3 ms·

Except that doesn’t hold. If you don’t like AT&T there is Verizon, Google FI, T-Mobile, etc. If you don’t like Apple, there’s Google, Samsung, etc.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
It's a reference to the classic AT&T monopoly, when Verizon et al were still part of AT&T and you notoriously had to buy your phone from them (and they prohibited analog modems in favor of paying them for extortionately expensive ISDN lines etc.) "You can just use Google" is the equivalent of saying "you can just use British Telecom." True only in some kind of theoretical sense. You can fly to Britain and subscribe to telephone service there. It's not realistic. Saying that you have a choice for the $1 app and all you have to do is replace your $400 phone and all your other apps and convince all your friends to switch away from iMessage is at the same level of practicality. Worse, because there are multiple different apps. What do I do if I need both iMessage and a BitTorrent client?
- ericmay 6y ago
  > And "you can just use Google" is the equivalent of saying "you can just use British Telecom." True only in some kind of theoretical sense. You can fly to Britain and subscribe to telephone service there. It's not realistic. I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic. > Saying that you have a choice for the $1 app and all you have to do is replace your $400 phone and all your other apps and convince all your friends to switch away from iMessage is at the same level of practicality. Worse, because there are multiple different apps. What happens if I need both iMessage and a BitTorrent client? A couple of things: first, you ideally should be doing research before buying a product. Second, if you need to replace a $400 phone for a $1 app, you're effectively buying that app for $401 - it must be really worth that amount for you to switch phones. If it's not, then it's just not. I think that's a personal choice and doesn't have much to do with anything other than making economic decisions for yourself. For example, I really like video games (but hardly play). There are games that I want to play that aren't available on the Mac. My choices are buy a Windows machine, or buy a Mac, or buy both (or neither). I chose to forgo a game I want to play in favor of having a Mac and to make that trade off. It's a trade off. I'm hopeful that game could come to the Mac but there's no good reason I can tell to force someone to make the game because I want to have my cake and eat it too. Products have features and trade-offs. On the iPhone you have iMessage which might be very important to you so you can go with an iPhone. Or maybe you need a BitTorrent client and it's not available on the iPhone so you buy something else. This is just how the world works.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic. You can just fly to Britain and rent a flat there. It's not physically impossible. It is an unreasonable thing to have to do in order to switch carriers. > Second, if you need to replace a $400 phone for a $1 app, you're effectively buying that app for $401 - it must be really worth that amount for you to switch phones. That's the point. The $400 is a switching barrier which acts as a wall segmenting the app markets by platform, with the result that Apple has a monopoly on the iOS side of the wall. Excluding competing stores is then monopoly abuse. > Products have features and trade-offs. On the iPhone you have iMessage which might be very important to you so you can go with an iPhone. Or maybe you need a BitTorrent client and it's not available on the iPhone so you buy something else. The point is that this trade off is artificial and only exists as a result of anti-competitive practices. Otherwise you could get iMessage on your iPhone from the Apple App Store and get a BitTorrent client from some other app store still on your iPhone. It's one thing for something not to exist because there is no demand for it. If anybody can develop a Mac game and then not everybody does because there aren't enough Mac gamers to justify it, c'est la vie. It's caused by lack of demand, not anti-competitive behavior. If you want to develop a game for Mac, nobody is stopping you. Whereas if the reason the Mac gaming market was small was that Apple had their own game studio and prohibited games from competing studios, that's anti-competitive behavior. It's specifically problematic because the market can't fix it -- even if there is demand for alternatives, alternatives are prohibited, which is different than just not enough people wanting them for anybody to become a provider.
  - redxdev 6y ago
    > I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic. I agree with you here - this is a bad comparison, it's incredibly easy to just go buy something that isn't iOS-based - but that doesn't actually help much, at least from Epic's perspective. In fact, Epic is suing Google over how they treat Android as well: * Google Play has similar restrictions to the iOS App Store, therefore neither Fortnite (assuming they want their own payment processing) nor EGS can exist on it. * Sideloading is possible (and was/is (?) used for Fortnite) so that at least is fine, however... * Sideloaded apps lose out on some important features - namely that they can't auto-update. Technically, this isn't a sideloading restriction but a restriction on non-system apps but the result is the same. System apps cannot be installed except via an OS flash (with a custom ROM)/root which is not something you can expect the average consumer to do. * Additionally, Epic cannot make deals with manufacturers to get EGS installed as a system app due to Google blocking them from making those deals. I have mixed feelings overall on whether we should be giving more opportunities for manufacturers to install possible bloatware on phones (something that plagued the early days of Android and still does to some degree) and whether it's a good idea to open up sideloading system apps. But even so, you have to admit that you can't "just" buy another phone to be able to do what Epic wants. Whether that's worthy of antitrust action... I really don't know.
anonymousab 6y ago
If Apple makes up a monopoly in a given market by some important metric - be that userbase, units sold, revenue $ or %, etc. - then those alternatives may not be meaningful or reasonable for developers.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

It's a reference to the classic AT&T monopoly, when Verizon et al were still part of AT&T and you notoriously had to buy your phone from them (and they prohibited analog modems in favor of paying them for extortionately expensive ISDN lines etc.) "You can just use Google" is the equivalent of saying "you can just use British Telecom." True only in some kind of theoretical sense. You can fly to Britain and subscribe to telephone service there. It's not realistic. Saying that you have a choice for the $1 app and all you have to do is replace your $400 phone and all your other apps and convince all your friends to switch away from iMessage is at the same level of practicality. Worse, because there are multiple different apps. What do I do if I need both iMessage and a BitTorrent client?

ericmay 6y ago
> And "you can just use Google" is the equivalent of saying "you can just use British Telecom." True only in some kind of theoretical sense. You can fly to Britain and subscribe to telephone service there. It's not realistic. I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic. > Saying that you have a choice for the $1 app and all you have to do is replace your $400 phone and all your other apps and convince all your friends to switch away from iMessage is at the same level of practicality. Worse, because there are multiple different apps. What happens if I need both iMessage and a BitTorrent client? A couple of things: first, you ideally should be doing research before buying a product. Second, if you need to replace a $400 phone for a $1 app, you're effectively buying that app for $401 - it must be really worth that amount for you to switch phones. If it's not, then it's just not. I think that's a personal choice and doesn't have much to do with anything other than making economic decisions for yourself. For example, I really like video games (but hardly play). There are games that I want to play that aren't available on the Mac. My choices are buy a Windows machine, or buy a Mac, or buy both (or neither). I chose to forgo a game I want to play in favor of having a Mac and to make that trade off. It's a trade off. I'm hopeful that game could come to the Mac but there's no good reason I can tell to force someone to make the game because I want to have my cake and eat it too. Products have features and trade-offs. On the iPhone you have iMessage which might be very important to you so you can go with an iPhone. Or maybe you need a BitTorrent client and it's not available on the iPhone so you buy something else. This is just how the world works.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic. You can just fly to Britain and rent a flat there. It's not physically impossible. It is an unreasonable thing to have to do in order to switch carriers. > Second, if you need to replace a $400 phone for a $1 app, you're effectively buying that app for $401 - it must be really worth that amount for you to switch phones. That's the point. The $400 is a switching barrier which acts as a wall segmenting the app markets by platform, with the result that Apple has a monopoly on the iOS side of the wall. Excluding competing stores is then monopoly abuse. > Products have features and trade-offs. On the iPhone you have iMessage which might be very important to you so you can go with an iPhone. Or maybe you need a BitTorrent client and it's not available on the iPhone so you buy something else. The point is that this trade off is artificial and only exists as a result of anti-competitive practices. Otherwise you could get iMessage on your iPhone from the Apple App Store and get a BitTorrent client from some other app store still on your iPhone. It's one thing for something not to exist because there is no demand for it. If anybody can develop a Mac game and then not everybody does because there aren't enough Mac gamers to justify it, c'est la vie. It's caused by lack of demand, not anti-competitive behavior. If you want to develop a game for Mac, nobody is stopping you. Whereas if the reason the Mac gaming market was small was that Apple had their own game studio and prohibited games from competing studios, that's anti-competitive behavior. It's specifically problematic because the market can't fix it -- even if there is demand for alternatives, alternatives are prohibited, which is different than just not enough people wanting them for anybody to become a provider.
- redxdev 6y ago
  > I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic. I agree with you here - this is a bad comparison, it's incredibly easy to just go buy something that isn't iOS-based - but that doesn't actually help much, at least from Epic's perspective. In fact, Epic is suing Google over how they treat Android as well: * Google Play has similar restrictions to the iOS App Store, therefore neither Fortnite (assuming they want their own payment processing) nor EGS can exist on it. * Sideloading is possible (and was/is (?) used for Fortnite) so that at least is fine, however... * Sideloaded apps lose out on some important features - namely that they can't auto-update. Technically, this isn't a sideloading restriction but a restriction on non-system apps but the result is the same. System apps cannot be installed except via an OS flash (with a custom ROM)/root which is not something you can expect the average consumer to do. * Additionally, Epic cannot make deals with manufacturers to get EGS installed as a system app due to Google blocking them from making those deals. I have mixed feelings overall on whether we should be giving more opportunities for manufacturers to install possible bloatware on phones (something that plagued the early days of Android and still does to some degree) and whether it's a good idea to open up sideloading system apps. But even so, you have to admit that you can't "just" buy another phone to be able to do what Epic wants. Whether that's worthy of antitrust action... I really don't know.

anonymousab 6y ago

If Apple makes up a monopoly in a given market by some important metric - be that userbase, units sold, revenue $ or %, etc. - then those alternatives may not be meaningful or reasonable for developers.