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Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

accc.gov.au

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Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#281

Post by inopinatus »

simondotau wrote: post #70

This report is somewhat bipolar. On one hand it's arguing that Google and Apple exert too much control over smartphone app marketplaces. On the other hand its proposed remedy asks that Google and Apple exert even more control over these app marketplaces by stamping down on anti-consumer practices like subscription traps and scams. On the other other hand it proposes that Apple and Google should allow third party paym…

The release does not say these things, and it is misleading to intentionally paraphrase as to invent logical conflicts that aren't present. In particular, it is wrong to equate the existence of controls with the abuse of market power.

Examples:

Kicking a scammer off your app store is a use of power that benefits the consumer.

Obliging service providers to mislead the consumer about their subscription options is an abuse of power and a barrier to consumer choice.

The desired outcomes are not "bipolar"; they are consistent with advancing consumer choice and consumer protection. They would only appears as conflicting demands to a rent-seeking organisation that prioritises its market share over consumer outcomes, which is of course why regulatory agencies like the ACCC exist.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#282

Post by stephen_g »

partomniscient wrote: post #200
hugi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that legal? Isn't that just incompetent government?

We're living in a time where if you don't have a mobile phone you can't complete the online form and therefore the transaction becomes impossible. This is even worse if you're on the phone and the person on the other end of the phone that works for the company is the one filling in the digital form. The fact that its now further embedded in an app. owned by international conglomerates is hardly suprising. They're slo…

I think the ACCC actually hasn't been that great for a while, unfortunately. We have awesome consumer protection, but they've made serious missteps more recently, especially under their current commissioner, Rod Simms.

They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either!

Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down.

In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right...

I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#283

Post by fragileone »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #279
encryptluks2 wrote: post #23

You can have third-party Android app stores. Can you say the same about Apple? While I agree that Google has market-dominance, they are not anti-competition or anti-consumer in the same sense as Apple. Android is open source, Chrome OS is open source, etc. Google is actually providing and contributing something back to the community. Apple intentionally locks people to specific hardware and to their app store.

You can have third party app stores in Android, but you can't have third party push notifications. And without them there is no way to deliver data to your app without making it persistent, which is increasingly difficult with every new Android version

Not exactly. There is MQTT, Server Side Events, WebSockets, plus Gotify[1] which has been discussed on HN before.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347848

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#284

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

fragileone wrote: post #283
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have third party app stores in Android, but you can't have third party push notifications. And without them there is no way to deliver data to your app without making it persistent, which is increasingly difficult with every new Android version

Not exactly. There is MQTT, Server Side Events, WebSockets, plus Gotify[1] which has been discussed on HN before. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347848

And how are you going to deliver a message using any of these if the application on a mobile phone is terminated by an operating system?

Check https://dontkillmyapp.com/ for more information.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#285

Post by trissylegs »

gonehome wrote: post #246
Aunche wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's obnoxious and anti-competitive, particularly in cases like Spotify where they directly compete and undercut them in the same market. How many Spotify users paid through their App though? I'd imagine it would only be a tiny fraction.

Apple bans app devs from linking to sign up via the browser or even mentioning its existence. They also started to prevent apps that don't have IAP for subscriptions.

Which is explicitly mentioned in the OP

> ...that app developers be allowed to provide consumers with information about alternative payment options...

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#286

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

bhelkey wrote: post #275
hugi wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. It's worked very well for us and really helped with contact tracing. But what democratic countries are mandating the use of covid apps?

Searching for mandatory and required turned up Hong Kong (required the app for entering restaurants) and Qatar (mandated when leaving the house). I don't think this is what OP was refering to.

Please search instead by 'COVID app mandatory for'; depending upon your location the results might vary i.e. if you are from one of those countries then all the search results in the front page would be about just your country and where as if you are not then you will get different countries/states which has mandated COVID app for some service.

If the former is true for you, it didn't mean I meant your country alone in my original comment.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#287

Post by kbenson »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #212
hugi wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What countries were that?

Not going to name countries and trigger a slugfest. But will include the List of countries with official contact tracing apps[1] and you can search for which services those apps were mandated. EFF commentary on these apps[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countrie... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-tech...

There's no point to this. If you're going to call out a group for behavior, you should be willing to state their name. You didn't avoid a slugfest, you just confused the issue ye being ambiguous for no reason. The only negative consequences here are a few lost points, and you get that already for making allusions rather than statements with evidence, and providing a list of countries that have tracking apps is not evidence that any of those countries mandated its use.

If the consequences for you are larger than that because you think your country is somehow monitoring your statements, I doubt being vague like this actually helps and you could always supply some other country as evidence, since your statements imply there are multiple.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#288

Post by JumpCrisscross »

berkes wrote: post #263
Gaelan wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing: Apple's exercising market power does bring all sorts of benefits to users. Obvious examples include the new privacy rules they're imposing, in-app purchases allowing any subscriptions to be cancelled with zero hassle. If Apple allowed other app stores, Facebook would almost certainly move to one that let them produce a far more invasive app. And the vast majority of the users will just download Face…

In essence that is arguing that an abusive monopoly (facebook) must be fought with another abusive monopoly (apple).

> that is arguing that an abusive monopoly (facebook) must be fought with another abusive monopoly (apple)

Plus the entire den of pests that is adtech and its various tracking companies, most of whom are far from monopolies.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#289

Post by swiley »

aspaviento wrote: post #274
Clewza313 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people, it's too complicated (as in, they don't know how) to transfer a photo into their computer and then upload it separately. Integrating a camera in the app is far easier. Still doesn't excuse being iOS-only, though.

Nowadays you can trigger the camera app from a website and get the image data directly in your web, making the experience of uploading a photo the same as any installed app.

The file upload input field has done this since iOS 4 or so.

Re: Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers

#290

Post by fragileone »

bogwog wrote: post #188
encryptluks2 wrote: post #23

You can have third-party Android app stores. Can you say the same about Apple? While I agree that Google has market-dominance, they are not anti-competition or anti-consumer in the same sense as Apple. Android is open source, Chrome OS is open source, etc. Google is actually providing and contributing something back to the community. Apple intentionally locks people to specific hardware and to their app store.

This is a bad take. Google is just as guilty of anti-competitive behavior as Apple. Sure, a third party store can exist in the Android ecosystem, but what are the chances that it can be commercially viable? It's practically impossible. * Google shows countless scary warning dialogs to users who even think about installing a third party store. Any competitor trying to run an alternative store needs to somehow educate…

> Yes, Android is open source. The operating system on your Android phone is not open source.

What you’re refering to as Android, is in fact, Google Play Services/Android, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Google Play Services plus Android. Android is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Google Play Services system.

Many mobile users run a modified version of the Google Play Services system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Google Play Services which is widely used today is often called Android, and many of its users are not aware.

There really is a Android, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Google Play Services is the core: the program in the system that is required for full functionality of a mobile device. The core is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Android is normally used in combination with Google Play Services: the whole system is basically Google Play Services with Android added, or Google Play Services/Android. All the so-called Android ROMs are really distributions of Google Play Services/Android!

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