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Comment by bluesign | Hacker News Reader

It is long shot, in my opinion PR stunt.

Cited law 'déséquilibre significatif entre les droits et obligations des parties' means 'significant imbalance between the rights and obligations of the parties'

I dont even think it is related (it is not even translated in the post)

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Definitely a PR stunt, but even so, being sued because you are so behind on standards that it's hurting other businesses certainly puts the spotlight on you.

"So behind on standards".

Remind me which browser engine has 100% es6 support?

Now remind me which half-baked web api exposes local network information to the JavaScript environment.

Oh right. It's HN so apple is the work of the devil and Google is basically Jesus returned.

The problem isn't so much about how apple is so behind on standards.

The problem is that they make it impossible for alternative browsers providing more up-to-date standards to exist on their platform, effectively locking away that userbase.

It's more that Apple is being very selective about which features to not include. Full screen support? Why would you not have that implemented yet in iOS? Notifications... all of these things lead to the conclusion that this isn't about security, it's about protecting the platform.

> which browser engine has 100% es6 support?

They were talking about HTML5 standards, not JavaScript standards. Standards like fullscreen support and notifications.

> It's HN so apple is the work of the devil and Google is basically Jesus returned

No one here has made such hyperbole except you.

I think winning in civil court is less likely than triggering a review and fines by the EU. If I were in Apple's shoes, I would fix this now that Microsoft wont distract anyone from their behavior. Any one of these butterflies could land on the wrong desk.

The Law that is being used actually gives power to the French Minister of Economy to cancel the provisions that bring 'déséquilibre significatif entre les droits et obligations des parties'. It can be very fast. It has already been used.

It certainly appears to be an abuse of one's monopolistic position.

Edit: That is not allowing an alternate browser to be the default.

Certainly? How so?

I'm also very curious about the monopoly. iOS has an estimated 13% market share.

Would a duopoly be more accurate for you?

Duopolies aren’t problematic in the eyes of the law.

On that note, neither are monopolies. The problem comes when a monopoly is leveraged to stop other companies from competing.

It might be 13%, but it's a rather loyal user base.

Being whimsical about what would or would not appear on the App Store is certainly abusive.

19.3% market share in France according to this [0]. Not what would normally pass as a monopoly.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274123/market-share-held...

Apple is the single biggest manufacturer with a 41% share of the US market.

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Re...

Do you believe this makes them a monopoly?

40% is a threshold for "abuse of dominant position" enforcement actions in the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Yeah but Safari has pretty much 100% market share among iOS users.

As a web developer, Safari is a huge pain for me. Most of the time I can develop on Firefox and stick to the standards and most of the modern and/or commonly used browsers are fine. But Safari will have issues, and since I don't own any Apple devices and can't run Safari on the devices I've got, it's difficult to figure out which standard Safari isn't paying attention to and develop a workaround.

When you develop in X you usually have problems with not X. Even when Safari and Chrome were working together on WebKit there were still differences.

It really depends how you define the market. If we look countrywide [0] France has ~20% iOS, here in the UK we have ~40%.

But the product my company is selling (in the UK) is currently faced with a OS distribution of ~80% iOS and ~20% Android (some small number of web only clients). Why? We hypothesise that our customers have greater cashflow than the average Brit and as such the iPhone is much more popular choice.

It is also worth noting that this dominance has caused us to drop at least one feature from our product because the iOS devices seemingly have no way of reliably running a process in the background.

[0] http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-ios-v-android-market-sha...

By your logic I could release an iOS only app and then claim iOS has a 100% monopoly because no one uses my app on android.

As for the background processes: that's by design. Only specific types of apps that have legitimate broad-appeal use cases for background processes (eg voip apps) are allowed.

There is a reason Apple products have high customer satisfaction survey results: a product is not just whatever shit you can throw together.

No you have completely misunderstood 'my logic'.

I was illustrating how product share depends on the market definition. I did not give a definition for a monopoly. This illustration could showed both that the parent comments' statistic is irrelevant/incorrect and that the market share is likely to vary significantly across a geographical population.

As for the background processes. I know that is by design. Believe it or not we are allowed by Apple to run our background process in a similar vein to most other Apps. Unfortunately the background process mechanism is not reliable enough for us. Hence why I said 'reliable'. Apple have no intention of improving this situation as we are not a large enough revenue stream.

I wonder what it would take for Android and IOS to be treated as distinct markets so that we can make progress on the plethora of anti-consumer and anti-competitive issues. For a market as large, valuable and consequential as "mobile platform", only ever looking at percentage seems too simplistic.

Android is not a like for like replacement. A customer is not "free" to change platform because there are large financial penalties if they have invested in an ecosystem due to deliberate decisions to create lock-in - they lose all the media, software and peripherals they have purchased.

Yes, that's exactly what is going on. Apple has market power from the lock-in they've established. Apple is abusing their market power to force customers on their platform to use their browser engine (and no others). Whether or not Apple has a monopoly is beside the point. This is anti-competitive behavior and if it is having a significant impact, it should be scrutinized and regulated.

In the US, all of the anti-competition laws more or less get described as monopoly law or anti-trust law. But distributor and partner programs have to be careful about laws in this category that have more to do with cartels and avoiding a situation where independent companies are agreeing not to compete. Those laws are more carefully enforced on monopolies but often hit individual manufacturers, etc.

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