It's far too convenient for C-level executives to reap the rewards when their leadership drives profits, only to shift blame to "the company" when things go wrong. Accountability should work both ways.

Other than the possible contempt for the guy who lied under oath (and some bad press), doesn't this injunction just mean that apple has to do... what it was already previously ordered to do?

Are there no fines or consequences for them doing this? Am I missing something else here?

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

https://mobilegamer.biz/apples-phil-schiller-refuses-to-fix-...

They should have made a separate Game Store and continue to collect those 30% from games, which protect 75% to 80% of their current App Store revenue.

Then 5 - 6% for all subscription based services like Netflix and Spotify. If you include the Credit Card Processing and other tax / VAT report this is a fair amount I think most company would be on board.

And 10% for everything else. Including Tipping and other IAP etc.

Apple would have protected most of their App Store revenue, generate lots of good will and continue their walled garden path.

But for whatever reason over the years every time I mentioned it I get downvoted.

Now it may be too late. The damage to developer relationship, to many business and to its brand.

I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?

We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.

However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)

See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714552

For example, the later does not serve fulltext WSJ articles

https://web.archive.org/web/20250501001608if_/https://www.ws...

The CAPTCHA, a "service" from Cloudflare, is hit when using archive.{is,ph,md,etc.} at 207.241.237.3 If not using that IP, then will not necessarily hit CAPTCHA.

One can switch to another address that works without CAPTCHA, such as 185.101.35.175

Until it too has problems; only a matter of time

On the other hand, the internet archive offers the same service with better credentials

web.archive.org

It wasn't always like that, though. We used to have antitrust with serious teeth in this country. And then it literally got borked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

If you view it on an Apple device, it takes you to the Apple News app and opens it there, rather than redirecting.

How do I know it was probably illegal? Because Apple finally caved and implemented RCS once it started leaking through backchannels that a legal case was being built against them.

They should go down the hall and ask the MacOS developers how they do it.

Where does it stop, should Microsoft, Nvidia, and Intel get a cut when I place an order on my PC that uses APIs and SDKs provided by those companies? Does this entitlement extend to anyone who facilitated the transaction, like my power company and ISP?

And let's not act as if people would use iOS if they couldn't have their apps. It is so much of a net gain to Apple to allow people to develop their apps there's a good chance it's indirectly profitable without any direct revenue from IAP's.

> To summarize, this Court’s orders required that Apple not impose restrictions in its iOS marketplace which would prohibit consumer access to and awareness of competitive alternatives to IAP. The Injunction specifically enjoined Apple’s anti-steering provisions which at the time prohibited developers from raising that consumer awareness and access. In response, Apple intentionally devised a compliance scheme to prevent developers from deploying competitive alternatives to IAP. Apple’s discounted commission rate, on its own, forecloses a developer’s use of link-out purchases. Adding to that, Apple’s various design restrictions and purchase-flow friction arbitrarily decrease the attractiveness of competitive alternatives (if they were utilized) and increase breakage in a purchase flow.

> Apple’s conduct violates the Injunction. The non-compliance was far from “technical or de minimis.” Apple’s lack of adequate justification, knowledge of the economic non-viability of its compliance program, motive to protect its illegal revenue stream and institute a new de facto anticompetitive structure, and then create a reverse-engineered justification to proffer to the Court cannot, in any universe, real or virtual, be viewed as product of good faith or a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s orders.

Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.

Neither Bezos nor Cook has an army (or a CIA). Trump does. They are not playing the same game.

All private wealth, and businesses, and cash flows exist only at the pleasure of the state.

Which, given the sentiment against the very existence of these things in PC gaming circles (as a desktop, at least) in favor of self-building, would be just laptops and handhelds (Steam Decks/ROG Allys) at best.

Let's put money on it. I'll put $10k on it.

In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.

Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.

Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.

And if that’s too tricky, you can just type “Subscriptions” (shows up after just typing “sub” for me) into Spotlight Search, and it’s the top option.

I would argue that this doesn't change my previous argument. I'm talking about how the "modern" OS experience necessitates a near-monopolistic app-store. That the OS cannot be separated from the app-store. This is also the current state of the Play store, even if google technically allows competitors. I also think their reluctant acceptance of these competitors was relatively recent, and therefore that market is still young. I would think that by the time several competing app-stores exist with their own exclusive apps, you'd have a markedly different experience on these OS's than you have today.

If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.

Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.

As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWVV533RHE&t=85s

It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.

Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.

For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.

Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)

I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments?

I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?

In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.

Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.

I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.

Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of

A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.

I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.

Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.

The repercussions of this could be huge.

Is Mac as secure as iOS?

This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"

Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.

Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.

(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)

It took me about 5 seconds to google "cancel subscription apple" and find about a zillion articles on how to do it. Basically open up the App Store, go to your account, click on subscriptions, click on the one in the list you want to cancel. Done.

On the other hand, I also wanted to cancel a pet-locator subscription that was coming up for renewal (we're leaving the country, they don't have coverage outside the US) and I had to go through about 30 layers of "are you sure", "are you really sure", "you know this will stop your service, right?", "we'd sure hate to lose you", "Is there anything we can offer to change your mind", etc. etc.

I doubt a scammer will do that.

Malicious compliance is exactly why good faith is a requirement but not a defense.

Bad faith will get you contempt, good faith will not save you from contempt if you didn't do enough.

Do companies try to skirt this anyway - sure. But they run the risk of a judge finding they didn't do enough, and sanctioning them anyway, even if they didn't have obvious bad faith, or heck, even if they have objectively good faith.

There are plenty of cases where judges sanctioned good faith actors who didn't do enough.

I quoted McComb in another comment (so don't want to paste it again here), but see https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/ and friends.

In the end, once you lose, if you play stupid games, you will usually win stupid prizes.

That doesn't mean people don't play, but it's almost always against their lawyers strong advice.

As for jail - you have to distinguish civil and criminal contempt. Criminal contempt can get you thrown in jail, and has different requirements.

Once a company gets burned by scary litigation, it is often very reticent about pushing the line again.

> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.

More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.

“They don’t want <bad thing> so they choose <equally bad thing good for their revenue>”

In other words, could Apple have done these exact same actions and successfully argued that the language ("external website") was in fact neutral, if not for the direct written record that established their intent to do otherwise?

Everything you just said makes sense, but the details of how the courts manage to enforce orders like this are interesting, and it seems like enforcing notions of good faith must be extremely difficult.

Thanks for writing this though, this is a window into a space I have never played in. The legal system is very mysterious to me.

What I don't get is that sometimes it seems that is the game, sometimes the legal loopholes are accepted and other times they are not. It feels one of the big benefits of hiring a good lawyer is that they know which loopholes are accepted and which are seen as spiting the authority of the courts.

If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's mind. If they didn't say exactly what they meant, then it is the judge that is at fault.

Next, the judge is an expert in law -- NOT an expert in humane interface, UI, or UX. They are in NO position to exert their amateur, ignorant opinion as fact and no effort was made by the judge to consult experts in the field about what would generally be considered "reasonable".

Finally, reasonable is subject to the facts and how those facts are subjectively viewed. Most Apple employees likely view this ruling as bad for their consumers and feel an obligation to protect their 1.4B iPhone users. From this perspective, discussing how to dissuade people from making decisions that could harm them would be very reasonable even if that discussion had a light-hearted tone or some joking along the way.

As an aside, I actively dislike what mostly amounts to forcing Apple to implement California state law outside of the state of California. I get no vote in California and should not be expected to abide by their laws in which I have no say. This whole thing should have been dealt with a the Federal level as it is obviously about interstate commerce and should have been legislated by congress rather than a politically-appointed judge that nobody voted for.

None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.

https://9to5google.com/2025/03/14/rcs-end-to-end-encryption-...

Even if these executive positions carried a guarantee of a several year term in minimum or medium security prison, for the salaries involved they should be able to find someone who is reasonably competent and willing to do the job.

It's not like the corporate entity itself can be threatened with state violence, and it's owners (probably half the US!) are insulated from any real consequences. An entity like Apple really has diffused responsibility to the point that it transcends the law at this point, and it becomes perfectly rational for it to defy the courts.

He probably got offered a couple mil for a slap on the wrist, he likely won't even be jailed for a day. Why wouldn't they lie? They have the money to get away with it.

Do they defy the courts in China or just in the US?

Now, practically speaking, that exposes them to the Court taking all their frustration out on the execs. Oops.

I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".

From a more negative point of view, so Apple knows how much it happens and gets to have some influence over it.

There are a lot of websites that give you a warning when you click on a link outside of their control.

It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).

#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.

Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?

If there is literally no documentation up until the final moment, doesn't that itself act as evidence that they were consciously and deliberately not wanting their reasoning documented?

Why not just do the right thing. Damn.

As a lawyer, that is your time to exit the scene. There are no airquotes that should be around wrong here. This isn't advocacy for some not-ethically-amazing legal position that has yet to be decided on. They lost already. They have already been found guilty. You are now under an active (IE not stayed) court order. If your client then is basically saying "well how do we ignore the court order and do the illegal thing anyway", helping them them is not defensible.

"What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter."

You (and others) are amazed because you think this would have worked. I don't know why. I mean, i kind of get it - I would guess you assume this because hiding things from showing up in discovery (a very different part of the process) used to work better. FWIW - It doesn't work anymore, either. See google being heavily sanctioned for doing exactly this, for example.

Beyond that - assume for a second that the lawyers involved are not morons. Assume they are instead, very smart people. Given that, why not assume that maybe your view of what would have worked might be wrong?

"In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting."

Try it sometime after you get enjoined and see what the judge does to you. I've never seen it go well, but hey, maybe someone has.

While sometimes very smart people are idiots, it's not that common.

"but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such"."

Uh, i think you are sort of dreaming here. Or just lying to the judge? Or maybe you've never actually been grilled by a judge in this situation. I dunno.

In any case, i think the judge would have gotten nearly the same info, if not more, but also would have been a lot more pissed and made a lot more criminal referrals :)

Lots of judges are former prosecutors, litigators, or defense attorneys.

Who don't get to have that kind of fun of cross-examining people, etc, anymore.

In this case she's a former private litigator for many years.

Good luck with your strategy of telling her "I dunno what happened, we just sort of talked about stuff".

This is like the scene from the dark knight where he wants to blackmail batman.

"Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision."

I don't believe so. I think the judge would have written something making them look even more stupid, evil, and criminal.

It's a long rant that is not based in the law, the application of "reasonability" in the law, or other examples of "good faith" standards being used. It's made without any expertise or direct relevant knowledge, yet it is offered with the authority and conviction as if you understood more about the law than the judge in question. Reasonable isn't a state of mind, so when you ask things like "who is this judge to read these people's minds" it begs a million quesitons like, how can your worldview ever deal with laws that DO involve a state of mind? This isn't some huge problem in the legal world, we rely on evidence and the reasonable conclusions and inferences you can make from the evidence.

our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.

a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty

The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.

Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.

...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".

Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.

--------

There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.

Might still make sense, though. Just for general historical preservation.

Console games are typically highly optimized for particular console hardware. This coupling allows great-looking games for hardware that is cheap to make.

As a result, it's typical for consoles to far outperform regular PCs of the same price range. Especially at the beginning of the console lifecycle.

So it can be argued that consumers benefit from this arrangement: they get cheap special-purpose devices for gaming that can't be obtained if consoles are prohibited.

> Games can be packaged to support multiple formats or a standard interface.

Sure. But for AAA-type games that push the envelope, it's not at all trivial.

However, it seems that this pattern is fading with the recent consoles. So perhaps they also need to be unbundled.

A lot of human behaviour is learned and becomes habitualised rather than logically thought through. Habits are sub-conscious and therefore logic doesn't (as) often get applied.

I find these really elaborate rants about the law, which are based on nothing but presumptions, and in this case, presumptions that do not even arise from actual personal experience, to be incredibly exhausting and in service of creating more confusion than anything else.

Like, you just said upthread that courts shouldn't rely on the word reasonable? I cannot think of an easier way to express that you have absolutely no experience with the legal system than that. It's for sure a common misconception of programmers that the law should function the way code does. What's sad about that is that you are somehow so devoid of actual life experience as to not realize how it must be the case that something like the law must not function like source code out of necessity.

Hint: rationalization tends to be after.

Not to say that it can’t be overridden with training and/or self-reflection/self-skepticism, but first reactions tend to allows follow this pattern.

Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.

It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.

That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.

I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.

Boards private jet to Monaco

IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.

One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.

I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.

Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.

Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.

It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.

I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.

Those experts spent collective centuries learning their area of expertise, but the judge became familiar with everything over the course of this one trial...

> I don't need to. It is not my obligation to defend the legal system because you have your own ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.

I've provide an argument that it is not. You have provided an unsubstantiated assertion. If you aren't willing to engage, then why make the assertion in the first place?

> The issue is convincing you, an incredibly unreasonable person.

You have made zero reasoned arguments and outright refused to make any reasoned arguments, but consider me to be the unreasonable person who just won't listen to what you have to say. How does this make sense to you?

> Judges make orders. SMEs don't and can't. And lol at the idea you are suggesting that a layman jury should define these things. It is clear to me that you do not understand the role of a jury in a trial. Jury's determine disputed facts. Nothing more, nothing less.

If a judge rules that a bridge should be built, that doesn't mean they should tell the engineers how to build it. You are confusing the legal ruling with the implementation.

In this example, the engineers put in a suspension bridge and the judge got angry because it wasn't a truss bridge even though a truss bridge wasn't specified in the ruling and the judge has no real idea why one might choose one bridge type over the other.

If the type of bridge mattered, it was the judge's responsibility to talk with the parties involved and reach a decision then add that decision to the final ruling.

In this specific case, the judge should have gotten SMEs together to decide which approach was correct and included it in the ruling rather than complain that things weren't as the judge envisioned, but never even bothered to write down other than in the vaguest terms. Holding someone in contempt because they didn't read your mind is unreasonable.

The truth is that you don't believe your own argument. You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail. You only differ from me in where that line should be drawn.

The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.

This explanatory model explains a lot of what companies do but not all. It is a useful first approximation for many firms.

Still, the conceit of modeling an organization as a rational individual only gets you so far. It works for certain levels of analysis, I will grant. But to build more detailed predictive models, more complexity is needed. For example, organizational inertia is a thing. One would be wise to factor in some mechanism for constrained rationality and/or “irrational” deviations. CEOs often move in herds, for example.

> The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

Theory, meet history. But more seriously, will you lay out what you mean by quickly? And what does market data show? Has this been studied empirically? (I’m aware that it is a theoretical consequence of some particular market theories — but I don’t think successful financial modelers would make that claim without getting much more specific.)

I was previously thinking that your comments had something to do with the topic, but now that you are admitting that you just want to, like, over throw the entire system and get rid of very common concepts in the law, I can ignore it for being basically irrelevant.

This has nothing to do with the use of "reasonableness" in law as you argue. There are all kinds of reasons a wrongful conviction could happen, such as falsified evidence. Claiming that the number of wrongful convictions is entirely because of slight ambiguity in various laws needs extraordinary sources, sources, and sources, because that is an extraordinary claim. You don't seem to realize just how widely used intent and reasonable compliance is in law.

> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.

Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.

Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.

That would not work with iPhone security model, as iPhone assumes the user is inexperienced.

That's what the plain language of this injunction does.

Admittedly if Apple had come to the court (or even potentially came to the court now) and agreed to the alternate solution of allowing sideloading the court might have issued a different injunction (or modify this injunction).

Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.

Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.

If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.