You're being highly disingenuous here. It doesn't mean you're wrong in what you want, but you're not honestly addressing the counterpoint and tradeoffs involved. What you should have noticed is that your logic works 100% equally in the other direction: "If developers actually prefer those freedoms, they can still choose to develop apps only for stores without them." There are full stack OSS phones in development, Android forks and alternate stores like Amazon did are possible, etc. Would you accept that as an argument in turn?

Obviously there are much more complicated dynamics here then your oversimplification. If a critical mass of key developers went to a forked store, users would face extreme pressure to follow regardless of whether it was horrible for privacy. Windows itself, brought up above, is the most direct example! It was totally open to any development, yet gained so many network effects that many users felt compelled to run it (if only in a VM) even if they hate it. This isn't some weird thing, in fact if anything it's Apple that's new for a general purpose platform. They've essentially been able to serve to some extent as a "union for certain consumers", in the sense of labor unions. Developers, platforms, and users all have a constantly shifting balance of power. By coordinating a lot of user power through a single point of leadership, Apple has shifted that. It is perfectly reasonable to purposefully "join the Apple Union" precisely because an individual wants more bargaining power vs Developers.

Just like management dislikes workers having more power, developers dislike users having far more bargaining power of them. And sometimes they're absolutely right! Users aren't always correct, and further just like union leadership can have its own goals, incentives, lockin/regulatory capture efforts, etc., that don't always align. Apple is using its position both in good and incredibly valuable ways for its customers (opposing not merely lazy/bad developers but certain kinds of government overreach as well), and for unnecessary, selfish and restrictive ends. Some of those are Apple's fault as a matter of choice, some are the inevitable result of a centralized point of failure/control (which still are Apple's fault, to the extent that the whole scenario is their choice).

I'm more then sympathetic to wanting to make tweaks and being really scared of a future where owners don't have any sort of choice for root on their own hardware. At the same time we should recognize that things got to here in large part because THE TECH INDUSTRY FUCKED UP. It was us, the tech experts and elites in particular. I remember damn well the jokes about PEBKAC and "lusers" and enjoying good reads of the BOFH etc. But Apple had the balls to actually confront a lot of our bullshit head on with a revolutionary message of "it's not your fault." We were telling users not to install random crap off the web, or install anything that looked interesting, or browse to shady sites, etc etc. "Users are so dumb argh!" Apple dared to ask

>"well, why shouldn't people just be able to browser literally anywhere, and look through a selection of software and install literally anything that catches their fancy at all, with as few as possible concerns that it'll hose their system or sneak them into some payments bullshit or even fuck with their privacy."

and rather then just dismissing it instead figuring out the stack necessary to try to achieve it however imperfectly. We, the collectively industry and HN-types for a decade before, could have done that but with a better balance of freedom. We could have had full crypto trust chains, but still the ability for experts to load their own root keys. Apple's idiotic decision to eliminate upgrade pricing has nothing at all to do with the goal there. Etc etc. Instead a void was left and Apple stepped into it, and it's been popular because it's providing a huge amount of genuine value to hundreds of millions of people.

So I'm suspicious about selfish calls by techies and competitors and devs to try to roll it all back without acknowledging the strengths, and particularly without respecting the people making a conscious choice to opt into it. It stinks of the same old smug thinking about "users are dumb, we know better for them." Why shouldn't their desires matter? I'd like to see much more fine-grained approaches tried FIRST before bringing out big anti-trust hammers. For example, the law could require a choice at order time (but unalterable after) to let people load root keys for hardware, software, both, or neither. Then consumers could still choose fully locked down devices when it made sense and different degrees of openness otherwise. Vastly improving warranty law would be another path to examine.

[1] - https://stratechery.com/2018/antitrust-the-app-store-and-app...

Maybe Apple doesn't want big, low-margin publishers in the app store. Maybe they want to be the big publisher and they only want small time content that is worth many times what it cost to produce.

As a developer, I don't like that the hottest new platform is a walled garden, but I can't say that Apple has ever even implied that the app store is anything else and they haven't twisted any arms or abused any monopolies to get where they are. They just played really well, went straight to the source (consumers), and now they have everyone else by the balls.

Even if the app store was run differently, say allowing a competing way of installing apps, Apple still have plenty of fungible power to make such deals. You might have ticked a box to make it technically fair, for some definition of, but that would probably be just cosmetic. IE, app store would still represent most revenue and everyone is in the same position but a few geeks.

The "platform game" establishes market power, where buyers and sellers need to go through you. They have no negotiating power, and you can price to make deals that take all the "surplus utility" off the table, in classic economic terms.

So... reality isn't perfect and some players are big enough to negotiate. Netflix is that player here. They negotiate when they have to, but try to keep it quite.

When the market is this structured, this is how it works.

That it is mutually beneficial is sort of my point. If every developer jumped ship, iOS would be in trouble. But they won't. They absolutely will not. It's a humorous hypothetical. So I'm not the only one viewing the platform users as an asset. So is everyone clamoring to reach them.

It's not being an evil monopoly merely to have built the most desirable thing. Android exists today. It doesn't have anywhere near the access to the people who spend money. Apple spent decades cultivating that access, and they're in an extremely strong position because of it.

I hate the app store, it's a lazy mess. I hate Apple's deliberate crippling of the open web to stifle competition. That's probably far more fruitful ground for legislative action. But setting a price for what you can choose to either buy or not buy from them seems wildly within the bounds of what they're allowed to do.

Lets stick to the ‘no lower pirce than apple store’. This is very and clearly anti competitive tactic. Only side (apple) with significant leverage can use it. In every other situation it is not possible.

And to make it clear: this point is anti competitive, while you re completly skipping this topic concentrating on apple vs developer, because it harms (increases of price) consumers.

Multiple datapoints on this available, the best one is the very own of apple: mac os store. It is a ghost town.

Ios store would be instantly the same ghost if there existed even one ios app store alternative.

P.S. reminder: im addressing your mistake of ‘this is not anticompetitive’.

But in that scenario, you can always walk out and walk into a competing grocery store and try to find a better price. The fact that you can walk is what makes it a competitive scenario, and not an anti-trust one. The question here is, is being able to walk away and use an Android (or other smartphone) product an equivalent (thus fair competition) - or is software in the iOS ecosystem unique enough that not being allowed to participate unless you follow arcane rules is unfair abuse of a monopoly.

Anticompetitive behavior can be downstream of stuff like this, even if Apple isn’t actively quashing something but merely making it way easier for certain places to absorb the costs (especially if the deal was only offered to Netflix but not to other platforms).

Its not a ironclad argument by any means but its something

IE I am not sure how anyone could look at Apple's control over its market, and its policies, and disagree with the idea that Apple has significant control, and that its policies are anti-competitive.

Regardless over the exact definition of a market that you use, it is quite clear that Apple has pretty significant market power over something and that its actions cause app prices to be significantly higher than they would be otherwise, if they allowed competing app stores.

I can accept that Apple can demand a 30% fee for billing customers on their devices. And I can accept that they would prohibit installation/sales of software any other way. But I should be allowed to mark up the price by 30% and then call it out as a line item.

The fact that Apple can control what prices I set on other platforms and prohibit me from disclosing what’s happening to my users...

That is the part of this that strikes me as dystopian, and that’s the area where I think antitrust and free speech laws perhaps ought to step in.

Google/Apple giving you shit? Give them the finger and put your app on another store. There's no stronger bargaining chip than the free market.

Where I imagine Apple could get into trouble is if they systematically turned a blind eye to commission-dodging by specific entities as part of a trade to ensure their market dominance. Unlike Google, though, I'm not even sure which entities Apple could bribe that would risk looking like a trust.

The counterargument is, "Okay, so let there be multiple app stores on iOS, that compete with each other, and let the market price that package of services."

But regardless, let's not talk about whether Apple is providing luxuries or necessities -- that's not what rents are about.

But what I think would happen is that there would be enough hold-outs from such an effort that Apple would come out on top because the players in the eco -system are more in competition with each other than that they really mind Apple. They want to pay Apple less but they want to put their competition out of business even more...

Android is better in some respects, but is mostly happy to not actually compete on a lot of levels because that would possibly endanger the 30% industry standard. What we have is two extremely large players, so large and so establishes and in a market that takes so much money to enter that new competitors are at an extreme disadvantage agreeing, even if tacitly, that the fees for their stores are not something they will compete on.

That's not better than when they agreed they wouldn't hire each other's employees (which they were punished for). It benefits only themselves at the detriment of everyone else, and through market manipulation. If they actually cared to compete, we would see competition in store fees.

> running the App Store, marketing the apps

What marketing specifically? Last time I checked, I had to integrate third party ad experiences in order to market my app in their ecosystem.

> In such a hypothetical world, developers could potentially avoid the commission while benefitting from Apple's innovation and intellectual property free of charge.

> Apple argued from the very beginning that the 30% was its fee for running the App Store, marketing the apps, and storing and delivering the app bundles

With hindsight of the antitrust case in the EU this argument itself seems like it is in bad faith. Apples argument in the EU against antitrust was that there isn't one but five different app stores, conveniently for each device family.

So they are indeed aware that a commercial app developer would likely not be "benefitting from Apple's innovation and intellectual property free of charge", because they are likely not taking advantage of their entire catalogue of intellectual property (if there is five different app stores, for five different markets, as per Apples argument, surely there is different IP between those markets to run the app store in an effective manner).

In other words, as others have mentioned, Apple charges a 30% flat fee for "intellectual property" that developers may or may not take advantage of, as per their own argument overseas. I don't see how it's not antitrust when a company forces me to pay for services that I am not taking advantage off or ever had the intent of using, or can't use, due to technical limitations.

As a developer, to me it rather feels like Apple is trying to artificially bind me to invest into the app store as a platform due to this high fee, for example by developing an accompanying watch applet or a tablet version of my app, because the act of simply offering these on their devices seems to be part of their precious App Store IP. And you can't argue that pricing these add-on apps differently would make a difference for Apple, since they collect the 30% cut across income in their entire ecosystem either way.

It also doesn't make sense for Apple to tell me to go elsewhere (Android) to mitigate this, as I can't replicate the UX of their ecosystem on my own even if I tried (prime example would be the peripheral integration imo. You'll find creating a device that integrates as seamlessly as the Apple Watch fairly hard, not because Apple has some special proprietary integration IP secret sauce, but because they artificially lock down ways to interface with peripherals to secure market dominance).

It's no different than Standard Oil giving itself preferential shipment prices on the rails. This is text-book anti-competitive behavior.

So yes, in a regulated environment where monopolistic tactics are supposed to be verboten, we are supposed to have a right to at least be on equal standing with Apple's own apps.