I’m linking to The Verge, since the original FT article is locked behind a paywall.
The European Commission will issue antitrust charges against Apple over concerns about the company’s App Store practices, according to a report from the Financial Times. The commission has been investigating whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies, following an initial complaint from Spotify back in 2019 over Apple’s 30 percent cut on subscriptions.
The European Commission opened up two antitrust investigations into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices last year, and the Financial Times only mentions upcoming charges on the App Store case. It’s not clear yet what action will be taken.
I’m glad both the US and EU are turning up the heat under Apple (and the other major technology companies), since their immense market power and clear-cut cases of abuse have to end. I am a strict proponent of doing what the United States used to be quite good at, and that’s breaking Apple and Google up into smaller companies forced to compete with one another and the rest of the market. The US has done it countless times before, and they should do it again.
In this specific case, Apple should be divided up into Mac hardware, mobile hardware, software (macOS, iOS, and applications), and services. This would breath immense life into the market, and would create countless opportunities for others to come in and compete. The US has taken similar actions with railroads, oil, airplanes, and telecommunications, and the technology market should be no different.
As it is politicians are way too corrupt to even consider breaking up Apple, as long as they get their bribe money.
I’m not one to defend politicians, but it strikes me there’s some nuance here. I’m also not an economist, but I imagine that breaking a company up for the sake of competition is considered bad for the company but good for consumers and also good for the market as a whole (i.e. good for other companies). The economic sum of many smaller competing companies is greater than that of a single risk-averse monolith.
However, politicians also have to consider the benefit a company brings to the country’s economy. If US politicians break up Apple at this point in time, they’re likely inviting in strong competition from non-US companies, which could harm US citizens, even while it benefits consumers and the market as a whole.
I’m sure that’s why the EU has been more aggressive recently when it comes to sanctioning tech monopolies, at least compared to the US authorities.
flypig,
Yes, that’s generally true. Like kragil, I think politicians are often too corrupt to do the right in a timely manor. Too often they’ll ignore problems until decades later when things are much worse and reparations become practically impossible.
That’s an interesting point. And it’s quite possible this has played a role in antitrust prosecution in the past. Ie: “Yes we know these companies are abusing their power, but they’re US companies and what’s good for them is good for us”.
On the other hand these oligopolies inevitably displace trillions of dollars from going to other US companies (not to mention all the missing tax revenue because our biggest corporations aren’t paying their fair share of taxes). Who’s to say we wouldn’t have a more competitive standing in the world if we had more competition here in the US? The fact that we’ve allowed our top corporations to make monopoly tactics so integral to their business models could actually be detrimental on the world stage. Maybe our trade deficit is partly because our top companies have focused so heavily on strategies that chop down the competition from a position of power rather than by competing on a fair playing field.
As a consumer, I’d rather rather have world trade determined by merit than strong-arming, but I’m actually very curious what impact these strategies have on world trade.
I believe it’s because EU governments are more independent whereas US governments and corporations are far more symbiotically intertwined with money and people going through the revolving door.
Yes, I agree (with what you say in general here, in fact). But it must be a very hard call to make, when balancing tangible benefits happening right now (successful Apple creating jobs and tax revenue) vs. some hypothetical future in which increased competition makes the US more competitive and successful overall.
I’m not saying breaking up Apple is the wrong move, just that from the narrow perspective of US policy, I wouldn’t want to be the person making the call.
I fully agree. Even from the perspective of a consumer it’s still hard to be objective about this though. Except in the really obvious cases (e.g. where there’s explicit price-fixing) the benefit to consumers of breaking up an oligopoly is as a secondary effect of there being a more competitive market. That can feel very intangible. If I were an Apple user, I’d find it hard to accept the intangible benefits of breaking Apple up.
Possibly. EU policymakers are primarily interested in benefiting the EU (it’s their mandate after all). Corruption aside, are you really saying that US policymakers are routinely acting against the interests of US citizens?
flypig,
We seem to agree quite broadly. I would note that our top corporations often pay a fraction of the taxes that the rest of us pay.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2019/0915/1075817-apple-tax-appeal-explained/
Some people defend this behavior saying they should pay as little tax as they can, but I would argue that these tax avoiding giants are directly responsible for our national debt crisis. The US actually had a balanced budget in the 90s under Clinton, but we’ve added so many corporate tax cuts and loopholes that it’s practically impossible to balanced the budget despite huge gains in corporate profits and productivity. It will inevitably be regular people & businesses like you and I who will end up having to pay off the debt caused by tax cuts for big business. Grr.
I’m not very keen on breaking up companies either. No matter how you cut it it’s going to be messy and nobody’s going to be happy. This is why I think it’s so crucial to stop fundamentally anti-competitive businesses practices BEFORE they become business as usual. Once the competition is dead, it is no longer enough just to stop the abuse so many years after the fact, there’s decades of lost business and opportunities that can never be recovered. By the time we end up at this point there’s no good reparation for lost time. New players introduced today will be weak and have to start from scratch against all-powerful incumbents. Even if anti-competitive practices were kept in check going forwards (and we’ve got a terrible track record doing this), incumbents already have 100% of the momentum in their favor. I think it will be extremely difficult to truly restore competition without being extremely unfair to the victors. This would have been easy and fair to nip in the bud decades ago, but now that we’re here everything we do is going to be unpopular and nobody wants to touch this politically. Alas if we do nothing, it’s at the demise of competition.
IMHO the very least we should do is stop all anti-competitive business practices that are happening today. Big businesses won’t like it, but leveling the playing field is justified.
That’s a good question. I think that in many cases the answer is yes. A party that favors gerrymandering is taking actions to deliberately subvert democracy, for example.
Yes, but this only applies to companies which have a dominant position in the market (80%-90%). Apple is nowhere close to those numbers. Windows and Android, in the EU, have those numbers though.
Having a small vertically integrated company, as opposed to the industry standard horizontal integration, is good for competition.
This entire thing doesn’t make any sense. Breaking up Apple would be a gift to their competitors more then about fostering competition.
I’m guessing it has everything to do with the EU trying to claw back some marketshare for EU companies then anything else. Thanks to 20 years of idiots in the White House who have been all in on US imperialism.
The EU has been interested in establishing a tech base in Europe to reduce reliance on the US recently, and hobbling US tech companies is the first thing which needs to happen. Apple is a good, soft target because they have lots of cash, and legions of jealous geeks who don’t understand the law or ecomonics ready to throw them under the bus.
The EU sanctions US companies to give EU companies an advantage in the EU in order for them to establish a user base, and EU citizens can escape the US surveillance state. Not that the surveillance state matters that much aside from optics since countries have information sharing agreements in place.
Geopolitics in action.
The European Commission takes a different view. It states that “If a company has a market share of less than 40%, it is unlikely to be dominant” [1], which implies that a company with more than 60% market share could be considered dominant. The Commission also says that market share is only a first indication of dominance, and that in practice it takes other factors into account, such as whether a company has enough influence to introduce barriers to other companies entering the market.
It’s hard to argue that Apple doesn’t have this kind of influence, for example in the app space (see for example the way Apple has the power to impact Facebook’s advertising revenue by blocking tracking). Just to be clear, I’m not claiming Apple is a monopoly, or even that it has a dominant position, but it’s hard to argue it’s not an influential player.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/procedures_102_en.html
Too late to edit it, but obviously that should have read “a company with more than 40% market share could be considered dominant”
This is a mischaracterization. Apple isn’t flat-out blocking Facebook’s ability to track users across iOS apps; rather it now prompts users to explicitly opt in to tracking for each app that wishes to do so. Since iOS 10 it’s been possible to disable the device IDFA globally but doing so required the know-how to drill down several levels of settings menus. Now it’s front-and-center and more flexible to boot.
This is how Apple builds trust and loyalty with its customers. The Facebook/Google adtech duopoly can continue operating its skeevy data hoarding and weaponization services on iOS, only now Apple is shining a big bright light on it. It’s telling when Zuckerberg throws a public tantrum over consumers being better informed and more empowered in the choices they make.
Note that “which market” (and how “market” is defined) is also a major cause of confusion.
Given that it’s unreasonable to expect consumers to replace their smartphone (hardware, OS, ..) just to be able to use a different app; it’s reasonable to say that Apple has about 100% of the “Apps for iOS retailing” market (and that apps for Android are a completely separate and unrelated market). In that case; it would also be reasonable to ask if Apple is abusing their “100% of iOS app retail” market share to gain an unfair competitive advantage (between their own apps for iOS and competing 3rd party apps for iOS).
Brendan,
+1, great points.
Just because I buy hardware X or Y doesn’t mean I want to be permanently tethered to ether app store. If it weren’t for owner restrictions, I am pretty confident that multi-platform stores could actually be popular with both consumers and developers. And not only that, but once multi platform stores become commercially viable, it could actually open the market to platform Z to join their app store. Imagine that!
PS. I’ve substituted letters in place of company names due to company names being politically loaded landmines apparently, haha.
Again, I really don’t get why Apple antitrust needs to happen. It’s trivial to avoid Apple and it’s ecosystem, it’s not like it’s the only option or forcibly intruding into your lives like it’s Standard Oil or Facebook.
People are buying Apple because they /want/ their phone and the laptop to work together in a coherent manner; developing them together also makes sense because it’s all the same stack. That, and. I find it odd we’re punishing one of the few technology companies that actually seem to put effort into engineering.
What I’m also concerned about is the antitrust grift possibility: i.e IBM antitrust leading to the commercialization of software, the simultaneous slap on the wrist but psychological scarring of Microsoft, or the obvious scam of the AT&T breakup.
DefineDecision,
Apple are quite aggressive at controlling markets actually. Keep in mind that in any antitrust scenario it’s not about denying customers the right to buy the monopoly products if they choose, it’s about calling out abusers when they use their dominant position to intentionally harm competition. Consider the MS antitrust case with internet explorer. MS had never forced users to use IE, in fact is was pretty easy to change. The case was largely about market manipulations happening behind the scenes, which blocked competing software from being installed by default. Apple’s market restrictions clearly go way past anything microsoft was doing. When it comes to the app store ecosystem, apple are nothing short of dictators. They use cryptographic controls to enforce compliance even after sale such that owners are unable to install competing app stores or any software from rival sources. Furthermore they’ve been known to force companies to give apple a cut of transactions outside of the app store even for things like online classes. Apple doesn’t do any work to earn that, it’s more like a tax and a good chunk of apple’s revenues have come from extorting the market like this.
I’m sure it will be a slap on the wrist compared to the trillions apple made rendering competing stores non-viable over decades. If regulators don’t do anything about this kind behavior (not just apple but everywhere), I believe it spells the end of free market competition as we know it. (I appreciate the irony in using regulation to protect free markets, but monopolies and oligopolies are probably not what Adam Smith had in mind for capitalism.) It is imperative that we do our best to keep competition healthy, otherwise industries can and will devolve into corporate monarchies. The entrepreneurial opportunities for small companies to succeed are closing. Increasingly everything we do is under the control of a shrinking set of increasingly dominant corporations. This consolidation into oligopolies has been undeniable over my lifetime and if we do nothing about it, it will keep getting worse in our children’s lifetimes.
Which markets does Apple control?
What dominant position does Apple have?
Oh no. Apple, a company with no monopoly, is exercising discretion over its own creations. The horror!
that guy,
You obviously haven’t taken a look at the data lately.
https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-iphone-record-sales-us-december-2020_id129957
This is US market share, but for better or worse this is the market that most affects me.
Personally I’m not against apple having a say about what goes into the app store, but blocking competing stores poses very serious antitrust issues. Companies should legally loose all rights to control hardware once it’s been sold. Historically the law sides with owners having the right to do what they want with their property, but thanks to modern crypto manufacturers have giving themselves privileges that usurp property rights away from owners who would have traditionally been legally entitled to do what they want, including the use of competing services. We’re creating a world where corporations are able to dictate what owners can do and in effect control secondary market such as for software. This isn’t my opinion, this is factually what apple have been doing.
I don’t think there’s any country in the world other than Japan where iOS leads decisively over Android (whether that’s due to pricing, retail marketing, cultural/historical aversion or lack of exposure to non-Microsoft/Google platforms, or a combination of all the above). So yes, in a a single geographic product category you can argue that Apple has the upper hand, but everywhere else it has always been a minority.
That should’ve been “any other country in the world except Japan.” Gomen.
that guy,
Well then I’m glad we can agree apple has the upper hand in some markets.
We can’t have quality engineering now can we? We can’t have nice things, and we have to make due with the broken sh*t everyone is pushing.
Think of the poor consultants. For the love of god, won’t someone think of the consultants who wouldn’t be able to charge exorbitant per hour fees if software actually worked! 8P
This actually worked, and the telecommunications act in the ’90s which forced established telcos to rent access to others worked as well. However, right-wing administrations sided with corporations rather then the people and allowed everything to backslide into the monopolist hell telecommunications is today.
As a consumer of phones that might be true, but as an app developer that’s a much harder argument to make. If I want to sell mobile apps, the only realistic options are via the Apple Store or Google Play, so it’s an effective duopoly. I’m not even sure whether selling just via Google Play alone is considered viable for many app developers.
flypig,
I agree. I’d like to add that even as a phone consumer this 2 platform duopoly isn’t great. In most markets we recognize that a duopoly is not considered healthy competition. It’s the same reason that bipartisan politics suck. we’re not one dimensional people, take down the barriers to more competition and give us more choices!
Thom, unlike the rest of so-called Big Tech, Apple does not have a monopoly in any market, and its vertically integrated strategy is what sets it apart from all of the actual monopolists or duopolists that it competes with in their respective locked-up markets: desktop processors (Intel and AMD), desktop graphics (Nvidia and AMD), mobile hardware (Qualcomm and Samsung), desktop OS (Microsoft), mobile OS (Google), web search (Google), social networks (Facebook), productivity software (Microsoft and Google), and creative software (Adobe). Breaking up Apple the way you propose would be the same as killing the company and making all of those markets even less competitive in its absence. Even the music streaming business would essentially become a Swedish one-man show without a competing Apple service.
One more monopoly: web browsers (Google)
Spot on — Apple is “defined” by being vertically integrated, so the poster’s assertion that Apple “should be broken up” into separate hardware, software, os, etc. separate companies is completely nonsensical, and of course equates to “killing the company” as ‘that guy’ comments.
Apple is in no way a monopoly nor acting as such. It has established its own proprietary platform and is entitled to have its own rules, and yes, it can make unfriendly/strict/restrictive rules as it sees fit. Apple might be unpopular for doing so, but parties choosing to participate on the platform don’t have to do so, and can go elsewhere. Apple is not a public utility, and governments or competitors have no right to falsely assert that it is, and thus should be regulated. The majority of computers, phones and tablets sold in the marketplace are not Apple. Apple participates in an open marketplace, it is not “the marketplace”.
I don’t understand the whole Apple hate either. Apple’s marketshare is even smaller in Europe then the US, which makes even less sense.
Maybe if Apple wasn’t a successful company with large margins the story would be different. That is the only thing I can think of. They should be less successful.
Flatland_Spider,
I don’t think that captures the opposing view fairly. It’s not Apple hate at all but genuine concern over the damage their business practices are doing to competition. I’m sure there’s some disagreement over whether Apple is a monopoly, but Apple doesn’t need to be a monopoly to abuse it’s position. I think that we should acknowledge that duopolies and oligopolies are fundamentally broken markets too.
Is this some bizarro David and Goliath analogy where the monopolists are the victims? Apple’s ability to damage competitors and consumers is inherently limited by the fact that it’s a minority player in every market where it competes.
that guy,
That’s factually wrong.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-share/
And in any case your David and Goliath analogy is a misleading characterization of the duopoly that we have. It’s really more like David going up against two Goliathes.
Apple has a monopoly on exactly nothing.
10% of people buy Macs, 47%(US)/20%(EU) buy iPhones. I don’t have numbers for the other things, but I’m going to say the numbers are insignificant next to Google Workspaces, MS Office 365, and any other services. Windows is the dominant platform, and it’s numbers dwarf Apple in every category.
Breaking up Apple would be a gift to the competitors who could increase their marketshare even more.
This entire thing makes no sense whatsoever in the sense of antitrust. Apple is a bit player in all of the markets they compete in. They just happen to have higher margins.
“In this specific case, Apple should be divided up into Mac hardware, mobile hardware, software (macOS, iOS, and applications), and services. This would breath immense life into the market, and would create countless opportunities for others to come in and compete. “
This sort of anti-customer nonsense is where tech Neo-liberalism leads you, combined with a pitifully shallow understanding of the economic theory and history of monopolies. The desire by a very small, but ridiculously loud and vocal, minority of techie tinkerers to reshape the tech product environment so that their desire to tinker can be satisfied even if that means a collapse in the quality of product experience for literally hundreds of millions of people is actually quite odious.
If you want to understand what the sort of unintegrated tech product system, where the end user is forced to be the system integrator, actually delivers then have a look at this Twitter thread (via Threadripper for readability)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1382355450050580486.html
The point to take from this Twitter thread is not that the guy made some mistakes when ordering a new PC but that the way the PC system works allowed someone to make such mistakes. You shouldn’t require the skills of a motor mechanic to reliably buy, and operate, an automobile, instead automobiles should be designed and sold in a such a way so that anybody can buy one, turn it on and drive. The same goes for computing devices whatever their form factor.
Two crucial points:
Apple does not have a monopoly in any product market.
Apple products are hugely popular with hundreds of millions of people, can sell in huge quantities at premium prices, and generate intense consumer loyalty, precisely because Apple products are deeply integrated, precisely because Apple controls it all, from silicon to software, which means the customer experience is (except for the tiny techie cult) superb. Not problem free. but way, way better than anything unintegrated product systems can deliver.
What really drives techie hostility to Apple is the fear generated by a world of tech products that doesn’t need techies.
What?! You mean there are people who don’t want to piss away countless hours of their lives obsessing over individual hardware components (that they might have to install themselves), tracking down and continuously maintaining their respective drivers, tweaking every last imaginable setting just so, and navigating a nightmarish computing funhouse where blown-up mobile UIs and half-baked 90s desktop UIs live side by side in unholy matrimony, all powered by a noisy dust magnet that doubles as a space heater? Pfft, dorks. My RGB LEDs laugh at your two-tone iMac.
Strossen,
I couldn’t get through the whole thing because he was way too melodramatic. I do appreciate the potential for confusion, and I’m not trying to victim blame here, but he admitted that he didn’t know what he needed in terms of specs and didn’t know the difference between hard drives and ssds, or that he needed wifi adapter, etc. IMHO he should have called sales instead of trying to order a system haphazardly. While a lot of companies aren’t known for the best customer support, it’s hard to fault dell in this case because it sounds like he actually got the system he ordered and he waited until the return period had passed. I also think he was leaving out details because a two week warranty period strongly suggests that he bought a used/refurb system, which makes it that much more important for him to double check everything and act quickly, which he admits that he didn’t do.
I can still sympathize with him though; he probably feels the way I did when I bought my first car – you learn an awful lot in hindsight. The bumper to bumper warranty the salesman is selling means squat if it’s not in writing, I still have gripes about that, so if this man holds gripes against dell or even all PCs until he dies, it would be understandable, haha 🙂
Antitrust laws don’t prescribe specific percentages and there isn’t a full consensus about when antitrust should kick in. Antitrust isn’t just balancing the field for those at the top, but also for those at the bottom. So both members of a duopoly should be culpable for their roles in stiffing competition to the extent to which they’ve stiffed it.
As to the second point, great. But it’s not a valid defense for anti-competitive behavior. Just imagine if microsoft, att, etc used that defense. It doesn’t make up for a company’s anti-competitive actions undertaken to remove consumer choices.
The fact that the current state of buying a supposedly cutting-edge high-end “pro” Windows workstation requires seeking the advice of a salesperson to decide whether to have an ancient and agonizingly slow spinning hard drive, a less-ancient but still slow SATA SSD, or an actual modern NVMe SSD — plus the fact that in 20-fucking-21 Wi-Fi is still sold as an option — speaks to how unbelievably cheap, out of touch, and stuck in its ways the Wintel market is and forever will be. Same reason why it’ll probably be another decade or so before Windows laptop vendors finally shed USB-A ports like they eventually did serial and PS/2 ports long after the rest of the world had moved on.
that guy,
I deliberately bought my current computer with 2 spinning hard drives to do raid, they’re still great for backups and are sometimes even preferable to SSDs because they’re less likely to die at the same time in a raid configuration. They aren’t for everyone, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong this option.
My computer doesn’t have WiFi, I have no interest and no need for it. Sure some people may want wifi, but it’s still very common for desktops to be wired physically. He said he purchased a professional business machine, I’d wager that the vast majority of business desktop computers remain permanently wired full time, which is appropriate given their intended use case.
Not for nothing, but I went to the dell website just now to spot check 30 listings (before getting bored) and every single one of the consumer desktops includes Wifi by default. Nothing to add! And every single desktop made solid state drives available either by default or as an option. Furthermore dell recommended solid state in every case (see screen shot):
https://i.postimg.cc/657kyfh1/screenshot.png
Not only that, but there’s a clear “Help Me Choose” link which describes the drive type and capacity options in layman’s terms.
Under the professional desktop listings, I estimate maybe 1/3rd include Wifi, but before you resume finger pointing, even these desktops *explicitly* say “No Wireless LAN Card”, which strongly suggests that it won’t support Wifi (see screen shot).
https://i.postimg.cc/RCjW3XBW/screenshot2.png
I don’t have any vested interest in painting dell in a good light, but on close inspection it actually seems that dell’s website is doing a pretty good job of indicating what you’re buying.
In any case I get the very distinct feeling you’re predetermined to find dell guilty of anything regardless of what the facts are. It is your prerogative to hold that opinion, but you should know that it comes across as awfully biased.
Personally I like to see both. I still need USB-A often and if it weren’t present I’d have to use dongle’s which sucks much worse than just having USB-A ports built in.
As backups or secondary storage sure, but under no circumstances are spinning hard drives acceptable as primary drives in any modern desktop computer made in the last five years, period, much less in ones marketed as high-performance pro workstations. What a joke.
Sorry but words matter, and “wireless LAN card” is just IT dork jargon that no one in the real world understands nor cares to. No one sits in a café and asks “What is your wireless LAN password,” do they? Then why the hell can’t Dell just use the word “Wi-Fi” and be done with it? What is the point of referring to it as a LAN card like we’re still living in an era of dial-up modems? What decade do these people live in?
that guy,
Great, it sounds like you agree with Dell’s recommendation, so this is much ado about nothing.
I think it’s fairly common and clear. Again much ado about nothing.
It’s the same decade when the maximum ram you can get with the latest imac is 16GB shared and the maximum number of cores are 8 with 4 high performance cores.
“Apple should be divided up into Mac hardware, mobile hardware, software (macOS, iOS, and applications), and services.”
How does any of the first 3 categories make any sense in the context of this story, or the wider reality? Apple don’t have a monopoly position in the PC hardware market, or the mobile hardware market, or in any software markets; the EU Antitrust case against Apple is solely based around App Store and Apple Pay practices (services).
The company might be wildly profitable in terms of hardware sales, but that doesn’t make it monopolistic in those markets.
It’s the incredible lack of deep thinking combined with an utter inability to learn from the history of the PC era that is so wearisome about the techie free marketeers and their tiresome ideological myopia about the modern App Store system.
Let’s think through this in simple steps.
OK Apple’s gate keeping role in the App Store is ended by some sort of external legal decision.
What next?
Presumably the thinking (if one can call it that) of the tech free marketeers is that alternative app stores and app distribution systems would spring up in a newly freed market. What tangible benefits these new app sources, free of Apple’s ‘monopoly’ control, would deliver to the mass of existing customer beyond what the Apple App Store already delivers is not clear but’s let press on.
These new non-Apple app stores – are they licensed in some way? And if so by whom? Apple? If so what’s the point? What criteria would Apple use to issue and rescind app store licenses? Who would set that criteria? Apple? Would Apple have some sort of kill switch for third party app stores in case of abuse? It all get’s pretty messy pretty quickly and any sort of regulated global app store ecosystem would inevitably end up being policed by Apple. If so what’s the point?
OK forget regulating the newly ‘freed’ app store ecosystem, let’s just remove restrictions and give the consumer free choice. Let the market decide. End users can download and install apps from anywhere, from anyone, via any mechanism. Total freedom. What next. What do think would happen?
I tell you what would happen – the predators would come a calling.
A great big juicy billion device ecosystem where end users have become complacent and relaxed about installing apps, and making payments via their devices, and carrying a tracking recording device in their pocket, because of Apple’s previous oversight will attract the scammers, and crooks and extorters in their hundred of thousands. Anybody who doubts that is a naive fool.
What would happen is that people will see some amazing deal being offered on some website, ‘just click this link and install our app’, what could go wrong?
A reminder : ‘You should be free to do whatever you want with your device’ also means any developer is free to do whatever they want with your device (if they can get you to tap OK a few times).
I think I would agree to this more if Apple were doing a better job of this: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-scams-fraud-review-enforcement-top-grossing-kosta-eleftheriou
The cops fail to catch all the criminals. Only idiots suggest the response should to abolish the police
Wow! I think Apple has a monopoly in length of OSNews conversations as well. Lets break up the conversations into OS, hardware, apps, stores and Cook …. 🙂
I also disagree with a breakup of Apple. The issue is a walled market. Simply un-wall the market. Probably been suggested already. But due to the above monopoly I could not find it.
Iapx432,
I feel like I’ve been calling for this solution for at least a decade now. It seems obvious that owners should have a legally protected right to use competing stores.
I think chances are very thin. Breaking Apple won’t do any good to USA
They SHOULD start with breaking up Microsoft. But what about all the other NON-U.S. based software companies. There are quite a few that do bad things too. Are they next? If not, they should be.
To be honest, I don’t see the big deal behind companies abusing their platforms, hardware, and operating systems to force their own applications, services, and profits even at the expense of limiting consume choice. I find it unfair to expect otherwise.
The real way to allow competition is more operating system and hardware diversity. Unfortunately, that is not happening.
hussam,
It doesn’t follow that prohibiting owners from going to alternative software stores is justified just because there’s a lack of hardware diversity.
Funny you should say that because apple actively penalizes developers that want to sell goods outside of apple’s store AND they block owners from installing them. Many developers do advertise outside of apple’s stores and apple still forces them to go through apple anyways.
We need to be more honest about where fair market prices come from. It’s not “oh this percentage is reasonable”. Real free markets are far more complex than X% equating to competitive markets. Also for consumers price really isn’t the only metric either. It is completely possible for other app stores to beat apple on quality, service, specialization, etc. and in any case no consumers should have to justify themselves to you or apple for choosing a competing app store. Apple should have to compete for it’s app store business, period.
Too late to edit, but the 2nd part was supposed to be a response for Sabon. Chalk it up to too many tabs, haha.