This was a no brainer. Apple wanted 30% (or was it less for subscriptions?) on any business that used apps, no matter if they used apple infrastructure or not.
Just think about it: one company is in practice entitled to 30% of what any other business makes (in any industry)!!
Also, I think apple brought this to themselves by picking a fight with Spotify (on Watch support).
Should add, the ruling is not really about the validity of the 30% fee.
What EU seems to argue is this:
1. Apple is in phone business, Spotify music. So far so good...
2. Then apple wants to get into the music business too. Now they have an unfair advantage since Spotify must pay 30% to apple while apple music "pays" 0%. So apple use their dominance in one area (phones) to get an advantage in a totally different area (music), which is a textbook violation.
Right, the percentage of Apple's cut isn't the key part of this EU case.
Certainly doesn't help that it's the current 30% but it being 15% won't change the fundamental issues being argued - whether Apple is abusing its market power and shutting competitors out of or subjecting them to unfair practices in its iOS ecosystem. E.g. unfairly favoring its own Music app.
I think it's a fairly straightforward case similar to Microsoft's antitrust case for bundling the Internet Explorer in its Windows OS a couple of decades ago. The argument then was that Microsoft favored its own browser and crowded out viable competitors like Netscape. If anything, the case is more obvious here since you can't even install any other music streaming alternatives on your iPhone if it's not in the App Store - in Windows you could download and install another browser (even if most users didn't).
The main difference with Microsoft is that Apple does not have a monopoly in phones like Microsoft had with PCs. Apple phones make up only 13% of the phone market.
Colloquial definitions of monopoly do not matter when it comes to antitrust laws[1]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
--
> Apple phones make up only 13% of the phone market.
Depends on how one defines "monopoly". Back in the late 1990s, one could theoretically install non-Windows OSes like Linux, Unix or even purchase an Apple Mac. But yes, in practice Microsoft commanded the market and abused its market power.
You could argue that users technically have a choice to switch to Android but due to network effect (e.g. your family/friends all use iOS) and lock-in features like iMessage and Facetime, it's often a false choice.
Every time App/Play store fees are discussed, it devolves into unproductive hair-splitting over the word monopoly. The proper term is captive market.
> Captive markets are markets where the potential consumers face a severely limited number of competitive suppliers; their only choices are to purchase what is available or to make no purchase at all
Original article didn’t make that case, or present this side of the EU’s argument.
If that were the EU Commission’s line of thought, it would be wrong on the basis of its presuppositions alone by trying to categorize these two companies into what businesses they are in and screwing up the timeline.
Apple has been in the music business longer than the iPhone has existed, even in prototype form, and longer than Spotify or Beats Electronics existed (whose Beats Music service is the direct predecessor of the subscription component of Apple Music).
As said elsewhere, who was there first is not relevant, whereas having prefered treatment because of your monopoly at any stage is. Some are mentioning the App Store being the root of the monopoly, and that is probably true. But speaking from a legal EU point of view, especially as the EU is stating their case in the streaming music area only, wouldn't the simplest way for Apple to get away with it be to externalize 'enough' Apple Music and to have them pay the same fees as Spotify? Therefore, the only way to restrict anticompetitive practices here would be as others like Epic are doing: by proving the monopoly in enough different domains covered by the App Store? Would the antitrust laws in the US similar, that is proving monopoly has to be done by domain, or would a more global view be possible there?
> As said elsewhere, who was there first is not relevant
You want to go back and re-read the comment I directly replied to where bullet point 1 was the EU (hypothetically at this point) making determinations about who was in what market and laid the foundations for bullet point 2 based on its own flawed presupposition and then tell me that the timeline is irrelevant?
I didn’t point this out to make an argument against the claims that Apple has any sort of claim to monopoly status (or that the EU has any basis for making that claim), but that any legal argument at all made on that foundation would crumble because bad facts make bad law.
> whereas having prefered treatment because of your monopoly at any stage is.
Except Apple does not have market dominance, let alone a monopoly, in Music or Phones.
> Some are mentioning the App Store being the root of the monopoly, and that is probably true.
Not having market dominance, let alone a monopoly, in phones, software, or software retail and distribution, that is actually not true.
They have a monopoly on iPhone features, including the App Store, insofar as the iPhone is researched, developed and sold by Apple as a cohesive product, and it does not have out of the box functionality that Apple does not add themselves. You might as well claim Google has a monopoly on YouTube channels or that Amazon has a monopoly on Whole Foods shelves; more accurately, that Nintendo has a monopoly on the eShop and Sony has a monopoly on the PlayStation Store. It was a bad argument 13 years ago, and it is a bad argument today that doesn’t even pass the sniff test.
> especially as the EU is stating their case in the streaming music area only
Why only streaming music? Spotify was originally an upstart competitor to iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, and the iTunes Music Store was originally a competitor to record stores.
Music itself is part of the larger News and Entertainment industry where ultimately the resource is someone else’s leisure time and you want to be the one to fill it. Spotify knows this; that’s why they experimented with video and they’re huge into podcasts now.
> wouldn't the simplest way for Apple to get away with it be to externalize 'enough' Apple Music and to have them pay the same fees as Spotify?
Why should they have to? Because they have a competitive advantage? Businesses always look to edge out their competitors by accumulating advantages. Spotify was successfully out-competing iTunes, so Apple acquired Beats and folded Beats Music into iTunes and called it Apple Music.
Spotify has almost 5 times the global market share of streaming music as Apple does, and has almost as many EU subscribers as Apple has total subscribers, that is globally, give or take 10 million.
What Spotify is doing here is trying to lower their costs because they have massive overhead in licensing fees, same as everyone else that licenses music. Part of their growth story is exactly being on the iPhone at the right time to capitalize on its growth, and being featured in the App Store. In order to compete, they offer an ad-supported tier from which Apple sees exactly none of that money. I don’t think you can even subscribe to Spotify from within the iPhone app anymore so Apple is still footing the bill for distribution and any money that Apple sees from prior subscriptions is now at the lower 15% rate that all subscription apps see for customers after their first year subscribed.
> Therefore, the only way to restrict anticompetitive practices here would be as others like Epic are doing: by proving the monopoly in enough different domains covered by the App Store? Would the antitrust laws in the US similar, that is proving monopoly has to be done by domain, or would a more global view be possible there?
I don’t know how to parse this. Clarify and I’ll get back to you.
> You might as well claim Google has a monopoly on YouTube channels or that Amazon has a monopoly on Whole Foods shelves; more accurately, that Nintendo has a monopoly on the eShop and Sony has a monopoly on the PlayStation Store. It was a bad argument 13 years ago, and it is a bad argument today that doesn’t even pass the sniff test.
Antitrust law focuses on the restraints of trade. Companies that are minor players in the market have been successfully pursued for antitrust violations, because it does not require a monopoly, or even market dominance. Monopoly law was the origin of antitrust law, but today is merely a subset of it. (For example, bid rigging, market allocation, and price fixing are all antitrust violations.)
Antitrust generally requires a substantial market position, and the use of that market position in one of a number of enumerated anti-competitive manners (the list differs between the U.S. and E.U.). One antitrust violation both the U.S. and E.U. have is the abuse of market position in one market (i.e., mobile devices) to anti-competitively establish market position in a different market (i.e., streaming music).
Apple has approximately 1/3 of the EU market for smartphones, which is a substantial enough market position for a single market position that antitrust concerns come into play. (Legally, the comparison is not Apple vs Android; it's Apple vs Samsung, LG, Huawei, etc.) Note that Samsung, etc., would have similar antitrust concerns if they tried to launch their own streaming music services in the same fashion as Apple did.
Note that if Apple had required an industry-standard fee for processing iOS subscription payments (generally, 2% or less depending on territory), or didn't require Spotify to use iPay, then there wouldn't have been any antitrust issues.
I think it's interesting that Microsoft got into hot water in 2001 for (among other things) including Internet Explorer in Windows, thereby abusing its dominant position in the OS market to dominate the browser market.
Microsoft very sensibly argued that including (and indeed integrating) a web browser was a logical evolution of the modern operating system.
In 2021, Apple (Safari/iOS/macOS) and Google (Chrome/Android/ChromeOS) would presumably agree with Microsoft's position. Mozilla might take issue.
I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft hadn't been dissuaded (somewhat at least) from completely integrating Windows and IE in the early 2000s. Perhaps Windows would be a lot closer to ChromeOS. And I wonder if Microsoft would have been more competitive with Google, Apple, and other companies if they hadn't been the target of antitrust action.
> Now they have an unfair advantage since Spotify must pay 30% to apple while apple music "pays" 0%.
I think this does not account for the opportunity cost. If Apple Music competes with Spotify, then Apple Music implicitly pays the 30% fee of the next best alternative. If Spotify operates at a loss with the fee, and Apple Music is otherwise an identical business, then Apple should prefer Spotify - it makes more money this way. The fee is basically irrelevant.
That ignores the 'operate at a loss to kill competition then jack up prices/lower quality' strategy that the EU is directly trying to fight here. It's a common trope; Monopolies are great for the consumer; until they aren't held accountable.
That’s good for internal bookkeeping but it’s not enough to prevent the unfair advantage.
Take this example: Apple Music “pays” 30% to parent Apple Corp. That 30% payment cuts into Music’s revenue and now they’re operating at a 25% loss.
However, that rough calculation still allows parent Apple Corp to consider Music to be profitable, since it’s a net profit for Apple Corp. It’s happy to take the 25% “loss” in the music division because it’s just a paper loss. In cash terms, the Music division increases Apple Corps profit.
The only real way for this division to be fair is to spin Apple Music off into its own company that is not owned by Apple Corp.
I don't think you considered the loss of the 30% from each apple music customer's previous subscription to a competitor. There's no unfair advantage, the maximum profit apple can make by switching a customer away from spotify is spotify's profit.
It's known that music licensing costs are about 50% of gross subscription prices. So a subscription to spotify is about 50% to rightsholders, 30% to apple, and 20% to spotify as their profit. A subscription to Apple music is 50% to rightsholders, and 50% to apple. The additional profit Apple makes from converting a Spotify customer is only 20% (50%-30%), the same profit that any other competitor to Spotify (such as Tidal) would make on a conversion.
Now, Apple could afford to lower their subscription costs to below Spotify's, selling below "cost" at say 75% rate. So they are still "making money" per subscription, but at a price which is unsustainable to Spotify, which seems at first glance unfair and is what I think the comment chain is picturing. But what's happening here is that Apple as a whole is actually making less money on an Apple Music customer (25% margin) than a Spotify customer (30% margin), so it's not profitable or a good business decision versus the alternative. And we don't see apple doing that, at least where I live both subscriptions are the same price. It only works if you are able to drive Spotify out of business, then jack up the prices, but that anticompetitive opportunity to "dump" is possible for Apple in essentially any market due to their vast vast cash reserves.
In my view the potentially anti-trust advantages Apple has over Spotify mainly come from the fact Apple Music is preinstalled and is promoted to iOS users through push notifications.
Disagree. If Apple only had their Music app, they wouldn’t have to maintain the whole ecosystem that comes along with the app store that allows Spotify to exist as an iOS app. Maintaining that system is where the 30% goes. Would anyone then say Apple had an unfair advantage as to who could have a streaming platform on iOS?
Spotify would be free then and are now to make a web based player like youtube or soundcloud.
Strange how Spotify managed to create and distribute their app entirely without Apple's "help" on macOS, but would somehow be incapable of doing the same on iOS.
What if spotify can get 1 customer at $1, but apple can get 2 customers at $0.7, to get $1.4.
Alternatively, if for some reason there's just a single lump of music streaming revenue to be earned, maybe it's still shitty if Apple steals spotify's business but breaks even on the opportunity cost.
With that accounting methodology, between the 30% apple store cut and the 70% music publishers cut, Apple music is left with no revenue whatsoever to fund their service, therefore running it at a 100% loss and thus price dumping which is also illegal.
I think dumping is only illegal in the context of international trade. Not sure of the nuances but operating at a loss certainly isn't illegal in most contexts.
It is technically illegal but thanks to a lack of appetite from antitrust prosecutors to do... well, anything very much combined with a high barrier of proof it's essentially allowed.
But this is an excellent accounting methodology then: Each sub-business should run as a separate business.
It picks my interest: Companies internally run as communist economies, all resources are merged and shared, employees are not individually associated with a revenue because the group is worth more than its sum, on the outer, liberal economy. At what size / on which criteria should a group inside a company be considered an independent product-and-loss entity, in order to avoid supercorporations to make use of monopolistic behaviors? Should a 100-billion-dollars marketing operation inside Apple be allowed to function at a loss if it pumps interest in all of Apple’s other products? Can Apple Music be disguised as a marketing operation instead of as an independent entity?
Whenever a company of significant size branches into another market where it has some unfair advantage thanks to it's dominance other industry it should come under scrutiny.
The reason products like Alexa and the Fire tablet have been so successful for Amazon is basically because they have been able to promote them for free on the worlds largest marketplace and then sell them at a loss offset by the profits generate from other segments of their business like ecommerce and AWS. I've been so underwhelmed by every Amazon product I've ever brought I'm 100% convinced their success in hardware has been almost entirely due to their cannibalistic business practises than their ability to make solid hardware that people want to buy.
This means in basically any market Amazon enters they don't need to make the best product, they just need to undercut and promote their products enough to kill off the competition. Google and Apple can also run this strategy very effectively with Google Search promoting Google products and Apple's hardware/appstore ecosystem promoting then locking users into their own hardware and software.
Since you mentioned that this piques your interest: There is an body of research and literature about this topic. The Theory of the Firm [0] is a good starting point.
In theory and superficially that makes sense, but they are the same company so it wouldn't make a difference in the end. It's not like Spotify can pay itself that 30%.
Let's take a step and ponder wouldn't you find it bizarre to have this sequence of events:
1. Apple creates iPod, and iTunes serves as its music store.
2. Apple creates iPhone, which has an iPod app.
3. Apple introduces App Store so other apps can be used on the iPhone.
4. iPod (Apple Music) competitors emerge.
5. EU says "that's it, Apple can't have iPod anymore on the phone unless iPod (Apple Music) becomes a separate company".
No one (successfully) sued Apple for anti-competitive practices on iPod. Ergo if the iPhone never had an App Store, they'd be allowed to have 100% of the revenue of iTunes, and ban competitors out completely.
By opening the iPhone platform to third parties, EU sees them as another type of entity completely. In effect the EU penalizes the creation of market places, because once you're market place, you lose control over your own products to the government.
Apple didn't invent music players, nor appstores, nor smartphones, nor digital music or music streaming. The entire argument is a red herring.
But even if we take this absurd argument at face value, it's still wrong: third party applications add value to iPhone and make them worth bying. If you could not install games, bank app, etc. On an iphone, iPhones would be useless and noone would buy them in the face of competition. The whole reason Windoes Phone died is that there were no apps. iPhone would simply follow
Third party apps have been dominant on PCs and Macs on the open web for a decade prior to the iPhone. Third party apps such as FB.Connor even Spotify.com still run on the iPhone built on HTML5. Of course, I will concede that the desktop publishing industry and the banking, finance, spreadsheet industries benefited from native computer apps in the decades prior to that.
Counter to the narrative of Windows phone’s failure, why were BlackBerry and Nokia successful despite not having third party apps at the scale iPhone does?
Third party apps add value to the iPhone — you’re right. They can also add confusion, adware, and bundleware if allowed to reign free; a curated, expensive gatekeeper is the cheap way to keep the crappy third party apps out; not a foolproof way, just a cheap way.
> No one (successfully) sued Apple for anti-competitive practices on iPod
Because they never had the market share and power in the music market that they have now on the mobile market that's why. You kind of answered why they are getting sued now yourself.
You're in effect saying "no, EU didn't sue iPhone because it added an App Store to iPhone, it sued iPhone because it was successful".
Is that better? Become successful, get sued? Android has 87% market share, iOS has 13%. That's not even a monopoly.
Of course we can define arbitrary categories like "Apple has monopoly on the iOS market". Which makes the concept of monopoly absolutely nonsensical, because then everyone has a monopoly. I have a monopoly on the slver username on HN, so I guess EU might sue me any moment now.
Also, let's recall EU suing Microsoft and forcing them to offer Windows without a media player. So what did this result in? It resulted in lots of nephews children and grandchildren having to visit their relatives and help them install Windows Media Player. I'm from EU and I want to like all their decisions, I'm team EU. But they're complete idiots sometimes when dealing with tech.
What a moot argument, there's absolutely zero competition in the mobile market. The living proof of that is that the only tariff changes Apple ever made in their whole mobile history was because ... of a real threat of an anti-trust lawsuit. They basically admitting the fact themselves, you can't even make this up.
Yes it's a duopoly and yes they are both abusing their market power. It got so bad that you have to get testimonials of mobile developers anonymously against those two companies because they are fearing retaliation against them (yes that does sound like a mafia).
> The living proof of that is that the only tariff changes Apple ever made in their whole mobile history was because ... of a real threat of an anti-trust lawsuit.
Not only that, this change highlighted the App Store and Play Store cartel[1] that engages in price fixing[2]. Google also dropped their prices to match Apple's, but not any more or less.
Instead of mobile app distribution prices being dictated by the free market, they're dictated by the cartel. Prices have only changed once in a decade, and not in response to the market at all, but by the whims of the app store cartel.
All these laws are not about "monopolies", that is just the wording people commenting use. So, yes the "concept of monopoly" is wrong here, which is why nobody is actually doing that and you are attacking a strawman.
Note: back in the iPod days, iTunes did serve as a music store for the iPod, but you could buy MP3 files from other providers as well, and transfer them to the iPod via iTunes. This whole process didn't "cost" the provider or user any extra.
Now, it's true that iTunes did get significant traction because of convenience for users of iPods, however there were definitely options for other music distributors. In fact, back in those days, I tended to still buy CDs because they were DRM-free and similarly priced, and I could rip the songs at my selected quality settings to transfer to my iPod.
If Apple never had an App Store, then this wouldn't be a problem, true. There would be no "30% cut for almost nothing".
But would people buy as many iPhones if they were restricted to Apple-only services? Some might. I would expect more people would buy into more "open" ecosystems. I could be wrong -- and Apple has every right to shut down their App Store to find out.
> because once you're market place, you lose control over your own products to the government.
This is bog standard anti-trust. Yes, if you become massively successful, in a market, then you are now no longer allowed to do certain things. That is how anti-trust law works.
If you take over a market, or become massively successful, you become a monopoly/duopoly, and have to follow certain laws.
These laws aren't hard to follow though. You just have to allow competitors to use your stuff, and you can't use your market power against them.
>In effect the EU penalizes the creation of market places, because once you're market place, you lose control over your own products to the government.
Operating a marketplace generates billions for Apple, and without the Apple Store I doubt the iPhone would have any value today. This comes with legal duties. Apple can't do whatever with their marketplace, but must compete fairly within it.
That like how startbucks UK pays it's company in a different country a fee for using it's brand, and therefore has no profits in Uk and pays no tax here
The law says that the fees paid for IP in this way have to be plausible. Franchising is a long-established business model and nobody would run a franchise if the franchise fee ate all the profit. So Starbucks' franchise fees are not plausible. Why doesn't HMRC challenge this? I've no idea.
I don't think that can be right. On the surface you're suggesting that if a company worked in a particular area before another company then the first company is entitled to use anti-competitive practices, which clearly isn't true.
I think the main point the (grand?) parent is saying is that "Apple is in the phone business" isn't a reasonable description of Apple. I agree that Apple hosting itself on its own platform is an abuse of market position (especially for something as peripheral as music), but to claim that music/audio isn't a/hasn't been core part of Apple's business model is ridiculous.
Ah, gotcha. Yes, that does make more sense, thanks. But I still don't think it really addresses the second point, which is the crux of the argument as far as I can see.
Exactly, it's time they let others use the phone they built in Shenzhen to listen to music with apps not made by Apple.
There's 0 reason to over tax Spotify as punishment for trying to do it better. The capitalist thing to do would be to allow and enjoy fair competition in a pure and perfect market.
Apple Corp was a company started by the Beatles back in the 1960s. The later Beatles albums were released on Apple Records as well. This Apple was also a source of much legal litigation between the Fab Four and the Apple company being discussed in this post. See:
They have both been successful business ventures and interestingly the original idea for the Beatles' Apple Corp is actually very close to what Cupertino's Apple is today electronics, music and movies and retail:
"On the founding of Apple John Lennon commented: "Our accountant came up and said 'We got this amount of money. Do you want to give it to the government or do something with it?' So we decided to play businessmen for a bit because we've got to run our own affairs now. So we've got this thing called 'Apple' which is going to be records, films, and electronics – which all tie up"
They shouldn't be allowed to run an App Store, and they should probably have their services division peeled away into a separate company.
All of the mega tech monopolies need to be broken up. What business do any of them have being movie studios, advertising firms, car dealerships (Apple?), banks, and fifteen different marketplaces rolled into one? This is absurd.
Tech would be better if neither Apple nor Google ran their app stores, Amazon/Apple/Google weren't in the media business, and Google couldn't run a browser.
Nobody is mad that Apple/Amazon/Netflix/etc are creating competition for banks, movie studios, car dealers, etc.
The complaints about these companies are the specific areas where they hold a dominant position and unfair advantage over other companies. The App Store in the case of Apple/Google, advertising in the case of Google, etc. The areas where these companies have a stranglehold on distribution is the problem.
Amazon and Apple having movie studios and banking aspirations makes competition BETTER, not worse. Literally nobody is mad at Apple for having a credit card or funding movie productions.
Apple has zero control over credit card distribution or automobile purchasing. Why the hell would you want to protect the big banks and lazy old car companies from having to compete with Apple?
The reason you don't want a platform monopoly operating a payment service isn't that they (currently) have a monopoly on payment services. It's that they would leverage the platform monopoly into one, and then there would be less competition in payment services. Prohibiting vertical integration prevents that sort of leveraging without having to micromanage every multinational conglomerate.
The platform company should instead return their profits to the shareholders, some of which will invest them in upstart payment services or movie studios or car dealers. The reason they don't do it this way is that they lose the "advantage" of leveraging the platform monopoly. (There are also perverse tax differences, but that's a different problem.)
It's macromanagement. It's a big clear fault line that regulators can see from outer space, instead of trying to evaluate whether Apple App Store charging Spotify a given percentage is anti-competitive based on a detailed analysis of their cost structure and having to argue about the allocation of fixed costs between business units.
It also has the advantage of creating a de facto limit on entity size so we don't end up with corporations more powerful than elected governments.
And it's not a prohibition on vertical integration whatsoever, only on vertical integration for companies with market power in any market.
> It's a big clear fault line that regulators can see from outer space
Nothing in the world of regulation is a clear fault line. You're just creating different points for regulators and lawyers to fight about. How are you defining "market power in any market?" Is it just if a company gets 20% of a market? 50%? 70%? 90%?
This also gets extremely sticky in markets that are still developing.
Take Saas for example. Mailchimp arguably has "market power" in email marketing (70%). Should they have been allowed to get into the social post scheduling business? Using your argument, you could call that unfair competition for social post schedulers like Buffer, since Mailchimp already holds market power over one area of the marketing stack.
But what if it's more efficient for all businesses to keep their email marketing and social post scheduling in one tool? Are you going to force everybody to be inefficient and use separate tools for everything because you think it's better the for the "social media management Saas" market?
Should that even be a market? How granular are you going to get over what's a market and what's just a product feature? Social post scheduling is both a feature, and a market of companies. This solves nothing and only creates more micromanagement headaches for regulators.
> How are you defining "market power in any market?"
This is already a concept that exists under established antitrust law. It's complicated and ugly and could probably use some reform, but it's also a different part of the equation. "Does this company have market power" is a separate question from what do we do if they do, for which the proposal is to prohibit vertical integration.
> Is it just if a company gets 20% of a market? 50%? 70%? 90%?
Market power has very little to do with what percentage of the market the company holds. For example, in a market with two local ISPs where one has 95% of the market and the other has 5%, they could both have market power because the market is so consolidated that the company with 5% could still be able to dictate terms to customers. On the other hand, a company with 99% market share might not have market power, if barriers to entry are low and any attempt to raise prices would cause new competitors to enter the market, as is the case with e.g. Walmart.
> Mailchimp arguably has "market power" in email marketing (70%). Should they have been allowed to get into the social post scheduling business? Using your argument, you could call that unfair competition for social media management Saas tools like Buffer, since Mailchimp already holds market power over one area of the marketing stack.
I don't see the trouble here. Mailchimp may or may not have market power (I don't know enough about that specific market to evaluate it), but knowing 70% isn't really that informative. If they do have market power then preventing them from leveraging it to destroy Buffer is good. If they don't then they wouldn't be prevented from entering the other market.
> I’m not sure you understand what monopoly means.
Well, you'd best take that up with the EU and the US Department of Justice, then. You might be a little late.
> Nobody is mad
Half the people in this thread are mad. Companies putting up with app store bullshit and extortion are mad. Furthermore, this will only get worse as the mega monopolies extend their reach into more industries and force people to use their rails for everything, taking their pound of flesh with every interaction. Apple customers aren't even your customers in their model, for Christ's sake. Why do they get the monopoly on that? It's beyond evil and makes it hard to survive, let alone thrive.
Having an iPhone, working for one of these companies, or owning their stock shouldn't cloud your judgment as to what's happening to our industry. Open your eyes and see.
>They shouldn't be allowed to run an App Store, and they should probably have their services division peeled away into a separate company.
I think the ship has sailed on App stores. They're just better than the alternative and consumers are used to them. I'd consider them an integral part of the OS.
The problem is the fees. 30% is excessive especially so for in-app purchases where the customer is already acquired. The easiest and cleanest solution is to just cap these to something more reasonable. Something like 5% or maybe CC transaction costs + a couple percent.
> I think the ship has sailed on App stores. They're just better than the alternative and consumers are used to them. I'd consider them an integral part of the OS.
If customers really want app stores then prohibit platform companies from operating them and third parties will do it. But they'll compete with each other instead of abusing a monopoly into high fees and prohibitions on apps that compete with the platform's business interests.
Or if app stores fall out of favor as soon as they're not imposed on everyone by platform monopolies then it disproves your theory that most people independently want them.
30% is industry standard. Spotify takes 50% fee from Anchor; Tencent takes 50% fee in its China Android App Store and owns 48% of Epic Games.
If you mention Tencent fee in Tim Sweeny Twitter you'll get instantly banned.
Amazon's Twitch also takes 50%. But everyone's mad at Apple since they produce products and services everyone buys, even Google engineers mostly use iPhones and Macbooks.
% of revenue shouldn't be a thing. They're offering a service for distributing apps - there should be a standard fee and transaction costs. When I go to get tires on my car they don't charge me based on my income. When I purchase a book they don't charge a percentage of my income. On the app store suddenly you owe them a % of your revenue and you have to use them to get apps on iphone.
By your definition companies like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Epic Games, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, IBM, Stripe, Facebook, Samsung, Adobe etc would all need to be broken up as like Apple they are in multiple markets with similar market shares.
YC itself would need to be broken up given your criteria.
I don't see the problem with separating every platform company from every app store. They can obviously be operated by two separate entities, like Steam on Windows.
I agree with this principle but in this specific case it’s not true because Apple started their music business long before the iPhone and Spotify existed. In fact they started with the iPod and their music business with the iPod is what lead them to invent the iPhone and the AppStore. It’s rich from other music businesses like Spotify to want to benefit from all of the R&D and innovation cost from Apple and the market they created whilst dismissing that in fact they entered the music market with the goal to eat shares from Apple and not the other way around.
starting first does not mean you are not abusing your monopoly.
Another way of looking at this is that a 30% margin is preventing a lot of businesses from happening until Apple do it.
The 30% is less of a concern that the fact that they can shut you down on a whim.
Apple doesn’t get a cut of their advertising revenue, and according to Apple was only paid 15% on subscriptions. With credit card processing fees and other associated costs it’s far from 100% profit.
That argument leads to the logical conclusion that Apple needs to be broken up so their music subsidiary have to pay their app store subsidiary the same 30% as Spotify do. Still not a logical defense.
It’s hardly abuse if Apple was the first to invent an iPod and iTunes and the online music business and then evolved their own products around their own offerings. They decided to let others into their own platform to enrich it, not to crush them. Spotify entered knowing that Apple already had a competing product. Why did they enter and start competing if they thought it was an unfair competition from the start? I find it hard to believe given the history of events. If it was in any way different then perhaps I could understand but to me it feels that Spotify just decided that now is the time to look for avenues to increase their profits and see the AppStore as the first opportunity to attack after never having had a problem before. Only a fool would start a business in a platform which tries to crush them so clearly that was never the case.
EDIT (cannot reply):
So if Apple would basically not have an AppStore for third parties and only distribute their own apps then it would be fair.
If Apple was to not allow other Music apps on their AppStore then it would be fair.
But when Apple allows others to distribute a competing product to Apple on Apple’s own platform for a fee then it is considered unfair?
It is not about who is first, is about fair competition, If Apple is the best then they should not be afraid to compete fair, let other web browsers exist, let alternative stores exist, let free apps show a Patreon link, let apps show the user the information that they have the choice to buy outside the store (defend this please, this information can harm the user somehow or it harms the pockets of some rich guy)
But you could be wrong right? Maybe we should analyze if there is actual any merit for the complaints on Apple or about the tracking on the web instead of inventing some conspiracy.
I would show you the example with Microsoft or Intel, this companies were found guilty and all the US nerds did not complain that EU is anti-american.(they were found guilty in US too)
You know what? The funny thing is that all of FAANG has their international HQs in the EU (Dublin, Ireland) for tax evasion purposes. I’d argue they are more reliant on the EU then.
Tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance is rational. Other EU countries have the ability to lower taxes right? It’s ironic that the EU is suing Apple because Spotify doesn’t want to pay 15% to Apple, yet the same people complaining of that have no problem with Apple attempting to avoid higher costs by having a non-Irish EU headquarters.
Yeah , the Apple tax makes Apple lazy and focus on how to suck even more, also makes some rich dudes richer while government tax goes into research, schools, roads etc.
Apple tax should not exist, you should pay for what you use or have freedom to chose exactly how you can chose web hosting companies and plans.
Nobody thinks of FAANG as EU creations. Even if Nintendo is headquartered in the USA, it’s still considered Japanese. IKEA is Swedish and so on. Where the companies were founded seems to play the largest role in their national identities.
> So if Apple would basically not have an AppStore for third parties and only distribute their own apps then it would be fair.
> If Apple was to not allow other Music apps on their AppStore then it would be fair.
> But when Apple allows others to distribute a competing product to Apple on Apple’s own platform for a fee then it is considered unfair?
> I honestly don’t understand this logic.
I mean, it's kind of textbook vertical monopoly.
Selling Windows is fine - you're competing over who makes the better OS. Selling Internet Explorer is fine - you're competing over who makes the better web browser.
But using Windows to push Internet Explorer is not fine - you're using your unrelated OS superiority to fight off Netscape Navigator.
It's a distorted market because the consumer is induced to go with iTunes over Spotify not because iTunes has the more appealing product, but because Apple makes iPhones. If the exact same software as iTunes was made by a non-Apple company, it wouldn't necessarily compete.
--
And I'm not sure it would be "fair" if AppStore didn't allow music apps, either. With web browsers and app stores, there's a decent case to be made that allowing those apps would compromise the iPhone product/ecosystem as a whole (although I'm personally of the "It's my phone and I demand to be able to install whatever the hell I want on it" philosophy and loathe walled gardens in all forms). Banning music apps simply because they compete with their own product would likely attract Vestager's ire just as well.
They bought out the name rights 8 years after iTunes launched.
That payment was $500 million, but they were printing money from iPod+iTunes at that point (revenues of $9.5 billion in 2006, $10.5 billion in 2007). I'd call it an ongoing headache more than a minefield.
When they started have no bearing. It’s using their power in one market to strongarm others in another.
It’s not about what is fair, it’s about making sure the market is healthy.
Yeah, my stance has always been that companies should exist to:
1. deliver value.
2. capture a fraction of that value.
I think it is pretty clear in most cases that 30% is well above the value Apple is actually delivering with their App Store. It's not like Apple is building the apps for other people. You still have to build the app entirely on your own, the only thing Apple is doing is letting you distribute your app / distributing it for you, which costs pennies. People keep saying "but you wouldn't have devices to distribute your app to without Apple" and while that is true, Apple is already capturing the value for that part of the deal – they're selling the devices to customers. If they were giving away iPhones for free, that would be one thing. But if the only reason you are able to charge 30% is because you've monopolized distribution on a device that the user "owns", that is not ok.
Then there is the dubious value Apple claims to be providing to end-users by "maintaining the quality of the app store", but I don't think this is true anymore. Shit-tier apps get thru every day, and great apps get knocked for arbitrary reasons. Apps are pretty well sandboxed at this point, requiring explicit permission for most worrying features, so I don't really think Apple oversight is needed. Allow 3rd party app stores already.
> I think it is pretty clear in most cases that 30% is well above the value Apple is actually delivering with their App Store.
You’re entitled to your opinion. And maybe it is not valuable to you. But I doubt you even know the costs to run the service so my opinion is that you are speaking from a place of ignorance.
Part of the value of the service is that you don’t have to go and build it yourself. I’m going to bet that you’d die before you built it. How valuable is your life?
> Shit-tier apps get thru every day, and great apps get knocked for arbitrary reasons.
My opinion is this will get much worse. Just because you are a cute tinkerer who just wants to publish the app you made for your grandma doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who can’t wait to get their malware onto the platform that carries the most wealthy consumers.
Haha what are you talking about? Building an app store is... not hard. It's some detail pages and file transfer. That's it. I would definitely not rather die than build one. I actually laughed out loud when I read your comment, because I have in fact already worked on App Stores – I contributed to some of the jailbreak app stores (and ran my own repos) when I was a teenager. So yes, I think I have a pretty good handle on the costs (and they've only come down since then).
For your own edification on costs, just look at AWS prices to see how much it costs to store and transfer a file on S3 (fractions of fractions of pennies) – that type of activity is the main expense. This is not my opinion, it is... how much this kind of thing costs. You seem to think that is unknowable or something to anyone that is not Apple, but that's obviously not the case.
Hell, I'd almost be willing to bet that the existing developer account fees ($99pa for individual, $299pa for biz) could cover server costs for the iOS App Store (with a 0% cut).
The other way we know that it is not actually that expensive to operate is because otherwise Apple would allow other app stores and not be monopolistic about the whole thing. But they know that their model (taking 30% of revenue) would not be competitive in a free market, so they don't allow a free market.
> Malware
Please re-read my comment, especially the part about sandboxing and 3rd-party app stores. The suggestion is not that anyone can put anything in Apple's app store, it is that people should be able to have 3rd party app stores on their phone, which they can enable/install at their own risk. And those other app stores can have their own rules, e.g. if nobody else did I would start one where we charge cost+, as outlined above with S3 costs. E.g. if it costs me $1000 to deliver your apps + updates to your users every month, I charge you cost + 30%, or $1300 (or w/e). Spotify et al would of course prefer to use my app store, because that is much cheaper than having to pay 30/15% of revenue to Apple for every sub.
> I contributed to some of the jailbreak app stores
You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing.
> just look at AWS prices to see how much it costs to store and transfer a file on S3
Look, if it's so cheap and easy to do, why is everyone so hell bent on getting onto Apple's? They should just do it themselves!
The answer is that it's not that simple.
> Please re-read my comment, especially the part about sandboxing and 3rd-party app stores
I reread it. You did not say anything about sandboxing _3rd-party app stores_. Thanks for wasting my time with that! You said "apps are pretty well sandboxed" and we've seen how well that's done to protect users' privacy. App Tracking and Transparency was created for a reason.
You really need to cool it with the condescension ("Haha what are you talking about?", "I actually laughed out loud when I read your comment"); it adds nothing to your arguments, except the veneer of juvenility.
> You really need to cool it with the condescension
> But I doubt you even know the costs to run the service so my opinion is that you are speaking from a place of ignorance.
> You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing.
That's some impressive cognitive dissonance ya got there, you might want to try looking in a mirror. You have no idea how much involvement I had. Please stop arguing from a place of complete and total ignorance.
> Look, if it's so cheap and easy to do, why is everyone so hell bent on getting onto Apple's? They should just do it themselves!
Surely you can't be serious... this is literally the topic at hand. Apple won't let anyone do it themselves. That is why they don't do it themselves. People absolutely would do it themselves if Apple wasn't behaving anti-competitively. I'm glad you agree that Apple should open up iOS to 3rd-party app stores so that they can live or die on their own merits, rather than being prevented from existing in the first place, based on dubious claims of protecting users. Though again, it is worth noting that people (yours truly included) actually have done it themselves, through jailbreaking. And that many jailbreak apps have done quite well financially, handling the distribution themselves. This is success in spite of Apple, as requiring users to jailbreak before they use your App Store is in fact a pretty high bar and does in fact make your system less secure.
> You did not say anything about sandboxing _3rd-party app stores_... App Tracking and Transparency was created for a reason.
Um, yes. That is exactly my point – the apps themselves are sandboxed and permissioned, at an OS level, so Apple's oversight (in the App Store) is a lot less useful than it once was (whether it ever was particularly valuable is not a given). If an app wants access to your location, the user has to explicitly allow it to have that permission. It doesn't matter what App Store the app is being distributed on, that sandboxing is there regardless.
Also, isn't it a bit strange that Apple added such a feature in the first place? You'd think, since they were already gatekeeping apps that can be installed on your device, there would be no need, because Apple would catch apps that asked for permissions they didn't need, hmmm... just kidding, obviously this is because different users have different needs and Apple can't prescribe the same thing for everyone. Which is exactly why Apple should open up iOS to other app stores, and in order to keep iOS users secure they should focus on more things like App Tracking and Transparency, not on monopolizing app stores.
You're absolutely right. I said "I doubt you even know," not "I know for a fact you do not know," and am willing to be proven wrong. I made an assumption that I'm confident would apply to most people commenting on this story. I don't think I misrepresented it as anything other than an assumption.
Until you show me some receipts I'm going to continue assuming you are not actually privvy to what it takes to run the app store.
> Apple won't let anyone do it themselves
You've misunderstood. People are free to build up a fleet of devices, the OS that runs on them, the backend services that make up the app store, all the customer support channels and tooling, find/hire/train all the employees that keep it running, etc etc etc. Apple can't stop people from trying that. Peoples' problem is that they don't want to take decades to get there, which is what Apple has done... lots of pain along the way, too.
_That_ is part of the value proposition of the app store itself. The app store does not exist in a vacuum.
> I made an assumption that I'm confident would apply to most people commenting on this story
Great, well, I'm not most people commenting on this story. If you've ever jailbroken an iOS device, there is a very high probability your device subsequently ran code that I wrote. I have distributed apps and tweaks to literally hundreds of thousands of users through the repos I've run. Don't make assumptions when you don't need to.
> You've misunderstood.
No, I think you've misunderstood. I did not say building hardware, an operating system, and an app store is easy. I said building an app store is easy. Let me quote myself:
> People keep saying "but you wouldn't have devices to distribute your app to without Apple" and while that is true, Apple is already capturing the value for that part of the deal – they're selling the devices to customers.
Look, I get it – you're holding on to the idea that Apple built the ecosystem, so they're allowed to do with it as they please. And in general I'm sympathetic to the idea that if you build something, you get to control it. The only problem is that it is not only Apple's ecosystem... the devices themselves belong to the people they sold them to, and Apple should not be able to unilaterally prevent those participants from using the devices they purchased as they wish in an anti-competitive way. This is precisely why we have anti-trust laws.
> If you've ever jailbroken an iOS device, there is a very high probability your device subsequently ran code that I wrote. I have distributed apps and tweaks to literally hundreds of thousands of users through the repos I've run. Don't make assumptions when you don't need to.
It's starting to sound more and more like you do not actually work on the Apple app store, as you've had a few chances now to correct me on that. So I believe my assumption was actually correct, despite your dancing around the issue. You may have many impressive accomplishments, but unless working on Apple's app store is one of them, I'm not adjusting how much weight I put in your opinion, and I'm certainly not going to feel bad for the assumption I made... which, again, sounds to be correct.
In fact, you being a jailbreaker and having built up all that infrastructure tells me that you are financially incentivized to get 3rd party app stores on the platform.
And just so you know, no, I have not jailbroken any iOS device I own, because I trust Apple more than I trust you.
> I said building an app store is easy.
And I told you why I think you're wrong. In order to bake an apple pie, first you must invent the universe. I'll quote myself too: "The app store does not exist in a vacuum."
> the devices themselves belong to the people they sold them to
That is true for devices, but the use of the operating system is _licensed_ to you. Apple retains control of iOS: "The software...are licensed, not sold, to you by Apple Inc" (https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS14_iPadOS14.pdf)
> Which is exactly why Apple should open up iOS to other app stores, and in order to keep iOS users secure they should focus on more things like App Tracking and Transparency, not on monopolizing app stores.
This is self-contradictory. If Apple allows third-parties to distribute apps outside the App Store, they lose the ability to enforce their App Tracking and Transparency rules.
With all due respect, have you ever developed an application for iOS? Because it doesn't sound like it, as this is not how it works.
Apps are sandboxed. In order to access certain features, they need to request permission from the operating system. e.g. there is a GPS chip in your iPhone. Apps, through the design of the OS (not the App Store), are unable to access the raw data coming from this unit themselves. Instead, they tell the OS "hey, I want access to location data", at which point the OS throws up a notification to the user asking if they want to allow the app access to that data. The user says yes, and the OS starts to provide the app with location data. At any point, the user can tell the OS "hey, stop giving this app access" and the OS will oblige. The App Store does not enforce this functionality at all, it is enforced at the OS level. Allowing 3rd party app stores would not change this. If Apple's App Store vetting process disappeared tomorrow, Spotify would not be able to get location data without the user's permission.
As a side note, I keep saying "at the OS level", but this is a simplification on my part. In more than a few places, Apple has gone further and done things like have the Secure Enclave which has complex interactions with the OS / kernel to make certain actions difficult even if you break out of the OS-level sandbox.
I have done mobile development (both iOS and Android) for a long time and am well aware how sandboxing works. You've misunderstood the issue if you think sandboxing sufficiently solves this problem.
Let me flip the question, are you aware what types of data apps collect in order to fingerprint a device? These are the same low level APIs that apps need for legitimate purposes, you can't simply disable them or put a permissions prompt in front of each one.
Yes, I am very aware of what types of data apps collect in order to fingerprint a device. That is exactly why I firmly believe this problem should be solved at the OS level, not at the App Store level. Because I trust a technological solutions much more than I trust App Store reviewers at Apple.
This is why I prefer an E2EE chat service to a service that is not but says "we promise we won't read your messages".
Do you really expect the OS to block apps from accessing screen size, locale, fonts, time zone, GPU metrics, accessibility settings, etc. when they actually need these APIs for legitimate purposes? Location and microphone permissions are red herrings when it comes to fingerprinting.
You're also neglecting the fact that malicious apps can mislead the user by prompting for permissions for a seemingly legitimate purpose and then abuse those permissions once granted.
It's 30% for the first year of subscriptions and 15% thereafter.
According to Apple in 2019 Spotify didn't actually pay 30% on any of it's subscriptions at that time, and only paid the 15% on 0.5% of the App's users. The rest are ad supported and Apple gets 0% of the ad revenue.
So for every Spotify app user Apple get's a 15% fee for, there are 199 Spotify app users Apple is distributing the App to for which they get nothing.
OK, that's the fact side of things. As for opinion, I think it's ridiculous that App vendors can't point out alternative payment options in their apps. That's a step too far. I'm also a bit concerned about digital sales, I can see why Epic doesn't want to pay 30% on every skin or loot box sold in Fortnite, but it's a free app otherwise distributed on the App Store for nothing so I think some sort of deal needs to be struck there.
Other than that, I think the iPhone is Apple's product. They get to decide how it works, and users get to decide whether that's acceptable or not. Apple (and NeXT) spent billions of dollars over many decades, taking huge commercial risks to build that platform. A decade ago we were constantly being told they were inevitably doomed and open always wins. Well no, some of us like the way Apple does things and don't want it to massively change. Some things sure, they're not perfect, but I do not support changes that would severely undermine the integrity of their product. You can always buy an Android phone.
But I think the key here, and probably a big reason Spotify went after Apple and not Google, is that on iOS you have to use Apple's app store. You can't distribute your app using your own infrastructure, or an alternative app store even if you want to.
That fact is key to the advantage that the iPhone ecosystem offers. I, and millions of users like me, like the closed garden.
I’m effectively outsourcing the duties implied by caveat emptor to Apple. I don’t have the time/inclination to check the safety & honesty of each app developer.
> That fact is key to the advantage that the iPhone ecosystem offers.
That's not an advantage - that's a disadvantage. Having an open ecosystem is a strict superset of the functionality of a closed ecosystem. If I can sideload, then I can sideload and use Apple's app store. If I can't sideload, then I can only use Apple's app store. It's a strict downgrade.
> I, and millions of users like me, like the closed garden.
Meanwhile, I, and millions of users like me (more, if you count every Android user as not liking walled gardens), do not like the closed garden.
Popularity does not make you right.
Absolute popularity doesn't even matter - only relative popularity does.
> I’m effectively outsourcing the duties implied by caveat emptor to Apple. I don’t have the time/inclination to check the safety & honesty of each app developer.
Apple doesn't do those duties consistently - malware repeatedly appears on the app store, and Apple doesn't even attempt to make sure that the vast majority of apps adhere to their privacy labels.
> "[banning sideloading] is a strict downgrade"
Nope, I can buy my mom an iPhone and know that it's not possible to totally brick it by clicking a link from a dodgy text/email
> "Popularity does not make you right"
I'm not saying that the closed approach is fundamentally better than the open approach, but it sure is for some use-cases. That's why we have a phone OS duopoly.
Regarding Apple's garden walls not keeping all the creepy-crawlies out, sure, but it's vastly better than on Android.
> I can buy my mom an iPhone and know that it's not possible to totally brick it by clicking a link from a dodgy text/email
If they add sufficient warnings about sideloading etc. then I don't see a problem.
If your mom is incapable of listening to these warnings and follows some guide to install some walware then I'm sorry but maybe she needs parental controls enabled or just a nice talking to about how to use her phone? Forcing everyone else to lose out on game streaming or Spotify signups seems like an overreaction to the problem and an oversimplification of the solution space.
Jesus, calm down. No-one is forced to do anything. Buy an Android. My mom will use an iPhone. The device fits the person and their behaviour, not the other way around.
> Nope, I can buy my mom an iPhone and know that it's not possible to totally brick it by clicking a link from a dodgy text/email
Uhm, I guess that's true in the same sense that it's usually more rainy in New York than Chicago: One click RCE aren't exactly impossible for IPhone, just historically more rare than on android. Though recently at least one exploit broker stopped accepting iOS Safari one click RCE because they just got too many shrug.
It's pretty clear that the parent was not stating that those were the same thing, but instead that popularity does not mean correctness (either in the technical sense or the moral sense).
Peak hackernews comment.
This is an inane comparison. Murder is not the same as me being satisfied that every app publisher under the sun cannot make their own app store to pollute my phone further.
And with alternative app stores you continue to have the choice of only using Apple's App Store, where Apple would hopefully continue to check each app.
The bigger difference is that the play store does not mandate using Google as the payment processor for transactions and subscriptions. Spotify would have no reason to look for an alternative app distribution mechanism on Android.
Fortnite was kicked out of the Google Play store for the very same violation of rules and consumer trust that they pulled with Apple. Epic are also suing Google under the same concocted story.
No they sue Google for a different reason althougher. On how they blocked OEMs from making a deal with Epic to include their store/launcher on phones (thus allowing it the same capabilities for autoupdates and the like than the Play Store)
That sounds nice to me. Want me to update? Provide an appealing update! Although I am still not a fan of having any sort of app store in the first place.
You can always disable updates if you want. And what alternative stores specifically cannot do is install/update apps without having Android itself ask for confirmation again. So even if you manually order the store to install/update one or more apps, Android will pop up another prompt for each.
Sure I understand that, but personally as an iPhone user I don't care. Users benefit from consolidation in the app store space, it much easier for me to have all my apps come from one app store with one set of rules and policies. I benefit from the fact Facebook can't bypass the App Store rules for security and privacy through side loading and an alternate store. Why do you want to take that away from me?
Also as a user I don't see any evidence that I am suffering from this, are app prices significantly lower on Android App Stores other than the Play Store? The vast majority of Apps are free, or rally pretty cheap. Show me the evidence.
I think the idea that competition in this area will benefit users is highly dubious. Does it really benefit users on Android? Side loading didn't work out for Fortnite very well.
At the end of the day it's Apple's product and they get to decide what code they do or don't write and what features they do or don't support and how they work. They get to decide, and are accountable for the security architecture. As long as hey are meeting trade, advertising and safety standards it's up to them.
So if you personally won't benefit from it you should not be against someone else benefiting right?
If you want to buy Cyberpunk 2077 you have the option of at least 3 stores, I did not see any Steam user getting damaged by the fact the game is on other stores too.
As the topic has been beat to death a million times, the danger is that adding additional app stores will result in decreases in the exact thing the OP likes the App Store for. All of the hard work fighting for privacy, security, etc., goes out the window. Facebook will put their app on a 3rd party store and now we’re back to them and others abusing privacy and tracking users and not sharing what and how they’re tracking. Apple’s benevolent dictator approach has revealed some nasty stuff these companies and others were doing. With a third party app, companies don’t have to tell me how they are using my data or give me an anonymous sign in option. Naturally they’re fighting back.
The App Store gives Apple a way to collectively bargain against app makers on behalf of users. Take that away and we lose what little power we have.
You can sideload on Android and yet there are stories all the time about Google removing some app and destroying some ones whole business. It's false to say that multiple avenues for app installation destroys apples leverage over app makers. The tyranny of the default is very real. Facebook is not about to move to the epic store so it can violate your privacy more.
Besides, there doesn't need to necessarily be a competing store. Even the ability to install from a website would be enough IMO. Apple can put up a scary message before you install a non app store app, and epic can side load their app. If you want the benefit of the app store, you can pay the 30%. I suspect most developers would. Additionally, you still have to get your app signed through apples developer program, so if they revoke your certificate, they could still destroy you.
And I think we can let go of the idea that apple curates it's apps for safety and security. It's been shown repeatedly that they let scams through all the time, while scrutinizing and removing apps over tiny mistakes around phrasing of payment.
> It's false to say that multiple avenues for app installation destroys apples leverage over app makers.
Sorry, I just completely disagree. Google's Play Store or w/e it is on Android is the fox in the hen house. Google is one of the offenders that Apple is making disclose data collection practices! I don't think they situation is exactly comparable and it's different enough that the prior precedent may not be applicable.
> Apple can put up a scary message before you install a non app store app, and epic can side load their app.
Yea until that becomes anti-competitive. Besides, that makes the user experience bad. Why do any of this at all? If you're sophisticated enough to want to side load apps, you're sophisticated enough to jailbreak your iPhone and get what you want.
I can already see it. You see some app in the App Store - you download it thinking it's an app but it's just a message: "Want to download our app? Go to our website!". Then I get all these pop-up warnings, download some malware on accident, whatever.
IMO (and I'll vote with my dollars at least) it's just a dumb experiment to run. I see 0 benefit in doing any of this. 0.
> It's been shown repeatedly that they let scams through all the time
Failures like this aren't indicative of overall policy so I don't really see the point here.
> Google's Play Store or w/e it is on Android is the fox in the hen house. Google is one of the offenders that Apple is making disclose data collection practices! I don't think they situation is exactly comparable and it's different enough that the prior precedent may not be applicable.
You don't think that it's a a good comparison to compare the only other large scale play store which implements the exact behavior I'm talking about?
And googles bad behaviors, and Google does have bad behaviors, is irrelevant to this conversation.
> Yea until that becomes anti-competitive.
How would that be anti competitive?
> If you're sophisticated enough to want to side load apps, you're sophisticated enough to jailbreak your iPhone and get what you want.
Jailbreaking your phone is a huge pita, even if you are technical, and it forces you to always be several versions behind. Not to mention very few companies will be making apps for jailbroken phones. This isn't a realistic alternative. If jailbreaking your phone were allowed by apple, then maybe it would be a reasonable compromise.
> Failures like this aren't indicative of overall policy so I don't really see the point here.
It is very indicative of the over all policy. It's very clear that the app review process is a tool for stifling competition, and that apple is abusing it.
--
The big argument I see is that the app store provides value, so the 30 percent is justified. If that's true, let apps side load, and keep the 30 percent fee, and let people side load.
If it's truly worth the 30 percent, very few apps would switch away from the app store. If it's not worth 30 percent, then we have introduced a mechanism for competition and it's healthier for the whole ecosystem.
> You don't think that it's a a good comparison to compare the only other large scale play store which implements the exact behavior I'm talking about?
Well, I didn't it wasn't good, just that I wasn't sure it's comparable. Google is a software company, and has tons of apps (Youtube, Gmail, Maps, etc.) that are big-time heavy hitters that exist on both their App Store and the Apple one. And given that they own the Play Store and aren't inherently inclined to follow Apple's privacy rules, I think it's hard to draw an exact comparison between the two.
> How would that be anti competitive?
I think people would start to say it discourages users from participating in a free market or something along those lines. But I also don't think the Apple App Store is anti-competitive.
> It is very indicative of the over all policy. It's very clear that the app review process is a tool for stifling competition, and that apple is abusing it
Sorry, I don't have much to say here that's isn't us going back and forth with. I couldn't disagree more and it's unlikely we'll reach any consensus.
> The big argument I see is that the app store provides value, so the 30 percent is justified.
I think that's one argument, but it's not the only one.
> If that's true, let apps side load, and keep the 30 percent fee, and let people side load.
> If it's truly worth the 30 percent, very few apps would switch away from the app store. If it's not worth 30 percent, then we have introduced a mechanism for competition and it's healthier for the whole ecosystem.
You'd have to convince me that, say, tracking users and avoiding Apple's privacy and security rules wouldn't be worth more for app makers. I think they're likely to change, to the detriment of users. So I'll personally oppose any changes here.
TBH I've done a lot of thinking on this topic, I'm pretty passionate about it, and I think I've arrived at a conclusion that is just and fair (in my view) and I'm unlikely to change my opinion in really any way - more likely to double down on it. I want to bring that up just to let you know where I'm coming from here.
Just wanted to ditto everything you’ve said. I don’t think people realize how good we have it with Apple and how easily things could’ve gone in a completely different direction. Yes it’s a benevolent dictatorship, but right now it’s still benevolent. I get a lot of value out of the fact app makers have their oh-so-clever hands tied.
And do you think that if Apple offers 2 iPhones , say the "American Dream" and "The communist pirate dream for EU" , and you buy the "safe one" for you and your family, then what are the downsides? If the "American dream " version is popular then FB will still be on it so you won't lose your FB access, you will still be protected from porn or apps that are not Political Correct and some EU "Communists" would have fun will their GPL programs and their inferior choices they had the freedom to chose.
But if this to much for the Apple devs to implement they can stop selling in EU, focus more on China , they can increase the tax on that store a bit and not lose any money.
>Or if it bothers you so much just don’t buy one. You don’t speak for the entire E.U.
Ha ha, laws don't work like that. I am speaking my opinion and it seems I am not the only one that can see past the Apple giant PR. But if you are from EU you are free not to unlock your device or buy the US cooler version. What you are not free is to demand EU to not apply the existing laws for Apple because Apple is cool but apply them for MS and Google because those companies are not cool.
iOS will have the sandbox, if some shitty app ask "Do you want me to open the microphone now?" the user can still say NO, if the app asks "Please give me access to location!" the user can still say No, or Apple could even be clever and offer the user the ability to give fake location data,
From your point of view iOS users are so stupid that they shold not be allowed to use a OSX device or a browser(not sure if you know but browsers ahve access to camera, , location if the user allows it so go unsintall your browser (I think you don't have the freedom to remove it , sorry for you)).
THIS. Permissions must be enforced at the operating system level. Apple, Google, and others have repeatedly demonstrated that large companies do a really bad job at policing their app stores - and the fact that the task is intrinsically harder and technically inferior to building a better operating system doesn't help.
The only correct solution to many privacy and security issues (such as microphone access) is OS-level sandboxing and permissions control, not an un-scalable and error-prone attempt at auditing before publishing to an app store.
(note that I said "many" privacy and security issues, not "all")
But long story short, I like things as they are and don't want them to change. If developers don't like that they can kick rocks. I'd rather have no apps and no App Store than to see things change, frankly.
> From your point of view iOS users are so stupid that they
No.. that's not my point of view or relevant at all to anything I wrote.
> shold not be allowed to use a OSX device or a browser
Well, judging by all the requests I get to fix things on computers versus iPhones...
> not sure if you know but browsers ahve access to camera
>But long story short, I like things as they are and don't want them to change. If developers don't like that they can kick rocks. I'd rather have no apps and no App Store than to see things change, frankly.
Who would force you to change? you could buy the US iPhone version with the diamond handcuffs.
>Well, judging by all the requests I get to fix things on computers versus iPhones...
Then good job to Apple PR and fanboys, the stories about Apple malware and viruses were burried very deep.
>Yes you have to give the browser permission.
So why this model will not work if you sideload an app? Do you need genius to check the menus of the app so you feel secure?
> Who would force you to change? you could buy the US iPhone version with the diamond handcuffs.
I'm not sure how up to speed you are with the current state of the discussion around this topic, but the gist of it is that if you make changes to the App Store, then Apple's work with respect to privacy, security, etc. go out the window because major apps that want to abuse these things will move to third party app stores. Apple loses the ability to collectively bargain on behalf of users.
So, making the change almost surely will result in "forcing me to change". Maybe it won't, but I don't see a point in running that experiment.
> Then good job to Apple PR and fanboys, the stories about Apple malware and viruses were burried very deep.
Yea maybe they are. My own experience - nobody has ever had a problem with their iPhone. But PCs or even Macs? Yea I've had to do work. Almost always it's downloading and installing some thing they shouldn't have.
> So why this model will not work if you sideload an app? Do you need genius to check the menus of the app so you feel secure?
If you don't like iPhone and Apple so much why not just not use the products? I don't get this desire to change things that other people are quite happy with.
Apple loses the ability to collectively bargain on behalf of users.
Without being overly smug here: Good.
Apple have been terrible stewards of the platform. Arguably better than Google, but that's a bar so low a deep-bore drilling machine couldn't clear it. The app store is overrun with scams, the approval process is nonobjective and unreliable, and prohibits entire classes of useful software on shaky moralizing grounds.
I don't want Apple to bargain on my behalf. I want apple to fuck off, get out of my way, and stop telling me what I can run on my hardware.
If you don't like iPhone and Apple so much why not just not use the products?
If Apple doesn't like the EU's rules why not just stop doing business there?
> If Apple doesn't like the EU's rules why not just stop doing business there?
What rules? These are proposals for rules, and also lawsuits. There are arguments that have merit on both sides. But yea sure, if it was me and I were Tim Cook and had unlimited authority and the E.U. made Apple open up to 3rd party App Stores I'd pull the iPhone from Europe. Bad business decision most likely, but principled at least. Instead they're likely going to just do something else about it. There's always work arounds. Closing off APIs, charging gargantuan fees to be listed on the App Store for big players like Spotify, etc.
There are plenty of companies chomping at the bit to get on the App Store top lists and happy to pay a fee to do so.
> don't want Apple to bargain on my behalf. I want apple to fuck off, get out of my way, and stop telling me what I can run on my hardware.
I think Apple platforms aren't for you then. They're highly opinionated and always have been.
> The app store is overrun with scams, the approval process is nonobjective and unreliable, and prohibits entire classes of useful software on shaky moralizing grounds.
So the solution is third party app stores that are even worse?
>Bad business decision most likely, but principled at least.
Are you trolling? Apple and principles ? They are giving Chinese customers information to the government and do bussiness with Saudi Arabia that would execute all those gay Apple executives if they could, are this principles??? Or you mean "Ferengi principles"
I said it’s what I would do and that what I would do would be out of principle. Not what Apple will do.
The E.U. Happily bows down to China all the time so if you really want to do this whole anti-China thing everybody is happily playing in the mud - Apple, and the E.U. .
>If you don't like iPhone and Apple so much why not just not use the products? I don't get this desire to change things that other people are quite happy with.
If Apple does not like EU rules for fair competition, warranties and repaiar Apple should not do bussiness there instead of breaking the laws.
People complaining about bad keyboards, bad video cards, bad batteries and even lawsuits forced Apple to not screw the users and recall bad products or offer free repair. If you like being screwed be my guest and do not use those limited"recall/repair" programs that complainers obtained (remember when Apple ass kissers would accuse people they put food int he keyboard because Apple is perfect)
Btw you have the option to buy an US version of iOS device, with the US version of the store, and never would change. you can;t say that FB will ask US people to buy an EU version of the phone so for sure on that US version Apple can continue protecting you.
It's not quite that simple. There are many APIs that are necessary for legitimate purposes that can also be abused. Many of the APIs used for device fingerprinting fall under this category. The contacts APIs are another good example (just because I want to load my contacts so I can send my friend a message doesn't mean I want you to exfiltrate my contacts to your server so you can build a shadow graph of my social network.)
Exactly, I like the fact that if Facebook want to be on my phone they have to meet Apple's security and privacy standards. That directly benefits me, and it's one of the reasons I buy iPhones. Forcing Apple to change their product to allow side loading and alternative stores takes that away from me.
The standards could be in the SDK and the sandbox. Like you don't allow location data or access to photos to any apo (not even Apple ones). So even if I sideload an app or start a Apple app I should get same prompts("Do you want to let this app ignore your firewall rules? This might be insecure The app dev is "Facebook/Apple/Unkown) .
And if Apple does not like Facebook tracking people maybe they should lobby for anti-tracking laws. They should also not allow lootboxes, gems or other gaming related shit (to be consistent with their puritanical PR spin)
You are eliding the distinction between rules that can be enforced by the API and rules that can only be enforced by pronouncement. Anyone can do the former. I buy an iPhone because Apple does a decent job of the latter.
Now of course if Apple is forced to permit third party stores, they’re going to be forced to make it really easy to get on these stores. Epic, Google and Amazon are going to make sure of that. So this isn’t going to be like obscure alt stores on Android that the nerdiest 2% tinker with, it’s going to be a shitshow.
If Google then makes Google Maps and Gmail exclusive for the iOS Play Store, all bets are off and the biggest reason why I prefer the iPhone is destroyed. And I will be sad and angry that other people wilfully supported its destruction.
>If Google then makes Google Maps and Gmail exclusive for the iOS Play Store, all bets are off and the biggest reason why I prefer the iPhone is destroyed. And I will be sad and angry that other people wilfully supported its destruction.
So is fine if Apple does not put iMessages on other stores or let open source people to create a bridge to talk with iMessages.
If there are many people like you say 50% that won't unlock the phone then Google and FB will put their apps on all stores because there are more users. But if you are just 1% then it is fair that the 99% should not suffer because you want unfair stuff because it advantages you.
What has iMessage got to do with anything? Don’t blame Apple because Google’s ten attempts to build an Android messaging platform were all dismal failures. Nothing stopped Google from mimicking iMessage and making that the default SMS app.
It’s not a question of who wants Apple to remain the sole gatekeeper of executable binaries, but rather who enjoys the benefits that come from that, even if they don’t explicitly realise it. I contend that it’s far more than 50% — especially because the few people who actually “care” about App Store diversity have already jumped ship to Android. (Or if they haven’t, they have proven that they don’t actually care.)
Is about your own hypocrisy. Apple is limiting iMessages and is fine with you but the notion that Google would limit the Maps app to their own store makes you mad. It makes sense that you are selfish and don't care about the larger picture
Anyway if you could look at the real world and not at the fantasy created by the FUD you would see that on Android there is no Facebook app store and Facebook is stiull present on the google Play store(and yes Apple and Apple users are not more special that for only for them Facebook will make a new store)
Why does there need to be anti-tracking laws? What if some people want to be tracked in exchange for a cheaper product? Apple allows people that value that to buy that.
Maybe we need to consider users, they are the larger number of victims. Should information be hidden from them? Should the user not decide if the wants to be tracked? Should the user not be allowed to donate to a developer without giving Apple a big cut?
Is the App Store really an obstacle to apps getting on the iOS platform? Is it artificially raising prices? That's what matters from a consumer interests perspective, are they losing out or are they getting ripped off. If the answer is no, there's no case to answer. The reason for companies to exist and develop and sell products isn't to benefit their competitors.
If anything I think the App Store has helped to drive the purchase price of software to $0. This in turn has driven every software vendor to either a subscription pricing model or a (privacy-invasive) ad model.
Open question on if this is net beneficial to consumers or developers, but it could also be considered an economic inevitability when MC = MR = 0.
> Is the App Store really an obstacle to apps getting on the iOS platform?
Yes. A tremendous amount of effort goes into playing the game of guessing what you need to do to pass the approval process. And I don't mean things like tracking. I mean things like removing any links to your website, because users could buy a subscription there instead of on through the app.
> Is it artificially raising prices?
Absolutely. That 30% has to come from somewhere. And since you aren't allowed to charge more for an app purchase than a subscription online, that means it raises the price for everyone. Not just people who use the app.
>Sure I understand that, but personally as an iPhone user I don't care.
I suspect the law is not structured so as to take your personal interest into consideration.
>I think the idea that competition in this area will benefit users is highly dubious.
this seems a very American concept of anti-trust, benefiting consumers is only one part of what concerns European anti-trust, in this case the question is does Apple Music have an unfair advantage on the platform against other music services - the answer would appear to be yes, for actually two points -
1. because they don't have the pay the fee the other music services have to pay
2. because they are not artificially restricted from communicating alternative methods of subscribing to their customers (because they don't need to because they are Apple)
I don't need to accept a huge licence agreement before I enter a supermarket
If I were to piss off their staff and get banned from Wallmart, they don't get to take away everything I bought from Wallmart in the past 10 years.
If I buy a game from Walmart, and the game sell in game items, I don't need to call wallamrt employee to come to my house to collect the money for that - that's effectively the epic lawsuit.
The way I've seen the rules inforced (though inconsistently) it would be more like walmart not letting Coke put their website on the can, because you can buy coke directly from the website.
"The rest are ad supported and Apple gets 0% of the ad revenue."
The vast bulk of the rest likely signed up elsewhere and aren't free users. I signed up online, as I imagine most people do for most services. I'm not sure if Spotify even had an app subscription at the time, though even if it did I wouldn't have used it.
I signed up for Netflix, Skillshare, Prime, Disney+, etc, all on their own sites. Even my Microsoft Office apps I bought a multi-year subscription on some site (saving something like 40% over the app fees). There is zero value for me subscribing to things like that through Apple. Actually negative value.
If it's some single-platform little app that needs a subscription to use the beautifier filter or something, sure, provide that "value".
"there are 199 Spotify app users Apple is distributing the App to for which they get nothing"
They have gotten hundreds of billions in purchases from consumers, all but the very first purchases predicated on a robust and healthy app ecosystem. Apple runs the app store for me, the guy who buys their devices. They are certainly getting loads for it.
It is perverse that Apple bars notifying users that they can subscribe elsewhere, and eventually that is going to be regulatory eliminated.
This is clearly because they removed the ability to subscribe in the app to avoid paying those 15%. So the rule imposed by Apple is costing them subscribers, all those who would have subscribed if it was available in the app (or even just if they could be informed about how to subscribe).
The fact that Spotify has barely no customer who subscribe through their app is showing that there's anticompetitive behavior. In a healthy market they would have a share there.
I haven’t ever subscribed to Spotify because I don’t see any _value_ in Spotify as opposed to what I get from Apple Music. I’m smart enough to know how to subscribe to Spotify from the web.
(There are other services like Pandora I would have paid for, in or out of the App Store, had they been available in my jurisdiction. Spotify just never interested me.)
I know that makes me an outlier, but it seems to me that Spotify has a much heftier case to make that they’re _missing_ customers because of Apple’s payment rules.
I personally don’t want alternative app stores; they will reduce the security and trustworthiness of the iOS platform. I do think that Apple should be reviewing its app / in-app purchase pricing, and I do think that there is a market access concern problem. I don’t have any good answers for it, because I _do_ think that some of the actions criticized have been net positives.
If you sign up for Spotify outside of the app then Apple sees 0 of that revenue. And yet they are then also hosting and distributing apps for these companies.
I think they’ll probably start charging companies like Spotify a banana amount of money to be on the App Store or on iOS at all if they lose these legal battles. I think the pull of the iPhone is far stronger than any app and there are many developers waiting for their chance to reach the iOS audience.
Every major app that iOS missed would be a significant dollar amount of sales that Apple would lose. If Netflix or Spotify or PrimeVideo wasn't available on iOS, not only would that be a marketing disaster, it would yield sales consequences. This ignores the catastrophic regulatory consequences they are already poised to incur.
Apple runs the app store for users (people like me who in aggregate have made it the most valuable company in the world), and it is simply bizarre seeing these claims like it's some enormous expense that they're doing because they're benevolent (which is quite clearly the foundation of your comment, given the claim that Apple could charge "banana" amounts just for being on the app store, contrary to reality where they're already under enormous scrutiny for claiming these fees as a payment processor).
There is an argument that Apple could charge some fee for their expenses of operating the app repository. Those fees, to avoid the regulatory hammer, would be absolutely tiny compared to what they are currently getting from their take.
Predicting that they're going to charge a "bananas" amount for "hosting and distributing apps" -- ostensibly on the basis of the cost of all of these "free" users (where free means paid enormous amounts for devices based upon this service) -- certainly does seem to make that claim.
Well, I can tell you with certainty that wasn't the claim that was made.
> ostensibly on the basis
Is where you begin to separate from my comment.
But in the spirit of good conversation, my point was that Apple will collect some fee for companies to be on the App Store, especially the large ones (Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, etc.). They're not going to just say well I guess we won't charge developers anymore. I think the idea with the percentage of revenue was to have the amount taken grow in proportion with the value of the user base and number of users using a particular app, especially if they might have discovered that app on the iOS platform (i.e. lead generation).
If that goes away, there's no reason that I can see that Apple won't say, well we charged you X last year, we estimate that you're deriving Y amount of revenue from the App Store so we're going to charge an annual fee of Z to be on the App Store.
>company is in practice entitled to 30% of what any other business makes
That's not a problem, there's no inartistic correct amount to make for enabling or providing value. For 30 years now, software makes much more than that as numerous industries no longer employ people but software.
The problem is, when you own the platform and you start competing on that platform you have an advantage that can be misused. For Apple, the advantage that can be misused is to deny some API or the existence of competing businesses on their platforms. They can also do unfair pricing, for example it could be argued that %30 on Spotify is unfair when Apple has directly competing product.
For Amazon for example, they can have analytics on the businesses on their platforms and create competing products and promote them unfairly.
There are countless examples of Amazon doing this. Google was also fined many times for using their dominance in one area to force dominance in another.
Essentially, it's the good old platform owner getting greedy issue.
IMHO we need platform and product separation rules, similar to the Hollywood rules on separation of production and distribution.
> The problem is, when you own the platform and you start competing on that platform you have an advantage that can be misused.
Except every platform ever built is there to get an unfair advantage. That’s the endgame for all the companies. Why would you build a platform otherwise? There’s a perpetual growth expectation after all.
You can make a platform because you want to sell it. You lock your platform because you don't want someone with a better browser or OS to compete with your lower quality products.
I think Valve is a good example of how to do it. Sure they also take a sizeable chunk out of sales, but they seem to compete on the same terms with their games with everyone else on Steam.
Going so far as to clearly make an unfair advantage doesn't make sense if your platform is already printing more money than you could reasonably spend. As is the case with Apple, and with Valve. Music sales are probably a drop in the ocean compared to what they make on hardware and the appstore overall. They just got greedy and started acting like assholes when it came to their competition.
> They just got greedy and started acting like assholes when it came to their competition.
I think we can all find examples when platforms were not "greedy" and eventually got pushed out as irrelevant. That's why Apple and others will try to leverage their position to promote their new services.
Yes, the incentives are often perverse. However, there are many reasons to build a platform even if your endgame is not extracting all of the value yourself and that is, make money from the commission on the platform or protect your interest in other businesses through the platform(for example, Android and Chrome platforms protect Google from being pushed out of data collection for advertisement).
Anyway, businesses might have that kind of aspirations but thats why we have governments. An important argument against influence of the businesses in the government and libertarianism.
Apple has built itself up into a vertical monopoly, which used to be illegal. There is no good reason to allow anti-competitive behaviours. They shouldn't be allowed to host the platform and compete with applications at the same time.
And yet vertical integration is a big part of why Apple products are so loved. By denying the option of vertical integration, you’re forcing the totality of products we use to be incrementally a little bit more crap.
Personally I’d have no problem if Apple was forced to give all streaming music services like Spotify a sweetheart (below cost) percentage, say 5%, which wouldn’t cover the totality of merchant fees, gift voucher markups, and dealing with fraud.
> no matter if they used apple infrastructure or not.
That’s not exactly right. If Spotify (just as an example) would acquire all of their customers through their website or desktop app then they would pay nothing to Apple. That fee is only there if a user does use the InApp purchase option which Spotify doesn’t have to offer. So they’re paying only 30% to Apple if the their customer has subscribed through the iOS App.
Where there are forbidden or prevented to inform the user that they can register somewhere else cheaper. This is explicitly mentioned by the EU commissioner in the press conference.
> Just think about it: one company is in practice entitled to 30% of what any other business makes (in any industry)!!
This seems to be the case for all markets. I don't really see myself winning a case against wallmart if I complain they want a markup on sales of my product and that they are misusing their "monopoly" on "wallmart shelf space" by not allowing me decide to put my products in their store without their say, or without letting them earn money on the transactions that happen through their store.
Walmart isn't competing openly though. They have a 100% monopoly on wallmart shelf space. Target is a different platform down the street sure, but that's like Apple vs. Samsung. You can't get the Apple app store on a Samsung, and you can't get the android appstore on an iPhone. But Target can't put products on wallmarts shelves and wallmart can't put products on targets shelves.
That we've allowed Apple to have a monopoly on all Apple apps this whole time is insane to me. Google at least does allow users to install apps and an entire app stores off the market place, even if many don't take advantage of it.
Walmart for example has an average margin of under 2% across their products. For every $1 they bring in, they only expect to make 2 cents. And here we have Apple, who often is simply providing a download button, advertising is extra, to take 30% off the top.
Fine, so long as they “fix it” for everyone. Whatever rules they come up with must be universally applied. That includes for Sony and Microsoft and the game console online stores.
Side note: Please stop using EU and Europe interchangeably, they are not the same thing. 100s of millions of people live on the continent of Europe, but not in the EU.
I don't disagree with you, but you couldn't really have picked a worst example (short of an an actual EU member country) given how their bilateral treaties with the EU means EU rules apply to do business in non-EU Switzerland.
Is not about the percentage, are you aware that you can't even mention you can buy a subscription from the website in the iOS application? Apple does not allow alternative app stores and is actively blocking you to inform of alternative methods of payment.
(A) It is only about Music (other cases exists in parallel). (B) They declared that the 30% market share of their devices has a practical vendor-lock-in (so a monopoly without choice there). (C) Apple competes with other Music vendors and cut them by 30% AND blocking them from directly accessing the user AND that they abstract the user away from the App (leaving the other app zero information while they have a monopoly on information)
Same is true for Walmart. If you own shelf space in a store front you get to dictate the terms for people who want to get onto those shelves.
The major difference is only that for other phones, the stores decided to let everyone go and put up diy shelves in their stores and now people are demanding the ability to do it in Apple stores too.
I believe it is 30% for the initial subscription (or maybe first year?), and then 15% after that. If you are big enough, and probably aren't competing with a market Apple wants, you can negotiate to the 15% (maybe lower?) from the get go, e.g. Netflix.
I think argument about 30% is not that good. There is a number of services that Apple provides like software distribution, updates distribution, reviews (even though they don't benefit software creator directly, they build trust in the platform and attract more users), invoicing, regardless on the location (this one is really big - getting a single invoice from Apple instead of dealing with potentially thousands of documents) and also marketing.
I spoke once to a guy who was selling English language courses on CDs in brick and mortar stores plus he was sending courses by snail mail. He's got interested in that new at that time App Store thing, so I've asked him about the fee. He said that comparing to his current packaging and distrubution costs, paying stores only to be able to put his product on a shelf those 30% is a laughably small fee.
Apple don't let us do any of that ourselves, so it's impossible to say that 30% is an appropriate fee for doing it. If they allowed competitor App Stores or direct downloads, and didn't ban us from even mentioning other ways to purchase a subscription (and other such anticompetitive practices), I would find this more convincing.
Every stupid app would have its own store if they did. As an iOS user, that would be detrimental to my user experience.
We're seeing a similar phenomenon in the streaming space now, and it's horribly obnoxious. Hardware lock-in is the only thing keeping app distribution on iOS sane.
Before the "but android" rebuttal, consider the more comparable (IMO) situation of wallet apps on android.
> invoicing, regardless on the location (this one is really big - getting a single invoice from Apple instead of dealing with potentially thousands of documents)
Paddle.com do this as a standalone service for any digital product (I use them for my SaaS).
It costs 5%, and that covers all payment transaction fees too, they handle local VAT for the whole world, includes subscriber management tools etc, and they directly handle support for all billing-related requests from your customers.
30% is extortionate.
If it is a reasonable price, why not compete against alternatives fairly?
Steam also has a tax but you still have a choice as a developer or as a gamer. Cyberpunk is on Steam, Gog, Epic and maybe other stores(there are many such games where you as the user can decide what store you trust , what is more comfortable for you or what company you like more).
If you are an iOS developer and and 2 other stores would exists, then you would publish on all to maximize your profit, and hard core Apple fans still get their app from the Apple store but it could cost a bit more.
That would be great if stores weren't pushing so much for 'exclusives'.
I fear that the endgame of multiple App stores is that the guarantee Apple gives (for instance with the privacy labels) will be sidestepped by businesses like Facebook who will force people through their own store without them.
Seeing how many people don't read the small print and just install everything available to them that's the most probable outcome.
>That would be great if stores weren't pushing so much for 'exclusives'.
Exclusives are not that many and instead of fighting like idiots to have only one store we could ask laws to block artificial exclusives.
On PC is not a big deal to install Origin and play a game if you are desperate, on iOS you can't install stuff without a big effort to jailbreak your device (though you can do it on OSX and I did not see any malware/viruses or similar complaints)
Said like that, your arguments sounds like “I had a friend in another business who was abused way harder, we should give Apple a break for abusing only a little”
I think we’d agree reducing/eliminating undue middle-men fees should be a goal whatever the amount.
In particular Spotify for instance gets little benefit from having Apple as a middlemen, while smaller players would sure appreciate the convenience. The argument would be to have a choice to rely or not on what Apple provides.
This is all fine if other stores existed on the phone that could compete with Apple's offering. If it's such good value then developers would choose the 30% cut over publishing on an alternative store with less fees (and potentially less benefits). But as Apple holds a monopoly on app stores on the iPhone this assumption that the cut justifies the value offered can never be tested in a real market setting.
Apple doesnt need to charge any fee (like how macs and pcs never charged a fee to install apps), they get enough benefits from the millions of apps that enrich their platforms, that they otherwise wouldn't ever build themselves.
This whole perverse 'ecosystem' exists because of the skewed oligopoly dynamics of mobile phones.
something is missing here, maybe quote the thing you replied to or be more clear.
Since is not clear, I might be off topic, Apple can not sell it's stuff in EU or can comply with the laws , it is fun when "our stuff, our rules, use something else if you don't like it" is applied to Apple.
It's far from the first time Apple tries to weasel it's way out of EU legislation. I remember it was this way with AppleCare years ago as well. One had to really fight them to uphold the minimum warranty guaranteed by national legislation.
Anything involving Apple Silicon goes straight to the top of the frontpage, comments are full of people absolutely gushing over just about anything - I personally don't really care other than that I find it subtly funny the number of times I see people saying "Wow my new M1 Mac is so much faster than [Different Mac that's almost a decade old, but I'm either not used to thinking about Apple products in terms of their internals, or I'm forgetting the passage of time]"
unfriendly as in "unfriendly to discuss"... not the company, itself - which tends to be favored. (this is why I said unfriendly 'for')
Just the topics. It's a download fest (on any side) for anything that doesn't fit their purpose. M1 is a prime example - it was top of the page and most of the comments were nothing about the technology, etc.
About M1 - I find nothing spectacular about it, given the amount of transistors it has.
How is apple entitled to 30 percent of what any other business makes?
Apple developed a platform and says to developers "pay is 30 percent to use it" sounds fair to me. Huge streaming service comes along "I want to use you platform but not pay the fee".
How is that remotely fair? No one is making Spotify use it. What right has any one or any company got to demand special treatment. Many other app developers are fine with the fee. If they weren't, they wouldnt use it. It's a choice.
Also "abusing market position" what does that mean. It's purposely broad, it can mean anything.
>Also "abusing market position" what does that mean. It's purposely broad, it can mean anything.
There's a reason for that. Not everything can be defined clearly. If every law gets defined down to a t, we will be in a very sorry state indeed. (off topic, but that seems to be happening more and more, with every lawsuit that goes to court and gets somewhat arbitrarily -and permanantly- defined)
Think about the regular people or the artists, not the giant.
Say we are a group of musicians and we hate the fact that a big chunk of our money is going to giants including ones from authoritarian countries... so we the musicians think . "let's make our own steaming platform, all the profit goes to the musicians"... what is the problem then?
Did you found it ?
If mobile devices, consoles and computers are locked then I will not be able to realize my dream of removing the parasites from the industry, I would be happy to pay for the SDK, to pay for a genous to review the app, to pay for the bandwith of the updates, but I will not be happy to let a parasite to suck 30% of my sales(NOT even profit)
Sure . the free market with only 2 players that were caught in the past colluding to do illegal shit https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo... , they would never collude to non compete on the Store tax or offering "transfer" services .
Again, no one is making Spotify use apple. They don't have too. They choose to because they ll make money. They just want to make more money by going to court and demanding a cheaper service. Why should apple have to, just because they happen to be in the same business?
People pretend that for-profit entities are supposed to build platform as a public good. When in fact corporations are incentivized by the market to be a monopoly.
Don't build one, build good products that users want and not forced to use. But this is from the users point of view. From a capitalistic point of view I agree you need to screw the users and environment as much as legally possible.
How do apple "screw" users. Anyone buying Apple products is making choice: keep my money or spend on a thing I find beneficial. I think anyone would be forgiven for calling this a first world problem. Getting screwed usually means having money stolen. Here it just means demanding someone else's services cheaper.
Apple forbids you to put a link or a text message in your app to inform the users that they could pay for a subscription or product on a webpage.
So how can we spin "forcing developers not to inform users so users pay more and Apple makes more money" in such a way where this is not "screwing users". If I was a fanboy I would say that "most iOS users are poor old grandmas and to much information and options is too much for them AND for sure the grandma hit I agree on the TOS where Apple says that they force users to hide useful information"
1. Is Apple using their platform to promote their services? Yes.
2. Is Apple making it harder for competition to compete on their platform? Yes. Someone mentioned Apple Music is not a subject to 15-30% fees while Spotify is.
3. Are companies building platforms to do exactly that? Also yes. There’s no point in building platform and not using the benefits of controlling it.
So where does that leave us? Apple is doing exactly as you’d expect it to do. Government will try to restrict that, that’s what it’s for. What I don’t get is why people are so emotional about it. It’s all out in the open, why pretend Apple isn’t using their platform ownership to undermine completion? Why get upset that they do? People perceive this situation as black and white, nothing in between.
> 1. No, this is limited to the AppStore, those businesses can operate elsewhere.
Defining "elsewhere" is important here.
They cannot operate on the same platform through alternative installation methods or the web (considering how Apple limits PWAs to be dead in the water). They also cannot reach these users through other platforms because of the immense lock in that Apple builds up intentionally. [1]
So they can operate "elsewhere" but they cannot reach those consumers. They are owned by Apple.
Regardless of how you feel about the legalities or how much freedom you think a company should have, that is obviously bad for competition and consumers.
> How is any business entitled to free or low-fee access to a platform that Apple built and maintain?
I’m sure many businesses would be perfectly happy to have no access whatsoever to the platform Apple built and maintain (platform meaning the App Store in this context), but if they want to ship on iOS (which is where all the money is), they have no choice.
Indeed, which is why they took $48bn in revenue for iPhone sales this quarter.
Their argument that they are responsible for Spotify’s iPhone-originating revenue to the tune of a 30% cut is a complete farce. If the iPhone didn’t have third party apps, no-one would buy them.
>What's the alternative? How is any business entitled to free or low-fee access to a platform that Apple built and maintain?
Maybe look at OSX ? Why can Apple be happy with OK with one but not the other? If you want to imply that phones are not computers then tablets are not phones and more like computers, so we all know that if it OSX was created today would be locked.
> How is any business entitled to free or low-fee access to a platform that Apple built and maintain?
I see the argument all the time - I don't think it's really in good faith.
You could argue that it was in fact the app developers who built the platform. For the _average_ iPhone or Android user, how much time is spent in the default apps outside of core phone functionality (making calls, reading/sending sms)?
I would assume most people spend time in 3rd party applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, Spotify, etc.
The "killer app" of the iPhone isn't apple - it's the tens of thousands of 3rd party developers. If all 3rd party developers stopped developing for iOS then the iPhone would be a dead platform.
> How is any business entitled to free or low-fee access to a platform that Apple built and maintain?
Since smartphones became essential to a functioning modern economy.
And it's not about prices, Apple is free to setup any price they want but they should have a choice to publish their app on their website without Apple if they want to.
> How is any business entitled to free or low-fee access to a platform that Apple built and maintain?
Because we have a regulatory system designed to ensure that happens as capitalism doesn't really function if you don't.
Also "platform" is bullshit. By "platform" we mean "Apple used it's control of the hardware to force control of all software on an unprecedented level so they could rent seek." There is no right to a "platform" here. Apple run an app store. People should be free to chose to use it or not, but they're not because Apple abuse their position as hardware manufacturer. That isn't a platform.
Why should people be forced to use Honda engines with Honda cars? Honda ONLY offers Honda engines, not any other manufacturer. The are abusing their control of the integrated car to force control of the drive system and engine. People should be free to choose to use Honda engines or not.
Apple created an integrated product that billions of people prefer. I don’t think it’s for us to arbitrarily tell Apple which parts of their product have to be split into different categories we arbitrarily define for them.
You can replace that Honda engine with a different one (at your own risk) if that's what you want. Honda also doesn't force everyone to give them 30 or 15% of engine oil or washer fluid sales.
The only way to install an app on an iPhone is via Apple's store. You can't download it from the dev's website and install it. You also can't use a different app store because Apple doesn't let you. And you also can't buy something on an app (eg: a subscription) without using Apple's payment system or even link to a donation page (why?).
You can have a well integrated product and still give users and developers some freedom.
For example, Android phones usually come with Google's Play Store, which is what the vast majority of users use. It's no different from Apple and the App Store. Then, optionally, you can download the apk (the .dmg or .exe equivalent) from the dev's website and install it. You can also install a different app store, if that's what you want (almost no one does it, but the option is there). Apps are still only allowed to do what the OS let's them do (eg: you still need to give them permission to access your location, camera, etc), so you're only missing the privacy given by the review process. And when it comes to payments, you can use Google's payment system or something else. Not very different from what happens on your computer.
Some people say this is terrible because then Facebook can create their store to bypass Google's rules. In practice, Facebook knows most users won't sideload apps or install a different app store, so they follow Google's rules like everyone else.
This was a no brainer. Apple wanted 30% (or was it less for subscriptions?) on any business that used apps, no matter if they used apple infrastructure or not.
Just think about it: one company is in practice entitled to 30% of what any other business makes (in any industry)!!
Also, I think apple brought this to themselves by picking a fight with Spotify (on Watch support).