Something odd about this argument is the fact that 30% is pretty much an industry standard. Apple isn't jacking up the price.
The issue is that Apple is not allowing cheaper app stores even in theory. Android does.
Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
231–240 of 369 posts
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#232> But Kavanaugh went further. He said Apple could also be sued by app developers, most of whom are forced to fork over a big percentage of their potential revenue, "on a monopsony theory." Is it possible for users to easily install alternative app-stores? Wouldn't that solve the problem?
> Is it possible for users to easily install alternative app-stores?
No, not on iOS
> Wouldn't that solve the problem?
Yes, because Apple will cease to be a monopsony for iOS apps. That is, if SCOTUS rules that Apple does have a monopsony. Kavanaugh only suggested they might have.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
"App stores" were run by telcos back then. Usually a storefront selling J2ME apps via WAP and charging money to your phone bill. To be fair the most popular content was ringtones (of the MIDI type). I think the BREW ecosystem had some solution to set up a store of this kind that they used to supply to carriers?
I have to give credit to Apple for taking power away from the telcos. They wanted to nickel and dime you for every app and feature. Getting even a dumb feature phone out the door required months of certification and the OS might get an update once in the device lifetime if at all. Sometimes it takes an 800 lb gorilla (with fresh iPod $$$$$) to take on the other 800 lb gorillas, even if it mostly meant we spent the fi…
>OS might get an update once in the device lifetime if at all.
And some how the lifetime of those phones were much longer than the iPhones, until they had to stop forcing updates which degraded performance.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#234If you don't know what monoposony is, ask a farmer.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#235Amusingly, there are two sets of people arguing about why Apple is bad, and each have their own argument: 1. Android sells more, and offers more variety of mobile and wearable devices than Apple. And here’s the data to prove it. 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c. Which one is is? Apple is like T…
You can’t have a mobile presence without dealing with Apple.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#236Something odd about this argument is the fact that 30% is pretty much an industry standard. Apple isn't jacking up the price.
I thought Apple was the originator of the 30% cut for app stores, and everybody else followed suit?
I think Valve takes a 30% cut on Steam and Steam predates the iOS App Store.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#237so: - monopoly: the only seller - monopsony: the only buyer So app store customers can only buy from apple. And the app developers can only sell to apple.
PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, sega, ... are the same: You can only sell for those devices with manufacturer licensing (that includes profit sharing and mandatory annoyances like “achievements”), and consumers can only buy games licensed by those manufacturers. The only difference is that PC developers haven’t experienced that before. It seems like this would have been established in the 80s/90s, so I’m surprised we’re…
One of the major difference here is that game platforms have a relatively less power than Apple/Google in their current business practice. It's usually game platforms that tries to attract game developers/publishers into their platform (sometime with strong incentives and even subsidiaries) to win the market and publishers are the decision maker; the same thing doesn't usually happen in the app store case. Game devs don't have much incentives to sue platforms as long as there's competition between consoles. Note that things were different in the NES/SNES era and there actually was a number of antitrust cases for Nintendo.
But honestly, I feel that competition within a single game consoles should be allowed. This doesn't have to take a form of side-loading (which obviously has a significant downside of piracy which hurts game devs/publishers even more than monopoly/monopsony) though.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a big city/country with only 2 stores, half of the population uses store A and half store B. Store A and B are happy with the profits and are not competing on the margins, both will take 30% of your products, both will ban your product if they judge they don't like it, maybe store A will block you if you compete with them and store B will block you because some algorithm. So basically you have 2 big pile of s…
I hope you’re not implying the old wives tale about Apple nit allowing apps that compete with it on the store. If so, there are plenty of existence proofs that that isn’t true.
I mean browsers, then there was an app that did some phone activity tracking and all was fine until iOS had it's own app and for some reason the old app was kicked out from the store. Then there are the cases where Apple apps have special access to APIs but a popular application like Spotify was denied access. Can you link to the case you are mentioning?
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
What applications in the Apple store are able to function as the default SMS app or the default web browser engine? On Android, I can use Signal for SMS and Firefox for browser engine. On my spouse's iPhone, the iOS applications with the same names are severely restricted in their functionality. Blocking ads, scripts, and tracking is significantly more difficult. If you believe these are core OS functions, and theref…
Are they allowed to be default no. Are they allowed on the App Store - yes.
Also links in different application will open in what Apple wants not in what browser/app you would like.
Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
or make their OS available for virtualization. Remember this was 2012 so our entire build process was done via cloud vms and Mac's requirements were a nasty welt on an otherwise exceptionally smooth process because there were no options available at the time.
It is available for virtualization - on Mac hardware.
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