Leaving aside the obvious problems with this, it also is just a shitty user experience. A search for “podcast” should not return a compass app. For a company that is supposed to be at the pinnacle of user experience and usability, the App Store buitin search is pretty unusable.
How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
111–120 of 215 posts
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, Apple products are (or were) frequently marketed towards the tech illiterate ("it just works") and so it's possible grandma accidentally deleted the calendar, tried to re-download via the App Store, downloaded the wrong one, etc.
Gmail on iOS will open Google Chrome if you have it installed. I don't know how they do it, but they definitely are doing it.
I believe the app itself (Gmail) is requesting to use Chrome.
So each individual app would need to request Chrome, something I'm sure Google's apps can do, but [insert random app here] won't.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many times this old wives tale will have to be repeated till people understand what went on then, and how it's nothing like it's now? Microsoft then had a monopoly on desktop OSes at the time, at 95+ (close to 97%, in fact). Apple has a paltry sub-50% share of mobile OSes. The "But they have 100% share on their own products" is not an argument, as far as the law is concerned, as monopolies are not judged this way…
Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices. An iApp only runs on iOS, so it's irrelevant that Apple is a minority of the mobile market because that's not the market being analyzed for the antitrust issues.
This logic makes no sense. Using your reasoning Nintendo is a monopoly because only Nintendo devices will run Nintendo games.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a hard time believing it was. iTunes search is wicked bad and has been since day 1. After they started allowing tags for apps it got worse, which is an impressive achievement.
Play Store search is also (still) notoriously bad. Even if it is a 1:1 hit, it does not show that as first entry. And it is full with malware.
The advantage to using Google Play is that apps containing ads are clearly labelled as such. Apple won't tell you this in advance. (This was my biggest surprise, recently switching from Android after the CopperheadOS meltdown)
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, Apple products are (or were) frequently marketed towards the tech illiterate ("it just works") and so it's possible grandma accidentally deleted the calendar, tried to re-download via the App Store, downloaded the wrong one, etc.
Gmail on iOS will open Google Chrome if you have it installed. I don't know how they do it, but they definitely are doing it.
They simply use the Chrome app URL scheme instead of the generic URL. Similar to how you go to an app’s website and it redirects you to the app itself. There’s an app called Opener [1] that uses this and you can do similar with the Shortcuts app.
Other apps can take advantage of this too. Apps like Reddit and Outlook have similar settings to do the same. They even offer options for other browsers like Firefox. But, developers would need to add each browser option themselves, instead of relying on a defaults system from Apple.
1: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/opener-open-links-in-apps/id98...
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you opened the App Store on an iPhone in May 2018 and typed “podcast” in the search box, you would have seen something like this. "in May 2018" > I just tried to replicate this Unfortunately, you don't have a time machine.
So, we're happily crucifying Apple on a hill based on an unreproducable search done half a year ago? Sounds... less than ideal.
No. Just because something was done in the past doesn't mean it doesn't have repercussions to this day. For example, the search result issue might have helped Apple get it's products into the hands of more users who settled for their apps rather than using a competitors apps that would have been found instead.
If you are going to continue this discussion, please do so in good faith and don't continue to misrepresent what is being said.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never forget the IE war, when everybody complain about the preinstalled browser. And that time they called "monopolistic practices". At apple, they even don't know what these words mean... /s
> I never forget the IE war, when everybody complain about the preinstalled browser. And that time they called "monopolistic practices" That's because at that time Microsoft had a monopoly. > At apple, they even don't know what these words mean... /s That's because Apple never had a monopoly. Their market share was always on the low 10% (desktop), or the mid-40s (mobile).
So preinstalled software is ok, till your market share is below 50 percent?
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to explain from a mobile, but in a nutshell generally retail stores buy the goods they are selling, whether store brand or third party, so they can differentiate the products in store how they like. Suppliers can and do use leverage like withholding popular brands from stores that go too far in favoring the house brand. Apps however have no such leverage, and due to the way the store is set up, the retail d…
I'm not convinced that its so different, at least from a "we should be concerned about it" angle. Yes, retail stores have inventory that they, generally, have to purchase and hold before the sale. This is a natural limitation on the amount and variety of goods they can offer. By comparison, app stores don't have inventory. But they do have natural limitations. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fe…
. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fees the App Store charges, which is a translation of underlying fees that Apple pays to host and distribute applications, whether paid to credit card networks, engineers, cloud infrastructure providers, supporting services such as iCloud, etc. There is a per-unit cost to app store downloads; its just that most of it is paid on the purchase, download, and use of the application, not hosting.
This is false. Payment transactions cost under 1%, especially at Apple's scale. In the case of many of the competing apps like Netflix and Spotify, only a de minimis value is provided by iCloud hosting (i.e., the mandated iOS app) because the majority of the content is hosted by the third party on external (non-Apple) platforms. If we're using Apple's costs as justification for the 30% cut, they definitely aren't providing services worth 15-30% they're charging for the vast majority of App Store transactions.
Additionally, App Store search result rankings are absolutely a limited resource which very closely resembles aisle space in a retail store.
I don't know what sort of weird grocery aisles you shop in, but in the real world grocery aisles are two-sided, with multiple levels, and every product fronts the aisle so that customers can see all products at the same time (though some products are easier to see than others). This isn't even remotely the same as the ordered, multi-page list that the app store provides, in which many competing products can't even be seen until you take further action.
When thinking about this specific issue (which dates back over 16 months ago? and has been fixed? why are we talking about this?): I don't see a philosophical or legal problem with Apple doing this. I see a usability problem. Its just bad results that aren't delivering what customers expect or want.
It's the same issue that Microsoft had with bundling IE. They're abusing their market position in one market to interfere with another.
Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see it differently. Since Apple makes the hardware and the software I don't have a problem with them preinstalling their own products. However, when a user is clearly searching for alternatives on the app store, it matters how far down you have to scroll to find a 3rd party app. Spotify being the 23rd result for a "music" search is absurd.
> Spotify being the 23rd result for a "music" search is absurd I have hard time believing this was not intentional. Edit: on Android Spotify is at place 2-4. iTunes is nowhere to be seen but that could be explained with the horrible reviews it has received (some are even legit).
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Re: How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls
#120I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it seems pretty minor compared to the fact that: 1) Apple's apps come preinstalled on every iPhone. 2) Apple's apps have permission to do things that 3rd party apps cannot. If I search for "Web Browser" on the App Store... well, technically I'll get results from third parties, but every single one is just a UI skin around Apple's own browser. That strikes me as a much larger p…
I see it differently. Since Apple makes the hardware and the software I don't have a problem with them preinstalling their own products. However, when a user is clearly searching for alternatives on the app store, it matters how far down you have to scroll to find a 3rd party app. Spotify being the 23rd result for a "music" search is absurd.
For me, Spotify is the 4th app when searching for "music", but it's the first app that doesn't contain the word "music" as the first or second word in the name.
It goes: 1. Apple Music 2. Music 3. Music> 4. Spotify New music and podcasts