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> By this logic, if Samsung announced a competing phone platform that nobody uses and a competing app store that only works on that platform and has no apps but

> By this logic, if Samsung announced a competing phone platform that nobody uses and a competing app store that only works on that platform and has no apps but charges 5% fees, everyone could switch to that app store and sell/get all their apps there even though it has no users and no developers. Exactly. This is how the free market works. If Samsung’s App Store is more palatable to developers and users, they will move there. This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store. > The vendor cannot be trusted. The owner is you. If you can't trust yourself then you've already lost. How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not. Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought. > Then those are two separate markets -- once you've bought your power plant you're locked into one or the other. You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant. But let’s avoid silly analogies. The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone. Buying an iPhone does not segment them into a different industry. They can easily get the same apps from an Android phone. The barrier to entry via device cost does not create an industry. Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps. That it is expensive to switch from an iOS App Store to an Android App Store is a factor that is left to the user to make when they decide to choose one of the app stores. This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Exactly. This is how the free market works. If Samsung’s App Store is more palatable to developers and users, they will move there. Except that they can't do that when they have to create an entire ecosystem in order to compete in app stores, because of the network effects. Microsoft tried and failed with Windows phone, despite having its own desktop monopoly to leverage, pouring a fortune into it and by most accounts creating something that was actually quite good, because you can't get developers without users or users without developers. The barrier to entry is a mile high. > This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store. Which is only possible because Google doesn't prohibit that. Apple does. > How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not. > Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought. That's all software. As soon as you lock the device, the decryption key should no longer exist and require the thing in your brain to recreate it. If the software is designed correctly -- and nothing about that needs to be a secret -- there is nothing the thief can do to decrypt the locked device even with unlimited control over the hardware. The thing hardware lets you do is allow you to use weak authentication, by having the hardware remain in possession of the real decryption key but rate limit the number of authentication attempts. But that has absolutely nothing to do with app stores or anything like that. All you need for that is a tiny piece of special purpose tamper-resistant hardware that can store a strong key and then release it in response to successful authentication, while rate limiting the number of authentication attempts. Then when you lock the device the main processor discards the key and the only way to get it back is the rate limiting authentication hardware, which can be completely independent of the rest of the device. > You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant. But that's the point. If you have to spend hundreds to have a choice of where to buy a $1 app, that isn't a real choice. If the alternative app store has the same app for $.01 instead of $1 -- a 99% discount -- all you can do is shrug because it's not worth spending hundreds of dollars to save $0.99. There is no amount of discount the other app store can offer to get you to switch. They could pay you $1 instead of charging you $1 and the switching cost would still put you deep in the red. That's what a lack of competition looks like. > The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone. If Walmart has a monopoly in California and Target has a monopoly in Florida, you can know that before you decide where to live, and pick whichever state you like, but either way you're living somewhere with a monopoly. > Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps. So you can't have a monopoly in California if there is a brick and mortar competitor in Florida, because you both sell similar products? > This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry. Yes, that is exactly the same, and the consoles should not be doing it either.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> Exactly. This is how the free market works. If Samsung’s App Store is more palatable to developers and users, they will move there. Except that they can't do that when they have to create an entire ecosystem in order to compete in app stores, because of the network effects. Microsoft tried and failed with Windows phone, despite having its own desktop monopoly to leverage, pouring a fortune into it and by most accounts creating something that was actually quite good, because you can't get developers without users or users without developers. The barrier to entry is a mile high. > This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store. Which is only possible because Google doesn't prohibit that. Apple does. > How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not. > Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought. That's all software. As soon as you lock the device, the decryption key should no longer exist and require the thing in your brain to recreate it. If the software is designed correctly -- and nothing about that needs to be a secret -- there is nothing the thief can do to decrypt the locked device even with unlimited control over the hardware. The thing hardware lets you do is allow you to use weak authentication, by having the hardware remain in possession of the real decryption key but rate limit the number of authentication attempts. But that has absolutely nothing to do with app stores or anything like that. All you need for that is a tiny piece of special purpose tamper-resistant hardware that can store a strong key and then release it in response to successful authentication, while rate limiting the number of authentication attempts. Then when you lock the device the main processor discards the key and the only way to get it back is the rate limiting authentication hardware, which can be completely independent of the rest of the device. > You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant. But that's the point. If you have to spend hundreds to have a choice of where to buy a $1 app, that isn't a real choice. If the alternative app store has the same app for $.01 instead of $1 -- a 99% discount -- all you can do is shrug because it's not worth spending hundreds of dollars to save $0.99. There is no amount of discount the other app store can offer to get you to switch. They could pay you $1 instead of charging you $1 and the switching cost would still put you deep in the red. That's what a lack of competition looks like. > The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone. If Walmart has a monopoly in California and Target has a monopoly in Florida, you can know that before you decide where to live, and pick whichever state you like, but either way you're living somewhere with a monopoly. > Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps. So you can't have a monopoly in California if there is a brick and mortar competitor in Florida, because you both sell similar products? > This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry. Yes, that is exactly the same, and the consoles should not be doing it either.