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U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#191

Post by oliv__ »

I don't get it.

You build a successful product that people love, gain an important position in a market you basically created, offer a closed marketplace for apps to further provide value to your core product, again this is a resounding success and people vote with their $$$ to subsidize your growth.

In the meantime, your competitor comes up with their own product and marketplace. Consumers are able to freely choose between both.

Now your company is forced by the gov to integrate your products with the competition's inferior marketplace. Why? How is this not overreach?

EDIT: easy to downvote, why don't you give me answers instead

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#192

Post by inasio »

I'm sure there's an argument to justify making it super complicated to move your Whatsapp content from IPhone to Android, but at the time I was having to dump the Whatsapp DB to recover the last messages from a dead relative it sure seemed like a convenient way to encourage people to stick around.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#193

Post by thxcvs »

Posting anonymously. I worked on an app where Apple gave us special access to private APIs allow listed by the app ID and told us to keep it secret. This access gave the select few apps that got it a huge advantage in performance. I don't want to share too much details at the risk of identifying the app and getting it revoked.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#194

Post by toast0 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #150
gnicholas wrote: post #13

> The Justice Department, which began its investigation into Apple in 2019, chose to build a broader and more ambitious case than any other regulator has brought against the company. As I was reading the specific charges detailed in the article, I was thinking this case seems like a stretch and will be difficult to prove. Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to brows…

How do you think they would spin Messages interoperability as security or performance?

The messaging claim seemed to be about carrier based messaging; SMS and MMS, and I guess in theory RCS (but is that really carrier based if Google has taken it upon themselves to enroll most Android users on a Google server)

Apps that read inbound SMS may be malicious and use that ability to steal verification codes. Or they may not be actively malicious, and meerly handle the data in an insecure way that makes messages available to others.

Performance, I dunno. Maybe they could argue something about how time between user requesting an SMS be sent and it actually getting sent is very important, and similar for display, and that they're more likely to do that right. I've certainly seen some Android manufacturer provided SMS clients that do much better than others on that, although I have no recent performance notes since I no longer get massive floods of SMS from too simple monitoring systems.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#195

Post by dataflow »

endisneigh wrote: post #129

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products. In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device? Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Wh…

> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products... Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem?

Is it trivial to move to alternatives once you've already bought said Apple products?

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#196

Post by bardak »

endisneigh wrote: post #129

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products. In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device? Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Wh…

The most compelling argument I can see is that due to its market share businesses cannot avoid dealing with the app store and it's fees.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#197

Post by oflannabhra »

atonse wrote: post #109
retskrad wrote: post #62

I've heard all arguments against Apple's practices, and to me, they all basically come down to 'it's unfair that so many people like to live inside the Apple walled garden'. When it comes to the law, Apple is not a monopoly. When it comes to competition on the market, Apple is competing with Android and Windows, and the vast majority of the world's middle and upper class willingly choose Apple products. Even if you l…

I'm not so sure. We are fully bought in to the Apple Ecosystem (Apple One, Apple Fitness, Music, everything). In most cases (like Apple Home), I did enough research and found that it was much more well thought out security-wise and was good enough, compared to the wild west that is the Google/Amazon smart home ecosystem. Again, for the most part, the walled garden is way superior to what I see outside the garden. Eve…

Just FYI, HomePod actually supports multiple music services, and Apple Health (the data store for Fitness) supports integrations with other providers (both input and output).

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#198

Post by [deleted] »

thxcvs wrote: post #193

Posting anonymously. I worked on an app where Apple gave us special access to private APIs allow listed by the app ID and told us to keep it secret. This access gave the select few apps that got it a huge advantage in performance. I don't want to share too much details at the risk of identifying the app and getting it revoked.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#199

Post by whywhywhywhy »

ethbr1 wrote: post #90
boringg wrote: post #22

It looked surprisingly pretty weak to my non lawyer eyes. I mean I fully understand that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software but its almost a feature for their system and you buy it knowing that. It feels like it goes back to Android vs Apple approach to their ecosystem.

> that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software To me, this is the crux of modern antitrust, and the EU absolutely got it correct at a high level. In simplest form -- doing certain things as an almost-monopoly and/or extremely large business should be illegal, while doing them as a smaller company should not be. The scale of global businesses, in low-competition industries, allo…

>I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.

I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.

I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut. If I even set my stall up on the street I have to pay for permits, certification, suppliers.

Not saying I agree with the App Store tax because I actually don't but I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal when it's completely abnormal compared to all personal computing up to that point, which maybe was an anomaly? Hope not.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#200

Post by screamingninja »

dkobia wrote: post #177

Apple getting sued in the US and EU is really about finding an equilibrium between 3 stakeholders - Apple, Users & Developers. The status quo favors Apple and Users. Developers led by companies like Epic just want a bigger piece of the pie. That's it.

How does it favor the users?

> https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/

> https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/

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