While this is even more true for consoles, the difference is in a specific purpose vs a general purpose.
General purpose platforms that become overly closed have roundly been rejected or been forced to open up: Carterfone, AOL, Windows, carrier locked phones, etc.. even iOS itself didn't allow apps at first and now does.
Closed platforms for a specific purpose like consoles, kindles, rokus, etc.. do a bit better because they are 1) more likely to have competitors, and 2) have more limited impact from being specific purpose platforms, though are still capable of maintaining monopolies/duopolies.
The phone market is a iOS/Android duopoly, and both are being forced to open up more. Hardly surprising.
Android is more open in the sense that there is more than one market and anyone can build a marketplace for apps. Yes, there are places where Google is not open with Android as well but my main problem is there is only one app store for iDevices. My thinking is that if Apple is forced to open up in terms of allowing more than one channel to sell apps through, or to sell directly, that it won't cede the market to Google but will set a precedent for all players.
I rarely hear complaints about the closed-platform monopolies enjoyed by the App Store and Google Play, on their respective iOS/Android platforms. Can someone make a case for why a similar app-store monopoly on Windows is any worse?
Apple aren't doing anything to prevent competition with their platform. Google are/were. It's that simple.
iOS is a closed platform, and Android is a more open platform, but that's 100% orthogonal to Apple or Google's _business practices_. Closed platforms are not illegal, while anticompetitive behaviour is.
But that also applies to every single current game console and
almost all other modern devices with app support, ranging from
smartwatches to home automation.
That doesn't seem like a monopoly to me. Apple has huge
competition on the mobile market. Windows Phone 8 only had
Microsoft's own app store, was that a monopoly with its <5%
market share? I think not.
The monopoly criterion is so outmoded. Anti-trust laws were enacted to counter organizations that cornered basic things like steel, railroads, power, communications, etc. 100 years ago, almost everything they could imagine was a commodity that was easily replaceable.
But app platforms are not commodities. There is considerable vendor lock-in, by design. It's not like one just takes an iOS app and instantly ports it over to Android when Apple's terms no longer suit; there is considerable sunk cost. Platforms cleave the market into captive audiences that can and are abused.
And what to do if you are little guy who invested everything in one of those two platforms and didn't have the foresight to write your app in a way that it was easily ported? Well, screw you.
So these platforms actually compete with each other to offer "value adds" which are really just like traps for vendor lock-in.
Anti-trust laws are full of flawed and antiquated reasoning that is unable to deal with the realities of the 21st century marketplace. And there is precious little understanding of these technological issues in courts and legislatures.
I'm showing that argument that iOS AppStore is not a monopoly because "If you don't like closed iPhone you can buy Android" is ridiculous.
Of course you have alternative hardware+os that you can use, just like in case of telephony you had alternative hardware (paper) that you could use, which didn't stop US goverment to split AT&T up.
Here's a reasonable metric: who controls the market for iPad or iPhone applications, and how did that compare to who controlled the market for applications that ran on Windows at the peak of Microsoft's dominance? For the former, the only distribution method is via Apple's store and Apple gets a cut of every sale. For the latter, developers could sell directly to the public; Microsoft did not control this. Apple's monopoly is much stronger.
Apple apologists will blur this by taking about the smart phone market as a whole. But once someone has bought a device, they are no longer in that larger market. They need apps, and there's only one place to get them.
That only leaves the question of whether they are abusing the monopoly.
Google has a similar monopoly over Android applications, but it's not as tight, because of side-loading and fragmentation by Amazon and others. Still, it's a near-monopoly because few people bypass the Play Store.
A common argument is that Apple is effectively a monopoly, in which case "the market" can't decide. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this viewpoint, but Android and iOS are two separate markets because the cost of switching between them is so high, users are subjected to so much lock-in that switching is almost not an option, and users can only use one market at a time. The difference is that while Apple has a monopoly on iOS with its app store, Google does not have a monopoly on Android with the Play Store because of the existence of competing stores (Galaxy Store, F-Droid, sideloading APKs etc.).
There are analogies to be drawn with game consoles, but there are some key differences: game consoles are not general purpose computing devices necessary for everyday life; users can own multiple consoles at once; there are more than two competitors; and the cost of switching is relatively low.
The iOS ecosystem has a much stronger claim to "might as well be a games console" specifically because it was so vertically integrated, which is why their business model looked essentially identical to one from the launch of the App Store. Yet the market evolved and it's clear that "might as well be a game console" is no longer an adequate defense for these leading smartphone platform owners.
While there are differences between Google/Android/PlayStore and Apple/iOS/AppStore when it comes to platform control and accessibility, and therefore a case to be made that they could be treated differently, this difference seems to point in the entirely opposite direction what you seem to be arguing.
In terms of market share, I'd say it's akin to a regional monopoly. But that's not entirely what I meant.
In my view, phones are general purpose computers. Apple also takes this view, which is the reason they have opened up a software marketplace on their devices.
Just like with Amazon, there are thousands of companies whose revenue depends almost exclusively on their ability to compete in the marketplace set up by Apple. In this scenario, both Apple and Amazon are notorious for abusing their control of the marketplace to disadvantage third-party sellers in favor of first-party products / hardware / software.
If a phone is NOT a general purpose computer, then Apple should disband the app store and only allow first-party apps to run. If a phone IS a general purpose computer, then Apple has an obligation to treat participants in the marketplace fairly, either by relaxing the app review process, or by allowing third-party marketplaces. They cannot have it both ways.
Legally speaking, Apple may not need to change anything. However, I'm talking about how things SHOULD be, not how they ARE.
One reason for the duopoly is that it cost more to have your app on more platforms. Its a disaster that for example government apps like id only works on the latest ios or android. There are also Sailfish, FirefoxOS, bunch of feature phone OS, and likely a lot I dont know of. The duopoly is self inflicted by the software industry.
As I mentioned I'm not following this case really at all, but some initial thoughts from your comment are that while Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smart phones, they do have a monopoly on what software users can run on the phones and tablets they make (so if you define platform as "smartphones" then no monopoly, if platform is "iOS" then yes monopoly).
On the Android side of things, Google doesn't have near the same level of control, so that is false equivalence. One can easily side load apps, and people do all the time (Fortnite for example, couldn't happen on iOS but did on Android). There's also competing app stores (F-Droid, Amazon App store), so a very different situation. You can also run any OS you want on your device if Google's Android flavor isn't to your liking. Google also doesn't make/sell most of the hardware.
Microsoft got in trouble for simply making it very easy for people to use IE instead of Netscape and Word instead of WordPerfect. Imagine if they had gone a step further and mandated that only apps that pass a Microsoft review process could even be installed at all?
"Monopoly" is an interesting term in this situation. Obviously they are the sole provider of the iOS platform access, but iOS itself is not the largest smartphone platform.
Your argument relies on combining the markets for iOS and Android apps into a single market. These are separate markets because you can't put an Android app on iPhone or an iOS app on Android.
If iOS had 100% share, you probably wouldn't say it doesn't have a monopoly on apps because you can just use desktop apps instead.
I also wouldn't say Comcast doesn't have a monopoly because they only have xx% share and you can move to a different state or country and get another provider. Or use your phone for internet instead.
> Ease of customer switching argument
This is confusing the consumer market for smartphones and the markets for distribution of smartphone app.
> Supply-Side Price elasticity argument
Yeah, if any monopoly's cut is too high, you can exit the market. This is not an argument that the monopoly is not a monopoly. This only means there is a limit to the monopoly's power.
Huh? Which space is competitive? Apple and Google are pretty much the only shows in town and even more restricted is that the App Store is the exclusive store for iOS.
In fact, they don’t even really compete with each other. Play is only on Android and App Store is only on iOS.
You could say Android and iOS compete with each other, but once someone has bought a phone, they do not have a choice of where to buy apps.
Heres where I think it is anti-competitive. Lets say you are building a streaming service. You choose to be android only, because you want the majority of the market, and calculate that you dont need the Apple users. Your competitor complies with more apple rules, and goes cross platform. They win because they chose to be cross platform.
It's hard to win (and by and large you usually need to be a winner, to exist in the long run) without offering your product to people, whichever device they choose to access it from.
Apple, despite being a non majority of the market share, is a king maker, they can choose the winners. And if they want to, they can cripple their competitors through a combination of app store rules, payment processing requirements and limited api access (streaming, payment, maps, etc)
This does suck, I wish it was a true free market. But it still is more open than say console markets or even Steam. I am not sure why they don't fully trust the market to produce and choose the apps.
But in the end we are sharecroppers in a kingdom, they built the platform and have the last say. Diversify to other platforms (I am sure android or windows market would like to see this) but don't stop developing. Every once in a while they let you know with a rejection who's platform it is. In the future maybe it will be fully open, it is what drove Android markets in the early days. I am still surprised one of the competing markets hasn't been more open or taken less than 30%. They just line up behind Apple following suit.
Personally from a game developer perspective, Apple is the most open viable market that has been created for game developers and remade handheld gaming. From a web developer perspective it is more closed.
General purpose platforms that become overly closed have roundly been rejected or been forced to open up: Carterfone, AOL, Windows, carrier locked phones, etc.. even iOS itself didn't allow apps at first and now does.
Closed platforms for a specific purpose like consoles, kindles, rokus, etc.. do a bit better because they are 1) more likely to have competitors, and 2) have more limited impact from being specific purpose platforms, though are still capable of maintaining monopolies/duopolies.
The phone market is a iOS/Android duopoly, and both are being forced to open up more. Hardly surprising.
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