11 ms·

Netherlands ACM launches investigation into abuse by Apple in its App Store

189 points by DeusExMachina 8y ago

Vinnl 8y ago
ACM is the Autoriteit Consumer en Markt (literally: Authority for Consumers and Markets), the Dutch equivalent of the FTC, I think.
- swiley 8y ago
  Good to know, it seemed like a strange thing for the Association for Computing Machinery to do.
- stevesimmons 8y ago
  small typo here: De Autoriteit Consument en Markt
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    Oops, sorry about that!
- mcguire 8y ago
  Thank you! I automatically read "Association for Computing Machinery", which is totally irrelevant.
anfilt 8y ago
Apple could help avoid some these problems if they would just let people side load apps without Appple's blessing or root your device without having to jailbreak it.
- asaddhamani 8y ago
  Well considering even Macs are moving to a more and more controlled and restricted ecosystem / use of apps, I don't see iOS going the opposite direction
  - aaomidi 8y ago
    Unless required to.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Wouldn't count on that happening. They don't want their phone turning into malware central. I bet they probably already did the projections and have figured out exactly how much each type of bad pr costs. They probably already have the data to know that it's better to take the bad pr with developers than to take that pr hit with actual customers.
  - simion314 8y ago
    We all know that the reason Apple devices, Sony,Microsoft and others consoles don't let you side load apps is financial.
- simonh 8y ago
  The trick is how to provide a feature like that which cannot be used as a vector for malicious hacks, and which can't be used by the authorities to compromise citizen's privacy against their wishes.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    Apple's side-loading ban creates ideal conditions for authorities to compromise citizen's privacy via censorship, VPN bans, etc. Ultimately, having one all powerful gatekeeper is not secure, because that gatekeeper can get compromised or impose arbitrary restrictions for commercial/ideological reasons (such as Apples anti-sex policies)
    - simonh 8y ago
      >Apple's side-loading ban creates ideal conditions for authorities to compromise citizen's privacy via censorship, VPN bans, etc. I can't really parse that. iOS being locked down and having strong system security prevents censorship because it prevents authorities getting access to your data. How on earth can opening that up and providing backdoors to the system prevent censorship? The whole reason for the VPN ban is precisely because Apple's system security is so tight that eavesdropping on the wire is the only way the authorities can get at user communications. This criticism makes no sense. Ultimately, your expectations of how gate keeping should pan out fail to match actual reality. iOS is vastly more secure that it's open competitors, so much so that it isn't even remotely close. I don't know how you can post that with a straight face, but I suppose ideology is a powerful force.
      - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
        >iOS being locked down and having strong system security prevents censorship because it prevents authorities getting access to your data. This is completely false. Owning a secure device does not help you get around censorship at all unless you can also install a good VPN (or similar). >I don't know how you can post that with a straight face, but I suppose ideology is a powerful force. What ideology would that be? I am an iOS user myself and superior security and privacy is one of the reasons for it. But that doesn't make me blind to the negative side-effects of Apple's approach. Being easily co-opted by governments for censorship purposes is undeniably one of those negative side-effects.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Google Play has not been immune to antitrust scrutiny because Android permits sideloading. Just because you can sideload, doesn't mean you can compete with the Play Store on even ground. Sideloading has generally required selecting a scary checkbox to permit "unknown sources", it's not like just double-clicking an EXE you downloaded off the Internet. I remember app developers getting kicked out of the Android Market back in the day (emulators for consoles, specifically) and saying they'd still work on their app as a sideloaded thing, but only a month or too later, they'd abandon it since nobody was really following them anymore. There's a certain amount of openness on some platforms I like to call "just enough rope to hang yourself with", where they say it's an open platform that anyone can build on top of, but they control enough of the business-side aspects of to ensure you can never successfully compete on. Legal entities are less concerned with the technical status of openness than the business reality of openness, and I doubt allowing sideloading would actually exempt them from much attention.
  - anfilt 8y ago
    I said "Apple could help avoid some these problems". Keyword is some. You can still be anti-competitive despite being technically open. Look at what happened with Microsoft and IE. You could still at least install an other browser, but that did not stop the authorities. It's even worse IOS because you can't side load and you can't even install a competing browser engine. You also can't publish one via the app store.
- eridius 8y ago
  If you want to side-load apps, use Android. Completely serious here. The degree to which iOS is locked down is absolutely a feature for the overwhelming majority of users. If you don't like it, don't use it. Not all computing platforms need to offer the same functionality. Not all computing platforms need to be "open". If you want an open platform, then use one.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  You can side load on iOS all you want -- just get your developer tools installed and build and compile your own code. No problem!
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    You don't even need to compile the code; signing the app binary with your development certificate is enough.
yig 8y ago
The title should be changed to reflect that this is a branch of the government of Netherlands and not the Association of Computing Professionals.
- rietta 8y ago
  Agreed. That was exactly who I thought the headline was referring to.
- jonathanyc 8y ago
  That’s why I clicked the link. Title should definitely be changed to indicate that this is the Dutch government.
- thefounder 8y ago
  The .nl tld should tell you it's not a US org.
  - dagmx 8y ago
    The ACM that the OP mentioned is a global organization and have a presence in many countries.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets is a global organisation?
- mises 8y ago
  Yes, I figured this was to do with them. I doubt it's intentionally misleading, but it might be good to expand the acronym.
- sctb 8y ago
  Sure thing, done.
mailslot 8y ago
I worked, briefly, for a mobile app developer that made an app so bad, it regularly bricked phones. There were bugs in the logging that would trash the flash storage. It would also prevent the radios from entering power save, and floor the CPU (bugs). Within months of use, customer phones would either “explode” from excessive battery drain, “lightly smoke,” or just become inoperable from dead flash storage. I sat in a meeting where the execs were all complaining about Apple’s unfair business practices re: their inability to do terrible things in background tasks, and their frequent app rejections / review process. In this case, Apple saved countless phones from being bricked by one of the worst enterprise app developers. Some of the restrictions help to prevent first class assholes, like them, from publishing wholly defective garbage.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  That's great. But that sounds like failing to meet what could be an objective quality standard, enforced by something like CI. I don't think anyone objects to that kind of gate keeping. The contention here (true or false) is that Apple tips the scales so that good apps lose to Apple's competing ones.
  - mises 8y ago
    On what is Apple competing with respect to apps? I know they've got a few, like garage band, but they make money regardless of which app is purchased.
    - salamander014 8y ago
      Their Music app versus Spotify, their Photos app versus Google Photos, their News app versus NPR... And that's not everything.
      - bilbo0s 8y ago
        Is there any app that they make big money off of that they're competing on? serious question. Not being argumentative. Trying to get a picture of how much of Apple's hundreds of billions these apps are.
holoduke 8y ago
The situation currently with both stores is a bit comparible with Microsoft during the internet explorer dominance. The only way to resolve this is by splitting up playstore and iTunes store. Too much self interest from Google and apple is destroying these ecosystems for small businesses.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  No. If you had to live through things back then you could see IE actively undermining the internet and making it MS specific. It wasn't like you use MS or you use an IBM OS or HP OS or something like that. It was you use MS or piss off. There was no realistic Mac option for the masses due to horrible mismanagement. Linux just was not there yet to be perfectly frank. (Even though techies were over the moon because the slackware had XWindows! So now you could open multiple bash terminals to get your work done! See how usable it is!) It ended up not mattering anyway. The courts kind of laughed the government out of the room. I'm pretty sure the best they got was a promise to let other browsers be installed. (Keep in mind, they were still going to pre-install IE, so nothing was going to change.) That was one of the biggest farcical scenes I'd witnessed in my lifetime. Equivalent of a slap on the hand. (Actually, maybe more like a tap.)
  - stevesimmons 8y ago
    Microsoft got far more than "a slap on the hand", at least in the EU. They were fined a total of $1.3bn for anti-competitive behaviour, which would have escalated up to $7.4bn if they hadn't stopped. The two fines were: - in 2004, EUR 497m ($611m) for restricting music player access, server APIs, etc, with remedies allowing competitors access to build interoperating products. That was the EU's largest fine ever against a single company. - in 2013, EUR 561m ($731m) for "inadvertently" removing a browser choice screen in 2011 that had been added in 2010 as a condition of the previous remedy following a complaint by Opera in 2007. That last fine was a firm warning to Microsoft to take anti-competition provisions seriously. If they hadn't changed, EU laws allowed a fine of up to 10% of global revenue, which would have been $7.4bn based on their 2012 turnover.
    - 8y ago
coldcode 8y ago
Is this not like complaining that Walmart dominates its suppliers in Walmart stores? They also sell their own brands plus demand suppliers offer and price exactly what Walmart wants.
- reinder 8y ago
  I suppose a supplier choosing to work with Walmart could have chosen any reseller/distributor, whereas with apps you're pretty much limited to App Store / Google Play. Not everyone shops at Walmart, but almost everyone shops for apps at App Store / Google Play.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    >almost everyone shops for apps at App Store / Google Play.... In fairness, "almost everyone" shops at Target/Walmart. That's why everyone's so desperate to get the buyers at Target and Walmart to do business with them. It's worse actually, because you can get on App Store or Google Play, and still not do very well. Whereas if you get space at Target you're set.
- headhuntermdk 8y ago
  More than likely you can buy the same brand at another store such As Target, etc. If Walmart was the only outlet where one could buy the product and that product was also competing with Walmart products, that is an unfair advantage in Walmart's favor. In the case with Apple Music vs Spotify, Spotify is not only at a disadvantage of API availability, but also how the rules are not applied for Apple's own apps (marketing push notifications come to mind). On top of that, it is more difficult to complete on price as you are coughing up 30% for any IAP (which you have to use Apple's IAP APIs to begin with). So spotify either charges an extra 30% to cover the fees or eats the 30% to remain price competitive.
  - gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
    But there's still an aspect of the same vein, right? Like, if you have a product, there's the retail price, and there's the wholesale price that Walmart pays you. There's a spread that you pay going through Walmart that they don't have to pay for their own products. Now, it's definitely not 30%, but its there. I think the numbers change how onerous the splits feel, but the mechanics look similar.
drivingmenuts 8y ago
I'd be perfectly happy if Apple were forced to allow alternative app stores on the IOS platform, so long as security was guaranteed and backed by legal penalties, if Apple was allowed to heavily curate the collection of apps offered by their own store. I wouldn't use a third-party app store, nor recommend it, but I'd be fine with their existence.
- kbenson 8y ago
  I argued for this here just last week. I would definitely add a store from Mozilla for any software they were paid to review and include. The app store works because Apple has a reputation, and we trust this reputation. Other companies have a good reputation and could trade on this to offer software.
- swiley 8y ago
  >so long as security was guaranteed and backed by legal penalties What does this mean? Apple's app store doesn't even guarantee security. Would something like F-droid be allowed? Because if not I would argue we're still not solving the problem.
  - drivingmenuts 8y ago
    First, security in the payment process. Apple seems to doing pretty well there, so equivalent or better than that. Second, offer a guarantee that the software on offer is free of malware and unreasonable tracking. Some degree of inspection and curation would need to be performed by the selling App Store as well as having agreements set up with the developers of the apps. Third, real penalties to all parties if there was some sort of breach or other malfeasance. In the case of data leaks and other issues from the store, the penalty would fall on them. For malware, etc., the penalty would fall on the developers and/or the store for lax practices.
herodotus 8y ago
Here is some context. There are two collections of frameworks available for iOS developers. The private frameworks cannot be used by non-apple applications. In some cases, this restriction makes it impossible for an App developer to develop an App that has the same functionality as the corresponding Apple app. Just to pick one example, the Music App has a download-to-device option (a cloud with an arrow) which allows users to move cloud-stored songs from their iTunes library onto their device. This functionality is not available in the iOS SDK. In my opinion, there is legitimacy to the complaints being investigated.
- oblio 8y ago
  Microsoft was attacked for the exact same thing 2 decades ago. If you make a platform, you shouldn't have any private APIs that only your applications can use, in my opinion.
  - simonh 8y ago
    I think there's a reasonable exception for some built-in applications that manage core services, but that privilege should be used sparingly and for clearly benign or user-friendly reasons. It shouldn't be used to gain a competitive advantage in revenue-generating applications or services. Hmm, after writing the above it occurred to me that cloud storage like iCloud might have to be an exception to that rule for pragmatic reasons. iCloud is clearly a competitor to Dropbox, but it is also used to store backups of the phone's system settings and such. On the one hand Dropbox should be able to compete fairly against iCloud for offline app data storage, but I don't think it should have access to do backups of phone system settings. I suppose the way out of that conundrum is to ensure that any use of iCloud for system related storage should not be part of a commercial service offering, which is sort of how it works as you can do that on the iCloud free tier. Still, it's an interesting edge case that shows how tricky these questions can be.
    - oblio 8y ago
      > but I don't think it should have access to do backups of phone system settings. Why not?
yohann305 8y ago
An exact same issue was raised in the 1910's about railroad companies who owned the rails and started transporting their own good and barring transportation access to other companies. I invite you to read this (quite old - 1914) book named "Other People's Money" by Louis Brandeis, it's in the public domain now, quick free read: https://books.google.com/books/about/Other_People_s_Money.html?id=uCpMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books/about/Other_People_s_Money.ht... History repeats itself. PS: you might also read this book to understand how the people owning today's banks are the same group of people that owned railroad companies!
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  I don't think it's the same exact issue since a key feature of railroads is the use of land, which can't be replicated endlessly with very low marginal costs.
  - yohann305 8y ago
    >> which can't be replicated endlessly with very low marginal costs. Sure it sounds easier to build an app store, but is it really any simpler than building railroads? One might think of app store as being just software but it's way more than that, it's an entire ecosystem built by a huge company made of the best talent in the world. Look at big companies like Microsoft and Blackberry who have given up on their smartphone ecosystem (and respective app stores). It's definitely very competitive and cannot be replicated endlessly with very low marginal costs.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      What app store are you on? The only ones I see have crap search and recommendation systems. Beyond that they're off the shelf shopping carts for file downloads. The stores that are popular are so because they're preinstalled. That's it.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    I think the ability to exclude is what matters here
appstorelottery 8y ago
What about this idea? If you create a platform (OS/Cloud etc.) then you're not allowed to create applications for that platform, or profit from the sale of 3rd party applications - or compete with your own users more generally. This would stop everything from the Amazon effect to Novell happening. For the life of me I don't understand why we don't enforce this kind of idea?
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Because many platforms might not exist under those conditions. I think Steve Jobs was initially opposed to allowing third party apps at all. Amazon market place might not exist either. Google, Amazon or Microsoft might not be offering AI services to third parties. There might not be extension APIs for MS Office or Google Docs. Instead we could be seeing a whole lot more vertical integration and a whole lot less opportunity for small vendors to leverage technology that benefits from economies of scale. I think it's better to let things evolve and then regulate when problems become obvious. Otherwise everything could be as stagnant as many utilities are today.
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    Under those principles, the entire computing industry would never have been created. If you can't create your own hardware, and then sell your own software to run on that hardware, then you're doomed.
occupodd 8y ago
Apple is a proto-fascist company and need to be labeled as such.
vinni2 8y ago
Coming from Computer Science academia ACM for me is Association for Computing Machinery.
musicale 8y ago
"Furthermore, they are not always able to use all functionalities of an iPhone" If Apple is using "secret APIs" in its own apps in the app store then that is unfair and should change. But sandboxing apps and limiting their access to data and to OS internals is a very good thing.

189 points by DeusExMachina 8y ago

ACM is the Autoriteit Consumer en Markt (literally: Authority for Consumers and Markets), the Dutch equivalent of the FTC, I think.

swiley 8y ago
Good to know, it seemed like a strange thing for the Association for Computing Machinery to do.
stevesimmons 8y ago
small typo here: De Autoriteit Consument en Markt
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Oops, sorry about that!
mcguire 8y ago
Thank you! I automatically read "Association for Computing Machinery", which is totally irrelevant.

anfilt 8y ago

Apple could help avoid some these problems if they would just let people side load apps without Appple's blessing or root your device without having to jailbreak it.

asaddhamani 8y ago
Well considering even Macs are moving to a more and more controlled and restricted ecosystem / use of apps, I don't see iOS going the opposite direction
- aaomidi 8y ago
  Unless required to.
bilbo0s 8y ago
Wouldn't count on that happening. They don't want their phone turning into malware central. I bet they probably already did the projections and have figured out exactly how much each type of bad pr costs. They probably already have the data to know that it's better to take the bad pr with developers than to take that pr hit with actual customers.
- simion314 8y ago
  We all know that the reason Apple devices, Sony,Microsoft and others consoles don't let you side load apps is financial.
simonh 8y ago
The trick is how to provide a feature like that which cannot be used as a vector for malicious hacks, and which can't be used by the authorities to compromise citizen's privacy against their wishes.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Apple's side-loading ban creates ideal conditions for authorities to compromise citizen's privacy via censorship, VPN bans, etc. Ultimately, having one all powerful gatekeeper is not secure, because that gatekeeper can get compromised or impose arbitrary restrictions for commercial/ideological reasons (such as Apples anti-sex policies)
  - simonh 8y ago
    >Apple's side-loading ban creates ideal conditions for authorities to compromise citizen's privacy via censorship, VPN bans, etc. I can't really parse that. iOS being locked down and having strong system security prevents censorship because it prevents authorities getting access to your data. How on earth can opening that up and providing backdoors to the system prevent censorship? The whole reason for the VPN ban is precisely because Apple's system security is so tight that eavesdropping on the wire is the only way the authorities can get at user communications. This criticism makes no sense. Ultimately, your expectations of how gate keeping should pan out fail to match actual reality. iOS is vastly more secure that it's open competitors, so much so that it isn't even remotely close. I don't know how you can post that with a straight face, but I suppose ideology is a powerful force.
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      >iOS being locked down and having strong system security prevents censorship because it prevents authorities getting access to your data. This is completely false. Owning a secure device does not help you get around censorship at all unless you can also install a good VPN (or similar). >I don't know how you can post that with a straight face, but I suppose ideology is a powerful force. What ideology would that be? I am an iOS user myself and superior security and privacy is one of the reasons for it. But that doesn't make me blind to the negative side-effects of Apple's approach. Being easily co-opted by governments for censorship purposes is undeniably one of those negative side-effects.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Google Play has not been immune to antitrust scrutiny because Android permits sideloading. Just because you can sideload, doesn't mean you can compete with the Play Store on even ground. Sideloading has generally required selecting a scary checkbox to permit "unknown sources", it's not like just double-clicking an EXE you downloaded off the Internet. I remember app developers getting kicked out of the Android Market back in the day (emulators for consoles, specifically) and saying they'd still work on their app as a sideloaded thing, but only a month or too later, they'd abandon it since nobody was really following them anymore. There's a certain amount of openness on some platforms I like to call "just enough rope to hang yourself with", where they say it's an open platform that anyone can build on top of, but they control enough of the business-side aspects of to ensure you can never successfully compete on. Legal entities are less concerned with the technical status of openness than the business reality of openness, and I doubt allowing sideloading would actually exempt them from much attention.
- anfilt 8y ago
  I said "Apple could help avoid some these problems". Keyword is some. You can still be anti-competitive despite being technically open. Look at what happened with Microsoft and IE. You could still at least install an other browser, but that did not stop the authorities. It's even worse IOS because you can't side load and you can't even install a competing browser engine. You also can't publish one via the app store.
eridius 8y ago
If you want to side-load apps, use Android. Completely serious here. The degree to which iOS is locked down is absolutely a feature for the overwhelming majority of users. If you don't like it, don't use it. Not all computing platforms need to offer the same functionality. Not all computing platforms need to be "open". If you want an open platform, then use one.
bradknowles 8y ago
You can side load on iOS all you want -- just get your developer tools installed and build and compile your own code. No problem!
- saagarjha 8y ago
  You don't even need to compile the code; signing the app binary with your development certificate is enough.

yig 8y ago

The title should be changed to reflect that this is a branch of the government of Netherlands and not the Association of Computing Professionals.

rietta 8y ago
Agreed. That was exactly who I thought the headline was referring to.
jonathanyc 8y ago
That’s why I clicked the link. Title should definitely be changed to indicate that this is the Dutch government.
thefounder 8y ago
The .nl tld should tell you it's not a US org.
- dagmx 8y ago
  The ACM that the OP mentioned is a global organization and have a presence in many countries.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets is a global organisation?
mises 8y ago
Yes, I figured this was to do with them. I doubt it's intentionally misleading, but it might be good to expand the acronym.
sctb 8y ago
Sure thing, done.

mailslot 8y ago

I worked, briefly, for a mobile app developer that made an app so bad, it regularly bricked phones. There were bugs in the logging that would trash the flash storage. It would also prevent the radios from entering power save, and floor the CPU (bugs). Within months of use, customer phones would either “explode” from excessive battery drain, “lightly smoke,” or just become inoperable from dead flash storage. I sat in a meeting where the execs were all complaining about Apple’s unfair business practices re: their inability to do terrible things in background tasks, and their frequent app rejections / review process. In this case, Apple saved countless phones from being bricked by one of the worst enterprise app developers. Some of the restrictions help to prevent first class assholes, like them, from publishing wholly defective garbage.

nathan_long 8y ago
That's great. But that sounds like failing to meet what could be an objective quality standard, enforced by something like CI. I don't think anyone objects to that kind of gate keeping. The contention here (true or false) is that Apple tips the scales so that good apps lose to Apple's competing ones.
- mises 8y ago
  On what is Apple competing with respect to apps? I know they've got a few, like garage band, but they make money regardless of which app is purchased.
  - salamander014 8y ago
    Their Music app versus Spotify, their Photos app versus Google Photos, their News app versus NPR... And that's not everything.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      Is there any app that they make big money off of that they're competing on? serious question. Not being argumentative. Trying to get a picture of how much of Apple's hundreds of billions these apps are.

holoduke 8y ago

The situation currently with both stores is a bit comparible with Microsoft during the internet explorer dominance. The only way to resolve this is by splitting up playstore and iTunes store. Too much self interest from Google and apple is destroying these ecosystems for small businesses.

bilbo0s 8y ago
No. If you had to live through things back then you could see IE actively undermining the internet and making it MS specific. It wasn't like you use MS or you use an IBM OS or HP OS or something like that. It was you use MS or piss off. There was no realistic Mac option for the masses due to horrible mismanagement. Linux just was not there yet to be perfectly frank. (Even though techies were over the moon because the slackware had XWindows! So now you could open multiple bash terminals to get your work done! See how usable it is!) It ended up not mattering anyway. The courts kind of laughed the government out of the room. I'm pretty sure the best they got was a promise to let other browsers be installed. (Keep in mind, they were still going to pre-install IE, so nothing was going to change.) That was one of the biggest farcical scenes I'd witnessed in my lifetime. Equivalent of a slap on the hand. (Actually, maybe more like a tap.)
- stevesimmons 8y ago
  Microsoft got far more than "a slap on the hand", at least in the EU. They were fined a total of $1.3bn for anti-competitive behaviour, which would have escalated up to $7.4bn if they hadn't stopped. The two fines were: - in 2004, EUR 497m ($611m) for restricting music player access, server APIs, etc, with remedies allowing competitors access to build interoperating products. That was the EU's largest fine ever against a single company. - in 2013, EUR 561m ($731m) for "inadvertently" removing a browser choice screen in 2011 that had been added in 2010 as a condition of the previous remedy following a complaint by Opera in 2007. That last fine was a firm warning to Microsoft to take anti-competition provisions seriously. If they hadn't changed, EU laws allowed a fine of up to 10% of global revenue, which would have been $7.4bn based on their 2012 turnover.
  - 8y ago

coldcode 8y ago

Is this not like complaining that Walmart dominates its suppliers in Walmart stores? They also sell their own brands plus demand suppliers offer and price exactly what Walmart wants.

reinder 8y ago
I suppose a supplier choosing to work with Walmart could have chosen any reseller/distributor, whereas with apps you're pretty much limited to App Store / Google Play. Not everyone shops at Walmart, but almost everyone shops for apps at App Store / Google Play.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >almost everyone shops for apps at App Store / Google Play.... In fairness, "almost everyone" shops at Target/Walmart. That's why everyone's so desperate to get the buyers at Target and Walmart to do business with them. It's worse actually, because you can get on App Store or Google Play, and still not do very well. Whereas if you get space at Target you're set.
headhuntermdk 8y ago
More than likely you can buy the same brand at another store such As Target, etc. If Walmart was the only outlet where one could buy the product and that product was also competing with Walmart products, that is an unfair advantage in Walmart's favor. In the case with Apple Music vs Spotify, Spotify is not only at a disadvantage of API availability, but also how the rules are not applied for Apple's own apps (marketing push notifications come to mind). On top of that, it is more difficult to complete on price as you are coughing up 30% for any IAP (which you have to use Apple's IAP APIs to begin with). So spotify either charges an extra 30% to cover the fees or eats the 30% to remain price competitive.
- gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
  But there's still an aspect of the same vein, right? Like, if you have a product, there's the retail price, and there's the wholesale price that Walmart pays you. There's a spread that you pay going through Walmart that they don't have to pay for their own products. Now, it's definitely not 30%, but its there. I think the numbers change how onerous the splits feel, but the mechanics look similar.

drivingmenuts 8y ago

I'd be perfectly happy if Apple were forced to allow alternative app stores on the IOS platform, so long as security was guaranteed and backed by legal penalties, if Apple was allowed to heavily curate the collection of apps offered by their own store. I wouldn't use a third-party app store, nor recommend it, but I'd be fine with their existence.

kbenson 8y ago
I argued for this here just last week. I would definitely add a store from Mozilla for any software they were paid to review and include. The app store works because Apple has a reputation, and we trust this reputation. Other companies have a good reputation and could trade on this to offer software.
swiley 8y ago
>so long as security was guaranteed and backed by legal penalties What does this mean? Apple's app store doesn't even guarantee security. Would something like F-droid be allowed? Because if not I would argue we're still not solving the problem.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago
  First, security in the payment process. Apple seems to doing pretty well there, so equivalent or better than that. Second, offer a guarantee that the software on offer is free of malware and unreasonable tracking. Some degree of inspection and curation would need to be performed by the selling App Store as well as having agreements set up with the developers of the apps. Third, real penalties to all parties if there was some sort of breach or other malfeasance. In the case of data leaks and other issues from the store, the penalty would fall on them. For malware, etc., the penalty would fall on the developers and/or the store for lax practices.

herodotus 8y ago

Here is some context. There are two collections of frameworks available for iOS developers. The private frameworks cannot be used by non-apple applications. In some cases, this restriction makes it impossible for an App developer to develop an App that has the same functionality as the corresponding Apple app. Just to pick one example, the Music App has a download-to-device option (a cloud with an arrow) which allows users to move cloud-stored songs from their iTunes library onto their device. This functionality is not available in the iOS SDK. In my opinion, there is legitimacy to the complaints being investigated.

oblio 8y ago
Microsoft was attacked for the exact same thing 2 decades ago. If you make a platform, you shouldn't have any private APIs that only your applications can use, in my opinion.
- simonh 8y ago
  I think there's a reasonable exception for some built-in applications that manage core services, but that privilege should be used sparingly and for clearly benign or user-friendly reasons. It shouldn't be used to gain a competitive advantage in revenue-generating applications or services. Hmm, after writing the above it occurred to me that cloud storage like iCloud might have to be an exception to that rule for pragmatic reasons. iCloud is clearly a competitor to Dropbox, but it is also used to store backups of the phone's system settings and such. On the one hand Dropbox should be able to compete fairly against iCloud for offline app data storage, but I don't think it should have access to do backups of phone system settings. I suppose the way out of that conundrum is to ensure that any use of iCloud for system related storage should not be part of a commercial service offering, which is sort of how it works as you can do that on the iCloud free tier. Still, it's an interesting edge case that shows how tricky these questions can be.
  - oblio 8y ago
    > but I don't think it should have access to do backups of phone system settings. Why not?

yohann305 8y ago

An exact same issue was raised in the 1910's about railroad companies who owned the rails and started transporting their own good and barring transportation access to other companies. I invite you to read this (quite old - 1914) book named "Other People's Money" by Louis Brandeis, it's in the public domain now, quick free read: https://books.google.com/books/about/Other_People_s_Money.html?id=uCpMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books/about/Other_People_s_Money.ht... History repeats itself. PS: you might also read this book to understand how the people owning today's banks are the same group of people that owned railroad companies!

lotsofpulp 8y ago
I don't think it's the same exact issue since a key feature of railroads is the use of land, which can't be replicated endlessly with very low marginal costs.
- yohann305 8y ago
  >> which can't be replicated endlessly with very low marginal costs. Sure it sounds easier to build an app store, but is it really any simpler than building railroads? One might think of app store as being just software but it's way more than that, it's an entire ecosystem built by a huge company made of the best talent in the world. Look at big companies like Microsoft and Blackberry who have given up on their smartphone ecosystem (and respective app stores). It's definitely very competitive and cannot be replicated endlessly with very low marginal costs.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    What app store are you on? The only ones I see have crap search and recommendation systems. Beyond that they're off the shelf shopping carts for file downloads. The stores that are popular are so because they're preinstalled. That's it.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  I think the ability to exclude is what matters here

appstorelottery 8y ago

What about this idea? If you create a platform (OS/Cloud etc.) then you're not allowed to create applications for that platform, or profit from the sale of 3rd party applications - or compete with your own users more generally. This would stop everything from the Amazon effect to Novell happening. For the life of me I don't understand why we don't enforce this kind of idea?

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
Because many platforms might not exist under those conditions. I think Steve Jobs was initially opposed to allowing third party apps at all. Amazon market place might not exist either. Google, Amazon or Microsoft might not be offering AI services to third parties. There might not be extension APIs for MS Office or Google Docs. Instead we could be seeing a whole lot more vertical integration and a whole lot less opportunity for small vendors to leverage technology that benefits from economies of scale. I think it's better to let things evolve and then regulate when problems become obvious. Otherwise everything could be as stagnant as many utilities are today.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Under those principles, the entire computing industry would never have been created. If you can't create your own hardware, and then sell your own software to run on that hardware, then you're doomed.

occupodd 8y ago

Apple is a proto-fascist company and need to be labeled as such.

vinni2 8y ago

Coming from Computer Science academia ACM for me is Association for Computing Machinery.

musicale 8y ago

"Furthermore, they are not always able to use all functionalities of an iPhone" If Apple is using "secret APIs" in its own apps in the app store then that is unfair and should change. But sandboxing apps and limiting their access to data and to OS internals is a very good thing.