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Comment by hjk05 | Hacker News Reader

Same story with phones. You are free to buy from other suppliers. But you can’t walk into a Walmart and buy milk from whole foods on their shelf’s, even if you feel that would be great for you personally because Walmart is closer but you prefer Whole Foods.

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And I am free to use Google Music, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer and even Tidal. Nobody is forcing me to use Spotify.

But, if I have an iPhone, the only application store I can use is controlled by Apple.

In other words: if I am an artist and I want to offer my music via streaming I have plenty of options. If one of them does have a deal that I find unfair, I can choose others.

If I am a developer and I want to offer my app to iPhone users, I have only one option. And if I am banned from this store for any policy infringement (which sometimes is ridiculous and totally arbitrary) I have no other option to offer my app to iPhone users.

I think it's somewhat frequent to have app submissions denied, but I haven't heard of Apple banning future submissions in the same way that I hear of Google permabanning developers.

I agree with Android it's slightly different because side loading is at least possible, but I doubt many people are going to find your widget if it's not on the play store.

I as a customer don't want your app from outside the App Store, from where I know I can get apps that protect my privacy and information.

True, and if I’m a dairy farm that wants to sell my products to Walmart’s customers there’s only one distributor of shelf space to go to. You can’t cut through an arbitrary point in the business and just demand they change their model. The iPhone might not even be a viable platform today if they had been forced to carry malware from the start because they had “a monopoly on their own product”

Users can’t reasonably be expected to switch smartphone hardware just because of an app. The smartphone hardware market has its own constraints (people generally own only one at a time, they upgrade it every couple of years at a cost of several hundred dollars, etc). Apple may have legitimately earned its position in that hardware market by making products people want, but it’s not legitimate for them to use that dominance to control wholesalers’ access to consumers in a separate marketplace: music streaming. In that marketplace, the relative success of Apple Music vs Spotify should be based on consumer preferences for those services, not on which company also happens to dominate a separate marketplace. See also: Microsoft using its OS market dominance to control the web browser market.

No, that is not the same story. Physical stores can be swapped out on a whim. Phones are something you change at most every couple of years (and hopefully last even longer, if you give a damn about the environment).

Actually, the "Walmart is a choice" claim also only holds up if there actually are multiple stores nearby, because who is going to drive fifty miles to the next store? Food deserts are a thing.

This is a false idea of "choice" and it is just yet another way producers and sellers try to shift responsibility to the end consumer who is largely powerless in most cases.

OK, but there are no iPhone deserts where only iPhones work and Androids get no signal. I don't see any false choice here. There are plenty of other phones on plenty of networks, with plenty of Apps. If there are more or better Apps on the iPhone, arguably that's at least in part because of their careful policies on curation of the platform rather than despite them.

To go to one grocery instead of another in suburban America means driving a few more minutes with a cost of some time, a bit of gas, and a minute amount of wear and tear on a car. To change app stores, it requires spending several hundred dollars on replacement hardware, not including having to repurchase applications, accessories, etc.

That applies as much to Android, or any other phone, as it does to Apple though. It’s just the nature of the market, not some perfidious Apple plot. There’s just nothing substantive here.

> That applies as much to Android, or any other phone, as it does to Apple though.

On Android you can side-load APKs, have alternative app stores like F-Droid and even install custom operating systems. So no, that is again not comparable.

> It’s (…) not some perfidious Apple plot

Sure

> just the nature of the market

Dammit, NO. The market is a human-made artificial construct, not some natural freaking law like gravity that is inevitable and unavoidable. And given that it is human-made we can change it, and make choices on what we demand from it.

This is more like I'm not allowed to keep whole foods milk in my sears refrigerator- I'm only allowed to shop at Walmart stores.

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