311–320 of 958 posts
As a consumer I trust how Apple payments work and like the fact that everyone was using it on iOS. Now I will need to cut back on apps and do more due diligence to avoid scams and other issues. Hard to see how this is a win for consumers in addition to developers.
You can still use Apple payments.
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Agreed. Lina Khan is one of my favorite voices on this matter for that reason. Edit: Stating my opinion without why isn't very HN-ly of me, eh? She's been on Planet Money and discussed her ideas, where they come from, etc before. I don't think I'd quite do them justice explaining them myself. Apparently she's now a chair of the FTC as well (which I was unaware of). If you want a raw view of her views on anti-trust: h…
I initially downvoted but thought it would be better to ask for the information I think would make your comment more helpful. Would you mind linking to something pertinent, in order to add to the discussion? What does she say? Where does she say it? Why does that appeal to you?
In this case, the opening of the person's Wikipedia page probably sums it up right away:
> In the article, Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework, which focuses on keeping consumer prices down, cannot account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as that of Amazon. She proposed alternative approaches for doing so, including "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."
> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.” It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thr…
It's a new game, and we need new definitions. Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous. They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole. Their objective: capturin…
There are many authors that have been exploring the economic aspect of platforms. As such nowadays that phenomenon is know as "platform capitalism" in literature due to Nick Srnicek's 2016 Polity book of the same name. [1]
[1]: https://theceme.org/richard-godden-platform-capitalism-nick-...
I'm really happy to see this moving forward, but I loathe the potential future landscape. Every fortune 500 is going to immediately pivot to their own IAP options which will make my life harder compared to Apple Pay. I'm hoping with this movement, tools like Stripe/Paddle will develop some better IAP flows to make it as easy as possible. Adding my card information to 50 different in-app wallets does not sound appeali…
As a user, I have zero desire to use some random payment gateway, using Apple makes my life easier, I can reasonably trust Apple not to let someone steal my money, how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways? Also if people move away from giving Apple any money for the App Store, I expect the annual fee to increase to make up for it, and might Apple make you pay more if you don't use Apple's gateway? I don't see…
Eventually Apple will get down to make the Amazon not turn profit out of iOS IAP and then you will be left with two choices.
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But Stripe and PayPal and Square have far lower fees... oh. Now I see what this was about.
I don't think you do. Stripe and PayPal are only payment processors. If Apple now has to allow other payment processors then they're either going to charge fees for hosting the files or they're going to charge fees for the other services that people are using (OTA updates, reviews, localization, etc.). All that stuff will still have to be in place so it'll just be an issue of whether or not these companies will have…
The central evil of all of this has been the bundling of everything together, so that nothing can be independently valued.
"30% is fair, in exchange for all the things we provide you", etc.
Edit: As an example, in the US this is mandated for home mortgages. "These are services you can shop for" + "These are charges for each service". Any platform having to offer the equivalent of a Closing Disclosure / HUD-1 doesn't seem like such a bad world.
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> how am I supposed to trust 50 different gateways? Do you not buy things online currently? Do you not use Amazon, or Lyft, or Netflix, or Spotify?
My concern is less about random one-off purchases but more the management of on-going subscriptions. Having Apple handle that, is a blessing, from a user perspective. I have a single place to manage all the random $1 - $10 subscriptions that I have, making it easy to change/cancel at any moment's notice, and from any device.
(I'm sure there will be some people upset at that kind of interfering overreach, but it's the kind of interfering overreach most of us would actually like.)
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In my opinion we don't need to change the definition of monopoly, we need to integrate "conflict of interest" more into anti-competitive practice discourse. Apple, Google, etc. are having their cake and eating it, too. They have platform which they charge others to use (ok), and then they study usage data (somewhat shady) and then launch direct competitors ( > shady). That's the root of the problem in many cases. Of…
Most of the apps that Apple sells are already in highly competitive markets like music, video streaming, cloud storage, etc. I really don’t feel bad if some developer selling a leveler app for 99¢ goes out of business because Apple pre-installs a free leveling app on the iPhone.
Everyone seems to reading this ruling as "Apple has to allow other payment processors." But the text of the order seems to be about anti-steering, i.e. Apple can't tell developers they can't link out to other payment options on the web.
OTOH it doesnt force apple to allow any link, they can still filter which payment providers are allowed
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What you're describing looks more like the supermarket shelves. Some 80% of products in the cereal aisle are owned by three companies. Nobody really cares, but the switching costs to get a cereal outside that controlled space turn out to be pretty high (just try it with a family with kids). If you want to make your own cereal, good luck; the supermarkets trust the Big Three and are pretty uninterested in flighting so…
I think you have that analogy backwards. Google, Apple, and Amazon are the supermarkets. But they're also filling the shelves with their own products. It might not be too different from Walmart, save for a few points: - They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores. Or repair their devices (bad analogy). - They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do. Like turning into music and movie stud…
As a user of Apple, Google, and Amazon tech for decades, I simply disagree on the other two. You'll have to clarify in what way Google and Amazon make it hard to shop at other stores. Google, in particular, enables side-loading on every Android device. Of the three you've named, Apple is the biggest offender, and it appears they have touched the hot stove, unless this Court's ruling becomes reversed. But they touched it in a way that Google and Amazon do not, unless I'm missing something.
I don't think a world where F-droid continues to exist is one where we can claim Google, in particular, is a supermarket that makes it hard to shop at other stores.
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do
That's not by itself illegal, or discouraged. Traditionally, companies have considered such expansion a bad idea because they expose themselves to outsized risk in a market downturn. But there are examples of other companies doing that. Sony is a hardware manufacturer and a movie producer. Disney owns theme parks and movie production. Proctor & Gamble make some 90% of what goes in, on, or around the American body and home that you can buy off a store shelf (including many apparently-competing products). ViacomCBS owns theme parks, television studios, book publishing, heavy-industry machinery, and nuclear technology.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
The user experience from the era you're describing, to be blunt, sucked. Mobile devices, when apps could be loaded on them at all, where hard-to-manage, the apps were buggy, and they were hard to find. Lack of standards, lack of oversight, no trust that any given app wasn't a security mess (or just a Trojan) without something like brand recognition to rely upon. It wasn't just Apple and Google who changed that; we saw Steam come along and regularize the games-on-PCs space, we saw package management get more robust in the Linux ecosystem... People weren't forced into software catalog ecosystems, they ran to them and brain-drained alternatives because most of the alternatives were actively painful.
The government wants to avoid stepping on the neck of a better customer experience inadvertently via over-regulation.
And perhaps most importantly: you can still do that. You can still write an Android app and put it on F-droid, or self-sign it and give users instructions for enabling side-loading. But you won't see the adoption you will in using the big app stores, because the big app stores are a way better experience for most users. Outside of those app stores, discovery, reputation-tracking, consumer communication, anti-Trojan safeguards, etc. are '90s era.
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> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do fo…
Companies will want it, but I'm not sure users will. Apple does a really good job of warning me, I feel, and centralizing subscription cancellation etc., and that's huge. Like, if I have to go to your app--or worse, your website--to cancel a subscription? I'm gonna just not use your stuff, because I'm going to forget about it until you whack me for another year or whatever.