Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhone market share is very close to 50% in the US. You can't have a successful app launch in the US without making your app available on the iPhone. Apples policies affect the entire market, especially in the US. If they're not already a monopoly in the US, then they might as well be since they have the same market control as a monopoly player. Also, a strict majority market share is not required for a company to be…
> “The fact that they have a [less than] 50 percent market share of smartphones doesn’t mean they don’t have a 100 percent share of the distribution of iPhone apps — which they absolutely do,” Yes, that's true, but it's not a particularly meaningful or insightful statement. That's defining the market in terms of the answer you want. Any company has a 100% market share if you define the market as "things that only tha…
I'd say the great majority of those benefits are going to Apple.
There's nothing that Apple does in their app store that a third party app store owner couldn't do. Anyone can curate apps.
As a customer of the Apple app store, I've absolutely experienced the detrimental effects of Apple's behavior. For one thing, I can't build software for my own device because Apple is too concerned about losing control. There are also whole categories of software that I simply cannot have because Apple won't let them be sold in their store.
They already lost the anti-trust case to decide if they can be sued again by customers. I hope they lose the next one too.