6 ms·

> monopoly on iOS? Way to drill that category all the way down to IOS to ensure that you're able to use that "monopoly" keyword. The deli that's in my complex

> monopoly on iOS? Way to drill that category all the way down to IOS to ensure that you're able to use that "monopoly" keyword. The deli that's in my complex has a monopoly on buying and obtaining wine if i don't want to drive anywhere or use a phone to order some via some delivery app.

bee_rider 3y ago
I wonder why McDonalds has been allowed to have a monopoly on McChicken sandwiches for so long.
- _boffin_ 3y ago
  I'm so beyond irked that i'm not able to purchase a del taco chicken taco from McDonalds.
- judge2020 3y ago
  I'd love to finally see consistency in food quality with a Chick-Fil-A McGriddle.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  McDonald's is the app, and a McChicken sandwich a feature of the McDonald's app. Phone operating systems are the malls, and for the vast bulk of us, unfortunately the only areas in the city zoned to have commercial app buildings.
garbagecoder 3y ago
The reason people say this is because that argument has been put out there by the other multi-billion dollar corpos trying to take some of Apple's slices of the pie. None of this has the consumer at heart at all.
m00x 3y ago
This is the perfect definition of a strawman argument. There are 2 dominating app stores: - Google/Android app store - IOS app store They have a duopoly in the mobile market, and they each have a monopoly on their platform. The deli comparison is asinine since there are millions of delis vs 2.
- judge2020 3y ago
  This is what Epic tried to define the market as, but the court instead went with "mobile gaming transactions".
  - nodamage 3y ago
    That's how theses cases usually work. Antitrust claimants want to define the market as narrowly as possible for their own benefit. Defendants want to define it as wide as possible for the same reason. It's up to the court to figure out what the actual market is, and not what the (biased) parties want it to be.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  You can side load in other app stores in Android. iOS started out with side-loading, but then this was crushed by Apple's exercise of their absolute control of the operating system.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    iOS didn't start with side-loading. Do you have a source for this ?
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      What mullingtover refers to.
    - judge2020 3y ago
      The first App Store was Cydia. Technically side-loading with how Apple failed to predict the dedication of breaking the (trivial, at the time) security to add more native apps to the home screen. https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/debian-style-installation-arrives-on-iphone/ https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/debian-style-installatio...
      - simondotau 3y ago
summerlight 3y ago
Relevant market is not a vague rhetorical definition as you such described. US FTC has not attempted to define a relevant market for digital apps, but EU clearly considers iOS alone as a relevant market and thus regulates it with DMA. To give you an idea of hypothetical regulation scenario: You want to move to an Android app. Sure you gotta need to change your phone as well. This is likely much more expensive than the app itself, thus it may make Android/iOS apps non-interchangeable. If FTC finds that this is expensive enough so most people won't make such move even if Apple decides to considerably increase the app store tax, then the App Store itself is a relevant market thus monopoly. We don't know the legal conclusion since FTC hasn't done such study (this is a very complex process that takes several years with huge uncertainties, this is why politicians prefer direct regulation via legislation), but many experts believe that Apple is not in a very safe position.
kmeisthax 3y ago
If I move off iOS I lose stuff I bought on iOS. Software licenses aren't portable across platforms, and there's lots of iOS software that doesn't even have an Android version (or vice versa). The software industry has fought tooth and nail to criminalize any attempt by users to resist this. Emulation software is legal, copying software you own to run it on different hardware is legal, but the digital locks designed to keep you from pirating apps make it illegal to migrate your apps even though it would otherwise be legal to do so. If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. We know this because of Microsoft and Amazon's failed attempts at making phone OSes. In Amazon's case, they actually used the same OS Google did, but Google refused to support it. And you can't legally port licenses over from Google Play to get Google's apps running on Fire OS. So the Fire Phone - a phone running Google's OS with Amazon's tweaks - could not use any Google apps. Anything on a Google service had to be used through the web browser. Windows Mobile was even worse: nobody wanted to support it natively. And again, you can't sell something that isn't an iPhone or Google-blessed Android that lets you buy App Store or Google Play apps and run them. This is the same situation for everything else, too. Amazon has a monopoly on books because Kindle and Audible books cannot be copied onto non-Amazon devices or reader apps. So nobody wants to buy books outside of Amazon's platform, because it'll split their collections. Nintendo spends extraordinary amounts of time and effort legally harassing anyone who publicly uses their games on non-Nintendo hardware. Same for Sony and Microsoft. To bring this back to your deli thing, imagine if you weren't allowed to have your deli's wine and other wine in the same apartment. There's chips in the wine bottles that will poison the wine if you do that, and there's a federal law prohibiting you from removing the chip, and prohibiting even discussing how to remove the chip. So you can switch wine stores, but you have to throw out all your wine that you already have. That is the current situation of software distribution as a consumer in 2023.
- chii 3y ago
  > If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. but apple wasn't the one preventing these from succeeding. they failed on their own. On the other hand, it is reasonable to conclude that Netscape didn't fail on their own, but that Microsoft _prevented_ netscape from gaining marketshare by preloading a competing browser; such a preloading can only have occurred with a monopoly on operating systems. Therefore, the monopoly abuse was to leverage its monopoly position in one market, to prevent competition a different market. So despite the fact that I also hate the appstore and walled gardens, apple _did not_ use their apple device dominance to _prevent_ android versions of an app from existing/competing. The complaint about walled gardens from people is that of lack of open access - not that of monopoly. I suspect that new laws needs to be introduced to break open walled gardens - i want to call these "interoperability" laws. It's in the interest of society for systems to be interoperable. This will not only concern apple devices, but things like EV charging networks, computer networks, and data interchange apis, and digital ownership of data. Imagine if by purchasing a CD or DVD, you are only allowed to play that disk on an authorized device! Now imagine instead of a physical disk, you buy a digital "disk" - a game, or music - but you're locked into the vendor's platform!

bee_rider 3y ago

I wonder why McDonalds has been allowed to have a monopoly on McChicken sandwiches for so long.

_boffin_ 3y ago
I'm so beyond irked that i'm not able to purchase a del taco chicken taco from McDonalds.
judge2020 3y ago
I'd love to finally see consistency in food quality with a Chick-Fil-A McGriddle.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
McDonald's is the app, and a McChicken sandwich a feature of the McDonald's app. Phone operating systems are the malls, and for the vast bulk of us, unfortunately the only areas in the city zoned to have commercial app buildings.

garbagecoder 3y ago

The reason people say this is because that argument has been put out there by the other multi-billion dollar corpos trying to take some of Apple's slices of the pie. None of this has the consumer at heart at all.

m00x 3y ago

This is the perfect definition of a strawman argument. There are 2 dominating app stores: - Google/Android app store - IOS app store They have a duopoly in the mobile market, and they each have a monopoly on their platform. The deli comparison is asinine since there are millions of delis vs 2.

judge2020 3y ago
This is what Epic tried to define the market as, but the court instead went with "mobile gaming transactions".
- nodamage 3y ago
  That's how theses cases usually work. Antitrust claimants want to define the market as narrowly as possible for their own benefit. Defendants want to define it as wide as possible for the same reason. It's up to the court to figure out what the actual market is, and not what the (biased) parties want it to be.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
You can side load in other app stores in Android. iOS started out with side-loading, but then this was crushed by Apple's exercise of their absolute control of the operating system.
- threeseed 3y ago
  iOS didn't start with side-loading. Do you have a source for this ?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    What mullingtover refers to.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    The first App Store was Cydia. Technically side-loading with how Apple failed to predict the dedication of breaking the (trivial, at the time) security to add more native apps to the home screen. https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/debian-style-installation-arrives-on-iphone/ https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/debian-style-installatio...
    - simondotau 3y ago

summerlight 3y ago

Relevant market is not a vague rhetorical definition as you such described. US FTC has not attempted to define a relevant market for digital apps, but EU clearly considers iOS alone as a relevant market and thus regulates it with DMA. To give you an idea of hypothetical regulation scenario: You want to move to an Android app. Sure you gotta need to change your phone as well. This is likely much more expensive than the app itself, thus it may make Android/iOS apps non-interchangeable. If FTC finds that this is expensive enough so most people won't make such move even if Apple decides to considerably increase the app store tax, then the App Store itself is a relevant market thus monopoly. We don't know the legal conclusion since FTC hasn't done such study (this is a very complex process that takes several years with huge uncertainties, this is why politicians prefer direct regulation via legislation), but many experts believe that Apple is not in a very safe position.

kmeisthax 3y ago

If I move off iOS I lose stuff I bought on iOS. Software licenses aren't portable across platforms, and there's lots of iOS software that doesn't even have an Android version (or vice versa). The software industry has fought tooth and nail to criminalize any attempt by users to resist this. Emulation software is legal, copying software you own to run it on different hardware is legal, but the digital locks designed to keep you from pirating apps make it illegal to migrate your apps even though it would otherwise be legal to do so. If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. We know this because of Microsoft and Amazon's failed attempts at making phone OSes. In Amazon's case, they actually used the same OS Google did, but Google refused to support it. And you can't legally port licenses over from Google Play to get Google's apps running on Fire OS. So the Fire Phone - a phone running Google's OS with Amazon's tweaks - could not use any Google apps. Anything on a Google service had to be used through the web browser. Windows Mobile was even worse: nobody wanted to support it natively. And again, you can't sell something that isn't an iPhone or Google-blessed Android that lets you buy App Store or Google Play apps and run them. This is the same situation for everything else, too. Amazon has a monopoly on books because Kindle and Audible books cannot be copied onto non-Amazon devices or reader apps. So nobody wants to buy books outside of Amazon's platform, because it'll split their collections. Nintendo spends extraordinary amounts of time and effort legally harassing anyone who publicly uses their games on non-Nintendo hardware. Same for Sony and Microsoft. To bring this back to your deli thing, imagine if you weren't allowed to have your deli's wine and other wine in the same apartment. There's chips in the wine bottles that will poison the wine if you do that, and there's a federal law prohibiting you from removing the chip, and prohibiting even discussing how to remove the chip. So you can switch wine stores, but you have to throw out all your wine that you already have. That is the current situation of software distribution as a consumer in 2023.

chii 3y ago
> If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. but apple wasn't the one preventing these from succeeding. they failed on their own. On the other hand, it is reasonable to conclude that Netscape didn't fail on their own, but that Microsoft _prevented_ netscape from gaining marketshare by preloading a competing browser; such a preloading can only have occurred with a monopoly on operating systems. Therefore, the monopoly abuse was to leverage its monopoly position in one market, to prevent competition a different market. So despite the fact that I also hate the appstore and walled gardens, apple _did not_ use their apple device dominance to _prevent_ android versions of an app from existing/competing. The complaint about walled gardens from people is that of lack of open access - not that of monopoly. I suspect that new laws needs to be introduced to break open walled gardens - i want to call these "interoperability" laws. It's in the interest of society for systems to be interoperable. This will not only concern apple devices, but things like EV charging networks, computer networks, and data interchange apis, and digital ownership of data. Imagine if by purchasing a CD or DVD, you are only allowed to play that disk on an authorized device! Now imagine instead of a physical disk, you buy a digital "disk" - a game, or music - but you're locked into the vendor's platform!