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Comment by pgm8705 | Hacker News Reader

I totally get the "their store, their rules" take, but it doesn't hold up in this case. Unlike most retail, there is no other store to go to. Sure, I could buy an Android phone, but the policy isn't much different there. The fact of the matter is that Apple & Google own the mobile ecosystem.

It is one thing to claim that the your marketplace is doing developers a service by distributing and putting their apps in front of their massive audience. Fine - collect 30% for downloads/subscriptions that come that way. Unfortunately, there is effectively no other way to consume software on these devices. Keep your 30% of downloads/subscriptions that originate from your marketplace, but let me opt-out of your marketplace and still get my product to my customers without your help.

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It is possible to use other app stores with Android. Samsung, Amazon etc have their own app stores which can run side by side with Google's.

There are linux phones, and web browsers

The typical consumer is not going to use linux.

If we don't facilitate them, they'll never use alternative platforms.

This reply (a version of "if you don't like it, write your own") is the most heinous and disingenuous reply out of the space of possible replies. The sum of time and work required to do that is completely unrealistic: Apple is not creating the ecosystem but rather it is the developers creating the ecosystem for Apple, while Apple is just playing arbitrary gatekeeper and tax-collector as the entity with the monopoly on making the rules. The "value" Apple is adding is essentially negligible if you consider in your calculus that Apple is actively stamping out competition to its platform and further fortifying its monopoly and doing little else. Developers do not choose to stay on the Apple platform anymore than essentially any American can choose from whom they buy their water or electric utility service (privatized utility monopolies are a whole other discussion, but apropos because Apple and Google, through their own extreme anti-competitive actions and policies, have forced people to use their platforms, effectively creating something that walks and quacks just like a public utility monopoly). You could conceivably haul the water yourself from the nearest river, or whatever (I will mention solar panels because where I live, in fact you cannot install solar panels without one of the limited number of permits from the local electric monopoly -- sound familiar?). Developers can choose which of the two monopolies will write the rules for their app -- rules which are almost exclusively about taking a cut and killing competition. But this is not a choice, and saying it's a choice is a kind of absurd baiting tactic. It has been clear for some time that Apple and Google are operating monopolies and staying the ire of the Justice Department through some sort of regulatory capture. I'm sure there are late-90s Microsoft employees that can't believe what they're seeing.

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