141–150 of 235 posts
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In the vast chasm between pure monopoly (one supplier) and the perfectly competitive market (which is imaginary), is large room for firms which have competition but are still big enough to abuse their market position. It's not useful to focus only on pure monopoly. From an economics perspective, there are plenty of other market structures which can be damaging for consumers.
But from a legal perspective [IANAL, but I'm pretty confident on this one], they can engineer the system to give them an advantage as long as they don't have an monopoly. When a company is a monopoly, new rules do apply.
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When Microsoft did the same thing in Windows it was grounds for anti-trust lawsuits to be brought against them: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/101947/microsoft-used-undocument... The idea here is that if you are supplying both the operating system and the applications that your applications should not benefit from being made by the same company as the OS, in other words, that it should be a level playing ground without…
Well, a PopOver widget is not something that gives any unique advantage to Apple. It can be replicated in a week or so by a third party. Now, a serious API, like say only Apple getting use of the accelerometer, that would be something. This is not the case here. But again, expecting all APIs to be public from day one is idiotic. APIs should only be made public if they are stable and ready to be supported for the futu…
What Apple can do and what it should do are not necessarily the same things. While it can establish privileged APIs, it should not. While it can attempt to support outside developers as a hardware company while also competing with them as a software company, it should not.
If it is easily demonstrated for this particular API, it may be present and less obvious elsewhere, including a serious API. The only way to know for sure is to inspect the code.
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Yeah, in a monopoly situation I see where you're coming from, but Apple has very healthy competition from Android. It's not currently in Apple's interest to hobble 3rd party apps; quite the opposite.
It's a local monopoly. An iOS user won't just switch to Android. Not overnight, at least.
Does Honda have a "local monopoly" on sedans because Civic drivers don't usually switch to a Kia Forte overnight?
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Those rules apply in a monopoly - when a business is not a monopoly it has considerably more freedom.
Apple has a monopoly on operating systems which work on apple hardware.
Let's contrast with Android's take on a private API: private Content Providers. > The problem is, there are more Content Providers in the system than are documented in that package, and while you can use them, you probably shouldn’t. They’re there because some of the Google-provided apps use them internally to access their own data resources. Because Android is an open-source project, it’s easy enough to find them ju…
Why is it whenever there is a criticism of Apple, we always have to turn it into an Apple vs Windows, or Apple vs Android type competition? Just because One party is behaving like a twat, doesn't mean there is justification for the other to do the same.
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But from a legal perspective [IANAL, but I'm pretty confident on this one], they can engineer the system to give them an advantage as long as they don't have an monopoly. When a company is a monopoly, new rules do apply.
Anti competitive practices are illegal, not monopolies.
A much narrower range of anti-competitive practices are illegal when you are not a monopoly.
When you put yourself in the shoes of the people on the product teams building the apps and maintaining the APIs, it's easy to see this for what it's much more likely to be: a hack that was implemented so that someone could leave the office at a reasonable hour.
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How would you prevent them from finding out?
https://speakerdeck.com/steipete/taking-advantage-of-the-run... - see 2nd line Peter Steinberger ( https://twitter.com/steipete ) shipped this in his PSPDFKit, which is used for Box/Dropbox/Evernote.