There is a benefit, though. If there was competition between app stores on the iPhone, the quality and quantity of apps available to iPhone users would increase substantially. App stores would compete on fees, attracting developers, protecting consumers, and so on. Fees would drop, developers would face less cost and friction bringing their apps to the market, app stores would have to innovate to keep protecting consumers. Monopolies cause consumer harm.
The biggest irony of all this is that consumers don't seem to realize the harm Apple is doing, because Apple is busy pulling the wool over their eyes by telling them they are protecting their security and privacy. iOS is a nanny state. Apple maintains a culture of fear among consumers to achieve its business goal, which is to maintain its monopoly position.
So now you expect Congress to force Apple to sell you an iPad at the same price it sells to a corporation that buys 1000s? Of course Apple is going to make a deal with Amazon when Amazon can offer it another sales channel.
> So now you expect Congress to force Apple to sell you an iPad at the same price it sells to a corporation that buys 1000s?
I honestly expect the congress to remove Apple powers as gatekeeper
If the Apple Store is the only store for iOS devices, they have to allow any app in and let the authorities handle misbehaviour
Apple is not a National State, so it shouldn't act as the ruler and dictator of the State.
I expect congress to force Apple to remove control over what's inside the box.
If I buy a product on Amazon when I open the box I can find a lot of promotional material put there by the manufacturer and sometimes even discount codes for affiliated businesses or coupons for other online stores, Amazon can't tell them to remove it or go elsewhere
Apple should allow promoting the product inside the apps as well
That's what I expect from the country that sell itself as the land of the free (and champion of free market)
I honestly expect the congress to remove Apple powers as gatekeeper
So you expect the same government that passed DMCA, COPPA, that is trying to get rid of end to end encryption, did the things that came out via Snowden, warranties wiretaps, buying location data from carriers, dismantled net neutrality, etc. to actually not do something malicious with more power and control?
If the Apple Store is the only store for iOS devices, they have to allow any app in and let the authorities handle misbehaviour
So Apple should have allowed the Facebook VPN so that spied on users? You really want the government controlling which apps can go on your phone? Have you been paying attention to the government over the past two decades? You really want to give it more power?
That's what I expect from the country that sell itself as the land of the free (and champion of free market)
So more government control is your definition of a free market?
> Government forcing companies to sell other company’s products is a terrible policy and completely contrary to the free market.
Really?
Amazon was born and is still a company that __literally__ sell other companies' products!
Apple is not forced to sell other companies' products, Apple should be forced to not block them from distributing freely the software users want.
The point is exactly that they shouldn't be selling other companies' products (apps) but the companies making the apps should be selling them, the way they please.
> On iOS I guarantee that if the App Store had even one alternative, many apps would do the same and bail on Apple, and you’d see a similar ghost store.
Yes, I certainly would, and the only reason I haven't already is I have no other way to get my app into the hands of users who own only Apple phones and tablets.
As an app developer myself, with apps on both the Google Play Store and the App Store with over 250K monthly active users, I have become so frustrated with Apple's arbitrary and capricious enforcement of its App Store regulations, its bullying and coercion of developers, its extortionate fees, and its monopolistic anti-competitive practices, that I have stopped updating my apps on the App Store. I wonder how many other developers are in a similar position. As a consumer, I now know that if I want the latest, up to date apps, I'm better off turning to the Play Store or one of the many other app stores that can be used on Android devices.
I've also given up on the MacBook line, tired of the touch bar, the slate-like keyboards, and (now) the transition to ARM. My next laptop will be a Thinkpad or Dell. Most of my development these days is done under Windows using WSL2, and my primary focus is on Android.
It used to be that my apps made more money on Apple devices, but now I actually make more on Android. The Google Play review process is a breeze compared to Apple's laborious and stifling rules (although it is not perfect either by any means), and at some point, it's just not worth the hassle.
It's sad, I was an enthusiastic endorser of Apple products just 7 years ago, but can no longer recommend them. This is the first year I won't be buying a new iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, too - I'm looking to switch to the Pixel or Samsung Galaxy line and Wear OS.
I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank). The law should make illegal restricting developers to any specific payment processor(s), too.
I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank).
I'm pretty sure that will have massive opposition, because they are deathly scared of opening their devices back to the general-purpose computers they actually are. However, I remain hopeful that people may finally wake up to the "security" excuse and stop sacrificing their freedom.
> I'm pretty sure that will have massive opposition, because they are deathly scared of opening their devices back to the general-purpose computers they actually are.
Who's the opposition coming from? Apple? They can fart around and waste time and money on appeals, but if they get hit with an antitrust ruling there isn't much they'll be able to do about it.
> So tell me again when an “antitrust” ruling has ever been applied to a company with less than 50%?
50% of what is the issue, though. Some arbitrary descriptive market the target company preferred to be used for the antitrust analysis, or the actual market in which substitution, and thus actual competition, occurs as found by the court hearing the case?
Because defining the relevant market is not infrequently a contentious point in antitrust.
So can I define Epic having a monopoly on being able to buy things in Fortnite? What if I want to sell my cool “Scarface dance” next to the “Carlton dance” within Fortnite without paying the “Epic Tax”?
I upvoted your comments based on a good faith belief that you're open to learning more about how antitrust law works. It has little to do with market share, and everything to do with a concept called "market power."
Market power is the ability to coerce people into paying more for something via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service. A textbook example which most people would agree is bad is a trust/cartel situation where a few players artificially limit supply, and then can raise the price on consumers because there are no competitors. But if a firm is able to drive up prices with impunity for any reason, it's likely they possess market power.
When a firm possesses excess market power it's good for that firm, but bad for the market, consumers, and society. By definition a firm with a lot of market power has very little competition, so even as their margins grow, product quality will decline and price will increase. (Sound like Apple in 2020?) And new firms will find it difficult to compete in that market even as the firm with market power grows very rich, which exacerbates the problem of wealth inequality. (Sound like America in 2020?)
A society which doesn't place some sort of checks on a firm's ability to acquire market power ends up being a place where the way to get ahead is to find an unfair advantage, abuse it, and screw everyone else. (Again, sound familiar?)
At this point it's almost certain that Google is violating antitrust regulation by abusing its market power (proven in the EU, and the US looks poised to start filing lawsuits this year). Apple, Amazon and a few others are up for debate and it's also fair to say that antitrust regulations should evolve to address the tech industry more effectively. The antitrust problem isn't limited to tech however, anti-competitive behaviors of questionable legality have proliferated all over the US since the 80s due to a lax regulatory environment.
If you want to learn more about this topic, Matt Stoller's newsletter "BIG" on Substack is a phenomenal place to start.
> Market power is the ability to coerce people into paying more for something via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service.
How exactly does Apple "coerce people into paying more for their phones via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service", and what is that mechanism?
> But if a firm is able to drive up prices with impunity for any reason, it's likely they possess market power.
How is Apple actually able to "drive up prices with impunity for any reason"? It seems to me, the more Apple raises iPhone prices, the more people are priced out and decide to switch to a cheaper phone instead.
The matter under contention is the pricing of in-app purchases, not the pricing of phones. By disallowing app stores other than Apple's App Store, Apple is coercing users to pay an inflated price for in-app purchases, since it takes a 42.8% price hike to negate Apple's 30% fee.
Both are relevant, because in order to successfully win an antitrust tying claim under US law you need to prove the seller had sufficient market power in a tying product in order to coerce buyers into buying the tied product.
In this case, once you buy an iPhone, you're forced to use Apple's system to make in-app purchases. The tying product is the phone, and the tied product is the in-app purchase.
So you need to show that Apple has sufficient market power in the smartphone market, and that is where the question of the ability to control prices of phones comes in.
Epic's lawsuit does not accuse Apple of tying App Store sales to phone sales. Two of the nine counts are about allegedly tying in-app purchases to app sales, and the rest don't involve tying.
But since you mentioned it, I'm not really sure that Epic will succeed with their argument that the "iOS App Distribution" market is the relevant tying product market absent an analysis of the overall smartphone market.
So what’s the true value of those cool Carlton dance moves I can get on Fortnite? How much less would the coins and loot boxes cost? Just imagine the overhead that Epic has to charge to reproduce the $18 billion of virtual goods it sales.
This article is about WordPress, not Fortnite. For WordPress.com to cancel out Apple's 30% fee, its monthly prices for its paid plans would need to increase from $4 to $5.71, from $8 to $11.43, from $25 to $35.71, and from $45 to $64.29.
I'm not sure that they are. I did say that something smells rotten (products getting worse and prices going up), but this alone is not justification for punitive measures.
The government playbook in this sort of situation is normally to start subpoena'ing emails, execs etc. and look for hard evidence of actual anti-competitive practices. They're not only interested in a business model as it's described in the media, they want to know what company execs actually did. If they find something they file a suit.
> Wouldn't an antitrust claim against Apple likely fail if the plaintiff cannot establish they actually have market power in the smartphone market?
Well, assuming it is one based on abuse of market power and not the other kinds of antitrust violations (e.g., combination in restraint of trade, etc.), it would fail if the plaintiff couldn't establish that Apple had market power in the market for the product for which they allegedly abused market power. If that was iPhones, for instance, that would be the market for iPhones plus whatever products empirically people substitute for iPhones in response to pricing changes. (Of course, if Apple has market power, there is some range in which the “plus...” part is “none”, since market or pricing power is the ability to raise prices without driving sales to a competing good.)
IANAL, but if the lawsuit was about selling smartphones, then yes I think so.
If the lawsuit was about selling some popular class of app in which Apple leveraged its monopoly over app distribution, I think the plaintiff could have a pretty strong case.
Do you think that a court will permit a plaintiff to claim Apple has a "monopoly" over app distribution without an examination of its market power in the greater smartphone market?
Keep in mind that even if Apple only had 1% market share in the smartphone market they would still have a "monopoly" over app distribution on their own phones.
> So can I define Epic having a monopoly on being able to buy things in Fortnite?
If price increases for Fortnite IAP don't, empirically, drive people to stop buying them in favor of alternatives of some kind, yes. Or, rather, you can't define the market that way, but if there is no substitution effect a US court considering an anti-trust claim is likely to see that as the relevant market, not some broader, say, battle royale game IAP market in which price-driven substitution does not occur.
I guess that’s the value of evaluating on a case by case basis. Depends on what you define as a market worth pursuing antitrust issues for. I would also argue this informally happens when people start to talk about antitrust as it’s usually applied to markets that are general enough that more or less everyone participates in (or feels consequences from) them.
So the government should make decisions on a case by case basis? Isn’t that what everyone is whining about Apple doing - treating small developers and large developers differently?
I’m much more worried about the government deciding what happens to people randomly than a corporation. I don’t have to buy Apple products. It’s a lot harder for me not to have to deal with a capricious government.
I’m with you, I’m simply stating the upside. My further point was that it is already treated somewhat case by case by the selection of antitrust cases to pursue.
You might be able to do just that after this Apple/Epic ruling. That's kind of why NFTs/digital ownership is so exciting. You might be able to buy or sell your dances on any store you want to and use them in the game.
I wish I could be on the other side of a bet against most of HN, betting against all of the wannabe lawyers who don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and posting examples of market collusion showing how Apple/Google could be charged based on the App stores.
The below took me about a minute to find through Google.
U.S. v Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S 150 (1940); United States v. Sealy, Inc., 388 U.S. 350 (1967); United States v. Topco Associates, Inc., 405 U.S. 596 (1972); Craftsmen Limousine, Inc. v. Ford Motor Co., 363 F.3d 761 (8th Cir. 2004), Northern Pac. Ry. Co. v. US 356 US (1940); Agnew v. National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n, 683 F.3d 328 (7th Circ. 2012); or In re Flat Glass Antitrust Litigation 385 F.3d 350 (3rd Cir. 2004), National Soc. of Professional Engineers v. U.S. 435 U.S. (1878); In re Insurance Brokerage Antitrust Litigation, 618 F 3d 300 (2010); or In re Southeastern Milk Antitrust Litigation, 739 F.3d 262 (2014).
Your argument, if you can call it that, is completely incoherent.
You seem to be under the impression that anti-trust is isolated to monopolies, when clearly it is not. Apple and Google do not need to have a monopoly for the government to decide that their app store business model is anti-competitive, and there doesn't need to be precedence.
Is that how the law works?Apple is not a monopoly because you can choose Android. This is an awesome loophole.
Visa is not a monopoly because there is also MasterCard.
At&t is not a monopoly because you can choose Comcast.
It’s a “loophole” that it isn’t a monopoly because you have a choice? That’s kind of a the definition of a monopoly. It’s even in the first two syllables of the word....
I love my choice of AT&T over Comcast. $70 all fees included gigabit up and down.
Your argument is based on a lay-definition and not a legal definition. It's good to know your etymology, but that doesn't get far in court. From the wikipedia article on us antitrust law:
> When enterprises are not under public ownership, and where regulation does not foreclose the application of antitrust law, two requirements must be shown for the offense of monopolization. First, the alleged monopolist must possess sufficient power in an accurately defined market for its products or services. Second, the monopolist must have used its power in a prohibited way. The categories of prohibited conduct are not closed, and are contested in theory. Historically they have been held to include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing.
Apple is exercising exclusive control over the market of apps made for the phones they make, so it looks to me like they satisfy the first requirement. The second requirement is murkier, but several of the examples listed sound quite similar to how apple operates its store. IANAL but the more I read about their behavior, the more I become convinced of their monopoly status. Having a monopoly is not a crime. Abusing monopoly power is.
The article literally spells out the legal definition, summarizes numerous actual antitrust rulings, with plentiful citations to relevant laws and case law, many with full and well researched articles. Maybe give it a read. You might even find an example where 4 tobacco companies, each with less than 50% market share, were found to be abusing market dominance.
You're conveniently ducking that they 100% control the market of software for their phones. And anyway, I didn't say that case was equivalent. You asked for a case where a company with less than 50% was subject to an antitrust ruling and I provided one.
And I'll remind you, I'm not a lawyer. Technically, zero lawyers is a good number of lawyers, so I must insist that makes me a good lawyer. Just, I'd suck in court.
A company that was subject to antitrust because it colluded with other companies in the market has nothing to do with what’s going on in the app market. Collusion is always illegal -except for the sports leagues.
Yes and consoles makers have control of their consoles, Roku has control of their platform, as does LG with their WebOS based TVs.
Yet and still when you were challenged to come up with an analogous example, the best you could come up with is multiple companies colluding.
I can't speak for what other people have posted, but there's, to my mind, a quite analogous case for this situation: Kodak v. Image Technical Services.
The case involved Kodak refusing to sell parts for its copiers to outside repair shops, and they were sued by the shops who claimed this was anticompetitive behavior.
Kodak made a claim that since there was robust competition in the market for copiers, they couldn't have market power in the aftermarkets for "Kodak copier parts and service." The Supreme Court rejected that argument, holding it was possible to show that there was market power (and therefore antitrust liability) in a secondary market even if the primary market is competitive.
The key point in the Kodak case was that Kodak changed their policy on selling repair parts after people bought the original product, and the change in policy is what led the Supreme Court to decide that the market for repair parts was a separate and relevant aftermarket, because the people that bought Kodak copiers lacked information at the time of purchase about Kodak's repair policy and therefore were locked-in to buying repair services from Kodak after the fact.
Subsequent cases since Kodak have continually narrowed the scope in which Kodak is applied, and it likely would not apply here because people who buy iPhones have known since the App Store launched in 2008 that the App Store is the only place they'll be able to install apps from.
Yes, the specifics of the case don't match up perfectly, but the context of the question was "show me a case where a single company had antitrust liability without a majority of the market," not "prove with a single citation that Apple will lose."
Do you realize that I said "if apple gets hit with an antitrust ruling"? I'm not certain of the outcome; I see room for argument on both sides of this. You've apparently picked this 50% hill to die on. I wish that you were taking a curious approach to this conversation, because we might both learn something. Instead, I regret responding to you in the first place.
I recognize your username and I recall seeing good and thoughtful comments from you. I hope to meet you again in a more productive conversation.
I think it’ll be interesting if Apple loses control of the App Store but still combats anti-practices through evolution of the APIs. It could become a consumer win.
I hope someone will officially propose a law that requires all hardware to be re-programmable by its owner (i.e. hardware should come with a fully documented and accessible interface); one good reason for this is the reduction of e-waste.
I'm a libertarian. I believe in personal choice and freedom. But you have tons of freedom here.
Instead of using an OS (iOS in this case) with 25% market share that forces you to go through their AppStore, you can choose to use Android (which has 75% market share) and side load apps to your hearts content.
You don't get to choose if you're a developer. For mobile apps a prerequisite for success is to have an app for both Android (via the Play Store) and iOS. With iOS you're forced to deal with Apple. With Android you're forced to deal with Google.
Yeah, you can opt to target only one of them, but you're (usually) going to get out competed by a company that targets both.
There are plenty of indy iOS app developers who won’t go near Android and are doing quite well. I’m sure there are some Android only indy developers making a good living. I just don’t follow that market.
There are plenty of markets and Technologies I won’t touch with a ten foot pole.
Libertarianism is d̵e̵a̵d̵ * slowly dying, because it fails to recognize that corporations can exert a similar amount of oppressive force as governments. Your platform of choice is now your country, and the software that platform runs is your government.
I wouldn't say libertarianism is "dead" but rather is quick to fall prey to logical contradictions justifying totalitarianism, similar to the two prime time political teams.
You're right that there is little difference between a corporation that one is de facto forced to interact with, and a bona fide government. For example, one can easily reframe USG as a corporation that you form a contract with by owning land, renting, or being on a public way. This does not mean that our current society is a libertarian paradise.
Turing completeness shows us the ouroboros of expressivity with programming languages. It's unfortunate people let their guard down in other areas.
Libertarian thought is complex, non-static, and (importantly), non-monolithic. This is especially true for the relationship between people, government, and corporations. The generalizing statements in this thread reject vast swaths of ideas for no reason at all; even ideas that generally agree with the ideas in the thread. My guess is most people hold in their minds a caricature of libertarianism informed either by "that one libertarian guy from college" or social media postings. That's somewhat deserved, but also a shame.
Many people associate the word "libertarian" with right-libertarianism, which is the predominant form of libertarianism in the United States. Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism is right-libertarian.
On the other hand, left-libertarians oppose capitalism while supporting personal property rights. Left-libertarians and right-libertarians find common ground in rejecting authoritarian governments.
Libertarianism comprises a diverse collection of views that aim to advance individual freedom, and anyone who is not an authoritarian is likely to agree with some libertarian principles.
Can a corporation reach into my bank account and take my money via civil forfeiture without a trial? Can a corporation in prison me? Can a corporation break into my house without identifying themselves and shoot me? Can a corporation stop me while driving down the street for “fitting the description”?
I'm an independent app developer too, and I share your frustrations. Sometimes I wish I had the luxury of walking away from the App Store -- but with ~80% of my revenue coming from iOS, I can't do that.
Similarly, I can't give up on owning a Mac because you need one to develop for iOS.
On one hand, it's super annoying whenever Apple rejects an update for some arbitrary reason. But on the other hand, making a living by writing and selling my own apps has been a dream of mine pretty much forever -- and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along.
I feel your pain. I would encourage you to grow and develop your audience on Android. There is a big market there to be tapped, which with some effort could equal or exceed your revenue from Apple. It's much easier to write cross-platform apps now than it was five years ago, thanks to frameworks like Flutter.
Of course, Apple would like to have us all believe that app developers couldn't make a living by writing and selling apps before the Invention of the App Store, and that they have done us all a great favor, one that warrants us paying them 30% of our income.
However, the reality is, this has always been possible. As early as the beginning of the 80s, indy developers made millions writing games for the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the Amiga, and so on. You just had to work with a publisher or distributor, of which there were hundreds and it was a free market. In the 90s millions could be made from DOS and Windows apps in the same way. In the early '00s, it became possible to self-publish on the web and our apps would be indexed and marketed for us by search engines; we didn't even need a publisher, but could still choose to go through one if the value add merited the cost.
So there has been no radical innovation, no Invention that has changed what is possible for us to achieve as app developers. It's arguably a little bit easier to get our apps to market than it used to be, but given how onerous Apple's "guidelines" have become, I'm not even sure that is true. Writing websites serving apps and integrating with checkout engines just isn't that difficult... and most apps still need marketing to succeed because being listed in the App Store is not by itself sufficient.
The only thing that has changed, now that the mobile computing revolution has almost reached saturation point and the majority of screen time by consumers is on mobile devices, is that we are now all forced to publish through a single store on each platform, and we are permitted no alternative if we want to reach our customers. Equally, our customers are permitted no alternative way to obtain our products. There is no competition between publishers on Apple's platform, because there is only one publisher, Apple, by fiat of Apple; and we are now forced to pay a 30% tax, a figure which is not challenged by the usual mechanisms of competition, and supply and demand, which make markets efficient.
> and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along
Isn't that more a result of mobile devices opening up a new market? I agree the app stores made a lot of difference initially when they provided a lot of visibility (ie: free advertising) to small developers, but those days are over aren't they?
> On one hand, it's super annoying whenever Apple rejects an update for some arbitrary reason. But on the other hand, making a living by writing and selling my own apps has been a dream of mine pretty much forever -- and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along.
I wonder how many apps actually are ramen-profitable on the App store. I often think that the dream of becoming rich (or even making a living) through the App store is just a myth perpetuated by Apple to attract developers; and nonsense from a statistical point of view. Do we have any numbers?
Getting out of iOS dev was the best career decision I’ve ever made. My baseline level of stress and frustration has plummeted. I also enjoy using my Samsung Note much more than I ever did any iPhone. It feels like the training wheels have been taken off my phone.
As developers I think we should all do what we can to nurture the open web. It’s the last truly developer friendly platform.
Apple more than anyone is hostile to the web. I still have a recurring iCloud charge I tried to cancel today. But I literally can't as it's not doable on any Apple website. You must use an Apple device or iTunes, neither of which I have.
I agree. There really is nothing more frustrating than spending months working on an app, to get it either rejected on some really minor issue or have to go back and forth with Apple for weeks explaining how things work from a customer and business perspective, constantly on tenterhooks as to whether they will give it the OK nod.
Then you go through the same thing each time you push an update, even for a minor bugfix like amending some foreign language strings, get a different reviewer who hasn't read the case notes (I'm guessing these must exist) and decides to do a deep-dive, or maybe a quick rubberstamp in a matter of hours. It seems like a total lottery from my experience. Maybe they just suddenly added a new clause that requires something being done differently and you aren't up on the latest app store guidelines... It really is so frustrating from a developers mental health perspective.
That's your choice to make, but pretending that developing web apps is all sunshine and lollipops and developing local apps for distribution via an OS vendor's store is fire and brimstone, is not realistic.
I don't know because you started off by making claims about "broken ecosystem".
The App Store may have undesirable qualities for some parties but to claim that it is a "broken ecosystem" just tells me that you're looking to exchange ridiculous hyperbole.
An ecosystem where one reviewer having a bad day can destroy your business meets just any useful definition of broken. And that's not even considering that most of the real money to be made in the app store is fleecing whales with scammy IAP.
It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone. Yes, there is a simulator available which you can run on Mac OS in a VM or on a Hackintosh, but you still will need a real device at the end of the day. Certain features like in-app purchases can only be tested on real devices. Furthermore, the App Review Board has the power to reject your app at any time until you provide them with a demonstration video which must be screen recorded on a real physical device, and on this ridiculous and unnecessary hoop to jump through I am speaking from personal experience.
Of course, you could always have a personal Android device and an iPhone solely for development purposes. Apple tries to force you to own a Mac and at least one iOS device (be it iPhone or iPad) to develop apps for the App Store. This is yet another example of their corporate greed. You can develop Android apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and there's no need for a physical device.
> It's not really practical to develop apps for iOS without owning an iPhone
This applies to all platforms. I wouldn't want to do business with a developer that doesn't own the device they're developing for, we learned that lesson with Blackberry thank you.
$94 million income. RIM was definitely in decline by then. Both the iOS and Android market were very much mature 7 years after the iPhone was introduced.
"At its peak in September 2013, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide."
I never said that they made more money but that the platform was generally better for executives
In 2012 I had a blackberry because clients that had strict security rules (one of them was in the diamonds business) allowed blackberrys but not other smartphones in their offices
>I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices, and the process of installing apps through those stores must be, by law, equally easy and straightforward as through their own stores (i.e., no security warnings or other jank). The law should make illegal restricting developers to any specific payment processor(s), too.
Not the same kind of regulation you describe, but still one that may solve a big chunk of your issues was covered here roughly a month ago[1], In which the EU plans to make those kinds of platforms more transparent, especially concerning bans and sudden refusals. But I see how that may not go far enough.
Thanks for the link, it's great to see the EU regulators starting to tackle these issues with actual regulations. I agree that it does not in its current form go far enough, but it's a good start.
Another shout out for WSL2. Feels good to have real Linux not Apple's kind of close but not quite, plus wide range of hardware to choose from and compatibility with commercial GUI apps.
(a). WSL is just a Linux VM. You can do this on any desktop OS. If you're not using WSL, you can even do it with multiple hypervisors at once if you so wish.
(b). macOS isn't, and has never tried to be, "Linux". It's POSIX.
There's a little more to wsl2 than just a VM. It's lighter and partially integrated. More like a VM running alongside windows instead of on top of windows.
> More like a VM running alongside windows instead of on top of windows.
It's not like that, it literally is that, because to enable WSL2 you end up running Windows itself on top of Hyper-V, and the Linux VM as a parallel VM.
> It's lighter and partially integrated.
I don't know what you think it's "lighter" than - it's a VM running on Hyper-V.
Given that with WSL/Hyper-V you'll be running Windows in a VM permanently, and WSL.. whenever it thinks you need it (maybe always too?) while Vbox you can just stop when you wish, it seems weird to refer to one as "lighter".
They're very different approaches with different tradeoffs for each.
Yes it's fantastic. Even the small things make a difference - for example, it's really nice to be able to use the same package manager on my local machine as I use on my Google Cloud servers, on which I'm running Ubuntu, instead of having to use brew. I can use GNU variants of CLI utilities like ps, head etc. rather than the quirky BSD variants found on Mac OS X. iTerm2 was binding me to Mac OS for a while, but Windows Terminal Preview is getting quite good, and IntelliJ itself has a very good built-in terminal that works well with WSL2.
This is off-topic, but your comment on your user base caught my attention.
Do you think Android app development can be monetarily worth the time investment for individual developers who would be just starting out?
I made two apps years ago and greatly enjoyed it, much more than any development I've done since. At that time, the markets were dominated by the big players. Only the big apps made any $$. Is that still the case making individual development a hobby with the occasional bit of $$?
Absolutely, yes, but if you are writing your own apps rather than being paid to write apps for other people, there's a strong luck element as with any entrepreneurial activity. I have six apps out right now, of which just one accounts for 90% of my revenue. Rather than setting out to write apps, I think it's better to think about an app as merely a vehicle to deliver a service, a product, some unit of customer value, from you to your customers. If you have something to offer that is of high value, you can definitely make a lot of money from an app. If you don't, no matter how well designed and built the app is, it is likely to fail.
Since being apartment-bound due to COVID, I've switched to doing most of my development on my desktop machine, so there hasn't been any urgent need for me to have a new laptop. I still have my late-2013 MBP, one of the last non-Butterfly / non-Touchbar laptops Apple made, which I use on rare occasions.
I've looked at the Windows laptops extensively though, and will likely get a ThinkPad X1 Extreme G2 or G3, or a Dell XPS 15, when the time comes. They both seem very good, with superior keyboards, displays, performance, and value compared to Apple's current lineup.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of those Linux laptops, and will definitely check them out. I hadn't seen the Zephyrus G14 either. How great to have so many choices!
Their fees are not so high as to be extortionate. They're not close to being deserving of that hyperbolic label.
The Apple and Google fees are a dramatic improvement over the model that they gradually replaced over the past decade.
Want to get on a retail shelf? Nope, you can't. One in a zillion odds you find someone to publish your box to retail - congratulations, now you get to keep less than 20% of the sale price.
If Apple's fees were 1/2 what they are, developers would be saying exactly the same thing about them. That's because the fees will always be too high unless they're close to zero, and in that scenario Apple is carrying an unfair burden.
And if you forcibly open up more app store competition, and then Apple decides to drop their fees below other competitors, it'll kill the store competition and Apple can sustain that indefinitely thanks to their device margins. They don't need to make money on the market. Then everyone will bitch about that being unfair competition, despite Apple serving up the low fees that were demanded. And on the complaining will go forever until we have a hyper regulated market with pricing set by bureaucrats. Why? Because Apple is really big, that's the real reason why. People hate big corporations almost universally, Apple is in the can do no right group; no matter what they do, a lot of people will bitch about their choices. The end result will be massive, stifling regulation, which everyone will then bitch about the consequences of.
> now I actually make more on Android. The Google Play review process is a breeze compared to Apple's laborious and stifling rules (although it is not perfect either by any means), and at some point, it's just not worth the hassle.
You should be making more on Android, it's a larger market. It's good that that former imbalance has corrected itself. Fortunately you're not entitled to an easy review process. It's a great thing that Apple adds friction to their store. It's their market, they should be able to set the rules. If it's not worth the hassle, then it's not worth the hassle, you've solved your own problem: give up on the Apple store.
I don’t know where to start with this. Antitrust is specifically about big corporations, that’s the whole point. We treat them differently. You’re saying if the market was opened up, prices would drop due to competition, so that means it shouldn’t be opened up? You think Apple’s in a situation where it has an unfair burden despite being one of the largest companies in the world?
> [..] and its monopolistic anti-competitive practices,
iOS owns 25% of the market. How is that a monopoly? You might not like their policies, but as you mention, you have a choice to move to a competitor with a vastly larger market share.
> I'm better off turning to the Play Store or one of the many other app stores that can be used on Android devices.
Doesn't this demonstrate that the Apple AppStore isn't a monopoly? That you have a clear alternative with 74% market share.
> I'd like to see regulation that forces Apple and Google to allow any and all app stores on their devices,
...but why would they do that? There is healthy market competition between Apple and Google. I'm old, so I remember when Windows dominated everything. That was 2007 (or '98 if you wanna talk IE anti-trust case). 13 years later and Microsoft has 0 market share in mobile devices. In another 13 years it is likely a new competitor could supplant the Google and Apple dominance.
“ A cartel is an organization created from a formal agreement between a group of producers of a good or service to regulate supply in order to regulate or manipulate prices. In other words, a cartel is a collection of otherwise independent businesses or countries that act together as if they were a single producer and thus can fix prices for the goods they produce and the services they render, without competition.”
Do you have any evidence that Apple and Google are conspiring illegally to set prices? Are they talking to each other to agree on price?
I would love to see a similar list for de-Apple-ing. Apple's anticompetitive and monopolistic practices with the App Store, the terrible direction MacBooks have taken, its price gouging on hardware... the list goes on. Google is saintly by comparison.
Apologies for running slightly off topic, but there's another way to look at this. The fact that Apple services like FaceTime and iMessage are restricted to Apple hardware means that those of us who haven't bought into this ecosystem encounter a fair amount of pressure to do so. So I think Apple's "saintly" behaviour is also self-serving.
You can avoid Apple by not using anything from Apple. Done.
That's how I lived for most of life when I still used Windows. Not one encounter with Apple. Now, I haven't used anything from Microsoft for 10 years until they bought GitHub.
But you'll always be feeding Google just by visiting completely unrelated third-party websites.
Google (like Facebook) fits most definitions of cancer, creeping into places where it doesn't belong.
Apple has done a lot of good for users and has amazing products, and they have yet to annoy me as much as Microsoft did and Google do, so I will continue to be a user and a developer for their platforms.
