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>Setting aside the store issue for a moment, what you suggest is impossible if Apple is also making apps. No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in al

>Setting aside the store issue for a moment, what you suggest is impossible if Apple is also making apps. No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in all sorts of businesses. Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees. Apple can hardly claim that they lack the expertise to compartmentalise information in this manner - prior to the iPhone launch, the software team had never seen the hardware and vice-versa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall

treis 8y ago
>No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in all sorts of businesses. Can you provide a software example? > Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees. Nobody should believe that a company paying fees to itself will change its behavior. The app development team would still act in Apple's overall best interest and not seek to maximize its own profits. Even if we somehow accept that there is a real divide, it's still not equal footing. Say that Apple Music and Spotify both have $0.75 in expenses for every $1 they charge on app store. After the 30% cut, both would have loses of $0.05 per dollar of revenue. For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >Can you provide a software example? Amazon are already very, very close to that state of play - developers within Amazon are required to design their infrastructure based on standard APIs, to facilitate the commercialisation of those systems via AWS. Chinese walls are commonplace in any kind of reverse-engineering as a protection against claims of copyright infringement. >For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't. That would constitute predatory pricing, which is illegal under EU competition law.

treis 8y ago

>No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in all sorts of businesses. Can you provide a software example? > Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees. Nobody should believe that a company paying fees to itself will change its behavior. The app development team would still act in Apple's overall best interest and not seek to maximize its own profits. Even if we somehow accept that there is a real divide, it's still not equal footing. Say that Apple Music and Spotify both have $0.75 in expenses for every $1 they charge on app store. After the 30% cut, both would have loses of $0.05 per dollar of revenue. For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't.

jdietrich 8y ago
>Can you provide a software example? Amazon are already very, very close to that state of play - developers within Amazon are required to design their infrastructure based on standard APIs, to facilitate the commercialisation of those systems via AWS. Chinese walls are commonplace in any kind of reverse-engineering as a protection against claims of copyright infringement. >For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't. That would constitute predatory pricing, which is illegal under EU competition law.