Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

> "And they are in a duopoly with Google with absolutly zero competition." "The history of the mobile OS market is beside the point"

It's not besides the point, it's important whether there's no competition because Apple crushed them unfairly in an anti-trust kind of way, or because all other competitors are completely and utterly incompetent. That there is a competing OS with many manufacturers customising and selling it and they collectively have the dominant market share by ~2x over Apple says that Apple is not a monopoly. "Duopoly with no competition, except the dozens of companies which outsell them by 2:1" is nonsensical.

> "if you don't like Android and iOS, well, you're screwed" "Yes exactly, smash both iOS and Android into multiple independent companies"

But I do like iOS. And I don't want you smashing iOS because you don't like it. Part of why it's good is because it's made by one integrated company. You already have Android from multiple independent companies - you can have it without Google services, where it's basically functionless, you can have it with Samsung UX or you can try Huaweii's build. Are you saying they're all bad (yes), that they all can't compete to make things better, but if the same happens to iOS that will somehow make it good? Of course it won't, it will make it just as bad in the same ways for the same reasons.

What's wrong with the Pinephone or Librem5 or all the other non-Apple non-Google phones? Why are you "screwed"? They can't compete because making a cutting edge device is hard and expensive.

> "because of Epic Game's threat... of an antitrust lawsuit, you can't even make this stuff up."

I'll check what Wikipedia has on that... "When Epic first released its Android client, it offered it as a sideloaded package rather than as a Google Play store app, as they did not want Google to take any revenue from the microtransactions in the game.[6] However, this resulted in a number of security concerns and numerous unscrupulous clones attempting to pass themselves off as the real Fortnite game in the Google Play store"

Yes, this sounds exactly what I expect, not techno-freedom-utopia but unregulated scamland, and why I'm objecting so hard in this thread. Followed by "Sweeney said that they undertook the actions as "we're fighting for the freedom of people who bought smartphones to install apps from sources of their choosing, the freedom for creators of apps to distribute them as they choose, and the freedom of both groups to do business directly."

That sounds awesome, imagine the freedom to install apps from sources of your choosing, like sideloading ... hang on "and by April 2020, Epic discontinued the sideloaded version and placed the game on the Google Play store". Oh I guess he didn't really believe his own story at all, and wanted to benefit from Google's better reptuation and filtering on the Play store, while arguing that it shouldn't exist?

"-There's an app for that."

That in my opinion is Apple advertising the iPhone as a do anything software device, a personal computer. Considering the only thing holding back the iPhone from doing everything like running GCC, Blender, etc. is a locked bootloader keeping people from easily hacking Linux or Android on there doesn't IMO make it not a personal computer. Whether you are happy with the walled garden approach or not doesn't make it not a personal computer either. But it's frankly ridiculous IMO to state that an iPhone is not a personal computer because Apple's ad copy doesn't say so and not on what it does.

> Apple have 27% of the mobile OS market.

iOS has 60% of the market in the US[1].

[1] https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share

> "There's network effects on mobile platforms, you could not make a new one even if you had 500 billion you could spend on it. The existing actors just prevent you to create a new one."

First it's network effects, then it's the existing actors preventing you. Make your mind up.

> "I don't like monopolies, I couldn't care less about the iOS interface."

Then use a Pinephone. That nobody else you know uses it, and nobody develops for it isn't Apple's fault. Apple's 30% appstore cut isn't bringing people from Pinephone to iOS, if anything it should be pushing the other way. I know they have negligible market size - the point is Apple iOS has big market size by being good and your plan to respond to this is to make it bad from sour grapes.

> "You're missing the point completely, in a market with competition, you are supposed to act and react according to the competition, the only change Apple ever did was because of a real threat of antitrust lawsuit... That's basically admission."

Fortnite was not competing with Apple though? Epic gave people a way to buy Fortnite on Steam, and then a way to install Fortnite free on Android, and people didn't want that. So Epic came after Apple and blamed them, irrelevantly, and the judge was leaning to Apple's side.

> "No, that just tells you that even the most popular game in the world could not make it outside the play store."

That just tells you that app stores are doing something people really really really want.

> "That tells you that Google's claim that "you can sideload anyways" are just complete BS"

Except you can sideload anyways, as evidenced by the fact that you can. What it tells you is that /people don't want to/.

Imagine if it was a terrible platform, and there was a bigger, cheaper, more sideloadable competitor you could easily use instead. Why would you spend so much time trying to get the courts to force Apple to let you into the ecosystem without following their rules? Why wouldn't you simply use the platform that already does all the things you say you want?