) Apple, Google etc could just refuse to host any apps that are being sold on other stores. This sort of exclusivity is common place and legal.

b) Larger developers who have their own agendas like Epic and their metaverse will run their own stores.

c) Everyone else will stay with Apple/Google. The costs of running a third party store are significant and ultimately developers or consumers will need to pay for it. So either end users or developers will end up having to pay more for an experience that is far worse than what they have today. And if a) ends up true then developers would lose their biggest distribution channel.

For all Epic’s talk, and as much as people support third-party App Store, they only really care about their third-party App Store.

They just want to get to be the middleman instead of Apple/Google.

This seems like an enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing… be very careful supporting them. They’re not a paragon of virtue.

You allready have 2 stores on samsung devices: goole play store and the samsung store. They both work the same. Choose an app and install it. They work like any other app...

You can also download apps from the "f droid" depository.

You can even turn on developer options and install raw apk files. Those can contain viruses. (Or more probably: are pirated)

Funny to have this discussion hacker news? I thought everyone was using side loaded apks from apkmirror when you needed an old version.

The case is about the fees in an anti-competitive situation, not about whether or not consumers should be allowed to install their own software on these devices.

The stores can be the exact same with the fees removed and device prices hiked, afaict

Third party stores do not have the same functionality as Google's store, this is one of the things Epic sued over, so I imagine it will factor into the remedies.

And we have already seen what happens when third party companies go around the Google Play store.

You might have heard about this little company

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanwhitwam/2018/08/25/epic-gam...

It feels like you're trying to use the existence of some criminal acts as a justification for a different set of criminal acts.

So, yes, when users literally own their own devices, it is difficult for the manufacturer to keep them perfectly secure without abusing monopoly power.

The door also swings the other way here too, because malware has certainly existed _inside_ the Play Store, and it took _users_ to bring it to the billion dollar corporations attention.

You realize the same company suing Google and saying that allowing third party app stores is the same company that actually introduced a vulnerability by doing so?

The entire value proposition of the App Store is the sandbox.

But Android security sucks either way

Sandboxing had nothing to with any app store, and Android security empathetically doesn't suck.

I just had a coworker say that he surreptitiously installed an app on his son’s phone that allowed him to see everything his son was doing remotely and listen in to his son’s conversations. He showed it to us in action.

It's a difficult security model when the threat actor is a parent who presumably has access to the device and in an unlocked state along with permissions to install anything from anywhere. It's not like the threat actor realistically couldn't (with some effort) see everything the child was doing already just by asking so I don't really see this as a very good threat model.

Sure, Apple might prevent you from installing such applications on devices (though they offer monitoring app usage and websites for parental controls), but that's just because they have a walled garden that could disallow such apps and it's less clear how to weigh app freedom against user safety.

If you're worried about zero days, Android exploits are priced around the same as iOS exploits apparently so take that how you will.

It’s not a zero day. It’s insecure by design. There is a huge difference between parental control and snooping.

You really think you are going to ask a child what are they doing every second and what they talked about and they are going to tell the truth?

What’s stopping someone also from surreptitiously installing the same snooping software on another adult’s phone?

It’s not less clear. There is no reason to allow this type of software to be installed on a phone without a clear indication that it is on there.

Of course not, but usually adults can force a passcode out (or take the device altogether) or force the child to sign in for them to see at regular intervals, in which case they can observe everything. I would agree that this is excessive for a parent to do, but clearly the parent you are talking about is already taking excessive measures.

Presumably, an attacker will not have access to the device and not be freely given the password or access with the ability to install an app. If they do, then there's nothing stopping the attacker from just going through the phone. Installing a app without the person's knowledge would either require you to have inside access or have a zero day.

A lot of the permissions individually make sense and this software could just be composed by a significant number of them. I'm not sure exactly how the software you are referring to works and its scope, so I'll take a narrow example.

In the case of messages, users may legitimately want a different messaging app. If the adult just side loads an arbitrary SMS app, how is that supposed to be distinguishable to the OS whether the app additionally happens to sync these messages to a third party?

In the case of screen capture, that's a perfectly normal use case to stream your screen. Android does warn you when this is occuring.

Or for that matter, many Android devices permit side loading an entire OS. This could be used by the adult to basically bypass any restrictions on apps altogether. This has a completely legitimate use case. Should we block that as well?

Even if the parent “forces a passcode”, they can’t remotely listen in on conversations and see exactly what their child is doing at any given minute.

Presumably, an attacker will not have access to the device and not be freely given the password or access with the ability to install an app.

Are you really unaware of what a jealous partner can do?

A lot of the permissions individually make sense

In what world does a permission to “remotely monitor your screen and intercept your voice and hide that the app is installed make sense”?

Maybe it’s a bad idea to allow a third party app to have access to your SMS messages especially seeing they are often used for 2FA?

And yet there are plenty of apps for Android that can do this surreptitiously…

You realize you aren’t making a great case for Android here don’t you?

If you own a device you can do whatever you want with it. Can you install surveillance cameras in your own home? If yes, then I don't know why you can't install surveillance software on your own device.

Without any indication that it’s on there? Would you feel the same way about an abusive partner installing software surreptitiously on their wife’s/husband’s phone?

That's like saying Linux is insecure because sudo exists.

Yes and because of Linux’s “openness” it’s being used by most people as their main desktop OS and in the US 60% of the market are buying iPhones. Have you thought that their priorities aren’t the same as yours?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

I’m saying that

A) most people don’t care about openness based on their revealed preference

B) if you do care, you are free to choose a more “open” choice

This sounds suspiciously similar to the “evil maid” attack: all bets on security are off when you’ve got physical access to the device. This is a well known weakness in all platforms. Some platforms manage short term protections against this, but nothing ever withstands it in the long run.

If the adult demanded the kid's phone password, it's rubber hose cryptanalysis. If the adult set up the password for the kid, it's a supply chain attack. Evil maid implies you don't know the password at all, which doesn't sound like the case here.

Having the kids password doesn’t allow the parent to see real time what the kid is doing every second and remotely monitor them.

Compare this to a desktop. The desktop spyware will be even more capable than the mobile spyware.

And these sorts of child-tracking (and sadly, abused-partner-tracking) apps exist on both Android and iOS platforms.

What “child tracking” device on iOS lets you intercept phone calls, text messages and remotely monitor in real time what someone is doing on their phone?

Android has privacy indicators for when software is recording things on the phone. Wouldn't that give the coworker away? Or does his son just have an old phone? (The privacy indicators are fairly new, IMO, but it mirrors a thing Apple did a few years ago.)

AuroraStore is very close, using a ton of reverse engineered stuff from the play store

It should all totally be open though

I don't fully understand. Are these functionalities baked into Android that only allow Play Store to use it?

Pretty much. Google Play services runs as like a root process that can (among other things) bypass all the security checks that the OS usually has. That includes those annoying update confirmation dialogs which make it impossible to install updates automatically without user interaction.

Specifically GMS runs as a "privileged app" (that's what priv-apps stands for) which can declare access to permissions in the manifest that non-privileged apps can't even ask for.

Importantly, this is largely a property of preloaded apps rather than GMS explicitly.

Yeah, they are curated by the author(s) of the Android build that the device is running.

That includes those annoying update confirmation dialogs which make it impossible to install updates automatically without user interaction.

Important to note this has changed starting with android 12, now you just need accept installing the app, and the source can update the app without interaction.

Droidify (third party fdroid client) supports it, among others like Aurora store.

Pretty much. Google Play services runs as like a root process that can (among other things) bypass all the security checks that the OS usually has.

Unnecessarily mind you, GrapheneOs proved that you can get the vast majority of GMS functionality without it needing to run as root. Even Gpay would work if google allowed it.

This has changed with android 12, third-party sources can now auto update an app after a user accepts the initial prompt go install it.

By that measure, F-Droid is very close in that both have the majority of apps some people use (Aurora for you, F-Droid for me).

Neither can compete with the Play store though, as only Google's offering is allowed to update or install apps in the background without user interaction (without root). For that matter, only Google Play Protect (part of the Play Store IIRC) can uninstall apps from user's devices with no interaction.

only Google Play Protect (part of the Play Store IIRC) can uninstall apps from user's devices with no interaction.

That sounds horrible. Why can a store decide to delete an app with no prior notice?

But it does seem Google has given more freedom to other apps to install apps. I guess it comes down to if that's still too many clicks or too fear mongering to count as "competitive".

It’s a security feature. They’ve had this feature for more than a decade [1].

It allows them to remotely remove any malicious app from Android devices without any user intervention.

1: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2752902/google-remotel...

Worse than that, I've had it unilaterally block legitimate third-party apps I've installed from F-Droid. Then since I've disabled it, it constantly nags me to re-enable it so it can re-delete my third-party apps. If you want to talk about anti-competitive, Play "Protect" should be where you start.

In my experience Google Play Protect can be disabled, and shows a warning an app might be "Harmful" and sometimes prompts to Uninstall or Ignore the warning, afaik no unprompted uninstalls

You can install and run apps from Aurora store without having Google Services installed? Did Aurora store replace Google Services somehow? Many apps depend on those services.

Many of the Google Services functionalities can be provided, mimicked, or worked around with microG: https://microg.org/

Google Play is not just app store, but also the only way to efficiently deliver push notifications on Android devices. And latest modifications to Android OS make it very rippled without push notifications, all background apps unload from memory very fast. The result is that it makes many types of apps impossible to implement without relying on push notifications - and lock in to Google Play services.

Same is true for Apple, of course.

While they carry almost the same name, Google Play Services are not the same as the Play Store, though. You can use the former without using the latter.

AFAIU Aurora isn't an alternate store, but an alternate front-end to the Google Play Store.

That is, the only apps available through Aurora are those on Google Play, and if Google's rejected an app, then you won't be able to install it via Aurora.

By contrast, F-Droid is an alternative front-end and app store, with apps available which aren't included in Google Play (for example, Termux).

(I use both Aurora and F-Droid on an Onyx Android device.)

What does google play store have compared to third party stores?

It runs as a privileged app.

It uses that to install new applications and update applications installed by other app stores without the OS-level confirmation, probably can't be uninstalled on most Android OSes and perhaps some other things.

Auto updates can be implemented by other apps without prompt. [0] But you're right on initial install there is that installation confirmation prompt and other stores may be uninstalled.

[0] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P...

This was only implemented after the Epic v. Google lawsuit.

Yes, but it's without prompt only for apps that they themselves installed, while Google Play can bypass that.

Hope it doesn't happen to Apple as I like and prefer that I can only buy stuff and most importantly have a single place to cancel all my subscriptions without dark patterns like having to talk to a person to cancel.

I'll again make my argument that the developers should respect the choice of the users. If the user chose iOS maybe they chose it because they wanted the curated experience and the locked it product. I certainly do so and so do my parents who haven't had an issue with random apps scamming them and stealing their card details or passwords.

I really don't understand the negative sentiment against Apple - guys, it's a phone/tablet. The consoles are much more like a General Purpose Computers and we are not really touching those or being that vocal which to me shows that it's not really a moral stance and it's a "my profits are affected stance".

If the user chose iOS maybe they chose it because they wanted the curated experience and the locked it product.

If no iOS user wants a 3rd party store, no one will install them, all of them will fail and we wouldn't be talking about this.

So why are Apple so afraid of a little competition? I think some iOS users (me) are willing to use other stores. And that's why Apple blocking it is anti-competitive.

One plausible argument is that Apple is afraid of other parties competing unfairly; if apps can ship outside the App Store - and, critically, if they can thereby bypass some of the restrictions Apple imposes through their review process - then ex. Google and Facebook could ship apps that do bad things (probably privacy related) and abuse their own market positions to coerce people into using such apps. Given that this doesn't happen on Android, it might well not be a problem, but Google already does anything they want on Android and arguably the restrictions that companies would want to bypass just don't exist there so it may or may not be a useful point of comparison.

A different angle is: If a user wants a 3rd party app store, why did they buy an iOS device?

(To be clear, I'm not really convinced either way at this point; I'm throwing out what I think are reasonable arguments but that doesn't mean I'm convinced there aren't good counterarguments to them)

If a user wants a 3rd party app store, why did they buy an iOS device?

Wants and circumstances can change over time. When I purchased my device, Fortnite and Xbox Cloud Streaming were available from the Apple App Store. Now they aren't.

Also I can want more out of my device; none of my devices are perfect but I still buy them. I believe 3rd party stores would be an improvement to my device. Replace the feature "3rd party app store" with folding phone: "Why did they purchase an iOS device if they wanted a folding phone" is a leap in logic to "No iOS user wants a folding phone"

A year ago, I'd say USB-C, but that's no longer the case.

if they can thereby bypass some of the restrictions Apple imposes through their review process

Those same restrictions are blocking apps like Xbox Cloud Streaming. When Apple chooses to block those, but I still want access to apps, 3rd parties providing the such apps isn't unfair competition.

I'm curious, do you have an Amazon subscription or any of the dozens of other major subscriptions that didn't go the AppStore route because of Apple' policies ?

I'm not sure at any point I experienced a "cancel all my subscriptions" in a single place, even as I was neck deep in the Apple ecosystem.

Just yesterday I stopped a handful of subscriptions all at once and it was excellent that there was a third party disinterested in trying to retain my business giving me a nice list of everything and a button to stop them. If I can subscribe through Apple Pay for anything, I will. It would be great if a bank had a workflow as nice as that.

guys, it's a phone/tablet. The consoles are much more like a General Purpose Computers and we are not really touching those

I mean, I'm on board with using video game consoles as proper computers as well, but my phone literally has gcc installed so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

This would make a lot more sense in a world where users have more choice. If you want to make this argument, you probably need regulators to step in and enforce standards and interoperability such that consumers have more choice, along more different axes than they currently do (2-ish operating systems, determined by the hardware you buy).

The problem is that this "choice" in iOS is an illusion, if both Google and Apple employ user-hostile, monopolist tactics. That's like saying someone chooses to stay with an abusive guardian when the only alternative, foster care, brings its own sets of challenges.

Is it worth it to pay 30% more for everything in order to have that convenience?

Even if you think it is, other people might disagree. Apple prevents app creators from even mentioning that you can purchase content or subscriptions in a web browser instead.

I just want to be able to use the hardware I already paid for without Apple taking a cut of everything I do on it.

Apple forbids developers from even telling their customers that it's costing them 30% more.

I like and prefer that I can only buy stuff and most importantly have a single place to cancel all my subscriptions without dark patterns like having to talk to a person to cancel.

You could STILL do that if that does happen on Apple. No one forces you. It just gives people more choices. Choices are good.

really don't understand the negative sentiment against Apple

I just want them to be better.

They take 15-30% of my gross revenue and are the source of most of my stress (through regular rejections of my app updates). It would be nice if they charged less and stopped rejecting me for mentioning Android in my app copy.

Just require that apps have to (non-exclusively) support Apple billing to be in the Apple store.

Then you can (personally) choose to never break the glass to install something from outside the store.

guys, it's a phone/tablet. The consoles are much more like a General Purpose Computers

Some five billion people have a smart phone [1]. For many it's the primary way they access the Internet.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone....

"Monopoly is actually pretty cool" is definitely a new one but I guess it's par for the course on this site.

Hope that this happens to Apple eventually too.

It's a somewhat different situation with Apple.

You can't buy iOS on a non-Apple phone; and a quick Google search has the iPhone at about 22% of the market.

In the US, where the case was decided, it's about 50%.

An interesting effect could be to have more devices that don't have the Play Store by default, and Google providing sanctioned ways for the customer to add the Play Store as a choice.

The 30% is only an issue for the jury in the context of the trial where it stands to gain against competing stores.

The jury did not set precedent that 30% fees in and off themselves are bad. It has very little relevance to Apple or other single market platforms (consoles etc) since they have no competing store product.

Force them to spin out the play store.

From the article:

But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case. It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down. It showed that Google was running scared of Epic specifically. And it was all decided by a jury, unlike the Apple ruling.

It seems the reasoning is that Google isn't really competing against the iOS app store, in which sense they don't look much like a monopoly, but just against all the potential other android app stores, in which sense they do look a lot like a monopoly. Seems sort of ironic that Apple avoided this argument by just not having any alternative app stores at all to be anticompetitive with.

It's more nuanced than that. Apple successfully argued that the combination hardware+software experience of iOS and its app store is "the product", since people don't buy iOS for e.g. what bootloader it uses, but rather the wide ranging ecosystem experience and the apps that Apple certifies and verifies through a "feature" of "the product". Without such tight integration of the hardware and software, the product loses immense value to both consumers and developers.

Android being open actually made its own point of being "an OS with other products [app stores] running on top of it".

So the walled garden model won against the (almost) open backyard model?

The way I’m reading it is that your platform needs to be totally open, desktop-OS-style, or manufactured as a single piece iOS/console style. Anything between those two is where the trouble comes in.

Isn't this just as simple as: if you claim to be open/allow something (alternative stores) you can't then do back room deals to prevent competition with them.

As someone else said: Google wants to make big loud claims about android being "open" but also wants to prevent anyone from competing with them.

But most people don't care much about those claims. If the end result is "Google stops claiming to be open", that's a terrible outcome.

Well I guess in a scenario where Google decides to stop working with other hardware vendors and just makes their own phones running their own software, their existing hardware partners will have three options: exit the phone business; continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"; or move their phones to a separate platform (ie webos, or... Samsung had one too, tizen?)

Unless every single existing android vendor stops making phones, the result is more actual competition.

They don't have to stop working with other vendors to stop being open.

That depends entirely on how you define "being open".

To me what is open about the android platform is that it's used (and even customised) by multiple vendors.

The openness that the lawsuit was about, in particular. Primarily the ability to add other stores.

If they stop promising to allow anything beyond the Play store, you can't sue them for breaking the promise.

But that's the point: Google don't have complete control the "Android" that ends up on other vendor's devices. So Even if Google says "we won't allow other stores on <Google brand> phones", that doesn't prevent Samsung/etc from enabling it in their own customised builds.

They can stop allowing customized builds, except from forks of the old open source code with no gmail, no google maps, no play services, no play store, no youtube.

Which is what I said above:

continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"

It seems quite unlikely that vendors like Samsung would just give up on their customisations.

That's not google being open though, so I feel like this line of conversation got mixed up somewhere.

Anyway, yes Samsung could do that, but do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?

Let's assume Google will still allow UI customizations. So Samsung can keep 75% of their work either way, the choice is between the remaining 25% or access to the Google ecosystem.

That's not google being open though

Part of what makes Android "open" is that it's available to other hardware vendors to use.

do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?

I don't know - Google seem pretty happy to put a YouTube app on the iPhone, where they have zero control over the App Store, and the reason is obvious: for everything they start, and eventually abandon, eyeballs are Google's primary business metric. Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?

Restricting the play store is one thing, I doubt it's even a drop in the bucket for Google profits, and it obviously gives them some degree of control.

I don't see them playing so fast and loose with the ability to view YouTube. It's like suggesting they would block access to Google search for non-Google "android" devices. The whole reason Android exists is to drive more eyeballs to Google services.

Whether Android is open, as a separate thing from Google, has very little to do with whether Google gets sued though.

Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?

When it's specifically about forking Android, and looking at how badly they've been pushing things behind closed doors, I think they'd play pretty hard ball.

It's not about whether most people care, it's about competitors taking Google at their word and putting in the effort to make a competing store, only to get materially harmed when Google makes these backroom deals.

Nobody's making a third party app store on iOS because apple says "we allow it" so nobody's harmed when apple requires exclusivity to exist on their App Store.

The list of companies that put in serious effort to make a competing store and would have been materially harmed by deals like this is very small. And many were the recipients of these deals.

If this ruling is about helping them, then that makes the outlook even worse for consumers.

The open model has won more openness, which is good for open models

But bad for incremental opening of things. It isn't like Apple will see this and think "oh, I want to to happen to me as well!".

It's not the first time Google has been paradoxically punished for being more open than Apple. When you have partners and competitors then there are a lot of people to argue against you in court. When you forbid competition and partner with nobody then the people harmed are the theoretical partners and competitors you would have had, but theoretical people don't show up in court.

Your last sentence almost gets the point: Apple never claimed iOS is an open platform open, nor made it available to other hardware vendors to use as they wish.

This isn't Google being "punished for being more open" it's punishing them for claiming to be open and then doing a heap of hidden deals to prevent competition.

The point is that what Apple did is as bad or worse from the perspective of promoting competition in healthy markets, but it's more difficult to prove and quantify the harm, so it doesn't get punished.

On one of the platforms it was possible for epic to make a third party app store, and on another it wasn't.

That alone should tell any sane person which platform was 'worse'. It's absolutely wild and a failing of our legal system somewhere that the company with the worst effect actually won their own case.

One company was honest about what their platform allows and disallows. You might not like how they choose to run it, but they did what they said.

Another company made claims about their platform (both to end users and to business partners) being "open" and then acted directly counter to those claims, in efforts to prevent competition.

Exactly. Epic actually created a third party store on Android, and then Google abused their monopoly position and colluded with phone manufacturers to hurt Epic's store. Apple just didn't allow them to create a store at all.

Google was really a victim of their own success. By making Android an open platform, they increased adoption by smartphone OEMs, but on the flip side it made them liable in this very specific case.

It’s optional to use your position as the OS developer to squash other app stores.

I think the ruling is more about saying Google did the wrong thing, not Apple did the right thing.

We learned in the Epic v. Apple trial that Apple cut sweetheart deals with Netflix and other companies as well. Am I missing how this is different?

Yes. Unlike Google, the deals Apple were making weren’t for the purposes of undermining competing app stores

But, that's a false premise. Apple doesn't allow competing app stores.

Which is precisely why Apple couldn’t have been making deals for the purpose of undermining competing app stores.

However, Apple's deals were for the purpose of undermining competing payment systems.

They weren’t, because Apple does not allow competing payment systems.

You mean like Epic cut with console makers for co-marketing dollars or like every company does with large customers?

I’ve got news for you - AWS also cut special deals with AWS, Spotify with GCP and OpenAI with Azure.

Do you really think large comoanirs get the same deals as the creator of random Indy app maker?

What are you even talking about and how is it relevant to what I'm asking? You seem to be leaping to Apple's defense as if you're taking a bullet for them but it isn't really necessary here.

I am saying that everyone makes deals with preferred customers and volume sellers. If you think you’re going to get the same pricing when you open an AWS account that Netflix gets you’re naive.

There has never been a law that a company has to make the same deals with everyone

If finding out that keeping rival app stores down was what was necessary for Google to lose, shouldn't Apple lose by the same token? And I don't think intention is part of the three-step burden shifting framework last I checked in any event.

I'm guessing it's because this was a jury trial and Apple's wasn't.

Practically I get that but legally I don't get it. Aren't we virtually dealing with the same evidence, arguments and laws?

Yeah - but give the same case to 10 different juries, and you'll get different decisions.

Probably will get at least one outlier with different 10 judges, too.

There's two possible decisions the jury could make, and the jury is composed of a group of people who are chosen by both sides to prevent it from being a biased decision. Obviously not perfect but a lot better than you describe.

and the jury is composed of a group of people who are chosen by both sides to prevent it from being a biased decision.

No, it's not.

It's chosen at random, and they have a chance to rule out people they think would be biased - and you can't just toss anyone for any reason.

It's not like Google can toss anyone they see playing a game or using an iPhone or something.

And it's definitely not like Google gets to pick 6 Google groupies and Epic picks 6 Epic groupies to be on the jury.

I didn't say they were individually selected and yes they can just throw out a certain number of potential jurors without any reason.

Maybe I worded my comment poorly but the point still stands.

We're dealing with the same laws, but not the same evidence.

There wasn't much evidence in the Apple case that Apple was explicitly taking action to disadvantage or harm third-parties, and there was even less evidence that Apple utilized their economic power to ensure their dominance.

If anything, the evidence in the Apple case showed that Apple treated all developers with relative parity.

The evidence in Google's case showed that leadership was so paranoid about a third-party store rising to prominence, since the platform technically allowed it, they were constantly wheeling and dealing to suppress competition.

Google essentially wanted to have their cake (side loading is fine! Android is open!) while eating it too (The Play Store dominates).

And they accomplished this by spending a lot of money, and giving certain developers better deals than others, etc.

Basically as long as you strip away your users rights equally, you're fine. Not exactly great news for future tech...

Both cases were about anti-competitive behavior, not user's rights.

The judiciary seems ridiculously slanted in favor of pro-business. That a bench trial would decide in favor of monopoly power is entirely unexciting & expected.

That a jury trial would decide in favor of consumer choice & be anti-monopoly quite reciprocally mirrors that strong anti-trust feeling Americans very widely feel, but which their government won't do.

Epic suffered pretty hard vs Apple when internal memos came out that Epic was intentionally breaking app store rules to get a strike, with the intent to sue over that strike. That's the kind of thing that a jury is more likely to let slide than a judge, as well.

So why didn't they go for a jury trial with Apple?

Because it’s always been the case that OS vendors to third party manufacturers get treated differently than integrated players

I thought this was the case where Google execs deliberately went off the record to avoid having their chats recorded for discovery. Hiding documents during a legal hold does not make the justice system happy. Unless I am confusing trials, this article[0] goes into more detail.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/judge-google-deleted-cha...

Good thing it's 15% for both of them then.

A teaser rate? Good luck getting publisher or VC funding for something that is a bet on you going big. They will discount projections by the full 30.

Yes I’m sure you could get VC funding by selling an app on the App Store.

Yeah of course you could, why wouldn't you? That is one of the easiest ways to get VC funding, up there with making a website.

There is a huge difference between making a “service” exposed by an app and making an app.

How many successful “apps” do you know of? And most successful “services” that people access through the App Store don’t go through the App Store for payments

Not in terms of Apple pricing, which is what we discussed.

Yes there is a difference - most services don’t go through the App Store for payments

On top of the other replies, the million threshold impacts smaller scale investment than VC as well.

How many business ideas does that guy have that make more than $1 million a year but would also be unprofitable after 30% app store fees?

It's more a portfolio of companies that many make less, but a few hits cover the investment in the rest (the standard publishing and tech investing story). If the hits are going to take a 18% rev loss compared to say Epic's 12% store, then that's 18% less funding for the rest if things are invested efficiently/predicted well for the portfolio.

Note it's 15% on the first $1 million then 30% after, at least for Google. So you're not losing money by being just above it either.

Yeah, I'm considering where $1 million isn't a significant portion of the revenue.

This is huge!

I've had so many business ideas that I've killed at the idea stage because giving 30% of revenue to Apple or Google made it not viable.

Might be time to revisit them...

name 3?

Anywhere where you exist on top of someone else's service is basically killed by a 30% margin. To use an example I worked on a while back, dynamic Minecraft server hosting: Taking advantage of the fact that most small servers need much less than 100% uptime, you realize that if you dynamically spin up and down these servers, you can offer substantially better use-based pricing. You're basically an AWS reseller in this scenario, so there's a hard floor in what you how much you can charge, because VPSs cost money, but you're competing against "leave the server on 24/7", which is your upper cap. Unfortunately, unlike those "Up 24/7" servers, you need a good way for your customers to spin the server up and down. A phone app seems like a good way to do that, until you realize that 30% of that revenue potential would be forked over to the app stores.

100% AWS uptime, at cost -> your competitor's price

10-15% AWS uptime -> your marginal costs

50-60% AWS uptime -> maximum price you can really charge while differentiating yourself on price

25-32% AWS uptime -> subtract your costs and google's cut from that maximum price

When you start factoring costs like customer acquisition, it starts getting very, very tight. 30% profit can make for a pretty healthy business, especially in businesses where your prices and costs can be predictably coupled. But a business with a 30% profit margin that has to pay 30% is a failed business.

What you're describing is a service that has an accompanying app. In those cases, you can just take the Netflix route and not offer the subscription on the app at all (only through the website), and voila, no 30% charge. Given how little of the value proposition for your service lives in the app itself, neither app store is going to have a problem with that plan.

If the profitability situation is about to change, seems like a poor time to reveal killer ideas.

This seems a great excuse to blame Instead of procrastination to me.. So 70% revenue was not enough to get something off the ground?

Have a look at AWS’s margins if you want a deeper understanding

People complain about credit card fees in the range of 2%. 30% lost to the ether could absolutely kill some otherwise profitable ideas in the crib.

Most existing businesses would fail if they faced those conditions, so yeah, actually it is a great excuse.

Yes because if you could sell on your own website I’m sure you would make gazillions..

And since plenty of companies do have viable businesses on the App Store, doesn’t that say more about your business idea than anything else?

There's plenty of software that straight-up doesn't ship on the App Store. One could even argue that the Mac fosters it's own class of unique software since the App Store tithe is optional. I don't think Pro Tools or Steam would get Mac ports if Apple enforced the App Store limitations on their entire platform. It's trivial to imagine businesses that become viable without strict vendor pricing control.

Steam is just a marketplace for apps and just like Adobe’s suite and Microsoft Office you can buy a subscription outside of the App Store and your apps work everywhere.

Two different cases, 2 different juries (OK the Apple one was a bench trial but you get my point) and neither one is binding precedent over the other.

But can Epic appeal then against Apple?

Were I Google I'd be appealling on the grounds Apple got away with it.

Well, if Google is willing to stop licensing Android to third parties and only sell Pixels, I’m sure they could

Did Apple pay companies not to deploy their own app stores? Oh, right, they were restrictive about even an app that had the same functionality as an Apple-made app, let alone competing app stores. This might get interesting.

They tried to use the apple case to get this suit dismissed. The judge already declined to dismiss the Google case

I imagine Google will appeal, and the whole shebang will be decided by the Supreme Court, applying to everyone.

This is probably where it is going. And yeah, it may cause some type of regulation of OS-integrated app stores and payment systems.

Both sides started appeals in July, iirc.

The system is still working, just slowly. Conflicting rulings from lower courts in very similar cases will be appealed and get put before the Supreme Court, whose ruling will apply to everyone

If they even deign to hear it. Do the supremes even know what a smartphone is? I've never seen a more out of touch bunch of people with so much power.

Half the court are in their 50s, it isn’t 2016 anymore for better and worse.

It's always leg day in Chief Justice Alito's kangaroo court.

John Roberts is Chief Justice.

That's my impression as well. Beyond messed up if true, Android as least allows sideloading.

No, the cases were very different. Mainly because Google had a whole bunch of emails and contracts with other companies that Apple just doesn’t make.

Came here to say something similar.

I'm not a lawyer, but the idea of #2 seems crazy to me.

Have there been any past case(s) where the country/nationality of minority owners of a company has been grounds for changing a ruling?

I’m also not a lawyer, I don’t think they can change a ruling.

But they could certainly get a law passed that changes the rules and supersedes the ruling.

Yes - this. It's not uncommon thah the legislature has passed a law in reaction to a court decision to clarify a law.

Current example everyone is likely aware of: all the various states trying to pass pro/anti-abortion laws in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling.

There are also are intl trade agreements that outlaw favouring domestic companies that the USA enormously benefits from.

while they do have pretty deep ties to tencent and are 40% owned by them, they’re not really chinese-owned since Epic is majority-owned by Tim Sweeney, a billionaire programmer on the Forbes 500 who mostly escapes criticism from programmers and game devs by branding himself as a savior for indie devs, which people accept uncritically because he likes to go on twitter and affirm their priors. He’s a highly effective nerd populist.

Oh I didn't know that! Thank you.

Oh please. Sweeney’s track record is frankly solid for indie devs. It’s not a branding thing.

He gets plenty of criticism too.

That’s a little unfair. Unreal Engine is very fair for indie devs. So is Epic Games stores.

Fighting to challenge the 30% tax is also good for indie devs. Without that, the 15% on first 1mil would’ve never happened.

Interesting no one has mentioned Epic's Chinese ownership.

Its not relevant to the issues in the cases they have been involved in over app stores.

I could see Google complaining to us govt that it's unfair for Chinese tech to win these court cases against US tech.

"The government" (presumably, here, you mean the executive branch?) can't veto a court ruling on the premise that the law should have been different then it was when the events actually happened and the case was heard.

There are avenues for dealing with security and other risks from foreign ownership, but they are entirely separate from the legal issues in Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google.

To be clear, I agree with you. But the administration is very anti China. Not saying they can violate the constitution, but they could pressure or suggest legislation about this.

The case can be used as precedent, though.

Epic is not a Chinese company. I'm not sure why people think it is just because some Chinese investors bought shares.

Epic is majority owned by Sweeney

ahem you know that item 2 given that it is non probative is a non starter as a legal argument...are you asleep doing lawyering?

I feel like answer 2 promotes the basis that such a complaint by Google is acceptable.

And I can see China retaliating if US takes measures against them.

In that case consoles from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo?

Why stop there? Smart TV manufacturers? Cars?

Yes. Given time. Take down all of these stupid walled gardens. People should own their devices and the manufacturer should have absolutely no say in what applications they install, from where they get those, or who they do business with, and should not have the ability to tax all usage of the device post-sale. You know, just like PCs.

Since you brought up the TV analogy - how would you feel about being forced to pay a Samsung tax every time you buy new groceries for your Smart Fridge? That's basically what Apple does. So they can, respectfully, get fucked.

Yes please. Lock it up for consumers all they want but let people who want to tinker, tinker.

And you can do that today by buying an Android device

Why do you defend apples 30% tax on ios apps, and being the sole approver of what apps you can install on your device?

Maybe he is an Apple shareholder. There isn't really another logical explanation.

Msybe other people don’t really care that they can’t run apps on the AirPods?

People have agency to buy devices that meet their needs and desires, yet they purposefully buy devices that are on average twice as expensive than the literally hundreds of alternatives and then complain.

Why if you wanted to sideload wouldn’t you buy an Android phone? Why buy a game console and complain about it being locked down instead of just buying a gaming PC?

Okay this is one of the worst strawman arguments I've ever seen. Surely the closest ios comparison to an android phone isn't AirPods. Maybe the iPhone?

Well, there you have it. If you want a mobile device that is open to side loading - do like the other 85% of the world does and buy an Androud phone.

Would you also buy a moped and complain that you couldn’t tow your fishing boat with it?

No. I think it shows an extreme lack of agency for someone to buy an Apple device that doesn’t meet their priorities instead of choosing one of the hundreds of Android devices?

Yes. If I bought and paid for something I own it and should be able to run whatever software I want on it. Anything less makes it not my device anymore.

And you bought a device knowing its limitations when you had other options…

The point is that these artificial "limitations" should not be allowed to exist. We already figured this out for most consumer goods decades ago, it's time to do the same for computers.

Why do you care if other people - 60% in the US could care less about “open ecosystems” when you have a choice not to buy one?

And have you actually paid attention to the trade off of “openness” on PCs? Viruses, malware, ransomware, etc?

if the Smart TV or Cars run Android (TV or Auto) then this case should extend to them too

Why just Android TV? Why not Roku and PalmOS?

And regulatory agencies and car manufacturers are never going to let you install what you want on car screens.

And this is fine. Devices with different purposes require different regulations.

It’s because Google did a lot of things that Apple didn’t that was found to be anti-competitive.

https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...

Yes, but in a weird way: Apple doesn't allow competition for phone manufacturing for their ecosystem, so the equivalent of "deals with manufacturers" are entirely internal. Fostering a phone ecosystem that overall has more competition has hurt Google here.

No, paying off phone manufacturers and companies to not create or preinstall third party app stores on to devices is what hurt Google here

Right, which is not something Apple "needed" to do because they didn't allow competition in the iOS phone manufacturing business.

Google didn’t need to pay these companies either. They chose to do it so they could keep their play store monopoly. And they may have just burning billions in profits because of it

Right, which is why I put the term in quotes. But Apple got that for free, since they didn't open up manufacturing.

Which is similar to what Microsoft did with PC manufacturers to kill off alternative operating systems.

I think you mean "and", not "no". The semi-open ecosystem is a prerequisite to the payoffs.

So the moral of these decisions are "Go vertical, or go home?"

I'm sure they did their own stuff, but Apple got away with a very nasty one. So I don't think competition law works. Results look completely random, like tossing a coin.

Being sued for different things - yeah you tend to get different results.

And what is the definition of nasty here? It's very subjective. Apple doesn't own the mobile market and are below 50% control of it so they are not really a monopoly. I'm also not sure how you can use anti-trust or anti-monopoly against them when they have been found again and again to not be a monopoly.

Banning competing browsers is illegal and Apple should have never gotten away with it. Not only an abstract absolute monopoly is a problem. Apple has a lot of leverage on the industry and is causing harm to the market with anti-competitive behavior.

For a second I thought you just posted the same link but that was very informative. It's just me but I think Google deleting all the chats automatically about the topics involved would have had me planted deep suspicion about motive in my mind.

The best answer would be to take a look at the ruling, it's pretty clear why it applies to Google.

On Apple, I think the EU will do a better job as for better or worse there will be no "let us bring money to the country" defense like the last time.

FWIW you don't really need an app store, you could download APKs off vendors/publishers, verify signatures and mind updates (except Apple won't let you, but that's a different story).

You want to use an app store, fine, use an app store and pay some commission on what you buy there, it's not a problem, reaching into any purchase done after the initial download is.

Where exactly can I download my bank's app as an APK? Except random shady websites...

How is this a Google problem? Ask your bank.

Hahahaha, yes, let's rely on the famously tech savvy banks to securely distribute their app.

[delayed]

They say I should use the app store.

So? Google isn’t forcing them to only publish on the Play Store.

Many applications such as banking applications are only available in the official app store.

Google is not to blame for the fact that your bank won't trust you to verify an apk signature. There's no fundamental need for the OS vendor to oversee app distribution.

you don't really need an app store

except Apple won't let you, but that's a different story

You're saying you can comment, but no one will give you access to the keyboard?

The whole discussion is about Google, they do let you use whatever store, and also let you compile and deploy your own Android if you're up for the task and your phone manufacturer allows you to boot what you want.

I'd too prefer Apple to be forced by court to open their devices for everything, not holding my breath.

That would be impractical and nearly impossible to do. Name even one other computing platform that works this way.

Oh, wait a minute …

Customers don't necessarily want a choice.

Sometimes choice equates to complexity, if it doesn't work for you, don't use the product. Apple is very well known (and probably very successful) for limiting choice, in product lines and features.

IMO Android devices are already open enough - there are alternative app stores and you can sideload apps. Banks not distributing on these channels is not Google's responsibility.

The average person needs safeguards to prevent them from being tricked into installing malware by seemingly trustworthy black hats. They should not be given devices that lack safeguards. That means having a gatekeeper that curates things. Be it Apple or Google, a gate keeper is a necessity for security.

Even for non-average people, gatekeepers like Gentoo's or Debian's package maintainer(s) do a great deal of good.

You're missing:

Apple: iOS only on iPhone. No way to get one without the other.

Google: Android is open source and everyone can build their own hardware. Play Store is optional for manufacturers.

Play Store is optional for manufacturers.

Wouldn't that make it less of a monopoly then?

Not when you're paying for it to be non-optional.

Somebody else could pay them to put their store on? I don't understand. The fact that you get to make a deal for money seems strictly more free-market than the alternative.

As someone living in a third world country and seeing that happening in many sectors, it's the second quickest way to market degeneration (the first is straight up threats of violence).

You really do not want people paying to block competition from arising.

You would rather have them block competition without paying? I really don't understand.

Or are you saying the iPhone app store has competition?

Google pays for the OEM to pre-install the Google Play store, not for them to disallow alternative stores. "Paying for it to be non-optional" is a bit misleading. Users always have the option.

So by enabling dozens of hardware companies to literally exist and make a ton of money, they are a monopoly? So they're being punished for being open and sharing their OS with others?

Nope, it's for blocking others to create alternative play stores on non-google devices.

IIRC, manufacturers are required to install Play Services on either all of their devices or none of them. That's a pretty important anti-competitive bit.

So Google is free to block third party App Stores on a Pixel?

Epic agreed to no jury trial in the Apple case. They requested one for this Google case. I imagine they knew the battle against Apple was a much bigger hill given the lack of any evidence of direct harm to Epic, besides in the payment processors argument (which Epic won).

No, I think your reasons would be motivators for Epic to have insisted on a jury trial against Apple. I think the real reason is Epic’s lawyers thought the average American jury member would be more sympathetic to Apple than to Google.

The lesson should be: do not get caught paying off companies to not compete with you when you already have a monopoly because you will get pilloried by a jury.

Because that is what Google just got punished for doing. They paid off companies to not ship third party app stores pre installed, pressured software companies to not make third party app stores, and gave money to companies to not compete with Google play

But if they had made it impossible to install another app store, they wouldn't have gotten punished.

If they had restricted those APIs way back when, Android would have stalled and Tizen or some other platform would have eaten a huge chunk of the market they have today. You can't just change some important historical detail and pretend there would be zero consequences except the ones you care about.

How can you be certain that changing this detail would result in Android failing? Was it really app sideloading and allowing other stores that made Android successful? I think the biggest contributing factor was that it was made by Google (who had the money to both partner with other manufacturers and eventually make their own hardware), in combination with a lack of other options that'd directly compete with iOS (you mentioned Tizen, but it wouldn't come out for another 4 years after Android's release)

It's not about what made Android successful, it's about what made OEMs ship Android rather than something else. OEMs were conned by Google with an open platform that was then shut by secret deals with some of them. That cost the others who weren't in on the secret deals and it cost consumers in missed opportunities. Take away that scam, and perhaps Android never would have got the OEM momentum it did.

It depends on when they did it.

But I'm more worried about the future here.

No, they could have avoided this outcome by not paying other companies to not compete with Google play. They paid off phone manufacturers like Motorola to not preinstall third party app stores and software companies like Riot Games to not produce third party app stores.

OP is saying they could also have avoided this outcome by not allowing competition at all. That's the route that Apple took and Apple won their case against Epic.

Google's plan was to maintain a de facto monopoly on app stores while technically allowing competition. Apple's was to just come out and say that they were the only authorized app store and therefore they can't be anti-competitive because there exists no market for iOS app stores.

Google is probably wishing they had taken that route now.

I think it’s tough to guess what would have happened if Google had been more proactive about locking down some parts of android earlier. Though I will speculate that android would have seen much less widespread adoption if they had been more restrictive

There are multiple ways to avoid an outcome.

Really? The lesson I learned is that if you make a product that the US government relies on, you are immune from prosecution. It works across industries from oil to manufacturing to computing.

The lesson is clear, don't buy off competitors to preserve your dominant position as that's illegal.

Why is there this assumption that third party apps are going to be so unsafe?

We already run untrusted executable code in the form of JavaScript.

Why does the android system need to be different? Why can’t we say the OS needs sandboxing, api permissions, etc.

I really don’t want the only thing protecting my phone being the fact that a human sometimes reviews an app.

because this is what computing used to be. you would download some random executable off some random website and hope you didn’t get infected with malware

except the stakes are much higher on your phone than your 1998 computer because your phone is more powerful: your phone has more personal data, financial info, and can consume costly telecom resources

So random websites I go to are now gonna be able to take over my phone?

Why aren’t we seeing this scale of attacks using JavaScript?

Javascript was designed to be secure-by-default, and it takes a vast amount of effort to keep it that way

Native apps were designed to be powerful-by-default, and the amount of effort to bolt security on after the fact is orders of magnitude more

Not for mobile. The default is to have everything sensitive locked down.

They are victim of Apple's security horror story. Apple advertises their mobile app sandbox system is poor, to protect their dominated store.

Javascript was designed to be secure-by-default

It absolutely wasn't, lol?

Where do you think half the zero day security vulnerabilities come from? JIT compiler for JavaScript!

No. The APIs are vastly different between modern mobile OSes and win32 from the 90s.

Seriously, if the Play Store is what's protecting Android phones... then Google's OS devs fucked up.

Cases in US district courts don't create binding precedent.

but the appeals might?

An appellate ruling would precedential within that court's circuit, yes. One of the most common reasons that SCOTUS grants cert is when there is a "circuit split," where multiple appellate court circuits have decided differently on the same legal issue.

All this is beside the point, because if Epic wants to overturn the ruling in Epic v. Apple, they would (and have) appeal that case. These 2 cases are not the same, and it's entirely possible they end up winning one and losing the other.

Only if the Supreme Court takes it and what they rule on would apply to Apple.

Google Google appeal using apple's case as precedent?

Apple doesn’t license its OS to third parties

No— just like how Google was not able to use the apple case as a precedent to have this one dismissed

Looks like Epic is getting almost everything they wanted from both Google and Apple, given that EU

It remains to be seen whether Apple will comply with EU rules outside of the EU. If not, Epic isn't getting their way, because EU revenue alone isn't going to be enough.

Whenever DMA kicks in, I'm reasonably sure that there will be a number of state legislatures to follow this case, which will practically enforce Apple to open up the App store in the US.

Why do you say that?

CCPA came after GDPR. What makes you think this is an exception?

I’m not even clear on if under the DMA, Apple has to comply in a way that will enable Epic to make their own store. Depending on how they intend to comply, Epic might still get excluded since they terminated Epic’s developer program accounts and their business relationship in retaliation for the lawsuit Epic filed.

If Apple is still anywhere in the final process, its entirely possible other people can make their own storefronts but Epic will not.

Apple makes a TRUCKLOAD of money off of their 30%.

Are customers really going to have a choice? It seems more likely a bunch of big companies are gonna want to get into the game of distributing apps to get the xx% cut of IAPs, and there will be exclusivity contracts for every app you want, and you'll have to install 5 app stores that will each be managing different things, and you'll no longer have a centralized location to manage recurring billing subscriptions like we have right now.

It’s interesting how the judges in Apple vs Epic stayed with Big Tech

My thought is that the judges are likely staying with the "letter of the law" which is what Big Tech (Big anything really) hires all of their lawyers to make sure that they technically stay within, while flagrantly violating the spirit of the law in a way that helps the business model.

The Jury is more prone to look at the spirit of the law.

I agree. Why would a judge be afraid of Apple or Google? They don’t give a shit. Neither company is going to hire hitmen.

The judges are following previous rulings and trying to apply them to what are likely novel situations that the law was never intended to cover because it no one foresaw it.

The courts are not how you fix this. The legislature is. Unfortunately that’s too broken to do anything.

Don't be too sure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_App_Markets_Act

A lot of stuff gets proposed that never gets passed. Or if it does it’s been gutted by then.

I know this is my cynicism saying it will never happen, but when it comes to this kind of stuff it seems to guess correctly quite a lot.

Since it's legal in US to buy political influence (lobby) and since judges and prosecutors are politically appointed and since the said corporations have very large pockets...

To add on that media and public opinion also impacts your career as a justice and money can swing both media and public opinion.

...I dunno; Epic seems to me like it's also part of Big Tech, even if it's not part of The Biggest Tech.

I don’t think that it’s that judges are scared of big tech. I think the antitrust teachings from the 80s and 90s were Reagan (Bork) style philosophies which have since become outdated. But federal judges are often older folks and probably lean on their now-outdated “law and economics” theory of antitrust

You can choose either one, or any other phone operating system. Nobody's obligated to make a popular phone operating system that satisfies all your desires.

I didn't say anyone is obligated to make an open popular phone OS. I just asked what is my option if I dislike lockins and tracking.

Pinephone.

Illusion of choice creates a stronger buy-in from participants, even if they don't have a choice at all.

Go off-piste and depend on unknown third parties running builds based on AOSP.

But, some things "blobs" mainly, are probably unavoidable.

See https://www-handyhase-de.translate.goog/magazin/android-alte..., for example https://e.foundation/.

Pixel + grapheneOS is the best middleground if you want.

"Knowingly agrees" - that phrase is doing a lot. The average consumer who buys an iPhone has no idea about Apple approved apps or app store restrictions. There also not told about it when purchasing the device or setting it up.

Before using the App Store, you have to agree to terms of service. No one reads it, but they could! They are told to look at it and must acknowledge they agree before they can use the service. What else are you going to do, force anyone buying any device with services attached to sit in a little room and interrogate them until you're sure they understand every detail?

In my country chemists are required to give you some information before selling you certain drugs. Something similar could be done.

Do you have Apple Stores in your country? They're almost always packed. Could you imagine how insane it would be to do that? Would you no longer be able buy iPhones online? What you suggest is completely infeasible.

consumers generally purchase iPhones knowing ahead of time that their app download options are restricted to the App Store

Even if Apple allowed other stores, consumers would still be able to choose to only download things from the Apple store.

Not having that option only harms consumers and benefits Apple who gets to apply an undue tax on everything.

It’s not like there was some centralized decision making here. It’s possible for the two cases to be contradictory, given jury vs bench, and a whole host of other reasons. I think it’s safe to say that there’s still a long road ahead for both cases, and it’s possible that one outcome will affect the other in the appeals process. Not to mention any legislation that might get passed as a result.

Underdog yes, it's a multi billion dollar company going after multi trillion dollar companies. Fighting for the little guy nah, fighting for their own interests. Those interests are probably closer to aligning with what the typical small/individual player might want than what the larger players want but that's not why they are doing it.

Yeah, to my view, it's one giant corporation battling another giant corporation, with little regard for end users like me.

I suppose Epic is the smaller of the two, so relative to Google, maybe they are the underdog. But compared to me they're both "big dogs".

In general, I am in favor of breaking up monopolies and making smart phones and other devices more open so, on the surface, this seems like a good result.

I think he was broken by "Games for Windows Live" on PC. They had to integrate it in Gears of War, and I think a lot of the industry saw it as Microsoft trying to steer the PC into being a MSFT only device. There was not much benefit for devs/pubs to using it, it was all good for Microsoft. He seems to want everything to be old school PC where anyone can sell in their own store and do what they want on a device.

However, it always feels weird to me on mobile since those devices were not really open and the maker always took their store cut. Epic knew this and got on those devices anyway, but then after Fortnite getting huge, wanted more of that mobile pie for themselves. That's sort of a generic take on mobile, as I haven't read through everything on this case.

From what I understand it's all ego and ethics from him - the board is not stoked about the risk involved and the potential upside. I think Epic has something to gain by removing app store fees for medium sized games though - that would put money back in their pocket creating an opportunity to charge more for Unreal revshare.

Both Google and Epic are large for-profit companies, and are primarily concerned with maximizing investor returns. Neither company should be considered "the good guy."

Despite that, I'm still glad that Epic won this case, as I believe they're in the right. But just because I think they're in the right with this court case does not mean I think that they're "the good guy," nor that they're concerned with gamers. Epic clearly has their own agenda, and in this specific case it aligns with my own.

I don't understand what "Google Play API" means. The point is the store, not store features or store APIs. The store is a monopoly.

There are locked down APIs that require Google Play Services to access, and IIRC some of them are only allowed to Google apps and can't be accessed by third-party apps.

I don't know if you remember the days where each phone had it own OS. It sucked, and beside playing snake there wasn't much you could do with it.

you got to take things in context, the current market for mobile OSes is a duopoly shared between apple and Google, there were two cases against each of them, but the outcome for each one them was different.

One verdict was that apple get to stay the dictator in its fiefdom and the other, more open platform got punished for trying to do the exact same thing.

What every company will take away from this is that, they either got to go full throttle on the control or no throttle at all.

Guess which side the companies like when given an ultimatum between theses 2 choices?

Is it possible for someone to make a better store than Google ? sure, I don't think any one is arguing that.

This will only lead to more fragmentation and a loss for incentive to improve the platform, guess it may join the graveyard in 10 years?

I see too many otherwise smart people suggesting that no one but Google could make a safe or otherwise good app store for Android.

Huh. That is literally the first time I heard a statement like this.

Google is in this case less developer friendly. They made secret deals with Spotify (0% fees when using Spotify billing, 4% when using Play Store billing), but it took lawsuits for normal devs to only have to pay 15% on the first million.

So yeah, it's a middle finger to all devs from Google.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-...

He said "friendlier than apple." Please read the comment in its entirety before replying next time.

Google is in this case less developer friendly. They made secret deals with Spotify

Are you saying Apple is different? I'd like to see the info on those deals if it isn't secret. Like the Spotify deal, Facebook deal, etc.

If I ran Apple or Google (and was running with the "customer safety" angle):

If you want to run a third-party app store, okay. But you have to play by Apple/Google's rules and standards.

Just like they have guidelines for their own store's apps, have the same guidelines for third-party stores. It puts the onus on third-party stores to make sure they're just as stringent as the parent store/platform. If you fail to be compliant per a specific set of rules (not ambiguous), your store gets booted.

If it's a purely a money concern, charge a "store developer" fee on an annual basis and tier it out based on number of sales/customers.

Defeats the purpose of third party app stores. The only reason I even have one installed (F-droid) is for apps that don't play by Google's rules and standards.

"Yes, you can have multiple app stores as long as they're all exactly the same."

I am not sure if you even posted on the right comment or if you even read the article.

This whole post is about how actually those rules are illegal and therefore we don't have to follow them.

The whole point is that actually we can use the law to force Google or Apple to change their rules, or forcibly allow developers to not follow them.

your store gets booted.

If Google or Apple doesn't follow the law then they will be forced to do so by the government, and fined large amounts of money.

The rules of the US government overrule the rules of companies.

I don't think you understand.

Your whole post is basically just saying "these are the rules".

Yes, those are the rules. But those rules can be illegal.

Just saying "yep. These are the rules" is a vacuous statement that is unrelated to the crux of the argument, which is that those rules can be illegal and the government can force Apple or Google to change them.

That's kind of a childlike interpretation, and mostly fits an anti-apple agenda. The two cases are only similar on the very surface, and nothing alike within the cases themselves.

Epic accused apple of being a monopoly, and using its monopoly power to price gouge.

The judge in that case ruled that Apple's online store is akin to a physical store and physical stores have _for centuries_ charged monies to shelf products.

In the Epic vs Google case:

that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive.

These two cases are not alike, not similar, and thus have dissimilar outcomes.

If Apple is not allowed to continue to charge for shelf space, then neither can walmart, Publix, or any other physical venue. That will never happen in the USA. Stores have centuries long tradition in charging vendors for shelf space to display and sell products.

Google was naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty. Google exhibited anti-competitive behavior in 4 different areas.

If Apple is not allowed to continue to charge for shelf space, then neither can walmart, Publix, or any other physical venue

When Walmart charges for shelf space the supplier isn't completely out of business if they don't take the deal. They can go to a different store, settle for non-prime shelf space or sell direct to the public. Those options are just not available to app developers - for many categories of app, Apple is the only way to make a profit at all.

Yes, sounds paradoxical to me as well, but given that a jury was involved, some degree of inconsistency is to be expected

Google did engage in anticompetitive behavior to make their App Store dominant over other third party App Stores

Google app store is only anti competitive if you define the market as 'android apps'. Perhaps you stretch this to just 'android app stores'.

So if we define a similar market of 'ios apps', where there's literally 1 single choice of app store, how exactly is that not anticompetitive?

Not likely, they aren’t the same type of case.

Apple didn’t force anyone else to install their App Store. That’s where Google differs and what Epic proved they did. They can’t prove Apple did anything like that since Apple doesn’t offer iOS to anyone else.

A company need not have 100% market share to have monopoly power in a market.

Is F-Droid preinstalled on any major android phones?

Microsoft was convicted of having a Windows/Internet Explorer monopoly despite the existence of Netscape and the Mac.

This fact alone makes it not a monopoly.

"The hypothetical possibility of competition" is definitely not enough to conclude that something is not a monopoly in any legal sense. A monopoly doesn't require 100% control of the market, nor is owning 100% of a market illegal.

by simple logic you prove that Google does not impede competition

Again, "the hypothetical possibility of competition" does not mean Google isn't impeding things. In fact, the case established quite the opposite:

Unlawful Restraint of Trade (Sherman Act Section 1 and California State Law) Question No. 6:

Did Epic prove, by a preponderance of the evidence and in accordance with the instructions given to you, that Google entered into one or more agreements that unreasonably restrained trade in a relevant antitrust market?

Jury answered: YES

Question No. 7:

If you answered “yes” to Question 6, which of these agreements did you find to be unreasonable restraint(s) of trade in accordance with the instructions given to you?

x DDA agreements

x Agreements with Google’s alleged competitors or potential competitors under Project Hug or Games Velocity Program

x Agreements with OEMs that sell mobile devices (including MADA and RSA agreements)

Jury answered: ALL OF THE ABOVE

Now, lets not undermine one under another both are influential on their own on the video gaming industry, on one hand Tim sweeney founded Epic Games and created Unreal engine, on the other Carmack made one of the most influential first person shooters of all time that defined the genre.

No one disputes that Apple and Google are monopolies. Monopolies are not uncommon or illegal. It's what you do with them that counts and this is a story about what Google specifically did with their monopoly and how that was illegal and a jury has said so.