From the article: "Microsoft making very similar arguments about how antitrust was going to stifle innovation" ... "when Microsoft lost its cases’ innovation didn’t end. What did decline after ... was Microsoft’s browser market share"
Yup, this is what Apple is afraid of as well, and why they are fighting it so hard with very similar arguments.
What market is Apple dominating? Microsoft is still king of the desktop. Android has a bigger install base for phones. Others attempt to make tablets, they just aren’t appealing to people… and the market seems open, as people often say iPadOS cripples the iPad hardware. Google wins on services.
I think of Apple kind of like Nintendo, but for computers.
> I think of Apple kind of like Nintendo, but for computers.
Then hopefully you understand why people get more upset over Apple's arbitrary "ecosystem" decisions than they are with Nintendo. I love Nintendo, even for all the mistakes they make. But they sell a toy; a games console that is strictly used for entertainment with no auxiliary purpose. Nobody is suing Nintendo because their PDF won't open on their Switch; Nintendo just doesn't offer that functionality, from anyone. There is no unfair market segmentation because Nintendo doesn't segregate functionality by-developer.
> What market is Apple dominating?
Have you not been following the DMA? It's software; they refuse to offer any form of competitive software distribution. Because of Apple's first-party advantage, they can explicitly block competitors from ever shipping a viable business, and until recently they even blatantly forbid the distribution of GPL-licensed apps. If Apple wants to play the Nintendo defense, then they can get both barrels that Microsoft dodged. I really have no patience for grown-up developers that want to rely on the benefit of the doubt we give a toy company.
Depends on the business. Let's say you're Dropbox, or a similar third-party subscription backup service. You want to offer a competing service to iCloud for iPhone users, but there are a few hitches in the way:
1) Apple doesn't give you the same APIs they use to integrate iCloud. Your service literally cannot compete with their service on a functional basis.
2) You cannot out-price Apple without a sweetheart deal from Apple themselves. This creates a situation where Apple's consent is required to offer pricing that would be disruptive to any of their services.
3) The de-facto integration, promotion and nagging that iCloud enjoys constitutes product bundling. As we know from their deal with Google, Apple prices their defaults at a ludicrous amount, in order to create a disproportionate first-party advantage relative to competitors. User control is put up for auction under the guise of security and simplicity, when it's really being divided among sinister benefactors.
With these combined, it is effectively impossible to present a competitive first-party software experience on Apple platforms. It wouldn't matter if your service was genuinely superior to Apple's offerings because, much like Microsoft, Apple enjoys a privileged position where they can block competitors from their internal market if they pose a legitimate threat.
Then you envision Apple opening both hardware and software platform for full business competition with itself. Similar to installing whatever Linux distro you want on an Intel box?
It's not like this is the early days of iPhone--the solution waiting for a problem. You needed competent developers to make quality products to engage and retain users. You offered lucrative deals as compensation.
I forsee it. Microsoft took three steps down that same path and was lucky to walk away in one piece. If Apple drills-down on this point then they will be destroyed municipally without a second thought. The only country sitting on their hands and refusing to fix things is the United States, Apple's designated tax-collector.
The US market, for example, but I wouldn't draw the line at countries. The linie lies where your wallet is. Or at least where some pretend it is.
The problem is the fact that it's hard to switch for many people who are not on the technical side of life. They really are locked into an environment. This is why it's so important to broaden this environment. Give people choices outside.
It’s hard to go the other way as well. I worked with a guy, who was reasonably technical (it was his job), who switched from Android to iOS. He was calling me in his office every other day to complain about something or to figure out why his Google stuff wasn’t playing nice with the Apple apps.
Changing platforms is inherently difficult and requires a lot of education and discovering new solutions to old problems, regardless of the platform. Every platform has lock-in for non-technical users when it comes to this.
The difference is what it's about here. On Android, you have a huge variety of alternatives. You don't have them at Apple. It's even worse: they are making it hard for you to chose alternatives. Often it doesn't even make sense, since software and hardware are made just for each other.
The lock-in factor is much smaller on Android.
PS. I was that guy. Had to switch to Apple at work. It was a pain. Not only for me, which is why they switched back after the person who decided it got fired (for different reasons). We've lost a lot of money that year.
Apple gets to charge 5-10x market rates for credit card processing inside all iOS apps, which is a big and captive market. Normal is 2-3% and they charge 15-30%.
The 15-30% isn’t for credit card processing. In countries where Apple has allowed external payments, they’ve broken out the cost for payment processing to 3%.
If you’re talking about standard rates, 30% is standard in most online stores like Steam, Google Play, PSN etc… None of them purport that the 30% is solely for payment processing.
Objectivism isn't correct, here. You are comparing a captive audience with zero internal competition to three competing platforms, all that set their pricing in accordance with their competition. Apple has no competitive pressure, therefore comparing their pricing to competing stores is rationally nonsense.
The rates on PSN, Steam and Google Play Store are "standard" because they have competitors that hold that price accountable. Apple does not. If you cannot see the anticompetitive harm there then I don't know what to say to you besides "better prepare your 401k for the worst".
If the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store have the same fee structure, and your argument is that Google got their through competitive pricing… how can you claim Apple is taking advantage of their position when there is no price gouging going on when compared to other platforms that are offering the exact same service on another platform?
No App Store runs at 3% transacgoon fee - that’s the credit card interchange fee. Steam is 30% (with limited exceptions for review samples and humble bundle and other limited off-platform transactions). Microsoft store and PlayStation store are 30%. google play store is 30%.
So no: apple’s fees are competitive. Actually the 15% tier is below-market - and larger players can negotiate better rates.
Out of all the complaints you can level against apple - non-competitive transaction fees aren’t one of them, 30% is the going rate for that.
Apple's dominance operates independently of the marketshare Android and Windows maintain. If anything, the existence of MacOS continues to prove that Apple can ship a high-quality and robust computing experience, and chooses not to on iOS to maintain control of the platform.
This can be a problem. For one, independent of Microsoft and Android's inter-competition, Apple's customers are now entirely isolated to whatever Apple curates. This is a captive market; one that Apple ensures operates inside the confines of their restrictive definitions. That has long-term effects on that market, some positive but many expressly negative. Once combined with Apple's aspirations with the MFi program, the Lightning connector "incident" in Europe, the Epic Games tempur-tantrum and their overall product strategy, it becomes blatantly clear that Apple wants to trade innovation for control. They don't want you to make the iPhone better, they want you to make them money. That's it.
Chrome is today’s Internet Explorer both in terms of market share, and use of non standard features to push a companies dominance.
Safari is today’s Internet explorer in terms of being bundled with systems as a requirement.
Ultimately, these analogies trivialize the actual state of the browser ecosystem in the 90s and early 2000s, because the computing landscape was so different.
The claim there was never about the OS being spyware though so that link feels like a stretch even then.
It’s always been about server and infrastructure access. But beyond that, the Prism leaks mostly applied to telecoms.
A lot of conspiracy minded folks failed to see the forest for the trees because they failed to grok the entire infrastructure between the device in their homes and the greater world.
It’s much easier to think the device in your hand is betraying oneself than to think about the immense number of other components like telecoms, servers, MitM etc that comprise modern communication.
But those are parlor tricks. Yes, the United States forces Apple and Microsoft to turn over data on a regular basis; everyone from India to Brazil demands the same thing. It's non-unique. The United States and it's FIVE-EYES partners clearly have more capabilities on the table; they literally control these businesses, up to a certain point. If you're unwilling to acquit telecoms and server providers for installing backdoors, then it's a no-brainer to implicate Microsoft, Google and Apple for knowledgeably shipping compromised client software too.
That's somewhat true, but the only other relevant browser is treating the internet like it owns it.
I'm sure it's wrong to "hold the web back", but I'm also afraid of when Google finally takes over the internet. Because those "don't be evil"-days are in the past.
Safari today has very good support for ratified web standards though. Looking through caniuse, the browsers are roughly equivalent with variances between them.
Most if not all the web feature that are not supported in Safari are things I resolutely do NOT want in a browser though.
Stuffing things in a browser is not good for anybody…
> Stuffing things in a browser is not good for anybody…
Food for thought:
Have you ever considered that the demand for this functionality in the browser only exists because it is forbidden natively? I've got no use for cross-platform 3D APIs, game streaming functionality or even WebRTC in my browser when it comes down to it; but it makes plain sense that people want to push this functionality to the browser because Apple resists it natively. That's just supply/demand at work.
I doubt that’s actually true (though maybe it is, I don’t know). Anyway 3D APIs are implemented in Webkit, as well as WebRTC and co and many other APIs.
I’m talking specifically about having access to the bluetooth stack, having access to the device’s vibrations, etc.
Apple making a conscious choice to be cautious about including privacy/security harming features is not holding the web back. It's putting users first.
Chrome's reckless and indifferent approach of including every API under the sun is being used by advertisers today to track users through comprehensive browser fingerprinting.
One can also say it’s a duopoly of two suboptimal browsers (factoring all Chromium based browsers together).
Even though other options exist “technically”, users on the two (3?) popular mobile and desktop OS experience a great deal of platform friction when opting to make their own choice (if at all possible like on iOS).
Not that I disagree on the duopoly part, but truthfully there’s only one third browser engine in play and that’s Gecko/Firefox.
Which, imho isn’t any more optimal than WebKit or Blink.
Granted, perhaps if the duopoly didn’t exist, it could get more resources. After all they did once dethrone IE6, but I think that was as much Microsoft’s blunder as it was Mozilla’s success. I’m not sure Apple or Google are making the same blunders today.
It is possible that I'm missing a bigger picture where Mozilla is pushing the envelope with Firefox.
We've crystalized around a specific role for each browser (e.g. Chromium brings in whatever webstandards it needs to pretend to be an OS, Safari tries to keep up while also sneaking Apple ecosystem facilities, Firefox... keeping up?) and there is no real innovation. Of course, we have better ways to not-block-ads, scrape user telemetry, or ai-whatever-that's-good-for... but nothing substantial towards improvements for the people using browsers.
What platform friction to users experience installing a different browser on Android? I'm aware few users actually choose to do it, but I don't recall any resistance from the OS to installing Firefox, making it the default, and keeping it that way.
Not just that, but forbidding any other browser engine on iOS and forcing Safari as the only browser allowed on the platform is completely abusive and anti-competitive. It's one of many reasons Apple is getting sued by the DOJ.
Only in the EU. Highlighting that that the only reason they’ve changed their mind is because of regulatory pressure. Android allowed alternative engines on day one, iOS allows it, what, 17 years after launch? It’s still fair to criticise Apple for the time it took and the extra lengths they’ve gone to in order to only allow it where they’ve been forced.
No other iOS browser engines have been approved, or even exist at this point. Probably won't see any real alternative browsers in the EU until they finish the rumored WebBrowserKit or whatever, to help contain JIT services.
I’m confused by this post. Formatting aside, it’s drawing a comparison between something Gruber said and something Microsoft said.
Beyond that, there’s not much substance to the post around the assertion of the title?
They may very well be correct or not, but the post itself has no real content to it.
It also erroneously claims that the browser changes were after the European commission rulings but their own graph ends at 2009 when that commission ruling happened. The prior one for that time frame was around media player.
However the quote they point to is around the DOJ investigation which again, does not actually lead to what they claim. Microsoft won the appeal and the later settlement didn’t affect Internet explorer significantly.
The loss in browser market share was imho inevitable as a result of the growing Internet and growing competition, as IE6 lagged greatly behind.
I also don't think the comparison makes sense for a number of other reasons:
Microsoft had a real market share monopoly. Apple has a vertically integrated platform that tends to include the most monetarily valuable users.
Microsoft was regulated using long standing antitrust law and a court settlement outlining specific compliance steps. Apple is being regulated by a brand new, extraordinarily massive law that is untested with tons of unclear requirements.
Certainly, innovation might survive in the EU. But nothing about this post or comparison seems well reasoned.
Yes, great point on the nature of the laws at hand.
I’ll add that the other difference is in the nature of the proceedings too.
The DOJ brought a case against Microsoft, as they are now bringing a case against Apple. The closest similar case for Apple is the one with Spotify. Where the EU tacked on a massive additional fine on top of the primary damages fine.
The DMA, as you state, is a new regulation that has significant room for interpretation. However more importantly, it doesn’t require a full judicial process for someone found in violation of it. The Commission can hand out fines as it sees fit without an external judiciary process and requires the receiver of said fines to bring a case against them instead.
> However more importantly, it doesn’t require a full judicial process for someone found in violation of it. The Commission can hand out fines as it sees fit without an external judiciary process and requires the receiver of said fines to bring a case against them instead.
Do you feel that this makes any difference for corporations like Apple?
Proactive and preventative punishments are a powerful tool for something like speeding tickets. They take the position that you are guilty until proven innocent , versus innocent until proven guilty. But those are limited in scope and clear cut.
The DMA by comparison is very far reaching and very loosely scoped by design. However it employs the same guilty until proven innocent model, because it too is trying to prevent the crime before it happens.
To bring this back to speeding tickets. Imagine if instead of fixed speed postings, you just had slow/fast etc. but those applied differently based on the vehicle you were in and you can’t ask about it first. Without clear guidelines, everyone would drive slow to avoid fines, making traffic slow to a crawl.
That’s the goal of the DMA, but it’s also why I think it will reduce innovation in the EU.
To be clear, I think the DMA is well intentioned and I’m personally very pro regulations. I just think it’s poorly implemented and Commission has already used its ability to interpret it as they wish multiple times.
A stricter set of rules, better consultation processes and better third party oversight would rectify it in my opinion.
Contrast this to the way the DoJ operates against Microsoft/Apple. They make the assertion based on the loose anti-competitive definitions, and have to bring it to a judiciary to prove it. It’s innocent until proven guilty.
However for cases like flagrant violation of well specified rules (like the EPA has), the government can bring direct charges. But again, those are well specified.
I don't know. If Apple or any other large corporation is contesting the "speeding ticket" it goes to the courts, where the financial power to hire the best attorneys, consultants and experts certainly counts.
I am also not sure about the alleged lack of specificity. Apple's violations seem rather glaring and obvious to me.
IE6 may have lagged, but that didn't matter as it had bundled-by-default status, which meant many wouldn't even become aware of an alternative, and many of those aware wouldn't even bother to try it.
But that browser by default status didn’t change in the time window that the author presents. The decline happened long before browser selection screens were mandated.
What a lazy comparison and article. No relevant facts, critical thinking, connective tissue or argument being made: it's "Hey kids you remember 1998, right? No? Well, it's just like 2024 but I can't tell you how." Perhaps the author is referring to being able to install a different browser on their iPhone or paying an Apple tax from their store. In 1998, smart phones didn't really exist nor did digital distribution. I can only guess we are comparing computers to phones - why? Shouldn't we be comparing phones to phones?
2006 is a good inflection point, before the iPhone came out, I could install apps on phone from the Verizon store over cell signal which were all around at least 30 bucks per app (there was no such thing as a "free" app). I could go on the internet, via cell tower and pay through the nose to get a slow stream of data on a small screen that was totally unoptimized and tested for my dumb phone. If there was antitrust issue then, it was the cell phone companies.
When did Apple become Microsoft 1998, was it really just this year 2024? Where are the facts that give rise to the criticisms the author presumes can be levied at Apple? Because I think it was 2007 when the iPhone came out, but if you made the argument Apple 2007 = Microsoft 1998 you'd be laughed out of the room. The author needs to make an argument, I can't believe this is at the top of HN right now
Do we really want the App Store to become the rotten cesspool that is Google Play? Do we really want to open the floodgates to thousands of third party web browsers crawling with malware and zero days? Personally I will never use Android because of this, and I thank god that Apple has held the line here. They have extremely good reasons for maintaining the policies they do, and the average user of an iPhone simply cannot be protected any other way.
> Do we really want the App Store to become the rotten cesspool that is Google Play?
Perhaps a more apt comparison is wanting the App Store on iPhone to become like the App Store on MacOS. Which is to say, empty, filled with expensive scam apps, and struggling to justify itself when every major software provider makes you download their app as a DMG off their website.
Maybe Apple's iPhone aspirations aren't compatible with what the market actually wants. It certainly seems that way on Mac.
This is incorrect. White box PC vendors could sell as many PCs as they wanted with Linux or any other non-Microsoft OS, and not pay anything to Microsoft for those PCs. But if they did that, they would miss out on certain discounts for Windows Licenses if they also wanted to sell PCs with Windows pre-installed.
"Missing out on discounts" is not the same thing as "having to pay a license fee for every machine no matter what".
Now do this one for AMD - “intel didn’t force you to only dell intel chips, but doing so would lose certain discounts on intel processors if you also wanted to sell pcs with intel processors included.”
Gatekeeper companies whose platforms are all-reaching and all-encompassing (ie. not just toys or games) should be forced to surrender default status to choice. Default search, default payments, default messaging, default email, default browser, and default app store shouldn't be first party options thrust on the user.
Defaults are something 99 out of 100 users will stick with, making them one of the most powerful forms of platform monopolization.
Ending defaults is the only way a competitive gradient can exist. Otherwise, these gatekeeper companies are forever entrenched and can feast off of all economic activity forever. They can furthermore choose to enter tangential markets and snuff out the incumbents.
Just earlier today, I read this post on Techrunch, of course not only because of Apple, but the size and weight of the FAANGs is just too much even for a free market:
> While these companies are definitely benefiting from embracing new trends, there are other factors at play as well — in particular, investors don’t have many places to park their money to make bets on new technology.
> “There’s minimal competition as we are in oligopolies and duopolies,” Wang told TechCrunch. “We used to have hundreds of software companies, but decades of mergers and acquisitions have whittled down the options to a few companies in every geography, category, market size, and industry.”
> Gatekeeper companies whose platforms are all-reaching and all-encompassing (ie. not just toys or games)
stopped reading. You can instantly tell when someone’s being disingenuous when they pull out the “this device has been so successful at branding itself as an appliance that I’m making a special exception for why it shouldn’t have to obey user freedom”.
Why shouldn’t I be able to plug a kb into my console and browse the web, or write an email or a word document, or do my taxes? Can science not yet provide an App Store with a web browser in it?
> Why shouldn’t I be able to plug a kb into my console and browse the web, or write an email or a word document, or do my taxes?
Do you want to know the truth? The cold, hard, glaring truth?
It's because Night Trap and DOOM existed. The ESRB got made and now nobody can ship games without the direct and glaring oversight of an entertainment commission. It sounds stupid because it is, but it also has bipartisan support so everyone can say "think of the kids!" and stop 17-year-olds from renting GTA for their PS2.
Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony love this. These are regulations they can exploit, because they more or less give them a legal imperative to root out bad actors and create the sort of walled garden Apple struggles to justify. Does it make sense? No. You should be able to legally unlock your Nintendo Switch bootloader, Nintendo be damned. But Nintendo is perceived to exist in regulated competition with their peers; Apple is running a free-for-all where everyone but them loses.
> You can instantly tell when someone’s being disingenuous
I'm being entirely serious, and I write my legislators about it.
Apple and Google are unfair monopolies that happened to be at the right place and right time. They now get to lock every single other player out of an entire domain of economic activity. What's more, they get to relentlessly tax all other technological innovations in perpetuity because they're wedged in as the only two options.
Have you ever had to pay extortion money to place ads for your own product's name? Have you ever had to schedule unplanned product development to jump through platform changes? Have you ever had your customer relationship severed completely on a whim?
You're one decision away from having your business demolished with these two titans.
Apple and Google aren't freedom. They're totalitarian dictatorships that tax us into subsistence living and make us dance to the beat of their drum. We are harmed by the fact that they've usurped so much control over technology.
The DOJ ought to split them into ten different companies apiece, but absent that, their control over mobile and search should be a liability, not a forever enslavement.
Computing should be as competitive as the automotive sector. Smartphones haven't seen advances in half a decade, and yet these companies are forever entitled to the most important device category on the planet. There isn't a way for any other company to come in and compete. It's absolutely impossible. Regulation is the only path.
> Oddly enough, when Microsoft lost its cases’ innovation didn’t end. What did decline after the settlement of the DOJ and EU trials was Microsoft’s browser market share — a fact which some commentators would have you believe is a complete coincidence and nothing whatever to do with governments forcing Microsoft to stop being an abusive monopolist.
Huh? I mean, it was a coincidence. Internet Explorer peaked in 2003, not because of the 2001 antitrust settlement, but because Firefox came out in 2004 and then Chrome came out in 2008.
The government didn't create Firefox or Chrome, nor is there any reason to believe that Firefox or Chrome wouldn't have been developed or become popular absent action from the government.
Or we might even say that if it wasn't coincidence, then that's because of a pattern where slow-moving governments often only try to regulate antitrust in the tech industry by the time the specific issue has ceased being relevant.
As Steve Jobs said:
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
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Hot take: Apple is keeping app quality high by pushing out PWAs (which are just a way for developers to have an easier time, but not a better product).
And Microsoft was improving the quality of web-content with ActiveX! How dare we shun their positive influence, all they ever wanted was developers to pay them money to sign their software for them.
As a user, I don't think you have the right to say that for certain unless the two platforms actually compete with each other. iOS does not offer PWAs a good-faith opportunity to compete.
On Mac, where PWAs and Electron apps are also very common, there are still native Mac apps getting made. They're usually expensive, outdated, and left to die on the App Store, but they do exist. Most of them are a testament to how fragile and unsustainable native app development is, given the choice.
It's not about that. Native is a more capable platform period. More performant, more permissions, etc. I get that a PWA makes sense for a startup or whatever but it's not for a better product it's for a cheaper product.
Apple pushes out PWAs because they can't make 30% revenue from them, and would rather developers write apps for their platform where Apple can make more money. It's a total money grab, which is why they forbid any other browser engine on iOS and force Safari on every browser app.
I personally find PWAs to be an objectively worse experience for even run of the mill brochureware apps. That said, i also believe consumers should be allowed to make that choice for themselves.
Safari PWAs support web push. Not only does Safari support it, but they're first-class notifications in iOS — they show on the Lock Screen, in Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.
I don't see how you can call it first-class when they don't support sound or vibration? Completely useless for anything that actually relies on push notifications.
I'm surprised you'd double down before trying it, or at least Googling it first.
Web push notifications are first-class notifications. They support sound and vibration. Standard notification badges appear on their app icon. PWAs that use them appear in Settings > Notifications. Users get exactly the same controls over them that they do native apps. Etc. https://imgur.com/a/Ofg6oxo
I did Google it. Maybe it's changed more recently but shouldn't have ever been released like that.
There's also concerns about PWAs on iOS in the EU. For a bit of time it was looking like you would no longer be able to add websites to your home screen, so maybe no more PWA push notifications?
Not a stable foundation to build a PWA on. If it ever does get better I would love to get rid of React Native and just have a PWA.
Yup, this is what Apple is afraid of as well, and why they are fighting it so hard with very similar arguments.