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Comment by dontblink | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why the disgruntled companies don't simply band together and remove their apps from Apple until Apple complies? Apple is as reliant on their third party apps for their ecosystems as much as the inverse.

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> Apple is as reliant on their third party apps for their ecosystems as much as the inverse.

I would take the other side of this bet. Barrier to entry for software to make a new chat app, social network, streaming app, crypto app, etc is much lower than barrier to entry to make hardware.

Another company willing to play by Apple’s rules will swoop in in relatively little time, while an alternative to iPhone/Apple Watch/AirPods/iPads/M processor computers will not.

Someone will just make a Roblox or Fortnite competitor and everyone will switch to it overnight? I doubt it

> relatively little time

Meaning alternative Roblox or Fortnite is coming much sooner than alternative devices equivalent to Apple’s hardware products.

Sure, why not? If the top ten games from my Steam library disappeared off the face of the earth I'd still have plenty of other games to play. Games rise and fall all the time; 10 years ago you could have written that about Minecraft and 15 years ago about Runescape. There are certainly still audiences for those games but they are smaller than before.

Say you have a game that you and all your friends play which you've purchased things for and logged thousands of hours on. You wouldn't be upset if it dumped from the App Store simply because Tim Cook woke up and chose violence?

I would certainly be sad. And then I'd start playing something else. It happens all the time in video games. People paid money for Club Penguin memberships and logged untold amounts of time there, too!

If the reason you couldn't play Club Penguin is Dell wanted 30% of the action, you probably aren't buying a Dell next time around.

Dell does not have ecosystem lock-in the way that Apple does. The question is not whether you will care or be sad that Apple blocked your game, but whether you will care enough or be sad enough to ditch Apple going forward.

Apple killed the 3.5mm headphone jack, it was and remains a really frustrating inconvenience, and yet here I am, still using a bunch of Apple products.

It's not a bad idea but there's no "simply" about it: organizing is hard. And if you're one of the disgruntled companies, you have to balance the chances a campaign like this succeeds against the odds that Apple retaliates against the first companies to sign on.

Doing this would piss off the entire Apple user base of those companies, with no certain gain. Those companies would lose lots of customers as collateral damage in a war that they could potentially lose. Sounds like a bad strategy to me.

Meh, Apple would be the one pulling the plug.

You could look at the Epic trial for hints.

- Epic ended up mostly in the same situation against Apple and Google. So you’re basically advocating for leaving the whole mobile market in protest. Few game producers can survive that.

- Apple’s core revenue source is games, and there will always be scummier games pouring money into the platform (think gambling. They’ll never join your union, they can thrive under any condition). That makes boycotts way less effective.

Epic is appealing right now and there was a hearing last month. DoJ even showed up to say they think the case was mishandled.

Because the most important apps to users right now are advertising-driven.

And the App Store has been around for nearly a decade now and we already know that users care far more about Apple than they do any one particular app.

People have already invested $1000 into their phones. It will take a long time to get them to switch (probably years tbh) and apple thinks they can wait longer than app developers.

Many of the apps in the Apple App Store—including Coinbase—also offer a web interface which would work fine in Safari. People would not even have to switch phones.

There is a reason these companies make apps, they increase engagement and make it easier to track users. I don't big tech is ready to give up apps on iPhones.

Me either, which is the point: companies complain about the App Store cut, but they are obviously getting value for it because they don’t pull their apps.

This is an interesting question. It reminds me of the contract disputes that content producers sometimes have with cable companies that might result in one or more channels suddenly becoming unavailable for cable customers. Content producers need distribution (or at least did, back in the day) but the cable companies needed them as well and I would imagine must have taken the brunt of customer outrage when a channel became unavailable.

Usually it has something to do with "not going bankrupt". Apple's sheeps spend more than on other platforms too.

Where are they going to go? Google has the exact same fees (but gets none of the outcry for some reason)

Apple probably has a loaded PR statement ready for a situation like this. Coinbase? The public perception of crypto is already a joke at this point on its own. Facebook? Something about “privacy”. And so on.

And do what? When in an oligopoly, there aren't many places to go to.

Investors would fire the board for doing that.

Apple us so flush with cash I doubt they care.

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