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Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mob

Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: 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? Apple is like Tesla. They don’t sell more cars than anyone else. They don’t have a stranglehold over vendors. They sell more luxury cars than a bunch of other people. And while you see lots of Teslas on the road, you still see more F-150s. Their market is insanely profitable, and for many developers, their little market is highly profitable. But how is it their fault that app developers don’t shun them for Android-only, or Windows (do they still make a phone OS?) Apple make their own devices. They don’t license an OS and then use shenanigans to force vendors not to offer consumers a choice, like Microsoft did. They make a desirable product, and offer developers a desirable market. But they don't have enough of the market to do whatever they like. They can’t charge $5,000 for a phone and succeed because of network effects. Android phones can call and text Apple phones. They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store. Apple’s current success is exactly what the free market is for. People may grumble about the price of a phone or the keyboards, or the app store cut, but those who pay it do so because the value is there, not because of arbitrary constraints. They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones.

Quarrelsome 7y ago
> They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store. 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.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And for most of the history of the consoles you had to have overpriced developer machines. Are you proposing that Apple be forced to port XCode to Windows?
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    They could make the signing APIs available to something like Jetbrains' AppCode. No porting necessary.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Because most companies are willing to give out their signing keys willy nilly... Would you expect the same from the console makers?
      - Karunamon 7y ago
        Users authenticate to access that API with their developer credentials.. username and password on infrastructure owned by Apple. There is no need for them to give out their signing keys.
  - Quarrelsome 7y ago
    Yes or Linux. Either that or change licensing so people can create Apple VMs and I can spin one up online. At the time I was looking at this problem (2012) the only viable solution was to buy a piece of Apple hardware and install it in the office and have the auto-build system call back into the office from the cloud to build the package as a particular step in the build. So I have to worry about power, about the safety, about hardware, about updates, all because I can't use an arbitrary x86 processor to build an executable targeting an x86 processor. It made me so fucking cross. Let us not forget that other platforms don't have this mandatory requirement.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Microsoft offers Mac build servers as part of Azure Devops. And there is Mac Mini Colo. And you want to force a company to release a product for other operating systems?
ksec 7y ago
Agree on most if not all points but the article didn't argue against any of that. It did point out two things. 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.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  Monopsony is a slippery concept. If I tilt my head just right, we could be discussing the way WalMart purchases products. They sell a product in their store, they decide they want a certain margin, and then they tell suppliers to meet a certain price target if they want their products in WalMart.
  - ksec 7y ago
    You can buy 90% of products in Walmart through other channels. ( 10% are either exclusive or own brand ) And Walmart is not the sole buyer of any of those products. Apple is the sole buyer of All App Store Products, and you cant buy those products anywhere else. Which as far as I understand it, is what the argument Monopsony is trying to make. Buying Power instead of Market Power. Edit: After rereading the article, the start of the article also pointed out, it was the developer that set the price of the App, not Apple. Giving them the power to price their product. Even if Apple were in this "Monopsony", it isn't really evident to me how this had harmed consumer.
    - justinclift 7y ago
      There are many stories, including recently, of Apple doing "weird things" to app developers. Such that the app is no longer carried at all, or isn't upgraded (eg rejecting new versions), etc.
hkhanna 7y ago
> They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones. 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.
- brennebeck 7y ago
  In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.
  - jonahx 7y ago
    > In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? This greatly underestimates the power of habit and default choice. I can tell you for sure that if I tried to mount such campaign among my (non-techie) friends, there would be a lot of pushback and annoyance.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - baddox 7y ago
      But this doesn't seem at all relevant to market competition and antitrust laws. It's not much different than disagreements over which coffee shop your friends are going to meet at (maybe you're the only one that lives really far away from the group's most convenient location), or who gets invited to a group of friends' parties.
p49k 7y ago
Apple is not like Tesla; iPhones are often touted as a “luxury brand” but the truth is that they offer products of quality that are roughly in proportion to their pricing, and their high margins are due to better/more efficient operations than their competitors. A phone is such an essential tool in one’s life and priced low enough that it makes sense to invest in a product that is of good quality. Most people can afford iPhones and even poor people can afford used ones. Not many people can afford a Tesla. 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.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  >you don’t lose a lifetime of app purchases, movies, songs and books when switching products That's a really alarmist (and counterfactual) way of framing this. Yes, if you change computing platforms, you generally need to replace software. OH NO. I don't see a need for regulatory intervention based on that. Deciding to ditch the iPhone for an Android has utterly no bearing on your ability to watch TV or movies purchased from the iTunes store. You can still watch those on an AppleTV, on a Samsung TV, or on your laptop. And obviously on your iPad if you have one of those. Tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store are yours, period. There's no DRM, so anything that can play AAC will play them fine. You don't lose those if you ditch the iPhone. However, Apple Music is a distinct thing. It's a subscription service like Spotify. If you stop paying for it, you stop getting access to the music you acquired with it. This is neither nefarious nor exploitative. You need a device supported by Apple Music, but it works on Windows, so not seeing the problem here, either. (Though I should note that I wouldn't see a problem even if Apple Music worked only on Apple devices.) Apple is a rounding error in digital books, and I know nothing about it (mostly a Kindle guy). However, if I decide to banish Amazon from my life, I'll lose access to Kindle books I "bought" from Amazon. That was part of the bargain at the time. >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. How far does that go? Would you insist on the right to do the same to any computer-controlled device you purchase from any vendor? Because that seems bananas.
im3w1l 7y ago
Apple is the smaller company in a duopoly market. There are not enough players in the market that dissatisfied customers can easily up and leave. 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.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  When you consider "monopoly" or "market unfairness" you have to look at it on the state level. I don't think anyone is complaining about Europe where Apple is in the minority of phones. I would assume we're talking about the USA where Apple does have outsized influence compared to other phone brands. We aren't talking about Apple vs Google. It's Apple vs Samsung/Google Pixel Line/Motorola/Nokia and their abuse of their status as the largest phone seller in the USA. Say iMessage policy being limited to the Apple platform as others have pointed out.
palijer 7y ago
>They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store. 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.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Can you mention a competitor when selling on any of the consoles?
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    Lot's of games openly tout cross-platform compatibility - the answer to your question is "Yes".
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Tangentially :) I have a question as someone trying to get in to the app world (total beginner, old had a c/embedded though). How do you handle features that Apple say are preventing your app from getting approved at Apple? Say it goes through with flying colors at the Google Play store. Is everything modularized to the feature level?
ldoughty 7y ago
Kinda miss the point of the article, which focused on monopsony -- sole buyer. 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)
- zbyte64 7y ago
  Bingo. All this talk about market shares is not about monopsony. Arguably Android is also monopsony.
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    Google does not restrict you from installing arbitrary apps or building your own App Store to compete with Google Play though.
  - ldoughty 7y ago
    I meant to put (Android) in for West coast, but yes, I arguably agree it's a very similar situation, though Google/Android is less restrictive / closed off... They are more like the old "Internet explorer" were Microsoft had to defend bundling their own app over competitors'
- unishark 7y ago
  I see no problem here until you also presume the firms are a monopoly (or oligopoly). Otherwise there are still customers served by someone else. There are thousands of stores in the US, maybe millions. As for as I know each may make whatever silly demands they want of me (perhaps aside from some racial/religious/safety constraints)) in order to stick my products on their shelves for their "unique customers". Further I see the prospect of govt regulation of this decision as a bad thing for the customer. Who do you think will end up writing those regulations?
julianozen 7y ago
While this is certainly true, computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period. While in the US, it becomes a small inconvenience for us that companies like Netflix and Spotify are having their business sidelined by apple, Apples lock on phones becomes a human rights issue in places like Hong Kong, Russia and Saudi Arabia when Apple complies with local regulation. While consumers with money have the choice to leave iPhone and go with Android, we as a society need to push back on the idea that you as a consumer don’t have the final say of what software can and cannot be run on a device you own. 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
- jp555 7y ago
  "computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period." I should expect to be able to run Windows on my coffee maker? That's a bit of an exaggeration of course, but I do not think this is an important "need". It's Utopian garbage. A top down "simple solution" that is appealing on the surface but deeply flawed in the complex interconnected systems of reality. You can already buy an Android device if you want more flexibility, and you can even get a developer account with Apple and make your own custom software if you really wanted. But telling everyone that they must have what you have decided is important is a garbage idea.
  - julianozen 7y ago
    We can play this game for any appliance but we know that your mobile phone and laptop is uniquely special in this regard. When Apple gets to decide everything that runs on your device, it’s bad for you in the long term. As an iOS developer who loves my phone, I’ve worked on teams that have dealt with complete bs that I shouldn’t divulge here, trying to get Apple to approve our app. we werent doing onerous data collection. we weren’t writing spam or malware. Just Apple’s bureaucratic and anti-competitive nonsense. Apples should not have the decision about whether to allow or pull the Hong Kong protesting app. It’s too much power for a private company to make
deleted 7y ago
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lonelappde 7y ago
It's both. The two aren't in contradiction. Apple uses vendor lock-in for software used by one customer across devices, and for software used by multiple users (iMessage)
kerkeslager 7y ago
> Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: > 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.
- zamalek 7y ago
  Yup. You cannot install a 3rd-party app store on iPhones without resorting to strange hacks (which are likely outside the scope of the EULA and wouldn't be pursued by average users). Developers and users have no alternative but to pay Apple 30%. If you are an open source project, someone has to pay up each year for the privilege of developing software for Apple devices. Windows, Linux and Android allow 3rd-party appstores. As evil as Google is, they certainly have that feather in their cap. Apple likely wouldn't have been facing this lawsuit if they hadn't kept pressing their advantage and tightening the noose on developers.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> 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. 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.
robbrown451 7y ago
"But how is it their fault that app developers don’t shun them for Android-only, or Windows (do they still make a phone OS?)" 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.
braythwayt 7y ago
On reflection, I will say one thing: 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.
- samatman 7y ago
  I agree that it's inconvenient for users; it annoys me every time I have to bounce out to the Amazon website to buy Kindle books, for example. But I don't see the alternative from Apple's perspective. If they allowed revenue side-channels, every app would be free, and useless if you didn't purchase an expansion pack from the developer. Sure, Apple could run the app store at a loss. They could allow side-loading. They could do a lot of things. But I don't fault them for declining to.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> 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? 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.
- manicdee 7y ago
  And then you find that people are buying Apple specifically because Apple does all this stuff to control the iOS app marketplace. The whole point of a walled garden is that it’s walled, and you don’t have to learn about gardening to enjoy it. Your experience with the garden is to simply walk through it chat with friends, and never think more about it. Allowing side-loading means suddenly you as the customer have to learn how to identify legitimate visitors to the garden apart from miscreants and pickpockets. How do you know who to trust? Why are people so keen to remove the gatekeeper from the walled garden? This is only about forcing Apple to provide a backdoors to their Secure Enclave. I am not falling for it.
grawprog 7y ago
>Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: 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. 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.
- xenadu02 7y ago
  > underpowered Are you positing that someone manufactures a better and faster SOC for mobile devices?
  - grawprog 7y ago
    >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. >Are you positing that someone manufactures a better and faster SOC for mobile devices? Thanks for proving my point.
    - pb7 7y ago
      Please make a better effort at defending your arguments than this. Apple has had the best real world performance on mobile for many years running. Their SOCs are years ahead of the competition. Bigger numbers on the spec sheet lack strong correlation to actual performance these days.
- smhenderson 7y ago
  I don't disagree with your opinions on Apple and their products but what in your list of bad things about them is actually illegal? 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. There is nothing illegal about selling rich people toys or dumbing down a device to make it appeal to a certain type of customer. I have never really cared for Apple products in general and also think they are over priced for what you get but for me that just means I don't buy them, I don't really begrudge them making money off a customer base I just don't fit into.
mtgx 7y ago
Call it monopoly, monopsony, or neither of those. 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.
appleshore 7y ago
I’d agree if iMessages was open platform. It’s beyond ridiculous that Android is limited to SMS (or their messaging app) but iPhone shuts out everyone for a basic utility function. I wish the US Government and regulators were pushing for this as opposed to trying to break encryption or force backdoors.
dilap 7y ago
I guess I'm not such a devotee of the free market. Ignoring legal theories for a moment and thinking about what ought to be, it seems clear to me that society at large is not well-served by having the defining artistic medium of our age in control of a single company, and censored to Disney-like levels. 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.
rahimnathwani 7y ago
"Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones." 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.
- blazespin 7y ago
  Clearly the OP doesn't have a teenage daughter. If he did, he'd realize that you have to have an iphone in order to be accepted into the communication clique caused by iMessages / AirDrop.
  - riversflow 7y ago
    How is this different from game consoles? The gap between Xbox Live and PlayStation Network was a big deal when I was in high school. If all your friends played Xbox, and your parents got you a PlayStation, you were socially isolated. Nobody is saying that MS and Sony must make everything 100% cross-platform compatible, but then there aren’t tens of thousands of indie game developers to complain about it.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    I have an adolescent daughter. She laughs at me being a fuddy-duddy wanting to use iMessage and FaceTime. Her friends are all on Discourse and TikTok(!) N=1 and all that, I can totally believe that there are other social clusters on different ecosystems.
wayneftw 7y ago
You can’t have a mobile presence without dealing with Apple.
bduerst 7y ago
Apple was like Tesla in 2009. 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.
henryfjordan 7y ago
You open with a false-dichotomoy. Apple is not a monopolist in the phone market (your first proposed argument). Apple is a monopolist of the app store (your second proposed argument). Those 2 positions are not mutually-exclusive.
deleted 7y ago
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overlyLogical 7y ago
If you want to provide services to 100 percent of the population, you need to bend the knee to Apple. 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.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  I assume you aren't in the USA? Imagine if that slice was 45-50% of the market. It's pretty bad here.
reaperducer 7y ago
All Google/Android/?#_next_startup has to do is make a better phone than the iPhone, and people will flock to it. That's how Apple did it. 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.
briffle 7y ago
> They don’t have a stranglehold over vendors. 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.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
Mostly Apple and Facebook and Google are too big and need to be split up. They are huge monoliths who stimy innovation and competition.
perceptronas 7y ago
There is a joke about similar topic. It goes something like this: >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

Quarrelsome 7y ago

> They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store. 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.

scarface74 7y ago
And for most of the history of the consoles you had to have overpriced developer machines. Are you proposing that Apple be forced to port XCode to Windows?
- Karunamon 7y ago
  They could make the signing APIs available to something like Jetbrains' AppCode. No porting necessary.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Because most companies are willing to give out their signing keys willy nilly... Would you expect the same from the console makers?
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      Users authenticate to access that API with their developer credentials.. username and password on infrastructure owned by Apple. There is no need for them to give out their signing keys.
- Quarrelsome 7y ago
  Yes or Linux. Either that or change licensing so people can create Apple VMs and I can spin one up online. At the time I was looking at this problem (2012) the only viable solution was to buy a piece of Apple hardware and install it in the office and have the auto-build system call back into the office from the cloud to build the package as a particular step in the build. So I have to worry about power, about the safety, about hardware, about updates, all because I can't use an arbitrary x86 processor to build an executable targeting an x86 processor. It made me so fucking cross. Let us not forget that other platforms don't have this mandatory requirement.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Microsoft offers Mac build servers as part of Azure Devops. And there is Mac Mini Colo. And you want to force a company to release a product for other operating systems?

ksec 7y ago

Agree on most if not all points but the article didn't argue against any of that. It did point out two things. 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.

braythwayt 7y ago
Monopsony is a slippery concept. If I tilt my head just right, we could be discussing the way WalMart purchases products. They sell a product in their store, they decide they want a certain margin, and then they tell suppliers to meet a certain price target if they want their products in WalMart.
- ksec 7y ago
  You can buy 90% of products in Walmart through other channels. ( 10% are either exclusive or own brand ) And Walmart is not the sole buyer of any of those products. Apple is the sole buyer of All App Store Products, and you cant buy those products anywhere else. Which as far as I understand it, is what the argument Monopsony is trying to make. Buying Power instead of Market Power. Edit: After rereading the article, the start of the article also pointed out, it was the developer that set the price of the App, not Apple. Giving them the power to price their product. Even if Apple were in this "Monopsony", it isn't really evident to me how this had harmed consumer.
  - justinclift 7y ago
    There are many stories, including recently, of Apple doing "weird things" to app developers. Such that the app is no longer carried at all, or isn't upgraded (eg rejecting new versions), etc.

hkhanna 7y ago

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

brennebeck 7y ago
In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.
- jonahx 7y ago
  > In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? This greatly underestimates the power of habit and default choice. I can tell you for sure that if I tried to mount such campaign among my (non-techie) friends, there would be a lot of pushback and annoyance.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - baddox 7y ago
    But this doesn't seem at all relevant to market competition and antitrust laws. It's not much different than disagreements over which coffee shop your friends are going to meet at (maybe you're the only one that lives really far away from the group's most convenient location), or who gets invited to a group of friends' parties.

p49k 7y ago

Apple is not like Tesla; iPhones are often touted as a “luxury brand” but the truth is that they offer products of quality that are roughly in proportion to their pricing, and their high margins are due to better/more efficient operations than their competitors. A phone is such an essential tool in one’s life and priced low enough that it makes sense to invest in a product that is of good quality. Most people can afford iPhones and even poor people can afford used ones. Not many people can afford a Tesla. 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.

ubermonkey 7y ago
>you don’t lose a lifetime of app purchases, movies, songs and books when switching products That's a really alarmist (and counterfactual) way of framing this. Yes, if you change computing platforms, you generally need to replace software. OH NO. I don't see a need for regulatory intervention based on that. Deciding to ditch the iPhone for an Android has utterly no bearing on your ability to watch TV or movies purchased from the iTunes store. You can still watch those on an AppleTV, on a Samsung TV, or on your laptop. And obviously on your iPad if you have one of those. Tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store are yours, period. There's no DRM, so anything that can play AAC will play them fine. You don't lose those if you ditch the iPhone. However, Apple Music is a distinct thing. It's a subscription service like Spotify. If you stop paying for it, you stop getting access to the music you acquired with it. This is neither nefarious nor exploitative. You need a device supported by Apple Music, but it works on Windows, so not seeing the problem here, either. (Though I should note that I wouldn't see a problem even if Apple Music worked only on Apple devices.) Apple is a rounding error in digital books, and I know nothing about it (mostly a Kindle guy). However, if I decide to banish Amazon from my life, I'll lose access to Kindle books I "bought" from Amazon. That was part of the bargain at the time. >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. How far does that go? Would you insist on the right to do the same to any computer-controlled device you purchase from any vendor? Because that seems bananas.

im3w1l 7y ago

Apple is the smaller company in a duopoly market. There are not enough players in the market that dissatisfied customers can easily up and leave. 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.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
When you consider "monopoly" or "market unfairness" you have to look at it on the state level. I don't think anyone is complaining about Europe where Apple is in the minority of phones. I would assume we're talking about the USA where Apple does have outsized influence compared to other phone brands. We aren't talking about Apple vs Google. It's Apple vs Samsung/Google Pixel Line/Motorola/Nokia and their abuse of their status as the largest phone seller in the USA. Say iMessage policy being limited to the Apple platform as others have pointed out.

palijer 7y ago

>They don’t tell developers that apps must be iOS-exclusive to be in the app store. 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.

scarface74 7y ago
Can you mention a competitor when selling on any of the consoles?
- sangnoir 7y ago
  Lot's of games openly tout cross-platform compatibility - the answer to your question is "Yes".
stjohnswarts 7y ago
Tangentially :) I have a question as someone trying to get in to the app world (total beginner, old had a c/embedded though). How do you handle features that Apple say are preventing your app from getting approved at Apple? Say it goes through with flying colors at the Google Play store. Is everything modularized to the feature level?

ldoughty 7y ago

Kinda miss the point of the article, which focused on monopsony -- sole buyer. 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)

zbyte64 7y ago
Bingo. All this talk about market shares is not about monopsony. Arguably Android is also monopsony.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  Google does not restrict you from installing arbitrary apps or building your own App Store to compete with Google Play though.
- ldoughty 7y ago
  I meant to put (Android) in for West coast, but yes, I arguably agree it's a very similar situation, though Google/Android is less restrictive / closed off... They are more like the old "Internet explorer" were Microsoft had to defend bundling their own app over competitors'
unishark 7y ago
I see no problem here until you also presume the firms are a monopoly (or oligopoly). Otherwise there are still customers served by someone else. There are thousands of stores in the US, maybe millions. As for as I know each may make whatever silly demands they want of me (perhaps aside from some racial/religious/safety constraints)) in order to stick my products on their shelves for their "unique customers". Further I see the prospect of govt regulation of this decision as a bad thing for the customer. Who do you think will end up writing those regulations?

julianozen 7y ago

While this is certainly true, computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period. While in the US, it becomes a small inconvenience for us that companies like Netflix and Spotify are having their business sidelined by apple, Apples lock on phones becomes a human rights issue in places like Hong Kong, Russia and Saudi Arabia when Apple complies with local regulation. While consumers with money have the choice to leave iPhone and go with Android, we as a society need to push back on the idea that you as a consumer don’t have the final say of what software can and cannot be run on a device you own. 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

jp555 7y ago
"computers and especially mobile ones need to allow consumers to run whatever software they want period." I should expect to be able to run Windows on my coffee maker? That's a bit of an exaggeration of course, but I do not think this is an important "need". It's Utopian garbage. A top down "simple solution" that is appealing on the surface but deeply flawed in the complex interconnected systems of reality. You can already buy an Android device if you want more flexibility, and you can even get a developer account with Apple and make your own custom software if you really wanted. But telling everyone that they must have what you have decided is important is a garbage idea.
- julianozen 7y ago
  We can play this game for any appliance but we know that your mobile phone and laptop is uniquely special in this regard. When Apple gets to decide everything that runs on your device, it’s bad for you in the long term. As an iOS developer who loves my phone, I’ve worked on teams that have dealt with complete bs that I shouldn’t divulge here, trying to get Apple to approve our app. we werent doing onerous data collection. we weren’t writing spam or malware. Just Apple’s bureaucratic and anti-competitive nonsense. Apples should not have the decision about whether to allow or pull the Hong Kong protesting app. It’s too much power for a private company to make

deleted 7y ago

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lonelappde 7y ago

It's both. The two aren't in contradiction. Apple uses vendor lock-in for software used by one customer across devices, and for software used by multiple users (iMessage)

kerkeslager 7y ago

> Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: > 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.

zamalek 7y ago
Yup. You cannot install a 3rd-party app store on iPhones without resorting to strange hacks (which are likely outside the scope of the EULA and wouldn't be pursued by average users). Developers and users have no alternative but to pay Apple 30%. If you are an open source project, someone has to pay up each year for the privilege of developing software for Apple devices. Windows, Linux and Android allow 3rd-party appstores. As evil as Google is, they certainly have that feather in their cap. Apple likely wouldn't have been facing this lawsuit if they hadn't kept pressing their advantage and tightening the noose on developers.

dragonwriter 7y ago

robbrown451 7y ago

"But how is it their fault that app developers don’t shun them for Android-only, or Windows (do they still make a phone OS?)" 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.

braythwayt 7y ago

On reflection, I will say one thing: 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.

samatman 7y ago
I agree that it's inconvenient for users; it annoys me every time I have to bounce out to the Amazon website to buy Kindle books, for example. But I don't see the alternative from Apple's perspective. If they allowed revenue side-channels, every app would be free, and useless if you didn't purchase an expansion pack from the developer. Sure, Apple could run the app store at a loss. They could allow side-loading. They could do a lot of things. But I don't fault them for declining to.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> 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? 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.

manicdee 7y ago
And then you find that people are buying Apple specifically because Apple does all this stuff to control the iOS app marketplace. The whole point of a walled garden is that it’s walled, and you don’t have to learn about gardening to enjoy it. Your experience with the garden is to simply walk through it chat with friends, and never think more about it. Allowing side-loading means suddenly you as the customer have to learn how to identify legitimate visitors to the garden apart from miscreants and pickpockets. How do you know who to trust? Why are people so keen to remove the gatekeeper from the walled garden? This is only about forcing Apple to provide a backdoors to their Secure Enclave. I am not falling for it.

grawprog 7y ago

>Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: 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. 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.

xenadu02 7y ago
> underpowered Are you positing that someone manufactures a better and faster SOC for mobile devices?
- grawprog 7y ago
  >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. >Are you positing that someone manufactures a better and faster SOC for mobile devices? Thanks for proving my point.
  - pb7 7y ago
    Please make a better effort at defending your arguments than this. Apple has had the best real world performance on mobile for many years running. Their SOCs are years ahead of the competition. Bigger numbers on the spec sheet lack strong correlation to actual performance these days.
smhenderson 7y ago
I don't disagree with your opinions on Apple and their products but what in your list of bad things about them is actually illegal? 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. There is nothing illegal about selling rich people toys or dumbing down a device to make it appeal to a certain type of customer. I have never really cared for Apple products in general and also think they are over priced for what you get but for me that just means I don't buy them, I don't really begrudge them making money off a customer base I just don't fit into.

mtgx 7y ago

Call it monopoly, monopsony, or neither of those. 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.

appleshore 7y ago

I’d agree if iMessages was open platform. It’s beyond ridiculous that Android is limited to SMS (or their messaging app) but iPhone shuts out everyone for a basic utility function. I wish the US Government and regulators were pushing for this as opposed to trying to break encryption or force backdoors.

dilap 7y ago

I guess I'm not such a devotee of the free market. Ignoring legal theories for a moment and thinking about what ought to be, it seems clear to me that society at large is not well-served by having the defining artistic medium of our age in control of a single company, and censored to Disney-like levels. 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.

rahimnathwani 7y ago

"Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones." 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.

blazespin 7y ago
Clearly the OP doesn't have a teenage daughter. If he did, he'd realize that you have to have an iphone in order to be accepted into the communication clique caused by iMessages / AirDrop.
- riversflow 7y ago
  How is this different from game consoles? The gap between Xbox Live and PlayStation Network was a big deal when I was in high school. If all your friends played Xbox, and your parents got you a PlayStation, you were socially isolated. Nobody is saying that MS and Sony must make everything 100% cross-platform compatible, but then there aren’t tens of thousands of indie game developers to complain about it.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I have an adolescent daughter. She laughs at me being a fuddy-duddy wanting to use iMessage and FaceTime. Her friends are all on Discourse and TikTok(!) N=1 and all that, I can totally believe that there are other social clusters on different ecosystems.

wayneftw 7y ago

You can’t have a mobile presence without dealing with Apple.

bduerst 7y ago

Apple was like Tesla in 2009. 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.

henryfjordan 7y ago

You open with a false-dichotomoy. Apple is not a monopolist in the phone market (your first proposed argument). Apple is a monopolist of the app store (your second proposed argument). Those 2 positions are not mutually-exclusive.

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overlyLogical 7y ago

If you want to provide services to 100 percent of the population, you need to bend the knee to Apple. 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.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
I assume you aren't in the USA? Imagine if that slice was 45-50% of the market. It's pretty bad here.

reaperducer 7y ago

All Google/Android/?#_next_startup has to do is make a better phone than the iPhone, and people will flock to it. That's how Apple did it. 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.

briffle 7y ago

> They don’t have a stranglehold over vendors. 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.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

Mostly Apple and Facebook and Google are too big and need to be split up. They are huge monoliths who stimy innovation and competition.

perceptronas 7y ago

There is a joke about similar topic. It goes something like this: >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