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

When the iPhone App Store first launched, Steve Jobs claimed[0] the 30% was to cover the cost of certifying software as functional, well-designed, and nonmalicious. Part of it was an ego thing too: he didn't want people fucking up apps and making his pet project look bad, so early App Review focused on a lot of UI polish things in order to make people think iPhone software was just inherently better than Android.

Even a few years in there's already evidence that Apple was entirely aware of how much of a cash cow owning the distribution market for your apps is. There's an internal letter asking about reducing the percentage because someone was worried about the Chrome Web Store (?) eating their lunch. Today, App Review is far too inadequate for the level of software submissions Apple gets, and they regularly let garbage onto the store that's specifically supposed to be curated.

I occasionally hear people complain about how Tim Cook "ruined the company" and that Jobs would never do the kind of control freak shit that he literally pioneered and is literally the selling proposition of the Mac all the way back in 1984. The only thing Tim Cook did was scale the business from "luxury compute" to it's inevitable conclusion as a monopolistic nightmare. The way that the App Store business game is played is specifically that you don't keep spending all your money on better app review. Once you have users and developers mutually hooked on one another, you siphon money out of them for your other projects (or your shareholders).

At one point, you were paying a premium for a better App Store, but not anymore. The business relationship just doesn't work out that way long-term.

[0] I personally think this belief was genuine at first.

What rubs me the wrong way about the Apple monopoly case(s?) is they sound to me like “we (the people) don’t want to actually solve the problem by through the totally-viable free market approach; we instead feel that we are owed some say in how this company chooses to develop its products; please strongarm them through legal means that don’t really apply, to make that a reality”.

People who are interested in Apple’s “walled garden” can buy iPhones. People who aren’t, can choose not to. Nobody is making people buy iPhones. Nobody is making people buy Androids either. Any company which thinks there is a sufficient market to be had in providing an alternative platform that does not use a walled garden approach can develop the hardware and software which would allow their customers a more open platform. There is absolutely nothing stopping this from happening today. The failure of companies and individuals to do so proves to me that nobody cares enough about this to take real action.

Contrast this with real trusts of days past like Standard Oil. If someone developed a competing company, they could undercut competitors by selling oil at a loss long enough to drive anyone else out of business. What would the parallel be in this universe? If someone developed a new smartphone, there is nothing in Apple’s walled garden approach that would prohibit that platform from taking off.

IMO when consumers buy products, they are entitled to the product they knowingly bought, not the product that they want.

I like my iPhone, and want to be able to use Kagi as my search engine. Why can't I?