I fear App Review is getting too powerful (2015) [pdf]

Apple absolutely has done things to prevent alternatives to their platforms. Not only can you not make hardware that iOS and MacOS run on (and in rare cases where people have, Apple has sued them[1]).

Can you run something other than iOS on an iPhone? Less and less possible, as they lock the phone hardware (and bootloader) down more and more.

Can you run an alternative app store? Nope, totally not allowed. You seem to think that if enough capital was gathered, you could do so, but you can't. It's completely locked out by Apple, and any way you have to circumvent it is either blocked by EULA, contract, or digital and physical controls. Without legal intervention, this isn't happening no matter how much capital you have, because Apple has specifically closed off all other avenues.

So, is it possible to gather enough capital to compete? I'm not sure sure. You'd have to take a page from Apple's playbook and close everything down to control it, and that's far more expensive now than it was a decade ago, and somehow get enough developers and apps and users in a marketplace that doesn't have anything in it to start. And you have to close everything down to outsiders because otherwise Apple will just support whatever your standards are while not allowing you to interoperate with theirs (look at the history iMessage and XMPP, and why Google eventually had to copy Apple's tactic of a closed IM system).

I think it's important to note that this is, at it's essence, anti-competitive behavior. Apple leverages their control over their system to provide benefit to their users, but they do this in a way that denies competition at all but the highest level, even when working at the lowest level. Again, iMessage is a good example of this. You have to buy into the entire Apple platform, from hardware to OS to App Store and control to be able to send messages across that system, and only to other iPhone/MacOS users, because Apple refuses to develop or provide an API to utilize the system from any non Apple device, while at the same time automatically making SMS messages use the system for iPhone to iPhone communication, forcing their users to use it. Is it better than SMS? Yes. Does Apple give it extra capabilities that other systems can't compete with? Also yes. How is this different than Internet Explorer on Windows back in the day?

The bottom line is that Apple's behavior is anti-competitive (in the true sense of the word, whether or not it meets with the antitrust definition in all cases). They use their control of different levels of the platform to stifle competition on other levels. No piece of their platform can be exchanged for another, so there's absolutely no competition at individual levels, only on the platform as a whole.

I want to be clear here, currently it's not Apple vs Android, it's Apple vs everyone and everything else. There's plenty of Android hardware I can take and load AOSP, or LineageOS, or even a Linux based OS. I can take any of those OS's and run them on lots of different hardware (the limiting factor is what people have bothered to port, not what has been restricted). Calling for enough capital to support another walled garden that can compete on the platform level with Apple in the same manner is not only not useful, it's actively harmful to competition overall as they are only able to compete at the platform level.

I want to make one last note. Have you considered that the reason Apple provides a great product and service isn't because they've leveraged their profit from anti-competitive behaviors to their own benefit, to make it even harder to compete with them? What if instead of a couple hundred billion in cash reserves held at Apple, it was partially spread around to various competing companies in the different segments the platform covers over the last decade? A valid third contender maybe? I don't know, but I have a hard time believing that Apple's been the most efficient steward of all that capital, nor that preventing competition leads to a better situation in the end.

1: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534792/apple-sues-mac...

Actually, since they also provide the hardware, in the truest sense of the word, it is. They are preventing alternative hardware for their software (they've sued over this), and preventing alternative software on their hardware. No competition is allowed in these areas, to compete you have to replace both.

If you then consider that they lock down what apps can run on their software, that extends the link to software able to run on the device. That means to actually compete on an App level with an Apple app on iOS, you need to not just write a better app, but provide an OS of comparable quality and hardware of comparable quality means they have artificially prevented competition at those levels, since there's no reason that they have to be linked. It provides some small benefits, but there's a large difference between not supporting their OS on other hardware and actively preventing it from running on it, and not providing any softawre except their own for their hardware, and locking it down so no other software will boot. That difference is why those actions are anti-competitive.

> I do not believe that you can create such an ecosystem by forcing Apple to open certain arbitrarily selected parts of their system.

And yet the only reason we don't have that competition is because Apple has closed certain non-arbitrary selected parts of their system/platform. I'm not sure why preventing them from closing those to competition wouldn't help spur more competition in them.

> If anything, I think this would prevent the emergence of a new model indefinitely.

I'm not even sure "model" means in this context. What do you suspect preventing arbitrary removal of competition, which is what Apple does, would somehow prevent a new model?

> $200B seems like a reasonable hedge against needing to rebuild their supply chains without Chinese cooperation.

Having a few full years worth of profit stacked away so they can replicate their entire manufacturing infrastructure needs of a nation that specializes in manufacturing is ridiculous. The comparison to Japanese Zaibatsu was apt before, but you're actually saying it's a good idea if some conditions are met here. Those are known to have outsize negative effects on economies.

> If your argument is that Apple should be funding its competitors

No, my argument is that they have too much control over their platform, with allows them to be anti-competitive. This makes them more money, but at the expense of their users (who do not benefit from that competition), and most likely some ceompetitors, unless you believe Apple would still provide a much better solution, in which case it's just he users that win.

> The part we agree on is that someone should be funding serious competition against Apple.

The fact that you think VC is the answer is part of the problem. Right now VC is the answer, because it's almost impossible for anyone to compete without huge amounts of money, but that's because of Apple's arbitrary barriers to compete.