Quit whining about Apple and just stop using them

If you don't like Amazon, good luck not using anything that touches AWS.

>A customer is an external stakeholder.

Customers used to have more choice, this made them highly valued stakeholders.

Before the era of permanent rolling mandatory updates and new releases customers (And IT managers) had to be convinced a new version had more value than the software it was replacing.

Windows Vista, DOS 4 And numerous other software failed to get traction because the value of new features was too low vs the pain points.

Now days the focus is on shareholder value not customer needs.

Locking in customers and maximising revenue is far more important than marking software better for the end user or IT teams.

Wow, this is a long-winded semi-rant that goes through a lot of contradictory points. Summing up, it seems to take two opposite sides, the first aligned with the title:

1) Don't take legal action against Apple because "think of all the ways that precedent could be abused against other companies" and "it seems silly to me to cry about monopolies", so "The solution is obvious. Stop making apps for iOS" because if you "can’t survive without the ability to suckle at Apple’s teat then you’ve made bad decisions" and "Stop buying iPhones" and "Don’t buy Macs while you’re at it"

...but the second totally opposed to it:

2) "In reality, I know none of these solutions are actually going to come to fruition", "Maybe the ultimate solution is an anti-trust legal one", and "My hopes for such legal action ever succeeding are not particularly high."

But as in most cases, reality isn't that black and white. The author is ultimately correct in saying "boycott Apple" is simply not viable, as it should be -- it would be like taking a sledgehammer to level a nail. Unfortunately, the author is being incredibly condescending and unrealistic that a business shouldn't depend on the iOS market, which is something like 2/3 of all mobile app store revenue.

But government intervention here doesn't mean a slippery slope -- that's a common but totally unfounded fallacy. Economists are well acquainted with all the different ways markets can fail, and how targeted governmental remedies are required for healthy market competition to function.

Identifying that Apple is abusing its market position in one area to stifle competition in another is easy to show, if we write appropriate legislation to define it (applying to Amazon etc. as well). The only question is what remedy best serves consumers: whether to treat this like a monopoly situation that gets broken up (force Apple to allow apps and app stores that bypass Apple's walled garden) or regulated like public utilities (the security and trustworthiness of the App Store is valuable, so set a yearly profit limit of e.g. 12% to that segment of the company).

> This echoes the "if you don't like it so much then just leave instead of speaking up" dismissal

It's even worse than that. Even if you leave Apple ecosystem, you are still subject to it. Consumers don't like paying different prices based on the platform they are using. They will feel cheated. For this reason, app and service developers almost always price their products the same across all platforms. If a service developer estimates that 50% of the service's customers end up signing up through Apple Pay and pay the Apple tax, which one of these scenarios do you think will happen:

1) The developer will just eat the loss and will not take Apple's cut into their calculations of what the pricing should be at all;

2) They charge users who sign up through Apple 30% more;

3) They charge everyone the same. In order to negate the effect of Apple tax, their prices end up being higher than they otherwise would have been. Everyone, Apple user or not, ends up paying 15% higher.

I would wager that number 3 is what happens in almost all instances. You cannot not pay the Apple tax, even if you never use Apple.

On a side note, I am so surprised that so many people see this as a fight between Apple and developers. They view the Apple tax as something developers pay and thus is developers' problem, not theirs. Like any tax, ultimately, we the consumers end up paying it. It may be indirect, but it is coming out of our pocket. And it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that I would have to pay more than $1000 to buy a device, and then get nickel-and-dimes by Apple to actually use the said device.

I‘m more and more of the opinion that oligolipolies (multi-monopolies) should be treated the same as monopolies. Just because there is more than a single provider still does not mean there is a free market and consumers have actual choice. Google and Apple both pull extremely anticompetitive behavior lately and the excuse of „just switch to the other side“ bypasses reality. There are quite a lot of studies that free markets start working only if there are more than 4 parties left to compete with significant market share.

Citations missing since I‘m on mobile.