I have a different perspective.

Many of my different friend groups use the "group messaging" feature on their phones. If everyone is using an iPhone in that group, it defaults to using iMessage.

I switched to Android about 18 months ago, and it broke all of the group text message chains I had because some of their phones continued to use iMessage even though my phone no longer supported it. Sometimes their messages came through to me, sometimes they didn't. I would see half of a conversation, and many of my messages wouldn't reach members of the group. Eventually, people stopped including me in group text messages because it made the chats unreliable.

After 18 months of being increasingly isolated from all my friends, I switched back to an iPhone. I switched only for the reason that it was difficult to keep in touch with people without it.

One-to-one messaging worked fine, but I was left out of group chats, a critical way my friends and I stay in touch.

If your want to sell on the east coast (Apple), you need to put your product in wooden boxes no larger than X and documentation must be written in French, and you must have 10 employees that speak French.

If you want to sell to the West coast, you put your product in plastic bags, and everything is in Spanish, and your employees need to speak Spanish.

Yes, you have two competitors, but reach had a unique customer pool, and each had the sole power to let you access them. You must build your product and hope they purchase it (and keep it around), otherwise your business doesn't exist... You can't sell your product to anyone!

You have no negotiation power, if you're not promoted in store you can't leverage your power as a seller (they have all power, as long as they do not violate any actual law)

Companies don't have to literally be the only buyer in a marketplace to wield "monopsony power." If competition isn't perfect — like when there are only a few companies in a market and they aren't undercutting each other's prices — companies gain some ability to lower the price on the stuff they buy. Sellers don't have a lot of other options.

Apple might be profiting from its monopsony power in the app market. In this argument, the company is effectively the sole buyer of Apple-compatible apps and services, which allows them to set their fee as high as they want.

Both of this are new argument from "monopsony" perspective, which is different to all your listed point above are "monopoly" perspective.

Not saying I agree or disagree with his monopsony thing, since it is completely new word to me.

> 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it.

> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.

> Which one is is?

Well, these aren't mutually exclusive. Apple can sell less variety, and still exert too much control over their platform--in fact, the first is caused by the second. I'd argue that "monopoly" doesn't really apply to the second situation, so that's sloppy use of the English language, but if you try to actually figure out what people are trying to communicate, rather than being pedantic, you'll have a more interesting conversation with those people.

Unlike a Tesla, you don’t lose a lifetime of app purchases, movies, songs and books when switching products; you don’t lose a major set of functionality between other Tesla owners which would hamper your ability to use your product. I think the “monopsony” is an excellent way to frame the problem. There should be regulation requiring companies like Apple to allow users to sell the apps and other digital content they’ve purchased to others, to allow people to set their own default apps on their own devices and to not hamper the efforts of others to provide interoperability with other devices. These should be common sense consumer rights issues, although at present the only consumer rights-focused entity strong enough to make any of this actually happen is the EU, and I hope they manage to do so.

If an iPhone user has friends that all use Duo on Android, she can install Duo on her iPhone.

If an Android user has friends that all use iMessage or FaceTime, there is no way for her to participate in group chats or group calls.

> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.

> Which one is is?

It's both, because they're two different contexts. There is no monopoly on phones; Android phones are direct competition. But what about app distribution? If you make apps and you want to buy app distribution to reach all customers, who is Apple's real competition for reaching customers on iOS? They haven't any; it's a monopoly. And it's not just like Walmart having a monopoly on shelf space at Walmart, because most Walmart customers will also shop at Target or Amazon, but most iOS customers don't also shop for apps at Google Play or Amazon. Apple is the only path to reach them.

Saying they could just buy an Android phone is like saying that a retailer with a regional monopoly in California doesn't really have a monopoly because all your customers could just move to New York. That's an unreasonable barrier to buy a $1 item, and on top of that it isn't even under the control of the app developer who wants to buy app distribution.

Apple recently rejected our app submission as we mention our Android version within our app settings. They don't demand you be iOS exclusive, but they damn well try to make it difficult.

That release was just a minor version with some fixes, the text had been in the app for years.

Antitrust enforcement isn't really about "fault". It's not there to punish, it is there to force markets to be more competitive.

Saying that people can develop for Android, so this isn't monopsony/monopoly is sort of like saying Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly because people still could use coal and steam power rather than Standard Oil's petroleum.

While many things about iPhone and Android phones are similar, there are also a huge amount of differences that put huge barriers to going from one to the other.

Network monopolies are complex things, and they aren't about people being able to charge "whatever they like." They are about significantly reduced competition and significant barriers to competitors. Not everything has to be so black and white.

"Apple is like Tesla."

Not really, particularly not in the respects that this article is about. For a consumer, going from a Tesla to another EV is not a big deal. Also, EV's are in their infancy, and antitrust enforcement tends to cut some slack when that is true. Tesla could (very reasonably) end up being forced to separate their car business from their charging network when they get big enough.

"They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones."

This isn't what the article is about. This is about the developer side of things, not the consumer side. Developers spend huge amounts of resources writing code that runs on only Apple devices. A very large number of users have iOS devices, not Android devices, and they only way to make apps for them is via the Apple store. Yes you can choose to develop for Android, but aside from the cost of switching, you are now selling to a completely different set of people.

For another analogy, imagine you're a clothing manufacturer, but if you want to sell clothing to women, you have to sell it through a single retail store chain. Saying "you can always make clothing for men" isn't particularly helpful.

I consider Apple's restrictions on monetizing apps to be shenanigans. It feels normal to me for them to insist on a cut from app sales and in-app purchases.

It feels like shenanigans for them to try to block developers having revenue side-channels. I know this is very uneven, for example, I can download an Amazon Prime app and use it, even though I pay for Amazon prime elsewhere.

But in the Amazon app, there are certain things I can't buy in the app, nor is the app allowed to link me to a web page where I can buy it.

The real harm we see Apple doing is that they allow the dominant groups in society to suppress anyone else. This became especially clear during the Hong Kong protests, where they banned apps protestors used after a request from Chinese authorities. Because of the lack of choice in the market, consumers have little choice but to live with whatever is imposed on them.

Come up with whatever theory under existing laws or come up with some new laws, but it seems to me like this is a ridiculous situation that should have a legal remedy.

2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.

What about 3?

Apple's products are overpriced and underpowered, locked down devices sold as fashion statements or 'lifestyle' accessories that are more like toys for rich people than the miniature computers they're supposed to be.

As for their computers, similar argument, overpriced, underpowered, locked down hardware.

And then there's the whole culture of snobbery surrounding Apple and their products that has existed since at least the mid-late 90's about how superior Apple products are to everything else always that's just kind of grated on me...well since then.

Those 2 positions are not mutually-exclusive.

They do force us to build the package on their devices though. Which is a wholly arbitrary demand which is frustrating to map into a build process that is already automated on the cloud. Prior to services that rent out Apple devices its an awkward fit.

They're very aggressive with their posturing and they ruthlessly exploit the power they have. Just reading the dev EULA in full is evidence of that.

> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.

The three positions suggested here (monopoly and monoposony being very different things) aren't actually incompatible. Android can sell more and Apple can be a monopoly (and even more easily, a monoposony) if there is a discernable market of buyers/sellers for whom price adverse changes in what apple is offering to sell or buy do not induce shifts to Android.

They flat out don't allow bloatware from the vendors on their devices. Android doesn't have that kind of pull, and Verizon won't push updates for my phone until they have tested all their bloatware crap that I can't uninstall.

Additionally, Apple has had many other 'requirements' from vendors to keep selling their phone, things like visual voicemail support, allowing them to use iMessage in place of texting (really goes with the part above), requiring ipv6 support, etc.

But currently the alternatives have many problems that cause people to choose iPhones. When those problems are overcome, the market will swing their way.

Apple is not infallible. It will screw up, or go out of fashion, or fall behind eventually. All companies do. People getting all worked up over this need to see the big picture.

>If you sell too cheaply - antitrust laws break you

>If you sell at the same price as competitors - its a cartel or a deal between vendors

>If you sell at a price too high - its a monopoly

Now the only way that Apple is like Tesla is if Tesla was also a utilities company that managed powerplants, which had a different pricing scheme for it's car customers.

At the end of the day it's about a company's abuse of power against users and smaller competitors, and that's what matters. If you get confused when this begins being called "monopoly" because you have a different idea of what a monopoly is, then stop calling it that.

It's about an abuse of power, pure and simple, and the bigger the company and its stranglehold on its users and developers, the more it can abuse that power. Government, the people's representatives (at least in theory), should have every right to deal with that.

I wish the US Government and regulators were pushing for this as opposed to trying to break encryption or force backdoors.

I don't, and it means 10 percent of the population can't use my free apps that save people time and money.

I suppose that's the cost of Apple being Evil and people buying from such a company.

Apple uses vendor lock-in for software used by one customer across devices, and for software used by multiple users (iMessage)

Plus long term, the technology industry would be healthier to push back against Big Tech keeping an iron grip on these platforms. In the last year that Apple has turned every default app on its phone into a $10 a month optional premium service. This marginal increase in service revenue will starve the news industry, compete unfairly against Netflix and HBO, eviscerate the remaining paid mobile game industry, and scare any fintech start up / vc playing anywhere near apples potential roadmap. And Apple isn’t even doing that good of a job at these new services - they just have the luxury of making the iPhone which is so good that it makes up for them doing everything else mediocrely

Apple’s defense argued that only the app developers could sue under a certain view of the precedent where Apple’s role as a pass through is essentially transparent to the law. Their argument attempted to shift who the customer was ultimately doing business with: Apple or the app developer.

One of the theories underpinning the precedential rule is that not stopping impacted downstream parties from suing may potentially subject Apple to multiple liability. Apple argued that they were already liable to app developers so shouldn’t also be liable to consumers. The Court is saying here that that theory does not hold water because Apple, as a middleman, may be liable to both upstream and downstream parties (damages from app developers and consumers, respectively).

While something like "4694372" is motorically meaningful to a person typing it on the keypad, or to someone watching him do it, it translates to the screen space as gibberish. Another way to put it is that when typed it has an obvious structure, but when read on the screen, the structure is prohibitively difficult to discern. That's interesting, because it's all too easy to forget that the computer as we know it today can interface with only a very small portion of our faculties.

Also remember how long that Microsoft rulling took and what it actualy ended-up being in the end - which for most was an annoying popup for those who already knew how to change web browsers. These days what happens is EU will start the long process and before it hits court some agreement is made.

But the difference for Android and Apple is that Android is `open source`, IOS is not.

Buy an android phone and change the app store - kinda entails rooting the phone in most if not all cases in some way and that for most phone sellers does void the warranty.

So say Apple did offer you to change app store - but in doing that voided your warranty, which would be fair from their perspective. May even be case of, well you have non Apple app store - no Apple services for you as we do not trust your device as you have modified it - enjoy. Again, something that they could justify and in a way which would be fair from their perspective. After all, nobody wants to open up a system in a way that may expose it to outside security or stability issues now. Remember Apple is more about reputation than the products, though they do go hand in hand, it is the reputation that carries them as much if not more than any individual product.

Another way to view this is a hotel has a nice inhouse restaurant, should they be forced to allow McDonalds to open a store in their hotel or leave that choice to the guests who can go to another hotel if they want that experience.

No, not on iOS

> Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Yes, because Apple will cease to be a monopsony for iOS apps. That is, if SCOTUS rules that Apple does have a monopsony. Kavanaugh only suggested they might have.

One important point on this is that the Play Store does allow some apps distributed within it to do billing themselves [0], but not games, which is why Fortnite is distributed outside the Play store.

There are some other rules, but if you're building a cross-platform app, you should know that many Play Store distributed apps can do billing themselves on the grounds that they have "digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself".

Spotify and Netflix do their own billing on Android, as opposed to iOS, where the Netflix app has a button to call a phone number that plays a voice recording telling you to go to netflix.com (web links to sign-up pages aren't allowed).

[0] https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/

People forget that there were phones before the iPhone decided all phones would be rectangles with touchscreens.

Those phones ran apps and games, and you downloaded them from app stores... there was in fact a cambrian explosion of app stores, when you made software you had to publish it to hundreds of them.

I can't remember the %, but it seems unlikely, in the fact of all that competition that it was as high as 30%.

It's ironic how some people seem to like saying "well they just copied Apple" and expect Google to be absolved of the actions they think are bad, but for everything else they would vehemently deny Google copying Apple.

* iTunes gift cards regularly go on sale for 60-70% of its value on third party markets, and * 30% is a reasonable, to cheap, price to pay for money laundering,

I think your theory is unfounded.

Eh, it doesn't work like that, if I spent a lot of time coding an iOS app, but Apple rejects it, that's my investment gone. Of course I can learn Android development, but I still spent a lot of time learning about iOS without any benefit.

Meanwhile, someone sold you a burger, if you didn't buy it, it doesn't mean someone else couldn't buy it...

Most Android phones come with an alternate appstore installed (e.g. Samsung come with their own one as well as google play) and you can easily install others.

To install alternates on the iPhone you have to root it.

There was a good interview in the vergecast with a lawyer preparing the case against Apple. The answer to “is it a different case for console ?” was more in the vain of “let’s do this case first”.

Exactly as is the case with iOS, Nintendo, or PlayStation.

Quite simply, if the legal tools don't exist to deal with this abuse, they need to be created...just like the Sherman Antitrust Act.

On a monopoly/monopsony theory, devices shipped is the relevant metric, and revenue isn't.

Microsoft takes 5% for selling apps in the Windows store. That may be a bit desperate given that these stores aren't just payment services but act as merchants of record, taking care of international taxes, billing and running an actual store.

I wouldn't complain for a second if store fees were in the neighbourhood of 10% plus transaction fee.

But charging 30% irrespective of price is not reasonable by any reasonable definition of reasonable.

(As someone who doesn't use either an iPhone or an Android phone, I don't really have a dog in this fight. Just an observer trying to see various points of view.)

If a customer signs up and setups payment for the service outside the app, then Apple doesn't take a cut. That's why you can't buy books in the Audible iOS app, or subscribe to Netflix via the iOS app. But you can login and watch/listen to content you've already bought or subscribed to.

For example, Apple prioritized service workers over web app manifests (which BTW are not yet a W3C recommendation). I can only assume this is partly because there have been so many failed attempts at static web app manifests in the past. Them prioritizing other features for earlier release doesn't mean that Web App Manifest support isn't in active development ( https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158205 ).

But honestly, I feel that competition within a single game consoles should be allowed. This doesn't have to take a form of side-loading (which obviously has a significant downside of piracy which hurts game devs/publishers even more than monopoly/monopsony) though.

Of course, everything is changing now. I think the apple app store might have led the way starting ~ 2007 or so.

Hence, people might not have thought it was worth it / important before, but they do now.

Dell: £2,349.00

Apple: £3,339.00

It's not as though Dell is a worse option for many uses either - there are plenty of strengths e.g. Linux compatibility, nvidia gpu, support for pens, repairability, on-site support.

We never had this problem Mac and Windows. Those are also created by companies and providing a platform for all sorts of applications, but anyone can develop for them. You don't need anyone's permission to install apps on your laptop. But for your phone, somehow you do.

In comparison, Android allows a lot more flexibility of cost when picking a development machine by allowing you to develop from Linux, Windows, or Mac OS.

Your point about six-figure cars is a good one. I can either spend $90k to $120k on a car to drive to work that's super quiet on the inside, or spend $12k on a used Accord and another $400 on the top-flight Bose noise-cancelling headphones and achieve the same level of quiet on my commute. The way Apple builds their hardware you can't modify it to improve how it works for you; the only option is to take it or leave it.