Epic vs. Google: Google Loses
theverge.com
theverge.com
And these are already trillion dollar companies. Why do some people support them to grow even more bigger and more powerful? It's a nightmare to see power getting accumulated into few hands. It's high time they are regulated. Don't treat them with kid gloves. They are not your typical mom & pop stores.
You want to use an app store, fine, use an app store and pay some commission on what you buy there, it's not a problem, reaching into any purchase done after the initial download is.
> except Apple won't let you, but that's a different story
You're saying you can comment, but no one will give you access to the keyboard?
I'd too prefer Apple to be forced by court to open their devices for everything, not holding my breath.
In all seriousness, you already have to trust the OS vendor not to be trying to do bad things. Having them oversee software distribution at least does not increase the number of organizations you need to trust. If you have someone else do it, you will be opening the door to black hats that will be clamoring to take that role. Not relying on the OS vendor to do that is how we have scams where the victims installed the malware that harmed them. :/
> FWIW you don't really need an app store, you could download APKs off vendors/publishers.
Very evidently I do.
It seems to me there is very little stopping there being a whole pile of competing Android app stores out there. Technically there's nothing stopping it in fact, as the existence of FDroid illustrates. It's purely a matter of convenience - which is the same thing that drives Chrome's dominance on Android despite there being better browsers available for free. The play store app is pre-installed and is almost a one stop stop for all the apps you could possibly want, so who is going to bother loading another app store?
Turns out that edge in convenience is enough to create an effective monopoly in app stores, for most people anyway.
Even if there was a popular alternative, there will simply be apps only on one store out of convenience. Just look at the PC market.
And most of the time PC leads to multiple releases as platforms tend to make it as easy as possible to release across multiple.
Sure the majority of games are on one but a significant fraction of the popular ones are on multiple.
Oh, wait a minute …
Sometimes choice equates to complexity, if it doesn't work for you, don't use the product. Apple is very well known (and probably very successful) for limiting choice, in product lines and features.
IMO Android devices are already open enough - there are alternative app stores and you can sideload apps. Banks not distributing on these channels is not Google's responsibility.
But that's not a requirement for something to be a monopoly.
I was going to say that it's something for them to decide, but then the conversation was going to be circular.
Nobody should have the right to not have a right.
Without that regulation it is a very different beast.
Having the government decide the platform cut would very much change the conversation.
Even for non-average people, gatekeepers like Gentoo's or Debian's package maintainer(s) do a great deal of good.
And given how much scammy shit there is on the two major AppStores, I would say that it is clear as day and night that Apple and Google utterly suck as "gatekeepers".
I lean WAY left and still agree the free market would have solved this ages ago.
I spent a few minutes looking over his shoulder.
A bit of gameplay followed by increasing amounts of gambling for power ups and constant reminders to buy power ups. This should be absolutely illegal.
Dark patterns upon dark patterns manipulating the kid to squeeze his parents for real money, by habituating gambling habits and normalizing a horrible experience.
Apple will never address these issues because these games make them truckloads of money.
Why is it different?
Having safer defaults is fine, but why is there no way for alternatives to exist? (30% of all revenue is why BTW)
All the boy’s friends play the game and similar games. It’s an uphill battle and an extraordinary pressure on the parents to control each game that gets played and micromanage to that extend - to the detriment of their relationship with the child, because fighting these intentionally instilled addictive patterns will create upset in the child and tension in the relationship. The game devs pay psychologists to create the addiction at scale which the parents just cannot compete with.
In reality parents have finite amounts of energy and a finite numbers of battles to fight. Eat your food, go to school, do your homework, keep your phone charged and call me when you need me to pick you up. That kind of thing.
Having week longs drama forbidding a game that everyone else plays is just not on the map.
It's more the nickle and diming people hate, not the actual gambling. And I don't know if we can or should regulate that.
But the games discourse online isn't exactly giving games like Fortnite any slack despite no longer using lootboxes for its monetization. Or on a fighter game (of which few ever used lootboxes) for offering dozens of skins.
That's the dangerous part on what to or not regulate. Do we want thr government regulating how many add-ons or cosmetics a game can sell?
Look at the PKI industry, they have a greater need for integrity but there's still a healthy market of certificate suppliers.
They'll open up the floodgates and average people will end up dealing with fake Epic apps. A decade from now maybe that same courtroom would better appreciate the value of a trusted gatekeeper.
But yea, really would like both mobile OS's to open up more. Apple is especially bad because they can effectively ban stuff of an entire OS if it doesn't follow store policies. no 18+ apps, no emulators, no file explorers (tho these two were loosened overtime), no alternate browsers unless it's a safari skin. Can't imagine Microsoft getting away with this on Windows at any time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...
https://www.benzinga.com/news/23/11/35888191/apple-google-wa...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-deal-default-se...
the sources go on and on, which makes sense, I guess. when two of the world's biggest and most powerful companies have interests that overlap (exclude any OS that isn't Android or iOS) collusion seems like a natural choice.
>Epic v. Google [...] hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.
Without finding the same thing in Apple, I doubt this will affect Apple's case much, but of course I should mention I'm not a lawyer; I'm perfectly happy to be schooled if someone more knowledgeable comes along!
If the result of this case is "you can have a monopoly as long as your device and ecosystem are 100% locked down", that's terrible!
You don't have to buy an iPhone, this isn't like a railroad or a telecom that owns all of the possible infrastructure. If you want a walled garden get an iPhone. If you want freedom with all that implies, go Android.
You can provide a walled garden. But that's not Apple does.
Instead, Apple is a mafia that shakes down all the vendors for the right to sell in their semi-open market square.
If Apple iOS were a walled garden, it would have contained only Apple applications.
Even using Apple, you can't do this, because you need a separate Android and iOS app already.
Big picture though, I don't think you really have a "right" or entitlement to just access everyone.
You're not entitled to use someone else's business, even if it's a good one. You can't just go and sell your product in the AT&T store, you need to agree to their terms. Even if you make a phone that only works on the AT&T network, you still need to agree to their terms.
You can't sell in Target or Walmart or Costco or even Amazon just because you want to. Oh and you may be quite disappointed to discover many of them take >30% cut too.
Apple thinks of the iOS App Store as another storefront, and you need their permission to put your product on their "shelves". The courts agree.
Prior to the 1980s, AT&T, as the dominant telephone service provider in the United States, had a policy that only allowed customers to use telephones that were leased from them. This policy was rooted in the belief that non-AT&T equipment could harm the telephone network. Does that sounds familiar?
Several legal cases (and the eventual breakup of AT&T) eventually opened up the AT&T network to third party phones and consumers rejoiced.
And yet you can literally pick up a phone, dial some numbers, and reach everyone else who has a phone number.
And yet you can literally pick up a [product engineered to a phone company’s specifications], dial some numbers [assigned by a phone company] and reach everyone else who [also agreed to the phone company’s TOS] [as long as you and them have paid a large monthly fee].
This isn’t freedom. Companies still decide how you can use their services.
The sneaky part of Apple's counterargument is that they try to apply your argument not to their own App Store, but to the entire OS. This is a land grab - the App Store is their service, but I own the phone, so the OS should respect my decision to circumvent Apple's curation if I so choose. If I'm not allowed to sell in Target or Walmart, I'm allowed to open my own store and people can circumvent Target to go to me directly. This is how it works for every other form of computer except phones and tablets.
But only because macs existed before they were able to get away with this. I would bet a huge amount of money that if macs were invented/created after the iphone, they'd be locked down exactly the same way. And many of the same people who love it on the phone would love it on the computer, even though now they would say that it's a general purpose computing device not an appliance like the phone is.
They can't shake down someone out of their reach.
They can identify them though ( green icon... )
I agree. However, consumers have the right to go to a different supermarket, without selling their house.
We can take these analogy absurdities wherever — the harsh reality is that nobody is stopping someone from building an open ecosystem phone. But there isn’t enough demand.
As a consumer, why should I care? As a company, unless I’m building my own walled garden for company phones, why should I care? What’s the market here?
I don't think there's too little demand, I think there's too much profit incentive in the other direction.
Only a tiny number of companies on earth have the resources to build a successful mobile platform. If you are lucky enough to be one of those companies, you're not going to leave money on the table.
The harsh reality is that manufacturing capacity and network effects actually prevents building an open ecosystem phone. You will never be able to purchase the best chips and displays.
I think we need to stop pretending that regulating competition is a bad thing. Competition is what makes capitalism work as an economic system. Without competition capitalism is inefficient and harmful. If we can inject more competition into the system as a whole, wherever possible, it's going to be good for consumers.
Consumers bought this house with their eyes wide open knowing that they can only access one supermarket.
There are billions of iphones out there. Unless you're working with data (which you should share) then your anecdotal experience from talking with other tech literate people is so ridiculously non-representative that it's hard to even visualize.
Might want to Google "Confirmation Bias"
Edit: I suspect I’m wrong, adding it probably causes their assumptions to be given more weight for no reason, as happened here. Interesting observation, that’s in line with the research that disclosing conflicting interests actually causes people to weight the compromised advice more highly than they otherwise would.
It's to the point where you can't look up local government apps here without getting some advertising garbage in the results first because Apple started selling app space.
Apple doesn't have multiple competing stores. It has ONE store.
And if you are a software vendor that makes mobile apps, you HAVE to support Apple or you will go out of business.
When I first started, I used to think of Apple as the best option available to me. Now I think about it as the least bad option. The cost of leaving involves so much time and money, that it’s not a realistic option.
DVDs come out. Now I have to rebuy all my VHS movies on another platform...
When someone comes to your store and says "I made the streets and regulate the power, water supply, sewer, and everything else in this place, cut me 30% of your revenue in taxes" that's the government.
And you'd do well to not confuse those so haphazardly. Apple didn't come to your app and with no cause blackmail you to get your money. They created an ecosystem that did not exist before, and they have to maintain it. Paying for it is completely rational.
That's exactly what Apple does. If you make a mobile app (for example, a presentation manager) you _have_ to support iOS, or you will go out of business.
As a developer, you simply don't have a choice. You have to either support iOS, or get out of mobile apps entirely.
What? That’s not true. There are plenty of Android-only developers.
Fortnight is the only example, and it's on its way to SCOTUS. Google apps, which one?
Beeper Mini replicates native iOS functionality - it's obvious why it can only exist as an Android-only app.
Fortnite is the product of a massive studio, whose decision of not publishing it on iOS was deliberate as part of their anti-monopoly lawsuits. They can easily afford to do it because Epic Games has other revenue sources, alongside with running Fortnite on pretty much every other platform imaginable.
Google doesn't really cash in on their more niche apps, publishing them on iOS is unlikely to change anything for them. However, not choosing to publish them gives Android - their own product - a tiny boost in appeal due to exclusive functionality.
But anyway, you said "As a developer..." not "As a major developer...".
By your logic there would be no towns, cities, countries, unions, companies, any kind of organization at all. Because any time you need to pay for something, you feel like it's the mafia.
- Is it the mafia when it comes time to pay time for rent. "I HAVE to pay rent or I'll be kicked out on the street!"
- Is it the mafia when it comes time to pay your bill at a restaurant. "I HAVE to pay my bill or I'll be hungry!"
No one owes you anything. You ask for money for your apps, don't you? Because why are you complaining otherwise? 40% of $0 is $0, isn't it? But you require money, despite maybe someone could be like "you're mafia unless I can play your game for free".
Things cost money. Grow up and start acting like an adult.
Are you a part of mafia? How else would you defend Apple that is bent on destruction?
If you want to charge money, Apple will collect it for you and take a cut. If you don't want that deal, you can still distribute your app for free, you just can't charge money for it in the app. You can still charge money for the service, but you have to do that on your own website and infrastructure (a la Netflix, etc.), not Apple's.
Basically, you can't make money. Duh. You can't even place a link for a third-party payment system (the case to allow that is on its way to SCOTUS).
Apple is a mafia.
Seems to me you're not noticing the Kremlin levels of cognitive dissonance in your statement here. With this severe lack of self-awareness, if you were in Apple's place you'd be way worse than they are right now.
> They want money from my app when I want money from their store!
Apple is a mafia because they want money that they do not earn. They didn't do anything that deserves 30% of gross to help me write my application, and they are not promoting it for free.
All they do is they provide a shitty autoupdate service.
> Seems to me you're not noticing the Kremlin levels of cognitive dissonance in your statement here.
Are you paid by Apple's Reich?
Worse, you can't make money and you have to pay the $100 developer fee every year. The developer fee is trivial if it's a business expensive, but quite expensive otherwise!
30% is way too high. 15% seems high as well without knowing the costs or benefits of the App Store.
Am I doing this right?
> Am I doing this right?
No.
Apple allows you to ship infinite amount of apps at no cost, if you don't in return ask the store for money.
What kind of a mafia works like that?
I think they actually have a monopsony since you can only sell to apple. If there were other app stores, you could sell to them instead.
"In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
(And they probably have a monopoly wrt iphone customers)
A reasonable fee with 0 competition would be fine. No fee, while hiking the prices of the devices would be fine.
Imagine you're working on a hardware product that can communicate with your other devices over Bluetooth. How exactly do you avoid Apple in this scenario?
You can't, or you won't be in business for very long. You need to develop an app because Apple intentionally gimps their browser, and to release the app you must agree to their terms.
They're in a dominant position that allows them to dictate unfavorable terms to the rest of the industry which, among other things, stifles innovation.
I can't think of nothing that is paired over Bluetooth that couldn't be done better with some other medium. Even Apple use a superset of Bluetooth to get its devices working properly together.
The HN audience in particular is not just tinker-friendly, but the vast majority surely lived through the era of Apple where Jobs pitched the iPhone as more of a gateway to the internet in your pocket, web apps were even mentioned as being a major feature/philosophy.
Not to mention the "old world" of premobile OSes which still have the basic understanding that I can install programs programmed for this platform, without "protection" and the "protection fees" associated with a centralized monopoly, an old world of which macOS could never shed in the name of profits, but iOS and beyond has become the battleground for redefining the computing experience to the mainstream: is it supposed to be a bladerunner 2049 esque experience of hitting the predetermined icons on my pocket vending machine, infantilizing and commodifying people's lifestyle for wealth concentration of a company that uses it's wealth to...hmm.
It is, at the very least though, a bit of a betrayal to those used to the old ways.
At the worst, it's part of a larger regression against individualism.
For comparison, Amazon charges 15%. AWS marketplace charges <10%.
Yes. Why are we so ok on giving up our rights like this? "no company is allowed to inside trade/use slaves/have a monopoly" - yes!
Framing things as you have leads to the impression that, by analogy to oppressing a person, restricting a large company is bad. But a company is not a person. Companies are legal constructs that exist because they are useful to society. A monopoly distorts markets and stifles innovation by disadvantaging potential competitors. This is not beneficial to society and so should not be permitted. So yes, a sufficiently large company should not be permitted to do things that might be permissible for a smaller company.
Exactly. If you take US antitrust law as written, once you're close to being the dominant player, you can't have a walled garden.
I think tech savvy users should be able to (after jumping through a few hoops) do whatever they want with their phones, without any fear of reprisal from software and hardware manufacturers. If Apple and Google insist on strangling this market then Tim Sweeney has the money to develop a competing phone ecosystem, it could be a great business opportunity if a large number of users and developers are actually not being well served. But he may find that this underserved population is a quite small slice of the total addressable market, and that walled gardens actually do a good job for the vast majority of users, protecting my oblivious grandma who clicks on everything from a horde of scammers.
Google is paying hardware manufacturers to use their search and for exclusivity with their store. Both of those are more or less explicitly to keep out competition.
Apple cut a deal with Netflix but what competition does it squash?
These are just different issues.
Anticompetitive behavior can be downstream of stuff like this, even if Apple isn’t actively quashing something but merely making it way easier for certain places to absorb the costs (especially if the deal was only offered to Netflix but not to other platforms).
Its not a ironclad argument by any means but its something
That’s what Google did according to the verdict. They paid money to stop competitors.
In fact Apple negotiated that deal to keep Netflix on the platform because Netflix wasn’t happy paying 30% (surprise). It’s not good that they’re playing favorites secretly, but it’s not the same thing
And Apple had previously explicitly stated in its defense that everyone got the same deal.
Towards other streaming services?
Yes.
The law doesn't say you have to give everybody the same deal just because it's "unfair" to others.
The monopoly/antitrust/etc. laws are about misusing a position of power for your own benefit at the expense of competitors. Apple doesn't have to be "fair" to Netflix vs Max vs Disney Plus.
The whole 30% fee is premised on providing services to app makers for money.
But they lied.
Without saying too much, I have personally witnessed such a deal at company with a measly 2-3 million app downloads. We had a physical product in the Apple Store that was doing very well. Our sales guy somehow negotiated lower IAP fees in exchange for higher cut or exclusivity of our retail product. Everything is negotiable if you have leverage.
> Netflix stops offering in-app subscriptions for new and returning customers on iOS
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18159373/netflix-in-app-...
Apple allows companies that have a free app used to access subscription content to sell the subscriptions on their own website without giving Apple a cut.
Netflix used to allow you to pay though Apple to reduce the sales friction of needing to set up billing through the Netflix website, but they stopped letting users pay through Apple years ago.
Monopolies aren’t illegal. Only the abuse of a monopoly position to advance your interest in other markets is illegal.
E.g. It’s not illegal to be the only seller of gasoline in the country. It is illegal though to bundle laundry powder with gasoline sales to corner the laundry powder market.
For one thing, the jury is probably more technically savvy than the judges that will ultimately decide this case.
Blocking all other means of distributing apps in a reasonable way absolutely should have been enough to get Apple sanctioned. Blocking alternatives with economic incentives is now forbidden, but blocking the access using code is allowed. This is stupid.
But sure, jury trial. And also US judges in this area are especially broken, with their warped understanding of when a monopoly is harmful.
---
Of course the other part of this is stupid as well. It should be illegal to have a monopoly, and it's the job of the government to break monopolies to enable competition. The US has it completely backwards here, and this is a big reason why that country is failing in key areas of economic development and infrastructure.
America's failings in economic development and infrastructure are not strictly caused by monopolization of the economy. South Korea's economy is run by like three chaebols[0] but they have working infrastructure. The problem with America is that we have a government that doesn't like to spend money, plus a group of illiberal, antidemocratic NIMBYs who make budgeting impossible by jacking up the cost of projects after they've already been estimated and committed to.
Since I already shat on the Libertarian Party, let me shit on the Democratic Party next. California and New York have legal climates that are unusually hospitable to NIMBYism. They figured out how to weaponize environmental review laws, to the point where actual reports about environmental infrastructure necessary for mitigating or surviving climate change say that we can't build the infrastructure because it'll get tied down in NIMBY red tape. In California this manifests as delays, cancellations, and massive wind farms in Wyoming; in New York it's cost overruns as bribes are paid to whoever can look the other way to get things passed through. Either way we can't build shit in our most populated states.
If there's a root cause for all of this, it's "vetocracy". In a democracy, when a decision is made, the people on the losing end of this decision agree to lose. However, since at least the 1970s, there has been several parallel movements to roll back decisions already made and form new mechanisms to prevent new decisions from being implemented. Antitrust was a rollback, NIMBYism was a new mechanism, but in either case, we're being dragged out of our brief experiment with liberal democracy by people who stand to gain from it.
[0] The Korean for Zaibatsu[1]
[1] The Japanese for Chaebol[0]
Some parts of that infrastructure seem to be having serious problems now:
This is not really what the courts said (and to my knowledge the people who said it weren't members of the Libertarian Party or Austrian Economists).
The actual quote from the Supreme Court is, "It is competition, not competitors, which the Act protects."
The idea here is that, for example, if Walmart can undercut you on price and you go out of business, that's harm to competitors but not competition, because Walmart is only able to do that by offering the same product for a lower price. They can only do it by competing, and only for as long as they continue to outcompete the alternatives. As soon as they tried to raise prices or reduce quality, competitors could spring up to take the market from them.
That isn't what Apple is doing. If you want to offer an app store for iOS that only takes a 5% cut, Apple will actively interfere with you -- and then they take a larger cut despite the existence of prospective competitors willing to take less. That's not consumers choosing the incumbent because they're the most competitive, it's the incumbent preventing consumers from having a choice. It's harm to competition.
For example, two parking garages across the street from each other are strong substitutes. You can easily pick either one based on e.g. which has the best price. But a parking garage in New York and a parking garage in Boston aren't in the same market, because you can't reasonably park your car in New York and get out and walk to your destination in Boston.
You can easily have viable substitutes for app distribution on any given platform. Windows has a first party store but you can also install apps with Steam or download them from the developer's website. The Windows store and Steam are in the same market, so neither of them has a monopoly on distributing Windows apps. The same as two parking garages across the street from each other, or a Walmart and Target in the same mall.
If the operating system prevents competing app distribution methods, there is no longer any viable substitute for the official one. This is what the OEM wanted, right? No competition for their app store -- no substitutes, a monopoly. But then that's just what it is. You don't have to monopolize markets ancillary to your primary one, but if you do, you have.
We're talking about the market for app stores, not the market for phones.
> But again if you redefine the market to Apps you can install on IOS then certainly that's a monopoly. I just question if that's a reasonable way to define the market.
But why? You haven't provided any reasoning.
Apple's store and Google Play aren't in the same market because they aren't substitutes -- you can only use one or the other depending on which type of device you want to install the app on. That isn't a law of nature -- Apple could offer Android apps in their store and stop preventing Google Play from distributing iOS apps. But they don't, and because of that they're not in the same market.
But once four or five different competitors have tried, had Walmart drop prices again to undercut them, and gone out of business, no one else is going to try because they'll know they're doomed to fail.
Competitors are required in order to have competition. The Chicago School interpretation of antitrust is as intellectually bankrupt as it is morally.
Suppose Walmart has the lowest price for batteries. The local hardware store goes out of business. Now Walmart doubles the price of batteries.
The local grocery store is going to start selling batteries. Walmart has to lower their price again or people will buy them there instead. If they do, the grocery store will still eventually sell their stock to customers who value convenience over the lowest possible price. They may not restock them unless Walmart raises the price again, but as soon as they do, batteries are back at the grocery store.
If Walmart never raises their prices the grocery store may never start carrying batteries, but then Walmart can never raise their prices.
Lol, what?
I'm from Northern Europe, where running a 3% deficit is seen as edgy and daring.
"In FY 2023, the federal government spent $6.13 trillion and collected $4.44 trillion in revenue"
There's a name for that condition: corruption
It is a societal disease that is vicious and hard to get rid of. It makes bad situations worse even when everyone says that they agree on a solution and want to make it happen.
Antitrust laws are one way to prevent and maybe even remove corruption, but they only work if the people writing the laws and enforcing the laws are not corrupt.
I don't think that's stupid. Blocking access using code is an honest act. Everyone knows the rules and can build their business accordingly. Blocking alternatives with economic incentives is manipulative. It gives the impression that the platform is open to competition, when it isn't.
Therefore, I support the Mexican drug cartels
Separately, that's kind of a gross choice of comparisons.
"Apple doesn't offer an App Store market" is just assuming the conclusion. Nobody expects you to get competing app stores from Apple -- you get them from Apple's competitors. What Apple ought to be in trouble for is interfering with their operating system customers' ability to patronize competing app stores.
This isn’t illegal. Equivalent to a “No outside food and drink” sign or not letting randos sell things in your own storefront
It’s not illegal just because you don’t agree with the philosophy of a closed ecosystem
In that case, someone else owns the storefront. I own my phone, not Apple.
If Apple would like to claim that I merely lease my phone, they need to update all their marketing so it isn't misleading. They should also be on the hook for repairs (without AppleCare), and all the other responsibilities that typically accompany a leased product.
Your phone isn't Apple's storefront. Their storefront is. Prohibiting their customers from patronizing any other store is clearly anti-competitive.
> It’s not illegal just because you don’t agree with the philosophy of a closed ecosystem
It's not legal just because you agree with the philosophy of a closed ecosystem. "A closed ecosystem" is inherently anti-competitive and should be illegal.
Really?
When you buy food from the grocery store, the grocery store goes to your home and physically prevents you from also eating food from a different store at the same time, in your own home?
When people buy a phone, they own it. They are using it in their own home.
No, a grocery store does not force you to only eat food from them, in your own home.
They do not prevent you from mixing milk from their store with cookies from a different store.
They appear to have ruled that Google has a monopoly because they’ve been squashing everyone else who should have been able to make an App Store by Google’s policies.
Apple isn’t squashing anyone, they just don’t allow it in the first place.
So I don’t think this would apply to Apple because of the line of reasoning. I know most people on hacker news think Apple should be forced to allow alternate app stores, but I don’t think this ruling can be used for that. It appears you would need something else.
It becomes an issue for the legislature to fix. Not the courts.
Rather think about this as Google lost, Android won. If this ruling goes trough, Android becomes an more open platform by default. Think about it: Steam, itch.io and GOG stores on Android.
The only thing that will be clear is that Apple got it right the first time by not allowing other app stores.
You might have a few stores but they will largely compete with each other, reduce prices, and offer freebies.
Fuck the App Store. I want to use steam.
Wildly different claim from “every game will have its own store”
Two markets ARE at play for consumers: mobile phone hardware (with OS) and mobile app stores/apps. Apple is using it's monopoly in the former to create/enforce a monopoly in the latter.
You can tell there are two separate markets because you, the consumer, make (at least) two separate purchases to participate.
The whole argument is that Apple is leveraging the position in one market (hardware) to gain advantage in another market. Your answer is "competitors can always build their own hardware" don't you see that this is a nonsensical argument?
Apple decided where the boundary of competition lies by deciding to bundle their phone, their operating system, their app store, and their code signing policies into a package deal. A thicket of copyright laws forbid you from unbundling any combination of these. For example, I can't legally run iOS on my Pixel 8 Pro. It is legal to run Android on an iPhone, except the hardware boot ROM is designed to reject anything not signed by Apple, and Apple won't sign Android. You can circumvent that by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in the boot ROM[0], and that's legal, too, but you can't legally tell anyone about those vulnerabilities because telling people how to break copy protection is a felony.
This same logic applies to application software. It's legal to jailbreak[1] your phone to install non-App-Store apps, but illegal to provide the jailbreak tool necessary to install those apps. If Epic had decided to release a jailbreak to install the Epic Games Store, instead of releasing a hotfix for third-party in-app billing and suing for antitrust, Tim Sweeney would have been thrown in jail for violating 17 USC 1201.
In copyright law, there's a concept of copyright misuse, which is what the courts call using copyright to break antitrust law. Copyright allows you monopoly control over your work, but you are not allowed to use that control to maintain an illegal monopoly that's outside of the copyright bargain. In other words, you don't get to opt-out of forms of competition you don't like. Congress decides those.
So no, "build your own phone and app store" is not enough. And letting Apple dictate the conduct of their competitors is effectively giving them antitrust immunity.
[0] Which are, BTW, once-in-a-decade. We've had a grand total of two bugs that can be used to install alternative operating systems on an iPhone.
[1] Jailbreak bugs aren't as scarce as boot ROM bugs, but they've been getting scarcer over time. This is not because Apple is doing a good security job, but because the NSA is hoarding all the good bugs for themselves.
I my opinion the two markets are: Providing apps on iPhone, and offering payment processing for apps on iPhone. Apple is using its absolute monopoly on providing apps to also entrenched itself in the market of providing payment for apps.
I mean, it's far more than that. Most importantly:
>Historically they have been held to include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing.
While IANAL - even as a plebe I can pretty easily tie refusing to allow third party app stores to both refusing to supply an essential facility, and product tying.
Why should my choice of hardware or OS dictate the apps I'm allowed to install? That's 100% product tying. It would be one thing if third parties just had no interest in supplying an alternative app store. It's another thing entirely to lock them out via your monopoly on the ecosystem.
For tying, while not a firm ‘rule’ the most common application of tying is limited to the ‘tied’ product being from another market when compared to the ‘tying’ product. Also, the current appellate court standard (worded semi-informally) is that a tying of products raises antitrust concerns when it restricts competition AND provides no benefit to consumers.
As to essential facility, the most impactful factor for the plaintiff (as in the hardest burden for the government to overcome to establish monopolistic abuse) is as follows: the plaintiff is REQUIRED to prove that the compelled permission to competitors to utilize the “facility” does not interfere or allow for detrimental effects of the dominant firm’s ability to serve its own customers.
Apple’s historic marketing speak and other ‘on the record’ statements about the app store’s exclusivity ensuring tight control for the security of Apple’s customers is directly written to advance defenses to these two claims.
You can certainly argue that Apple’s conduct is characterized as abuse of monopoly, but there arguments against that can also be compelling.
The above IS NOT and should not be considered legal advice.
Do you own an iPhone? I suspect that the vast majority of people complaining about Apple's "lock down" are people who don't even use an iPhone.
If you do own an iPhone ... why the heck did you buy one knowing its limitations. It's like buying a pink shirt when you hate pink, despite the availability of shirts of other colors, then going to the manufacturer to complain about the color.
> why the heck did you buy one knowing its limitations.
Because:
• Almost everyone I know uses iMessage exclusively.
• I very strongly dislike Android's UI design.
• I strongly prefer iPhone hardware.
Any two of these would be insufficient to offset how furious I am that I can't decide what code runs on my own damn phone! But taken together, Android just doesn't make sense.
I jailbroke my iPhone for years, despite the many inconveniences of running an outdated version of iOS, but Apple's security has just become too good.
So for example, if you had a dominant market position for a particular category of phone operating systems, and you wanted to advance your interest in the market for app distribution...
Paying off gamedevs would be analogous to paying off dough-makers (or doughnut bakers?) to only supply your store, and not your competitor, which would be super illegal. AMD sued Intel for very similar activity, and won.
Epic as a game store is very much not a monopoly by any means. Game consoles are certainly an argument, but thus far none are dominant over the other. It would mostly be a problem if a new console jumped in and Sony/Microsoft teamed up to hardball it out.
Isn't the resolution the same in each case? If you have an iPhone and you want to install an app from another store, you have to buy another phone. It's the same with these deals with Android, just overt.
Apple prevents that I bring an outside donut from competitor's, while Android allows it. That is basically the difference.
I only know of the concept of Corkage, where you pay the restaurant a fee if you bring your own wine to drink:
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/blog/2626/corkage-fee-guide...
> A corkage fee is the price charged to guests who choose to bring their own bottle of wine to a restaurant. Corkage fees usually exist at restaurants that already serve wine. The practice of allowing guests to bring their own wine is considered a courtesy to guests. … The average corkage fee ranges from $10 to $40 per bottle but may be as high as $100 or more.
Or you know, they don't care as long you're a paid customer.
BTW, I didn't say anything about restaurants. Coffee shop in general have much more of a lax atmosphere, so they generally don't care too much.
Some do, some don't. In my experience, Starbucks couldn't care less as long as you buy a coffee (and even then couldn't care less. maybe a restaurant would care more but it's on bar logic: they don't mind lending seats until paying customers come in). Smaller shops tend to be more strict about doing that kind of thing.
Seems to me the analogy holds.
What percentage of people do you suppose carry two different phones in their pockets? Is this something you reasonably expect the majority of people to do?
> Apple preventing other app stores on iOS is more like Starbucks preventing Peet's from coming into its stores to sell its coffee.
Just look at your own words. Preventing other stores is like preventing competitors from selling in your store?
Preventing other stores is preventing other stores. You can put whatever you want in your store, they put what they want in theirs, and the customer gets to choose where to get their app.
Preventing the customer from using the other store is the anti-competitive thing being objected to. It doesn't need an analogy, that's literally what it is.
It is anti-competitive to prevent competing stores. How you do it is irrelevant.
and their OS. I don't care if they allow whatever on their store. I would like the option to go to other stores or even sideload my own apps without the store intervention. That's right now impossible without a) hacking the device or b) being a dev working on an app.
So IOS may one day not be considered a starbucks, but a park. And you can't hog a park to yourself
People that are not employees of the company that holds dominant market position.
Except the App Store was added to the iPhone before it reached its current level of ubiquity.
I believe Apple views the App Store as a feature of the iPhone that contributes to its value - the huge variety of apps available definitely contributed to the iPhone’s success; see the Windows phone for an example of a phone without a good App Store.
fwiw I completely agree, but isn't this the inverse of the argument people make for why Apple deserves 30% of app revenue? Do app devs deserve a huge chunk of iPhone revenue since they contributed to its success?
Why should that matter?
> I believe Apple views the App Store as a feature of the iPhone that contributes to its value
If people prefer to install apps from Apple's store they're free to do so. That doesn't require them to prohibit other stores -- let the customer choose.
> the huge variety of apps available definitely contributed to the iPhone’s success; see the Windows phone for an example of a phone without a good App Store.
You're referring to the platform's selection of available apps. That is something different than the method of distributing them or whether it has competitors.
They all have closed application ecosystems and don’t allow third party stores.
they can, but they don't. Part of their argument seems to be that mobile is now a general purpose computer like Windows so it should open up. The big 3 consoles don't try to pretend that you can make host much more than games and movies on their devices, and the consoles operate on much thinner margins than the mobile market.
You can say it's cynically about money and that Google/Apple are the biggest targets. You can optimistically say it's that Epic knows consoles do more to deserve their 30% and aren't just gatekeepers (there is a LOT more support for AAA devs from the big 3 consoles than anything Google/Apple offers. Including direct help in porting if you strike deals).
We're seeing more handheld PC's, but the days of the Vita or 3DS as dedicated handheld consoles seem to be past us. There's a non-zero chance PC far in the future does the same to regular consoles too.
It's one thing to say "this is how the law should be, so that Apple should have to open their platform"; it's quite another to say "as the law is right now, Apple should have to open their platform."
If the courts get it wrong then you have to go to Congress, sure. But then you're in the same place -- convince Congress that it's bad.
Either way we're having a debate about whether it should be allowed. And the answer is no -- this business model is anti-competitive, for any business, and if existing interpretations of the anti-trust laws don't currently prohibit it, they should.
And still Apple is the one being sued.
The way that anti-trust law works is that if you have more market power, like Apple clearly does, then you are even more subject to the law and required to do certain things.
But also, if you disagree, then feel free to sue those other groups.
Being charitable, these are two different juries. It's a little annoying that, in a country where iOS is the dominant OS, the iOS monopolist is exonerated and the non-iOS monopolist is recognized- nonetheless this is still a big win for consumer rights.
Just this part alone would applies to Apple the same way
It should be though. Unchecked monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies are antithetical to a free market economy - they stifle competition and make the market un-free as well:
- for employees, they're bad because monopolies (or cartels) suppress their freedom to go to a better employer. The best case to look at is actually the tech sector, where large corporations colluded to keep compensation down [1], but there's also more evil cases like WalMart that go as far as underpay their employees so badly that they can only survive on food stamps [6].
- for suppliers, they're bad (in the correct term of a monopsony) because having only a few (or only one) buyer depresses their ability to get fair prices for products, e.g. in agriculture [2], or in WalMart [3][4]
- for customers, they're bad because they can't (realistically) go to alternatives, especially if the monopoly in question has extinguished competitors by advantages of scale - again, WalMart is a nasty example [5].
- for society as a whole, they're bad because, again, large actors like WalMart can devastate vibrant community centers like malls, leading to dereliction of entire neighborhoods in a domino effect [7], and eventually the erosion of local tax bases, leading to funding issues for basic government services.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[2] https://usceconreview.com/2022/07/06/america-where-even-sust...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/wal-marts-suppliers-feel-pre...
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-ratchets-up-pressure-o...
[5] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/walmart-effect.asp
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/20/how-mall-closings-in-america...
Some markets only support a natural monopoly though. If you forcefully break up every monopoly you'll always be in court, because after winning the case and breaking up a company, the next natural monopoly will form within a few years.
The best compromise is to only go after them if they're abusing their position. I agree the standards for that are too low though.
I think there are a lot of laws about this. Guys get nicknames like "The Trust Buster" for going after them.
Google and Apple are a duopoly that controls one of the most essential devices of our time. Their racket extends more broadly than Standard Oil. The smartphone is a critical piece of modern life, and these two companies control every aspect of them.
- Tax 30%
- Control when and how software can be deployed
- Can pull software or deny updates
- Prevent web downloads (Apple)
- Sell ads on top of your app name or brand
- Scare / confuse users about web downloads or app installs (Google)
- Control the payment rails
- Enforce using their identity and customer management (Apple)
- Enforce using their payment rails (Apple)
- Becoming the de-facto POS payment methods (for even more taxation)
- Partnering with governments to be identity providers
- Default search provider
- Default browser
- Prevent other browser runtimes (Apple)
- Prevent browser tech from being comparable to native app installs (mostly Apple)
- Unfriendly to repairs
- Unfriendly to third party components (Apple)
- Battery not replaceable
- Unofficial pieces break core features due to crytographic signing (Apple)
- Updates obsolete old hardware
- Green bubbles (Apple)
- Tactics to cause FOMO in children (Apple)
- Growth into media (movie studios, etc.) to keep eyeballs on their platforms (Apple)
- Growth into music to keep eyeballs on their platforms
If we compared the situation to auto manufacturers, there would be only two providers, you could only fuel at their gas stations, they'd charge businesses every time you visit, they'd display ads constantly, and you'd be unable to repair them without going to the provider.
There need to be more than two providers. And if we can't get more than two providers, then most of these unfair advantages need to be rolled back by regulators.
This is horrific.
You might be able to blame Apple for starting this and continuing it on their phones, but I don't think Google is pushing Android handset makers to do this at all, just like I don't think Google is pushing Samsung (and maybe some others) to eliminate 3.5mm headphone jacks on their phones. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those things where the whole industry is just copying each other. Non-removable batteries are better for manufacturers for various reasons, but bad for consumers, and they've conned consumers into accepting it.
>Unfriendly to repairs
Same here. Nothing is keeping Android phone makers from being repair-friendly.
>Updates obsolete old hardware
This is Apple-only. The Android counterpoint is "Updates simply cease after 2-3 years, leaving you with security vulnerabilities that won't be fixed", but here again it's the fault of the handset makers, not Google: they're just too lazy, and Google is too stupid and short-sighted to force them to support their phones longer-term to improve the Android brand image.
It's so sad that a company that resorts to those kinds of tactics to increase their market share, as opposed to, just selling more of their product because it's a superior product.
Also, the OS developer acting as a gatekeeper is necessary to prevent malware from getting onto devices. Without that, you have Windows where black hats trick the average user into installing malware constantly.
Almost everything you list is actually a positive thing, although I would be wasting my time to explain it to people who should take the time they put into complaining into developing their own competing platforms that align with their ideals. Please do put your energy into making a competing platform. We need more choices at the operating system level, and nothing people hope these lawsuits would accomplish would give us that.
If Windows and MacOS imposed the same limitations, entire classes of software would stop getting distributed. Games would no longer be profitable enough to ship or diverse enough to compete in terms of profits. Professional software/plugin developers like Pro Tools, Panic! and U-He would lose the software margins they enjoy today and potentially stop supporting new OS releases. It happened already on MacOS after the depreciation of 32-bit apps and OpenGL.
> the OS developer acting as a gatekeeper is necessary to prevent malware from getting onto devices
You say that, but then viruses like Pegasus show up using nothing more than first-party Apple services. It's a bogus fearmongering tactic that cannot be used to justify not giving people a choice. User exploitation will exist as long as the user has enough power to act against their own interests. You'd have to remove the phone functionality to make a safe phone.
> Almost everything you list is actually a positive thing
> nothing people hope these lawsuits would accomplish would give us that.
Interesting, you sound incredibly desperate to dismiss the idea that legislation could fix this problem despite a lack of evidence. Wanna expand on that?
Google said you could start your own App Store and then secretly undermined people who tried to start their own App Store.
That’s what they got in trouble for. There is no evidence of Apple making backroom deals to prevent people from doing things Apple said they could.
Or would that be illegal since it was originally open?
On the other hand, Google is trying to manipulate the market to gain an advantage over competitors on non Google hardware running Google software.
On the Apple side of things, the full vertical is Apple. That is not the case for Google.
(Not that meal kit companies would be paying Apple 30%)
A typical customer lifetime might be somewhere between a year and two years, unless you happen to be a giant like Netflix.
Let’s say you expect your customer to churn after 14 months, so that means you only enjoy 2 months of Apple’s reduced royalty rate. Your total average rate is 27%.
This concept is why many sunscription services are able to offer lifetime subscriptions. They have already figured out what one customer is worth based on churn rate, so the lifetime subscription is set up to be a price that matches or exceeds that number.
A locked garden is a locked garden. But a locked garden that you go into knowing it's a locked garden is better than a locked garden that advertises itself as open and then locks you in. Both are locked gardens; one is also false advertising.
Out of curiosity, say that I'm not a techie that knows all about Apple vs alternatives ... and say I'm interested in buying Apple because I like the aesthetics of the device or something. Is there anything actually explicit in Apple's marketing that makes it clear to the consumer that they are buying into a "locked garden" ?
Part of this discussion has to do with definitions and what we're talking about, specifically. It's common in other industries to find yourself with some degree of vendor lock-in for "compatibility." I bought some high end Canon camera lenses, for example, so I have zero expectations that I can use those lenses with a Sony or a Nikon. I tend to buy Dewalt tools because I own Dewalt batteries etc.
Here we're talking about the "App Store." I don't know that it would register on the average non-techie's mind to assume they would have options ... but us techies know that the "locked garden" tends to mean "you're buying into the Apple ecosystem of products and will likely be stuck only buying Apple products for compatibility sake." Non techies might assume that because they assume that everything works that way. But is Apple making this extremely clear in their marketing so that people who don't assume would know up front? I'm genuinely curious since I don't buy Apple products.
If I must be in a walled garden, I'm choosing the better kept one. Android is quite simply inferior, I tolerated it because it gave me relative freedom but there's no reason to tolerate it any longer.
The PKI industry is a good example of this.
The Certificate authorities have to abide by standards and any misbehaving Certificate Authorities can be removed.
I'd argue the integrity of the PKI industry is just as important, if not more so, than App Stores and they have managed to maintain a device agnostic market with healthy competition.
- Ben Franklin
I can, and I don't mind. Let it happen. Computer freedom is more important than preventing scams and fraud. Just have the corporations and banks eat the losses instead. God knows these trillion dollar corporations can afford it.
If that's not enough warning for someone then they probably shouldn't have a smart phone, or if they do it should have strict parental controls on it (blocking 3rd party installs, most sites, and phone calls/texts).
There have been many such cases.
One could hope people would despise such a company and the market would fix it, but humans have proved the opposite. I've stopped trying to educate people and lost all faith in humanity. Most of them just don't care, as long as they've got their shiny stuff.
It reminds me of the Newburgh Letter, suggesting that George Washington be declared king after winning the revolutionary war. It's like they missed the whole point of the exercise.
I guess part of the result is "you can't lock your ecosystem while pretending it's open". As for Apple's situation, it's different enough to warrant a separate lawsuit.
The rule of thumb, in a very simplified way, is indeed that you can have a monopoly as long as you don’t actively leverage that power to stifle competition.
That’s not a result of this case but a result of all the jurisprudence leading up to this case.
And to a certain degree, that makes sense. The alternative, making all monopolies illegal, would cause too much havoc because it would affect almost everyone putting out a product.
Say, for example, you’re a newcomer in the market of smart thermostats. By definition, you have a monopoly on your thermostats. If monopolies are by definition illegal, regardless of circumstance, you’d have to allow Nest to put software on your thermostat advertising their products.
That’s an undesirable outcome, if only because it makes it harder for you to compete in that market.
Apple doesn't allow other stores to exist on their ecosystem. That's a problematic monopoly, because competitors can not exists.
That's different from what you are saying: other companies are allowed to create smart thermostat and compete against Nest
What's really important is the power play: your company should strive to hold a comfortable and stable monopoly position in a meaningful market (meaningful to you), while the government's role is to watch over all the businesses so that large numbers of people are not under heavy influence of external forces and not made unhappy. If any product exploits its monopoly by shifting the power from the government or making people sad, then gov steps in and interprets the rules in the way to correct this. Or, the gov is corrupt and helps keep that monopoly going :-)
To your second point: people are sad that we can’t have cheaper and better software on iOS. It’s a poor UX when an app makes me go on my desktop to sign up for their paid service. It negatively impacts consumers and only exists because Apple is wielding its monopoly.
So every store is a monopoly? You are going to have to be a bit more rigorous than adding “-place” and call it a day.
This is why monopolies aren’t illegal per se, and it requires a couple of components for it to venture into unlawful territory.
One is that the monopoly is powerful enough that it can be exerted to pressure other parties in an anti-competitive way, and another is that that power is actively used. There are more, but for the sake of simplicity, these are the important ones in this debate.
Disallowing competitors to exist, in this case, means passively making it possible for competitors to exist.
The omission of an act (passive) will never be as substantial as an indicator as an active act to quash competition.
The App Store hasn’t changed much since its inception. Commission rates have decreased since its inception, making it harder to argue that Apple is squeezing developers now that it has more power.
The analogy with the thermostat hypothetical is accurate. If I create a new smart thermostat startup, I create a new market, the software distribution on the thermostats I manufacture.
This is analogous to the market definition people use to argue that Apple is violating antitrust laws. If it makes it easier to grasp what I'm saying, then instead, imagine I start manufacturing a new smartphone.
They launched the iPhone and, by doing so, created a new market, the iOS app distribution market.
The only difference is that the iOS app distribution market has grown exponentially, but the relevant legal realities are the same. The law currently doesn’t have a mechanism to say, “Ok, now you’ve grown, so now it’s illegal.”
Instead, it looks at abuse of power, where acts weigh heavier than the omission of acts.
The main difference between the Google and Apple’s case is that the former went out of its way to stifle competition by making demands and setting requirements (akin to Microsoft back in the day).
Some now say that the only reason this difference exists is because Apple doesn’t have to pressure others like Google did, but that’s not a difference to be shrugged away. It’s an essential difference.
It makes the difference between one giant who throws its weight around and another who never had to do that because the terms have been the same from the get-go (however favorable it was for them).
It is for that very reason that the Google case won’t have much bearing on the Apple case.
No. It’s you can have a monopoly if you treat everyone equally and don’t make secret deals with anyone.
This is a generally accepted and non controversial practice in certain areas.
Of course not saying that this should be the case for app stores or that Apple is actually treating everyone equally..
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/12/22667694/epic-v-apple-tri...
it sounds like the EU is going to slowly push on Apple t do the very thing Epic wants regardless. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/08/apple-admits-thir...
So I guess Epic had the right idea but the wrong angle (or simply the wrong judges in the US. Probably a bit of both).
Is it a specific reason or a difference of opinion?
On the latter monopoly abuse is bigger problem.
But if you make, build, control and design everything from bottom to top on the product, then it is less about monopoly abuse. It is just single total product.
This cap of capability has been increasing drastically with technology. Even if you had an old, repairable car, not everyone has capabilities to repair it or modify it to something else in the past. But now even less likely.
The question is that how much they hinder on purpose? In the case of Apple, many times it might have been hindering on purpose, but some choices have also valid points.
If you remember the old times of Android (and still), Android provides extra-ordinary attack surface for malware what iOS has never had.
The distinction between Google and Apple is that you might think that with Android, as there are many manufacturers and brands, you have a choice, but it is just an illusion, if Google "abuses" it's market place with other manufactures.
In the case of Apple, it's just Apple. Apple can do whatever they please but is unlikely affecting any other manufacturers or brands. If they want to compete with Apple, they need to be better than Apple.
Of course, there is the value of user base. All the companies must try to adapt with the social behavior of people, and if they choose to use iPhone for playing games and listening music, companies must bring games and music on those platforms to be competitive. It is hard to get this userbase.
The biggest issue of this particular case with Google were the deals. And other manufactures and companies since Google is not manufacturing the phones itself, but instead makes secret deals about the Play Store and other software. This goes to line of monopoly abuse, since it affects other companies and the illusion of choice, and also hinders innovation.
If you hear of a judge that encourages juries to think for themselves and answer as they think, rather than prescribing how to think to them, let me know.
Jury nullification has never existed as a right in any common law system. It is merely a descriptive term that lawyers use to describe a situation where a jury decides to ignore the law. Lawyers cannot instruct juries on its existence because, in the law, it doesn't exist. It only ever happens because juries cannot be punished for deciding contrary to what the law says; their right to their own reasoning is sacrosanct.
It describes a situation where the jury ignores the law, and lawyers can never instruct juries to ignore the law, in any circumstance. Lawyers can never say "I know the law says X but if you ignore that, we can't punish you hint hint."
It is a term that describes a crinkle in the law. It does not exist as a right, and juries are NOT entitled to do it, but at the same time, they cannot be punished for doing so.
People who whine about jury nullification are one step below 'sovereign citizen' types in terms of driving me nuts with their willful misunderstanding of the law.
As the other posters said, most jurisdictions follow specific recommendations on avoiding telling the jury to do whatever they want. And different jurisdictions have different rules on whether or not the jury can truly redefine the law or facts. Some places have that ingrained in their state constitution, but most do not. And civil vs. criminals trials also have different rules. And where I live, there are even different rules for specific types of civil trials.
It really is all fairly complex, hence every trial will give a specific set of instructions to that jury. And that is also why an attorney in one jurisdiction might not be correct on how the details work in another one. (Although the gist of it all will be the same.)
At the same time, this is also why we don't know for sure what the jury said or thought. We can get all their instructions - those are public record. But the actual deliberation is not.
As always, IANAL. Other commenters already seem to be annoyed at my layman's take on it all, but this is what I know from being a law school dropout and having served on juries.
For instance, for a long time if you wanted to make a device with the Play Store on you could not make any Android device which did not have the Play Store, even as a third party for someone else.
If you do that while making billions in platform fees don't be surprised when everyone else thinks building their own app stack on top of vanilla embedded Linux is a better idea.
Of course often the OEM intentions are far from honest, but the deliberate result of Google's antics is to prevent the emergence of any honest actor trying to produce an Android device which does not serve the ad tech beast.
And yet the LG app store is terribad, and constantly pushing garbage the CEOs son in law wrote or something.
Hope that this happens to Apple eventually too.
It should all totally be open though
Neither can compete with the Play store though, as only Google's offering is allowed to update or install apps in the background without user interaction (without root). For that matter, only Google Play Protect (part of the Play Store IIRC) can uninstall apps from user's devices with no interaction.
That sounds horrible. Why can a store decide to delete an app with no prior notice?
But it does seem Google has given more freedom to other apps to install apps. I guess it comes down to if that's still too many clicks or too fear mongering to count as "competitive".
It allows them to remotely remove any malicious app from Android devices without any user intervention.
1: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2752902/google-remotel...
Not anymore, since Android 12 (2021).
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-alternative-app-st...
> in response to mounting pressure from Epic Games and government regulators
Just because it came out before the judgement doesn't mean it wasn't because of the court case. And frankly, needing to be sued to do the not-a-monopoly thing isn't exactly a great look.
Maybe I'm just grouchy because I'll never get to use it though - BlackBerry stopped making handsets, so I'm using either the last great physical keyboard (subjective, but true IMO) while being "stuck" on Android 8.1, or GNU+Linux à la Pinephone Pro.
Important to note this has changed starting with android 12, now you just need accept installing the app, and the source can update the app without interaction.
Droidify (third party fdroid client) supports it, among others like Aurora store.
Unnecessarily mind you, GrapheneOs proved that you can get the vast majority of GMS functionality without it needing to run as root. Even Gpay would work if google allowed it.
> That includes those annoying update confirmation dialogs which make it impossible to install updates automatically without user interaction.
This has changed with android 12, third-party sources can now auto update an app after a user accepts the initial prompt go install it.
That is, the only apps available through Aurora are those on Google Play, and if Google's rejected an app, then you won't be able to install it via Aurora.
By contrast, F-Droid is an alternative front-end and app store, with apps available which aren't included in Google Play (for example, Termux).
(I use both Aurora and F-Droid on an Onyx Android device.)
Same is true for Apple, of course.
It uses that to install new applications and update applications installed by other app stores without the OS-level confirmation, probably can't be uninstalled on most Android OSes and perhaps some other things.
[0] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P...
You might have heard about this little company
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanwhitwam/2018/08/25/epic-gam...
So, yes, when users literally own their own devices, it is difficult for the manufacturer to keep them perfectly secure without abusing monopoly power.
The door also swings the other way here too, because malware has certainly existed _inside_ the Play Store, and it took _users_ to bring it to the billion dollar corporations attention.
The entire value proposition of the App Store is the sandbox.
But Android security sucks either way
Sure, Apple might prevent you from installing such applications on devices (though they offer monitoring app usage and websites for parental controls), but that's just because they have a walled garden that could disallow such apps and it's less clear how to weigh app freedom against user safety.
If you're worried about zero days, Android exploits are priced around the same as iOS exploits apparently so take that how you will.
You really think you are going to ask a child what are they doing every second and what they talked about and they are going to tell the truth?
What’s stopping someone also from surreptitiously installing the same snooping software on another adult’s phone?
It’s not less clear. There is no reason to allow this type of software to be installed on a phone without a clear indication that it is on there.
Of course not, but usually adults can force a passcode out (or take the device altogether) or force the child to sign in for them to see at regular intervals, in which case they can observe everything. I would agree that this is excessive for a parent to do, but clearly the parent you are talking about is already taking excessive measures.
> What’s stopping someone also from surreptitiously installing the same snooping software on another adult’s phone?
Presumably, an attacker will not have access to the device and not be freely given the password or access with the ability to install an app. If they do, then there's nothing stopping the attacker from just going through the phone. Installing a app without the person's knowledge would either require you to have inside access or have a zero day.
> It’s not less clear. There is no reason to allow this type of software to be installed on a phone without a clear indication that it is on there.
A lot of the permissions individually make sense and this software could just be composed by a significant number of them. I'm not sure exactly how the software you are referring to works and its scope, so I'll take a narrow example.
In the case of messages, users may legitimately want a different messaging app. If the adult just side loads an arbitrary SMS app, how is that supposed to be distinguishable to the OS whether the app additionally happens to sync these messages to a third party?
In the case of screen capture, that's a perfectly normal use case to stream your screen. Android does warn you when this is occuring.
Or for that matter, many Android devices permit side loading an entire OS. This could be used by the adult to basically bypass any restrictions on apps altogether. This has a completely legitimate use case. Should we block that as well?
> Presumably, an attacker will not have access to the device and not be freely given the password or access with the ability to install an app.
Are you really unaware of what a jealous partner can do?
> A lot of the permissions individually make sense
In what world does a permission to “remotely monitor your screen and intercept your voice and hide that the app is installed make sense”?
> A lot of the permissions individually make sense and this software could just be composed by a significant number of them. I'm not sure exactly how the software you are referring to works and its scope, so I'll take a narrow example.
Maybe it’s a bad idea to allow a third party app to have access to your SMS messages especially seeing they are often used for 2FA?
> In the case of screen capture, that's a perfectly normal use case to stream your screen. Android does warn you when this is occuring.
And yet there are plenty of apps for Android that can do this surreptitiously…
You realize you aren’t making a great case for Android here don’t you?
A) most people don’t care about openness based on their revealed preference
B) if you do care, you are free to choose a more “open” choice
And these sorts of child-tracking (and sadly, abused-partner-tracking) apps exist on both Android and iOS platforms.
I'll again make my argument that the developers should respect the choice of the users. If the user chose iOS maybe they chose it because they wanted the curated experience and the locked it product. I certainly do so and so do my parents who haven't had an issue with random apps scamming them and stealing their card details or passwords.
I really don't understand the negative sentiment against Apple - guys, it's a phone/tablet. The consoles are much more like a General Purpose Computers and we are not really touching those or being that vocal which to me shows that it's not really a moral stance and it's a "my profits are affected stance".
Then you can (personally) choose to never break the glass to install something from outside the store.
I just want them to be better.
They take 15-30% of my gross revenue and are the source of most of my stress (through regular rejections of my app updates). It would be nice if they charged less and stopped rejecting me for mentioning Android in my app copy.
I'm not sure at any point I experienced a "cancel all my subscriptions" in a single place, even as I was neck deep in the Apple ecosystem.
You could STILL do that if that does happen on Apple. No one forces you. It just gives people more choices. Choices are good.
Some five billion people have a smart phone [1]. For many it's the primary way they access the Internet.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone....
Even if you think it is, other people might disagree. Apple prevents app creators from even mentioning that you can purchase content or subscriptions in a web browser instead.
I just want to be able to use the hardware I already paid for without Apple taking a cut of everything I do on it.
Also Apple take around 15% from most developers.
Also it’s not really about providing choice given that developers will flock to the lowest % store and it doesn’t matter if that store siphons personal data. My main problem with this is that the push comes from profit margins and not care about the users and that is pretty obvious if you ask the why question a few times
This would make a lot more sense in a world where users have more choice. If you want to make this argument, you probably need regulators to step in and enforce standards and interoperability such that consumers have more choice, along more different axes than they currently do (2-ish operating systems, determined by the hardware you buy).
If no iOS user wants a 3rd party store, no one will install them, all of them will fail and we wouldn't be talking about this.
So why are Apple so afraid of a little competition? I think some iOS users (me) are willing to use other stores. And that's why Apple blocking it is anti-competitive.
A different angle is: If a user wants a 3rd party app store, why did they buy an iOS device?
(To be clear, I'm not really convinced either way at this point; I'm throwing out what I think are reasonable arguments but that doesn't mean I'm convinced there aren't good counterarguments to them)
Wants and circumstances can change over time. When I purchased my device, Fortnite and Xbox Cloud Streaming were available from the Apple App Store. Now they aren't.
Also I can want more out of my device; none of my devices are perfect but I still buy them. I believe 3rd party stores would be an improvement to my device. Replace the feature "3rd party app store" with folding phone: "Why did they purchase an iOS device if they wanted a folding phone" is a leap in logic to "No iOS user wants a folding phone"
A year ago, I'd say USB-C, but that's no longer the case.
> if they can thereby bypass some of the restrictions Apple imposes through their review process
Those same restrictions are blocking apps like Xbox Cloud Streaming. When Apple chooses to block those, but I still want access to apps, 3rd parties providing the such apps isn't unfair competition.
I mean, I'm on board with using video game consoles as proper computers as well, but my phone literally has gcc installed so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
The jury did not set precedent that 30% fees in and off themselves are bad. It has very little relevance to Apple or other single market platforms (consoles etc) since they have no competing store product.
It's a somewhat different situation with Apple.
You can't buy iOS on a non-Apple phone; and a quick Google search has the iPhone at about 22% of the market.
It’s interesting how the judges in Apple vs Epic stayed with Big Tech, same with Microsoft on the Blizzard acquisition.
Almost if the Judges are scared of Big Tech but the Jury composed of lay people see the monopoly for what it is.
My thought is that the judges are likely staying with the "letter of the law" which is what Big Tech (Big anything really) hires all of their lawyers to make sure that they technically stay within, while flagrantly violating the spirit of the law in a way that helps the business model.
The Jury is more prone to look at the spirit of the law.
The judges are following previous rulings and trying to apply them to what are likely novel situations that the law was never intended to cover because it no one foresaw it.
The courts are not how you fix this. The legislature is. Unfortunately that’s too broken to do anything.
I know this is my cynicism saying it will never happen, but when it comes to this kind of stuff it seems to guess correctly quite a lot.
Since it's legal in US to buy political influence (lobby) and since judges and prosecutors are politically appointed and since the said corporations have very large pockets...
To add on that media and public opinion also impacts your career as a justice and money can swing both media and public opinion.
The key reason Apple won their case is the fact that consumers generally purchase iPhones knowing ahead of time that their app download options are restricted to the App Store. If they disagreed with that restriction then they could have made the choice to purchase another phone instead, but deciding to purchase an iPhone anyway means they "knowingly agreed to the challenged restraint".
Under US law the precedent is very clear (established by the Supreme Court case Eastman Kodak v. Image Technical Services and the 9th Circuit case Newcal v. Ikon) that if the consumer knowingly agrees to aftermarket restraints ahead of time then that aftermarket will essentially not be considered a monopoly for antitrust purposes.
Source: The Epic v. Apple 9th Circuit ruling (specifically pages 30 to 40 which explains this in detail).
By the way, I don't care if it slows down Apple's phones sold per minute/hour metric.
Even if Apple allowed other stores, consumers would still be able to choose to only download things from the Apple store.
Not having that option only harms consumers and benefits Apple who gets to apply an undue tax on everything.
That said I think the jury vs bench is a red herring here given that Apple prevailed at the appeals court level where there is no jury involved.
Now I wonder what if Google/Apple decided to decrease their cut to a more reasonable level, around 10~15%? App store/Play store fees are not their primary revenue stream so this must be a reasonable cost for them to mitigate this kind of legal risks, but they choose not to do so.
It remains to be seen whether Apple will comply with EU rules outside of the EU. If not, Epic isn't getting their way, because EU revenue alone isn't going to be enough.
If Apple is still anywhere in the final process, its entirely possible other people can make their own storefronts but Epic will not.
Of course, Apple can try to circumvent but that's a blatant violation of DMA and there will be serious retaliation. EU already has given a warning[1]. Perhaps it's good to remind that Apple could've been in a better position with all the USB-C situation if they didn't insult EU congressman with laughter[2]... I don't think Tim's going to repeat the same mistake.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eus-vestager-wa... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/apple-adopting-usb-c-po...
Also, subscriptions are charged at 30% for the first year, which then drops to 15% for subsequent years.
When we sold software through resellers years before the App Store we often paid 40%-45%. We found it absurd at first too, but we learned that large businesses only bought from certain resellers or the resellers could sell into businesses we couldn’t reach (a sales staff in business or marketing to consumers). In some rare cases we negotiated to 30% so I don't find these fees out of the norm.
So yeah, it's a middle finger to all devs from Google.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-...
Are you saying Apple is different? I'd like to see the info on those deals if it isn't secret. Like the Spotify deal, Facebook deal, etc.
Feels like a "if you run somebody over with your car it's better to back up and kill them" moment of perverse legal incentives.
Because that is what Google just got punished for doing. They paid off companies to not ship third party app stores pre installed, pressured software companies to not make third party app stores, and gave money to companies to not compete with Google play
Google's plan was to maintain a de facto monopoly on app stores while technically allowing competition. Apple's was to just come out and say that they were the only authorized app store and therefore they can't be anti-competitive because there exists no market for iOS app stores.
Google is probably wishing they had taken that route now.
But I'm more worried about the future here.
1. The fact that Google lost here doesn't bind or affect apple. Jury verdicts aren't binding on any party other than those in the lawsuit. Apple may or may not be found to violate the law in a separate case.
2. Interesting no one has mentioned Epic's Chinese ownership. I could see Google complaining to us govt that it's unfair for Chinese tech to win these court cases against US tech.
Have there been any past case(s) where the country/nationality of minority owners of a company has been grounds for changing a ruling?
But they could certainly get a law passed that changes the rules and supersedes the ruling.
He gets plenty of criticism too.
Fighting to challenge the 30% tax is also good for indie devs. Without that, the 15% on first 1mil would’ve never happened.
Its not relevant to the issues in the cases they have been involved in over app stores.
> I could see Google complaining to us govt that it's unfair for Chinese tech to win these court cases against US tech.
"The government" (presumably, here, you mean the executive branch?) can't veto a court ruling on the premise that the law should have been different then it was when the events actually happened and the case was heard.
There are avenues for dealing with security and other risks from foreign ownership, but they are entirely separate from the legal issues in Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google.
And I can see China retaliating if US takes measures against them.
Google didn’t just lose some point— they lost every point
> The jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too.
This may wind up being an enormous shake up.
That's what a video game console is, technically speaking. It's a completely locked down environment which is curated tightly.
> but open yourself up to any competition and your behavior becomes anticompetitive.
That's called the antitrust investigation into Microsoft Windows; or the complaints about Apple's "sherlocking."
Edit: I'm actually OK with this, even legally, because I view devices as being means to an end for an experience, which is also how I think most consumers view devices. When viewed that way, we really have three major "buckets" of devices if you will: "Computers", "Gaming", "Phones".
The "Computers" market is a race in most minds between Windows and Mac (and thus Windows gets hit with antitrust investigations). The "Phones" market is once again a 2-cart race between Android and iPhone (and this time, Android gets the antitrust investigations). The "Games" market is a 4-cart race between 3 console manufacturers and the PC, with 2 additional smaller carts called Cloud Gaming and the Smartphone (which, themselves have 3 and 2 carts respectively) - thus, no interest in investigating anyone there. However, if gaming didn't exist on the PC and was strictly Sony v. Nintendo, it would totally be investigated.
And they get away with it because Apple isn't competing with anyone within their own ecosystem; it's not a market.
Really is a neat little bit of lawyering, iOS and all apps within aren't competing with each other hence the rule about too many apps with similar features, they're competing as a unit with other computing platforms.
This article lists a bunch of the special deals Google made with various companies in order to prevent competition https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...
> One Google Play exec boasted she got Riot to halt development on its own app store by promising the company $10M in marketing.
> Another Google exec suggested that sharing revenue with Samsung would be “better at disincentivizing other app stores from being preloaded.”
> Google wanted to offer a 16 percent Google Play revenue share to key Chinese OEMs to “secure Play exclusivity” — and wound up giving them 20 percent.
> A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android’s app store fees
Apple made significantly less of these deals - they have their rules that you can either follow or not participate. I do think that some of those rules limit competition and make worse products for consumers.
Apple makes a lot of deals. A lot. I'd expect them to be about even.
Beyond that there’s no evidence one way or another that there are any sweetheart deals. None of the public documents from the trials showed that.
Anything beyond that is speculation.
Apple makes the devices, so they aren’t making others squash competition. They’re exactly what they say.
Google just has more types of companies in the ecosystem to make deals with. Apple’s iOS OEM deals can’t be found anticompetitive because they don’t have those deals to begin with.
Supposedly, the 15%-after-first-year rule for subscriptions that they instituted was because they were trying to entice Netflix to continue to take in-app payment for subscriptions. Rather than a sweetheart deal, they rolled it out as a platform change.
There are areas which I think are more questionable, such as their Apple TV partnerships with Amazon and a few others.
I think Apple just did that because it was becoming clear that what they were saying wasn’t true/they were getting political pressure about charging 30% no matter what.
I don’t remember the exact timing on the change so my guess as to the cause may be wrong.
But even one deal is enough.
Smartphone makers need app store revenue to make the handsets competitively priced. It would really hurt Android market share if all non-Google Android phones were say 10-20% more expensive to compensate for that. Or alternatively if you had a fragmented ecosystem with a separate app store per OEM.
I'm not saying that it's a good thing, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to share app store revenue with the OEM making the device.
Can't speak to the deals with particular app developers like Riot or Spotify
For example, what's stopping Samsung then from using the world's most inefficient and old manufacturing techniques, and then complaining Apple's more efficient (but expensive to research) techniques are propping up their profits? Nothing. It would even be easier for Samsung to do that, and then use their competitor's own cost-cutting innovations to take them down.
B. Android also charges 30%. Developers making under $1M per year pay only 15% (initially announced by Apple, copied by Google). You can't argue you'd save a penny going to Android.
C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.
D. It is no secret that the 30% fee has nothing to do with consumers, but will instead be used to increase the developer's profit margins. Expect to pay the exact same after the fees are lifted.
I could not disagree more.
> B. Android also charges 30%. It's actually better on iPhone, because developers making under $1M per year pay only 15%. On Android, everyone pays 30%. So you'd be paying more to Google on Android than on iPhone.
Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
> C. You can always sell your iPhone, if it matters to you now, and buy an Android.
Will I get refunded for the apps I bought? What about the macbook I bought because I entered the apple ecosystem?
> A. That's not exactly secret information, so your ignorance is not an excuse when you could have easily found that information if you cared. It's not a secret contract.
How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?
Well, we can agree to disagree, but call it a prediction - in three years, prices will be exactly the same as they are now. No business, especially in this economy, gets an opportunity like this to raise margins without affecting sales.
> Android is bad too but at least you can get an app store without the fee.
Yes, and literally nobody will install it. And the few app stores that are available - Aurora will get your Google account banned, while F-Droid re-signs all apps with itself, meaning you are opening your device to serious security risks. A middleman in F-Droid would mean every app you install from them could be compromised with fake developer signatures. Fun.
> How could I have known to look this up before it became a story?
How about paying attention since the 30% commission was announced at the iPhone App Store launch in 2008, literally by Steve Jobs on stage when iPhoneOS 2.0 was announced? There's no legal requirement to advertise every possible detail to cover every possible person's perspective - especially when it's old hat announced a decade and a half ago with fanfare.
https://youtu.be/WUrzjLjP4UQ?t=217
Edit for the comment below about iPhone being anti-competitive (because I'm "posting too fast"):
Well, here's the problem with trying to investigate the iPhone.
Remember how I showed that announcement in 2008? iPhone market share, at the time, was less than 5%. Almost the entire smartphone market was split between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.
Now look at where iPhone is now, despite the fee. That demonstrates, to a regulator, that it is a competitive product, and the market preferred it, despite the fee which was implemented at the beginning. Apple didn't build the iPhone to where it is now and then lock it down - developers signed up right when it was beginning and didn't care then, so they can't care now that it's a success.
Apple has basically an ironclad argument for competitiveness. If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would've died at birth. Nobody would have supported an anti-competitive product if they actually cared at a time when it could have easily been ignored. This came up in the argument with Epic - Apple argued, successfully, that the market chose them and their "anti-competitive practices" despite them having almost no clout, which can only be the result of market support for being a competitive product.
Edit 2 (same issue, thanks @dang):
> What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?
The iPhone took off because of third-party support, any market analyst will tell you that. If it didn't have third-party support from the App Store, it would have died.
Why was that third-party support there? Previously, on almost all other cellphones, every carrier had their own App Store. With their own policies. And a 50/50 split at best. Some only gave the developer 30% with the carrier taking 70%. With the developer paying for your own credit card fees and hosting fees. Many carriers had severe upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars to get a half-functioning SDK. The 70/30 deal with one App Store was revolutionarily competitive for the time. Developers flooded Apple's scene because it was, by far, the cheapest and most profitable App Store available at the time. They can't claim, high on the success that Apple gave them, that Apple's the problem now when Apple did not even change the deal that they initially signed for. At least, not legally easily.
What makes you say that? A product being anti competitive has little to do with whether consumers will buy it. You dont see how you can have the best product on the market and also stifle competition?
I also think youre mixing up your markets here. The app store is not the same thing as the iPhone. The iPhone was a very competitive product that has an anti competitive market in it and some consumers are willing to look past that. Doesnt make it acceptable.
Aurora isn't an app store. It is an unauthorized client for the Play Store.
Of course, I don't know if we can say that Apple's app store approval process filters out more or fewer security issues or malicious apps than F-Droid's vetting process does.
I don't really get this point. Internet service providers are all anti-competitive, but they're doing quite well, because there are no alternatives. When the iPhone was released, so so so many people immediately saw it as completely in another class above all previous phones, and there were no alternatives in the same class. (Obviously there were trade offs: I personally know quite a few Blackberry people who scoffed at the iPhones lack of physical keyboard.) Even barring all that, the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field was still going strong at that point. The iPhone was cool. (And at that point, there wasn't even an App Store, and no SDK for third parties to build apps.)
Most people don't realize that they're negatively impacted by anti-competitive behavior until it's too late. They've already bought into the ecosystem. Sometimes they don't even know things could be more innovative or cheaper or whatever, because they have nothing to compare it to. To revisit my ISP example, a simple reason I'm mad at Comcast's anti-competitive behavior is because I know it can be so much better, based on people I know who live in other places and have an order of magnitude faster internet connection for a fraction of the price. If I had no other examples that suggested that 1200/35 for $90/mo was a bad deal, I might think that was just how it had to be in order to provide the service.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. I agree that developers are unlikely to lower prices if the 30% fee is eliminated or reduced. But it seems reasonably likely that the next time they look into raising prices, they may raise them less, or decide not to raise them at all.
I do agree with the underlying point: prices are not set based on cost, but are set in line with what the market will pay. If the market will pay $10 when the developer has to pay a 30% fee, the market will still pay $10 if that fee disappears.
But still, consider that for many apps there's going to be a tension between what the market will pay, and the minimum the developer needs to keep the lights on. The developer might settle for a lower per-sale profit if they get a bunch more users that more than offsets the lower per-user revenue.
Let's say a developer sells at a $10 price point, which nets the developer $7 (after Apple's 30% cut), and that they need $6 to keep paying their other costs; they'll get $1 in profit after all is said and done. But maybe they can only make 100,000 sales at that price point, or $100,000. Kill the 30% fee, and they make $4 per sale, or $400,000. Great! Instant 4x profit! But maybe they'll be able to make 150,000 sales if the price were $9, which would give them $450,000 in profit. That's a compelling reason to drop prices. Or at least not raise them even when their other costs go up from $6 to $7.
Obviously these numbers are made up; maybe dropping the price to $9 only nets them an additional 5,000 sales, so it's not worth it. But we can't just flat-out say that no developer will do the math and decide that dropping prices can actually help them.
What absolute unsubstantiated nonsense.
At any rate, maybe try for some productive discussion rather than shallow dismissals?
If anything, they’re hurting developers, but even that may be hard to argue. Developers still flock to the platform.
Even if those developers can’t make a living doing that (and many likely can’t), that’s not an argument for Apple’s fee being too high. There’s no right to be able to make a living in the way you want.
You can always build your own phone and setup your own app store. Samsung does.
I generally agree with your point, but this is a weird argument: towns can and do ban big-box stores, and yes, "move to a different town" is exactly the only remedy people have, if they want to live close to those kinds of stores. And frankly we generally see that as a good thing! Big-box stores tend to kill downtowns.
> I've invested considerably money into the apple ecosystem.
This confuses your Walmart analogy quite a bit, because there's no such thing as "investing money into the Walmart ecosystem". Walmart doesn't have an ecosystem. If your Walmart closes down and other stores pop up to replace it, you just start shopping at those other stores, and likely don't really notice much of a difference.
And that's precisely the point of the issue with Apple. If I've been an iOS user for years and years, and suddenly Apple changes the terms to something I really don't like, it'll cost me a lot to switch to another platform.
In the Walmart case, you've bought your house. Presumably up until now you've mostly relied on Walmart to furnish it, and to buy groceries, etc., etc. Walmart disappears. Your existing furnishings are fine and still work. You can buy more furnishings at other stores, and they will work just fine in your existing house, with your existing furnishings. You can buy groceries at another store, and consume that food just fine in your existing house. Also consider that Walmart has online ordering and ships things; if you really want to continue to get some items from Walmart, you can still do so.
Sure, if you're unwilling to take the entirely reasonable step of finding alternatives to Walmart, I guess you'd have to sell your house and move to a town that still has a Walmart. But that's... a pretty ridiculous course of action to take, honestly.
And yeah, Google taking 30% as well also sucks. Just because Google does it, it doesn't mean it's fine Apple does too.
No, the opposite, it is evidence that Apple is a monopoly, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten away with taking 30% with no repercussions. It should have driven their profits to 0 in the appstore market since why would users pay such a massive markup for everything? But it didn't due to their anti-competitive measures.
> A company employing anticompetitive practices would drive those profits to zero
No, that isn't how it works, they weren't anti competitive towards other apps, just towards other app stores. Their massive tax on those apps is the result, you can still be profitable even with a massive tax.
Google, as evidenced by their own internal docs and company deals, had no interest in having any real competition for the Google Play store.
It’s really hard to see these deals when Google is the arbiter of android and anything but extremely anti competitive
What if they didn't just pay off, but forcefully forbid it, wouldn't it be anticompetitive? Basically, as Apple does on iOS.
I have no idea if iOS or Android is better (or maybe if iOS is actually worse on some basic level, but they can rely on the single store to reach parity).
But, their justification is at least plausible. Do I think they actually telling the truth? I think it at least is a case of financially motivated reasoning. But they haven’t completely given it away.
Google has by being willing to open up as long as some financial requirements are met.
Consider how many of those items apply to Google's behavior and how many apply to Apple's.
That Apple is the only way to get the hardware or software for their products (compare to getting Google software licensed on Samsung) is a very important distinction.
I personally don't think the distinction you point out should actually be important at all. The end result is an anti-competitive platform, and that's all that should matter.
If we go by the oft-used test of consumer harm, consumers get harmed in exactly the same way on both platforms, with higher prices (due to percentage fees that you can't opt out of) than if the market were more open.
Google is anticompetitive because they allowed users to install third party apps, but paid big players not to develop app stores.
But if they had just done what Apple does, and just ban third party installs all together, that'd be what? Hyper competitive and fair?
It absolutely pains me to see Google essentially punished for having the only phone platform that allows users to install their own apps.
I kinda get how it plays out that way in a legal sense, but it still baffles me that so many people can simultaneously support this ruling against Google and continue to praise Apple's practices. Cognitive dissonance (and the Jobsian RDF) is a thing.
They do. It's either Apple store or you go out of business, if you are developing a mobile app.
They don't. Apple is selling both the services and the hardware. They're not asking anyone to develop apps for them and no one is entitled to build an app store for their hardware.
But if I'm an Android phone manufacturer and Epic wanted to build an app stores for my devices, but I refused for no other reason than Google's money or pressure, there's a case for anti-competition. If Apple licensed iOS to other manufacturers, the same case would apply.
You are clearly missing the point on purpose. Imagine that all roads in the US belonged to Apple and you had to pay 30% of the cost of your goods to Apple for the privilege of transporting them.
This would be OK, because you'll still be able to walk or maybe even use rail transport.
Apple's ecosystem is _unavoidable_ if you are making mobile applications (not games). You HAVE to support iOS, or you'll go out of business. No alternatives.
Ultimately if you're a sizeable company that wants to operate in the US, and a mobile app is something you need to offer, you have to build one for iOS. If you don't, you'll fail.
I would say these days you aren't going to do quite as well if you don't also build an Android app, but you can probably get away with it in quite a few markets if you really didn't want to.
Heh, I remember when Instagram was iOS-only, and that was the case for... at least a year? More?
If you go this route, not all roads would have belonged to Apple. People would use Apple's roads because they're well built, the majority of cars are nice ones and drivers drive well because enforcement is harsh. Maintenance is usually done on schedule and if people want hassle free travel, it's the best choice even if they're boring and uniform.
There exists other roads for every (start, destination) pairs. But only the new ones are maintained. Drivers do whatever they want and even enforcement wants to stop at every turn. Sometimes you're not even sure what exactly are alongside you on the road.
Here you come trying to create a taxi service (But you did not build any road yourself) and both companies ask you for the same fee. But you know you can probably get your cars on Google's road and bypass the fee with some hassle. But Apple's won't let you do that. People has paid a high fee to get access to these road and they don't want random cars on it. But you know these people has money and you want some of it.
I could go on and on with this.
> Apple's ecosystem is _unavoidable_ if you are making mobile applications (not games).
If you're a business, why would you care for 30%? Apple is providing the whole SDK for free, and your users' platform is getting updates for free. You are not doing any of that. the 99$ yearly fee is peanut.
If you're building things for yourself, Apple has never advertise that iOS was something to tinker with.
Yes, some backwoods roads would belong to Android. Maybe around 30%.
> If you're a business, why would you care for 30%?
Because it's a lot. Apple is triple-dipping:
1. You have to pay for Apple computers.
2. You have to pay for the SDKs.
3. You have to give the MAFIA shakedown 30%.
There are good manufacturers for Android. But they're still unmatched in terms of services. In the above analogy, nice road, worse travel experience.
> Because it's a lot.
It's the cost of doing business with Apple, made clear to you since you begin. You just factor it in your offering.
> 1. You have to pay for Apple computers.
Because it's the tool for the job. No ones expect you to build a Windows App without a computer running Windows. The tools Apple provides only run on MacOS which only runs on Macs.
> 2. You have to pay for the SDKs
You don't. You're paying only for access to the distribution channel (base fee).
> You have to give the MAFIA shakedown 30%
Remember the tools and services above? If you're making business with Apple customers through Apple services, you're paying for it on a transaction basis.
Again, it doesn't matter if roads are nice. Or if your mafia thugs give you a handkerchief after they beat you bloody.
> It's the cost of doing business with Apple, made clear to you since you begin. You just factor it in your offering.
Just like mafia.
> No ones expect you to build a Windows App without a computer running Windows.
Can I buy macOS to run on my PC? No?
> You don't. You're paying only for access to the distribution channel (base fee).
Since you mentioned Windows, I can compile and distribute as many Windows applications as I want. Without paying a cent to MS.
> Remember the tools and services above? If you're making business with Apple customers through Apple services, you're paying for it on a transaction basis.
Again, like with mafia. But now on iPhone!
After all, without their generous service, you wouldn't be able to earn money. Right? What's that puny 30% of your income to you? It's really nothing!
Building a mobile app SDK and an app store is very much asking a lot of people to develop apps for them.
Certainly the definition of "success" differs depending on who you ask, but if we're talking about a player like Epic, they absolutely have to sell their app on the Apple app store. They absolutely should also sell on the Google Play Store, but it's still table stakes (at least in the US) to have an iOS app.
Apple on the other hand has tried very hard to make sure such perceptions of markets do not exist; for instance, the requirements they gave to Microsoft for shipping a game subscription service on iOS is that the games themselves had to be in Apple's App Store, pass App Store review, and take payments for DLC or currency via in-app purchase.
This is also IMO why Apple will never actually lock down macOS so that things are only available in the Mac App Store. Whether or not it is a good idea, they can't defend it legally.
I'm not sure why this should matter, though. I don't see why it's somehow better to use technical means to refuse to allow there to be a competitive market, than to use shady business deals to ensure a competitive market doesn't grow.
Google, as evidenced by their own internal documents put into record in this trial, was not interested in creating a platform where they had any real completion with the Google play store
Now finally some big guys are getting a sense of the issue with centralization. There can only be one government-ordained winner and it's not the one who plays fair and square who wins. It's usually the biggest political manipulator.
Google is in a weak position now due to the perceived risk of AI disrupting its business. When you show any weakness at all, the law starts working against you in the most blatant ways and it becomes self-fulfilling.
Just wait 10 or 20 years. Watch the system concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and people blame everything under the sun except the design of the system. I think the winner will probably be either Microsoft or Oracle because they are the most corrupt.
Seriously, does Microsoft or Oracle do anything useful these days? No, they just extort money from the government via overpriced proprietary software licenses, lock-ins and contracts obtained through corrupt practices. That's what winners do.
And while you have a bit of a point about Oracle being stagnant... Microsoft? They own and develop tons of things. Microsoft isn't just Windows and Office.
I don't think this will be uncovered because you need money to have a voice in this system and as this serves the bigger moneyed interests, anyone who has an incentive to cry foul will find that their cries fall on deaf ears. Also, PR firms will manufacture narratives to spin things to make the people who are complaining seem like a lunatics. They will also gaslight individuals who raise alarms to lower their confidence. In many cases, they can dig up dirt on whistleblowers and have them jailed. In some cases they can manufacture dirt on whilsleblowers (e.g. Julian Assange) to have them jailed to send a message to future whistleblowers. So they can hold the fort for a very long time.
These cases always goes like this. Jury awards 1 billion dollars etc. It always gets revised by the judge later on. Is this any different?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37731541#37732596
I don't want to be pithy and low-effort here. I'm confused on why Google lost while Apple won.
That being said, Apple isn't stupid: they probably know as of now, even if they managed to believe it didn't before, that this monopoly on distribution has a shelf life. So I'm interested to see how they expand iOS app distribution to counter the claims of monopolistic behavior in the future, not unlike the way Microsoft supported other browsers financially for years to stop the FTC suing them into the dirt over Internet Explorer.
I'm generally an Apple fan, and to be totally honest, if there was another app distribution system on iOS, I doubt I would touch it. I appreciate the baseline level of quality and curation in the App Store and have no desire to leave it. I see the low-effort dreck of the Play store by comparison as undesirable. That being said, I don't grudge anyone for pointing out Apple's position in that space is uncompetitive. It is. I have no interest in alternatives but that doesn't mean alternatives shouldn't exist.
I think rulings against these companies are warranted, but I want an end game where iPhone is closer to Android's best aspects, not where Android drops them to mimic iPhone's. Google could easily stop being as "anti-competitive" by not releasing another public update of Android again, launching a new "Pixel Play Store" available on Pixel, and putting all of their effort into this platform going forward. The world would be a worse place for this, and Google would likely make more services revenue. I have a feeling developers would abandon the other manufacturer's platforms in a microsecond. If Google's not allowed to have influence over the default search/apps installed on 3rd party android phones made by Samsung/HTC, why would Google even bother with the business? They only ran it to get more mobile search users into Google Search IMO.
I'm sure Google deserves to get smacked for the worst of their behavior but Apple walking away (for now) without a scratch is sending a stark message, at least to my eyes. You say Apple's time with this behavior is limited, and I can only hope you're right. Being positive, hopefully down the line, this case can be used as a wedge to peel Apple's grip open.
so simply being in the exact same position is not enough, the details of exactly how you navigate it are more important
with that in mind, Apple is still vulnerable based on their behavior, but its not a slam dunk by mere nature of being in the same position
for example, revenue splits were always high in app stores, they didnt jack them up higher and in fact have come down periodically as if there was competition, and the market still chose to use them. app stores have always had heavy handed selective moderation approaches, it didnt get worse its gotten better in some regards. makes it very hard to prove antitrust just because the market kept subjecting itself to these
This is one of those legal situations I really can't wrap my head around, though. The point is the situations are different enough it would have to be a different legal framework for Apple's situation, and a different day in court.
I think a ruling like this is good. We need more checks on Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
The next time someone sues Apple for this, there will be precedent. But then again, Epic Games v Apple might be used as precedent in Google’s appeal.
EDIT/correction: Apparently, only appellate and higher courts can set precedent for case law. So it might take a bit longer for Epic Games v Google to set a precedent, while Epic Games v Apple has already been dealt by a higher court. The next time someone sues Apple, there might not yet be precedent set by Epic Games v Google.
In theory. I’m not an expert on this. But this doesn’t happen as often in civil law countries I lived in (EU), where the law doesn’t apply before it’s written, and when it’s written, it applies universally.
Things will even out in the US over time, I think. There will be case law for what’s allowed and what is not for everyone.
Trial courts don't set precedent, only an appellate court or higher can set a precedent, and that precedent is only binding on lower courts.
Since trial courts are the lowest courts, their decisions are not binding on any future trial and as a general matter do not set any kind of precedent.
Epic Games v Google is going to appellate now, though, isn’t it?
Don’t fulminate, my brother, see comment guidelines on HN for more info. There’s need to act like this and your comment doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion.
Does yours?
I mean that in earnest, not as a dig. You're posting legal analysis without even rudimentary legal knowledge, and I think that's worth noting and responding to.
It's also worth noting you only admitted you were not an expert once your initial post was debunked, and that in your corrigendum you manage somehow to add many additional substantive legal claims. Without any apparent additional legal knowledge.
If you did the same on a programming topic, there'd be an army of people ready to downvote you, because most of the wonderful folks here on HN are versed in programming, and could easily see through that. But this doesn't hold true for law, and you're in a position to mislead. Noting that contributes to the discussion by helping a reader discriminate signal from noise.
No, that was in the original comment. I added only the paragraph prefixed with EDIT.
My friend, you are just picking a fight on the internet. You don’t actually know what the comment was and yet you say you do. Please do not.
Alternatively, please tell me how my comment is misleading now, if there truly exists an argument in your comment beyond an ad hominem. That would be more useful.
My respectful advice is that if you're not legally trained, but wish to write legal analysis, (1) pause and consider how useful this actually is to others, and (2) if you must continue, preface (!) your statement with a disclaimer that you're not legally trained.
Lawyers are trained that with knowledge comes responsibility - people tend to rely on what lawyers say, often in unanticipated ways. Not only does this often lead people to go off half-cocked, but it can have legal consequences for the person giving the advice (there's such a thing as negligent advice). Generally these laws apply equally to lawyers and non-lawyers, and simply because you don't have any legal training doesn't mean you're not giving 'legal advice', it just makes your advice all the more dangerous. It seems reasonably unlikely you'd be sued for negligent advice for random comments online (not impossible!), but you should reflect on the ethics of confidently leading people on, from a position of relative legal ignorance.
I realise you may not be receptive to what I am saying to you - you appear to have become somewhat defensive and might be perceiving my words as further attacks - but I'm genuinely not here to diss you, and I'm absolutely not looking for a fight. Perhaps my initial comment was a little glib, but not knowing what precedent is and giving legal advice is rather like not knowing what a variable is but nonetheless giving confident programming advice. Generally best avoided.
Similarly, a judge in one circuit may look to the decision of a different circuit court when their own circuit has yet to rule on an issue, even though a different circuit’s opinion does not bind them.
In this case, however, the issue was ultimately put before a jury which doesn’t produce the kind of written decision that other judges would look to when deciding similar cases.
Like you I was born and raised in civil law (France) and now have been living for 10 years in common law (Hong Kong), and the difference is almost invisible: Judges obey parliamentary decisions in both, whether you call that laws or constitutional amendment or even political pressure. They also ensure consistency of decision when needed but are ready to launch a little revolution if they feel society has changed (gay marriage in Hong Kong is in the air, for instance)
There was a sense in business circles in the latter that what is not legally a crime, one cannot be punished for. So there was a bit of a drive to exploit that for profit. If something becomes forbidden by law, it’s “verboten”. It cannot take place, no matter how ethical it might be.
It’s much less clear in common law countries, where you could be tried and be unable to defend yourself for immoral things. Or you could break the laws but have such a strong moral argument for it, it is possible to defend. So generally, people and business are more considerate of each other, less stone cold bureaucratic. But that invites ambiguity in the legal process, even if the ultimate forces shaping it are similar to civil law. And you can get different outcomes in similar cases, like Epic Games v Apple and Epic Games v Google. These cases started out very similarly.
In civil law countries, if something was prohibited by a code, then it would be penalized, there wouldn’t be much debate in the courts. I think this is why the EU keeps fining these large tech companies all the time, it’s like a non-event, whereas it’s much more difficult in the us.
That is what I observed. Of course, what you say is also true.
Note, US Supreme Court recently overturned 50 years of precedent of Roe vs. Wade.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608075
Apple has always been “here’s the rules, follow or go away”. Google was “we’re open!” except they kept undermining that.
That is legal according to the ruling on the Epic vs Apple trial.
Epic vs Google was decided by a jury and God only knows what they were thinking. (All jury notes, doodles, etc are destroyed afterwards).
I imagine the Supreme Court will probably rule on this case. I’m not looking forward to whatever boneheaded precedent they’ll set in the process.
The majority is also openly corrupt, and will throw whatever they want out the window the second they are paid to do so.
Edit: Also, this idea that they should clear legal debt is a massive expansion of their charter. The system works as follows:
- Congress writes laws
- If they are vague, the courts set precedents that are irreversible except in the case of dire errors.
- If congress doesn’t like a precedent they clarify the law.
The current court is violating separation of powers by retroactively going against the actions taken by the last 50-100 years of legislators.
For instance, congress had decades to amend the constitution to say the fourth amendment doesn’t imply a right to privacy or women’s reproductive health care (including abortion) as Roe v. Wade established.
The current court greatly overstepped their authority when they ruled there is no right to privacy or reproductive health care.
This isn’t a minor oversight that congress forgot to consider. This is the justices deciding they have been elected dictators for life.
The current court is not violating separation of power by overturning older laws. Your point about the court only overturning vague laws is completely false. The court exists as a check on Congress and the executive to hold them accountable to the texts which charter them. It is designed this way because overturning laws is far less harmful than upholding them. Government should do less, not more, and that is in our DNA as a country. The Supreme Court is acting as designed.
That's the most he can say? Pretty damn low bar to beat Apple's walled garden at 'openness'. Sheesh
With losing on EVERY point, there may not be a lot of room to appeal, as appeals rarely overturn findings of fact. But it will create delay.
Maybe we'll ultimately get some relief.
Then, with a level playing field we see if Google's Play Store can compete with other app stores, and whether Google can give Android a great app store management experience to end users.
Despite that, I'm still glad that Epic won this case, as I believe they're in the right. But just because I think they're in the right with this court case does not mean I think that they're "the good guy," nor that they're concerned with gamers. Epic clearly has their own agenda, and in this specific case it aligns with my own.
I suppose Epic is the smaller of the two, so relative to Google, maybe they are the underdog. But compared to me they're both "big dogs".
In general, I am in favor of breaking up monopolies and making smart phones and other devices more open so, on the surface, this seems like a good result.
However, it always feels weird to me on mobile since those devices were not really open and the maker always took their store cut. Epic knew this and got on those devices anyway, but then after Fortnite getting huge, wanted more of that mobile pie for themselves. That's sort of a generic take on mobile, as I haven't read through everything on this case.
I remember arguing with people for years about these cases.
The thing with the app store situations is that Epic/app developers only need to win a single time vs the app stores, whereas the app stores need to win every battle.
Either it will be through existing anti trust laws, or through new laws being created, or through the same thing happening in any major country in the world.
Because as soon as there is a single win, the whole app store system all crumbles and developers win.
I wonder what the excuse will be next over these app stores.
If you want to run a third-party app store, okay. But you have to play by Apple/Google's rules and standards.
Just like they have guidelines for their own store's apps, have the same guidelines for third-party stores. It puts the onus on third-party stores to make sure they're just as stringent as the parent store/platform. If you fail to be compliant per a specific set of rules (not ambiguous), your store gets booted.
If it's a purely a money concern, charge a "store developer" fee on an annual basis and tier it out based on number of sales/customers.
Defeats the purpose of third party app stores. The only reason I even have one installed (F-droid) is for apps that don't play by Google's rules and standards.
"Yes, you can have multiple app stores as long as they're all exactly the same."
I am not sure if you even posted on the right comment or if you even read the article.
This whole post is about how actually those rules are illegal and therefore we don't have to follow them.
The whole point is that actually we can use the law to force Google or Apple to change their rules, or forcibly allow developers to not follow them.
> your store gets booted.
If Google or Apple doesn't follow the law then they will be forced to do so by the government, and fined large amounts of money.
The rules of the US government overrule the rules of companies.
> If I ran Apple or Google (and was running with the "customer safety" angle):
I don't think you understand.
Your whole post is basically just saying "these are the rules".
Yes, those are the rules. But those rules can be illegal.
Just saying "yep. These are the rules" is a vacuous statement that is unrelated to the crux of the argument, which is that those rules can be illegal and the government can force Apple or Google to change them.
- Citing the current payment options open to most subscription services - How practically do these other options end up saving the 30% fees structure for end consumers and businesses - Explicit demonstrations of non-App Store purchases and restoration of ownership in games - How Apple enforces App Store review processes for apps with other payment options
If these are proven and turn out to be hurting competition and customers, that lawsuit might see an overturn. We'll have to see where it goes.
Epic accused apple of being a monopoly, and using its monopoly power to price gouge.
The judge in that case ruled that Apple's online store is akin to a physical store and physical stores have _for centuries_ charged monies to shelf products.
--
In the Epic vs Google case:
> that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive.
These two cases are not alike, not similar, and thus have dissimilar outcomes.
If Apple is not allowed to continue to charge for shelf space, then neither can walmart, Publix, or any other physical venue. That will never happen in the USA. Stores have centuries long tradition in charging vendors for shelf space to display and sell products.
Google was naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty. Google exhibited anti-competitive behavior in 4 different areas.
When Walmart charges for shelf space the supplier isn't completely out of business if they don't take the deal. They can go to a different store, settle for non-prime shelf space or sell direct to the public. Those options are just not available to app developers - for many categories of app, Apple is the only way to make a profit at all.
But, some things "blobs" mainly, are probably unavoidable.
Apple: no sideloading
Google: yes sideloading
Apple: no alternate app stores
Google: OS-native APIs for facilitating third-party app stores
Apple: no monopoly
Google: yes monopoly
Just wondering if I have this straight.
Edit-
> And it was all decided by a jury, unlike the Apple ruling.
Oh, OK.
Google will take this to SCOTUS, and their record there (The Author's Guild, Oracle) is pretty good. This is far from over.
Apple: iOS only on iPhone. No way to get one without the other.
Google: Android is open source and everyone can build their own hardware. Play Store is optional for manufacturers.
Wouldn't that make it less of a monopoly then?
You really do not want people paying to block competition from arising.
Or are you saying the iPhone app store has competition?
I have an Android device. If I can't find something in the Google store, can I go to the Apple store?
We can stretch the argument to say that a power company in Los Angeles competes fiercely with one in Miami, because if people don't like it in Los Angeles, they might go to Miami (and take some of their appliances with them to a power company there).
Thus power companies are not monopolies: people can move. Q.E.D.
I wish the title said Epic Win.
This is not a big deal. Multiple or alternative stores should be the norm, and celebrated.
I had my entire adsense account including all of my other games cancelled because it's against Google's terms of service to advertise on other people's content... well that's exactly Google's business model. Think about it?
Banned me for life too, if they want to crush people on the internet it's in their DNA and don't think they won't.
Meanwhile the people allowed to run internet ads are selling v iol e nce, pi lls, se gs, addictive gam bli ng games etc on my kids YouTube videos.
Good news for Epic.
Microsoft was convicted of having a Windows/Internet Explorer monopoly despite the existence of Netscape and the Mac.
I've had so many business ideas that I've killed at the idea stage because giving 30% of revenue to Apple or Google made it not viable.
Might be time to revisit them...
> I've had so many business ideas that I've killed at the idea stage because giving 30% of revenue to Apple or Google made it not viable.
> Might be time to revisit them...
name 3?
100% AWS uptime, at cost -> your competitor's price
10-15% AWS uptime -> your marginal costs
50-60% AWS uptime -> maximum price you can really charge while differentiating yourself on price
25-32% AWS uptime -> subtract your costs and google's cut from that maximum price
When you start factoring costs like customer acquisition, it starts getting very, very tight. 30% profit can make for a pretty healthy business, especially in businesses where your prices and costs can be predictably coupled. But a business with a 30% profit margin that has to pay 30% is a failed business.
How many successful “apps” do you know of? And most successful “services” that people access through the App Store don’t go through the App Store for payments
Not in terms of Apple pricing, which is what we discussed.
And since plenty of companies do have viable businesses on the App Store, doesn’t that say more about your business idea than anything else?
https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...
And what is the definition of nasty here? It's very subjective. Apple doesn't own the mobile market and are below 50% control of it so they are not really a monopoly. I'm also not sure how you can use anti-trust or anti-monopoly against them when they have been found again and again to not be a monopoly.
On Apple, I think the EU will do a better job as for better or worse there will be no "let us bring money to the country" defense like the last time.
https://ia804506.us.archive.org/10/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
"The hypothetical possibility of competition" is definitely not enough to conclude that something is not a monopoly in any legal sense. A monopoly doesn't require 100% control of the market, nor is owning 100% of a market illegal.
> by simple logic you prove that Google does not impede competition
Again, "the hypothetical possibility of competition" does not mean Google isn't impeding things. In fact, the case established quite the opposite:
---
Unlawful Restraint of Trade (Sherman Act Section 1 and California State Law) Question No. 6:
Did Epic prove, by a preponderance of the evidence and in accordance with the instructions given to you, that Google entered into one or more agreements that unreasonably restrained trade in a relevant antitrust market?
Jury answered: YES
Question No. 7:
If you answered “yes” to Question 6, which of these agreements did you find to be unreasonable restraint(s) of trade in accordance with the instructions given to you?
x DDA agreements
x Agreements with Google’s alleged competitors or potential competitors under Project Hug or Games Velocity Program
x Agreements with OEMs that sell mobile devices (including MADA and RSA agreements)
Jury answered: ALL OF THE ABOVE
All this is beside the point, because if Epic wants to overturn the ruling in Epic v. Apple, they would (and have) appeal that case. These 2 cases are not the same, and it's entirely possible they end up winning one and losing the other.
We already run untrusted executable code in the form of JavaScript.
Why does the android system need to be different? Why can’t we say the OS needs sandboxing, api permissions, etc.
I really don’t want the only thing protecting my phone being the fact that a human sometimes reviews an app.
except the stakes are much higher on your phone than your 1998 computer because your phone is more powerful: your phone has more personal data, financial info, and can consume costly telecom resources
Why aren’t we seeing this scale of attacks using JavaScript?
Native apps were designed to be powerful-by-default, and the amount of effort to bolt security on after the fact is orders of magnitude more
It absolutely wasn't, lol?
At least, Apple please support PWA.
I for one would welcome a mobile store from Valve, Epic etc, especially if I could have my purchases work on multiple mobile platforms.
I saw plenty of people who never installed anything because it was PITA.
There’s a reason the App Store revolutionized things.
My mom searched for a printer driver and ended up installing some third party crap wars on her computer
I've said it before, I'll say it again, as many times as people need to hear it: There is no such thing as, "I'm just not a computer person!" We're over and done with that era of human history. Just like we're over and done with, "I just can't read and write!" Too bad. You live in a world were reading and writing is required just to exist. It's been that way for about 100 years, give or take depending on who you ask.
Now you need to have basic understanding of computers and the Internet. That's the world we're living in now.
Should we ban cars since there are people who cannot drive?
The point is that if you are the owner of the device you get to choose what to do with it, not Google. If the trade off for that freedom is an increased risk of malware then so be it. The people that want to only use the Google Play store as their source of software are free to do so, that's the beauty of your device being /your/ device.
I’ve also known since then that if I wanted an open device, I bought one and not complained about a device that I knew going in that I couldn’t program.
The point is that this isn't 1986 anymore and when everyone's devices are locked down it prevents competition because there's no distribution method for homebrew software. If there was no ability to install custom OSs on IBM and IBM-compatible machines we wouldn't have Linux. And if Microsoft was the gatekeeper of what websites could be displayed on IE in the 90s we wouldn't have the web in the form we know it today. So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?
I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.
There is very much a choice of homebrew applications - buy one of the “few” devices you admitted existed and develop for it.
You could even buy one of the Linux phones.
> So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?
The “average” person decided that they didn’t care about obtaining homebrew applications enough to buy such a device.
> I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.
And you are free to make that trade off and buy such a device.
Your view seems to be that the free market will solve all ills then and that if this was really something so important then the average consumer would care about it and change the situation. However, 100+ years of anti-trust laws would disagree with this position. It should be fairly obvious that building a new mobile ecosystem would require an insane amount of investment to the point that it's essentially impossible now. As such, the conclusion that "everyone who cares can just buy a Linux phone" is not a viable solution as it's not feasible for a competitor trying to do that to survive long enough in the industry before being run into the ground due to the anti-competitive behavior of Apple and Google locking everyone else out of access to their operating system's users outside of their formal, approved channels.
If we relied on the average person to act in the interest of ensuring viable competition can enter a market we'd be living in the world of the early 1900s with completely vertically and horizontally integrated Standard Oil type corporations controlling every industry. Not that we're too far off from that currently unfortunately, but your view of letting the free market control who has adequate access to potential marketshare in a given industry is incredibly naive and illustrates the exact reason why we need anti-trust laws in the first place and enforcement of those laws. That's all I have to say on the matter.
Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?
God I hope so.
They would not be able to recover their costs early enough in the lifecycle. Which means that the time between console releases would be much longer than it already is.
It also would put Nintendo in an untenable situation since they rely on low price hardware as their differentiation.
At this point consoles have very few advantages to PC. If they got "opened up" it would be zero.
Because Acer, Asus etc could simply come along and undercut them on price and still have access to the exact same game catalog. And then they would each decide to add more proprietary features or add more performance.
And so you've just recreated the PC gaming market again.
What's the issue with that?
Developers certainly have no problem making PC games.
Can you say the same about buying any PC? Will that be true for any game you buy for the next five years?
That will be a much better experience for me as a consumer.
There is no need to open up consoles. You don’t have to buy them. The PC is incredibly healthy as a gaming platform.
Please let people like me who want to gaming appliance have it without screwing it up.
Besides, even if someone somehow forced, say, PlayStation to be cross-compatible with other platforms for some reason - it's not like the issues you described are exactly plaguing PCs nowadays. With very rare exceptions (like ancient or heavily modded games), the experience is pretty much "Press 'Play' on your launcher of choice -> Play game".
How is a market with three competitors, four if you count PCs and even more if you count phones “a monopoly”?
Btw, the judge in the Apple case said that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in game distribution
That would all disappear if you could side-load any content.
It's the fact that Nintendo, Sony etc wouldn't be able to enforce any licensing revenue since users could just install any game directly.
For Nintendo it would decimate the company since it's their primary revenue stream.
I think the benefit of being in the Nintendo store is far higher than that, and they'd do fine. And they have lots of first party games too.
Random sideloaded games are just irrelevant when people are buying the systems for Zelda and Pokemon.
Nintendo charges 30% on the sale of every game sold.
Looking at the current best sellers [1] they would stand to lose a significant amount of money.
Easily in the billions based on current revenue.
[1] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/best-sellers/#sort=d...
Well, that certainly will bode well for the future.
https://www.wired.com/story/jury-will-decide-if-googles-play...
Google, on the other hand, just got pilloried because they are not the phone manufacturer (for the most post), but instead were using their position as the producers of android to pressure phone manufacturers and companies to not compete. Their own internal docs showed the extreme lengths they were willing to go to stop companies from producing third party apps stores. It was this stifling of completion that just got them reamed by the court
It's quite literally impossible for apple to be do the same, because they've banned installing apps at all on their platform. Clearly the right move for Google would have been to do the same 15 years ago and saved themselves the headache.
Apple doesn’t really make these deals, so they weren’t punished for that.
If it was revealed that Sony gave Epic a special marketing deal to prevent Epic from launching a console, then yeah that would be pretty dodgy!
If they left it alone and all OEMs chose to keep Google play store and billing, nothing would’ve happened.
I know for sure that if it were possible to sideload software onto my Switch or PS5, that would definitely benefit me as a consumer. The fact that I have a reasonably powerful computer attached to my TV but can't install software on it without convincing Sony to sell me a janky dev kit for way too much money is just wasteful.
Just about the only objection I can imagine is "piracy", but the locked-down nature of these platforms has surely not stopped piracy from occurring. Nor has piracy caused the failure of Valve's game store or the downfall of their gaming hardware.
You need a new law to say that.
Google got in trouble for saying that you could do something and then secretly undermining it. Whether or not third-party app stores were allowed on devices was not the core issue.
I suspect they'll end up ruling in favor of Epic, in some limited fashion. But let's see!
a) Apple, Google etc could just refuse to host any apps that are being sold on other stores. This sort of exclusivity is common place and legal.
b) Larger developers who have their own agendas like Epic and their metaverse will run their own stores.
c) Everyone else will stay with Apple/Google. The costs of running a third party store are significant and ultimately developers or consumers will need to pay for it. So either end users or developers will end up having to pay more for an experience that is far worse than what they have today. And if a) ends up true then developers would lose their biggest distribution channel.
They just want to get to be the middleman instead of Apple/Google.
This seems like an enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing… be very careful supporting them. They’re not a paragon of virtue.
The stores can be the exact same with the fees removed and device prices hiked, afaict
You can also download apps from the "f droid" depository.
You can even turn on developer options and install raw apk files. Those can contain viruses. (Or more probably: are pirated)
Funny to have this discussion hacker news? I thought everyone was using side loaded apks from apkmirror when you needed an old version.
The outcome of this trial should be that ALL Google Play Android APIs are public and documented and that Google be disallowed for a period of say 10 years from developing any new Play Store features on APIs that are not part of that public set. Want to add something to the Play Store, the API is public at or before launch.
Even playing field for app stores. Plain and simple.
Then it's up to Google to make picking and changing and removing app stores and all of that a super awesome experience that keeps users safe and in control, just like any good OS vendor would. It's also up to Google to have a competitive app store in Google Play. There's plenty of room for competition there and I'll wager that 30% cut will be one of the first things to take a hit.
Huh. That is literally the first time I heard a statement like this.
you got to take things in context, the current market for mobile OSes is a duopoly shared between apple and Google, there were two cases against each of them, but the outcome for each one them was different.
One verdict was that apple get to stay the dictator in its fiefdom and the other, more open platform got punished for trying to do the exact same thing.
What every company will take away from this is that, they either got to go full throttle on the control or no throttle at all.
Guess which side the companies like when given an ultimatum between theses 2 choices?
Is it possible for someone to make a better store than Google ? sure, I don't think any one is arguing that.
This will only lead to more fragmentation and a loss for incentive to improve the platform, guess it may join the graveyard in 10 years?
Can someone explain why Google lost despite android having all sorts of way to install apps while bypassing the play store?
Probably will get at least one outlier with different 10 judges, too.
No, it's not.
It's chosen at random, and they have a chance to rule out people they think would be biased - and you can't just toss anyone for any reason.
It's not like Google can toss anyone they see playing a game or using an iPhone or something.
And it's definitely not like Google gets to pick 6 Google groupies and Epic picks 6 Epic groupies to be on the jury.
Maybe I worded my comment poorly but the point still stands.
That a jury trial would decide in favor of consumer choice & be anti-monopoly quite reciprocally mirrors that strong anti-trust feeling Americans very widely feel, but which their government won't do.
There wasn't much evidence in the Apple case that Apple was explicitly taking action to disadvantage or harm third-parties, and there was even less evidence that Apple utilized their economic power to ensure their dominance.
If anything, the evidence in the Apple case showed that Apple treated all developers with relative parity.
The evidence in Google's case showed that leadership was so paranoid about a third-party store rising to prominence, since the platform technically allowed it, they were constantly wheeling and dealing to suppress competition.
Google essentially wanted to have their cake (side loading is fine! Android is open!) while eating it too (The Play Store dominates).
And they accomplished this by spending a lot of money, and giving certain developers better deals than others, etc.
Basically as long as you strip away your users rights equally, you're fine. Not exactly great news for future tech...
> But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case. It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down. It showed that Google was running scared of Epic specifically. And it was all decided by a jury, unlike the Apple ruling.
Android being open actually made its own point of being "an OS with other products [app stores] running on top of it".
As someone else said: Google wants to make big loud claims about android being "open" but also wants to prevent anyone from competing with them.
Unless every single existing android vendor stops making phones, the result is more actual competition.
To me what is open about the android platform is that it's used (and even customised) by multiple vendors.
If they stop promising to allow anything beyond the Play store, you can't sue them for breaking the promise.
> continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"
It seems quite unlikely that vendors like Samsung would just give up on their customisations.
Anyway, yes Samsung could do that, but do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?
Let's assume Google will still allow UI customizations. So Samsung can keep 75% of their work either way, the choice is between the remaining 25% or access to the Google ecosystem.
Part of what makes Android "open" is that it's available to other hardware vendors to use.
> do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?
I don't know - Google seem pretty happy to put a YouTube app on the iPhone, where they have zero control over the App Store, and the reason is obvious: for everything they start, and eventually abandon, eyeballs are Google's primary business metric. Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?
Restricting the play store is one thing, I doubt it's even a drop in the bucket for Google profits, and it obviously gives them some degree of control.
I don't see them playing so fast and loose with the ability to view YouTube. It's like suggesting they would block access to Google search for non-Google "android" devices. The whole reason Android exists is to drive more eyeballs to Google services.
> Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?
When it's specifically about forking Android, and looking at how badly they've been pushing things behind closed doors, I think they'd play pretty hard ball.
Nobody's making a third party app store on iOS because apple says "we allow it" so nobody's harmed when apple requires exclusivity to exist on their App Store.
If this ruling is about helping them, then that makes the outlook even worse for consumers.
This isn't Google being "punished for being more open" it's punishing them for claiming to be open and then doing a heap of hidden deals to prevent competition.
That alone should tell any sane person which platform was 'worse'. It's absolutely wild and a failing of our legal system somewhere that the company with the worst effect actually won their own case.
Another company made claims about their platform (both to end users and to business partners) being "open" and then acted directly counter to those claims, in efforts to prevent competition.
I’ve got news for you - AWS also cut special deals with AWS, Spotify with GCP and OpenAI with Azure.
Do you really think large comoanirs get the same deals as the creator of random Indy app maker?
There has never been a law that a company has to make the same deals with everyone
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/judge-google-deleted-cha...
We all know from the personal computer how it should be. Apple and Google are on borrowed time.
So if we define a similar market of 'ios apps', where there's literally 1 single choice of app store, how exactly is that not anticompetitive?
Apple didn’t force anyone else to install their App Store. That’s where Google differs and what Epic proved they did. They can’t prove Apple did anything like that since Apple doesn’t offer iOS to anyone else.
So they're being punished FOR allowing choice?
the facts are different between apple and google
Apple is very much considered here.
“Court System” is very contextual: the Texas Supreme Court just blocked a woman getting an abortion for a non-viable pregnancy.
It's inventory, delivery, and to an extent stewardship. The same with Steam. I don't expect junk and I expect refunds when I find it. Once you split that to a vendor the perverse incentives kick in and you end up right back in the Bad Place.
I personally think somewhere in the neighborhood of 18% is probably closer to sustainable, given all that we expect. And I also think Apple fucked up. If they had voluntarily reduced their fees and created the intro level at the same time, and a year or so earlier, they could have picked a higher number than they are likely now to end up with when all is said and done.
I meant the Hidden Notification Entitlement. By default iOS requires you to display a notification when you receive one.
But that conflicts with the idea of encrypting notifications. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38545984
That said, if I could not pay both Steam and Apple for Civ VI DLC, that would make me so happy
Not exactly. That would be a purely progressive tax like US income taxes. With the Small Business Program, what you say is only true the first time you cross 1 mil. Assuming your revenue never goes down (you can appeal if it does), in all future years you pay the full price. So if your app makes a consistent $1.5 mil / year, you’re paying the full tax on all of that revenue, not just $.5 of it.
The original filing said "It is also Dr. Karsan’s good faith belief and medical recommendation that that the Emergent Medical Condition Exception to Texas’s abortion bans and laws permits an abortion in Ms. Cox’s circumstances, as Ms. Cox has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from her current pregnancy that places her at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of her reproductive functions if a D&E abortion is not performed. Dr. Karsan is unsure how close to death her patients need to be before abortion is permitted under Texas law. As has been the case with prior patients over the last two years, Dr. Karsan is unsure if Ms. Cox’s current medical condition counts as close enough to death under Texas law for the Emergent Medical Condition Exception to apply." (clauses 139,140)
The Texas Supreme Court said "The pleadings state that Ms. Cox's doctor believes Ms. Cox qualifies for an abortion based on the medical-necessity exception. But when she sued seeking a court's pre-authorization, Dr. Karsan did not assert that Ms. Cox has a 'life-threatening physical condition' or that, in Dr. Karsan's reasonable medical judgement, an abortion is necessary because Ms. Cox has the type of condition the exception requires."
In short, the court decided that Dr. Karsan described the statute, and that Dr. Karsan stated that the statute applied, but Dr. Karsan did not actually say "the patient had a life-threatening physical condition," but only that the patient WOULD have a life-threatening condition if an abortion were not performed. Or at least that's probably the argument; it's not explained very well. Therefore, the Court cannot not rule on whether the abortion is legal or not. After all, only a doctor could make that determination, not a court (you can read the smirk).
Truly an amazing decision, and if there's an award in Hell for achievements in pedantry, that court would have a real shot. Sadly, the Court would probably be disqualified for such an award as they technically lied (Dr. Karsan did in fact say "Ms. Cox has a life-threatening physical condition"), and one presumes Hell's Pedantry Awards interpret such rules quite strictly.
Numbers 5 gives a process for distilling a “bitter water” and circumstance under which to induce an abortion with said water.
In case you’re curious it’s simply if a husband has “a jealousy” and fear that his wife has “laid with another man.”
In other words reincarnation.
In a way we were set up before birth as said by Jeremiah above, because our DNA existed before we became the fertilized egg. Our DNA was in two parts which were then combined by the act of conception.
As a practical matter, they know that many women won't realize they're pregnant until it's too late to feasibly schedule the procedure. They're minimizing the number of abortions while moving what the American public sees as reasonable from 24 weeks to 6. Once everyone's used to six, they can reduce it even more.
I grew up in an ultra conservative religious community, and as a kid, stuffed envelopes for a pro-life candidate’s campaign without fully understanding what it was I was doing, because I was a kid. I’ve seen the mindset up close, and it’s very worrisome.
Do think it’s ultimately short sighted because of the likely pendulum swing. But there is certainly a lot of damage to be done before that happens.
These ultra religious groups provide a sense of community, and the highly restrictive rules and policies they espouse give them a sense of control - something that many of them have lost in various ways. It’s as sad as it is dangerous.
Looking at data from 2022, about 13.6% of the population is White Evangelical Protestant, but that's been on the decline. It was around 25% a couple decades ago. Overall, just over half of the country is Christian, most being Protestant of some denomination.
But it's the White Evangelical Protestants that are the big driver here. You might think it's the 12.6% White Catholic and the 8.6% Hispanic Catholic populations that are the most fervently anti-abortion, but most actually vote for more liberal politicians.
The thing is, Evangelicals, if I understand correctly, weren't even that anti-abortion to begin with. That was seen as more of a Catholic issue historically. But what they're very big on is the idea that 1) America is the greatest country in the world, and 2) America is great because it's a Christian country. As such, they feel it's important to elect Christian leaders who feel and think like they do. And because they are predominantly white and their leadership is exclusively male, they want white men to be in control. (And I say this as a white, cisgender man.)
Because they've always been such a large percentage of the US population, and, more recently, because US distracting gives rural voters a greater voice than urban voters, they've been a large political force in the country since the 19th century, but in the 20th century, they were never so large as to completely dominate US politics. And this kinda worked well for both sides in the early 20th, since towns, counties, and states dominated by Evangelicals were largely autonomous enough to do whatever they wanted locally. But when desegregation came, and women entered the workforce in greater numbers, Evangelicals were forced to accept nonwhites and women holding important positions, even in their areas of the country.
Abortion became an issue they could use to gain support from Catholic voters, and as a wedge issue for the larger community. For Evangelicals, it was less about writing specific religious creeds into law, and more about forming strategies to gain political power so they could put the "right people" in back in charge of the country. It also helps reinforce that men are in control by removing autonomy from women.
https://www.prri.org/spotlight/prri-2022-american-values-atl...
If you can make people believe that you can make them believe anything.
That's their goal, make critical thinking unpopular, condemnable and "sinful".
That is an interesting question which may have something to do with Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma. Even though Republicans as a whole will lose votes because of this, each individual Republican candidate will stand to gain an advantage over their primaries rivals by being perceived as more uncompromising, more principled.
And it is curious if not silly, 6 weeks is seen as, conceived to be "more principled", than 7 weeks.
One way to look at it is that killing millions of people is NOT morally equivalent to killing 1 person. Is it?
Similarly killing 100 cells of a just fertilized egg is not morally equivalent to killing a born person with 30 trillion cells.
Time limits can be a pragmatic and tested solution. I think most European countries use 12 to 15 weeks.
But if you want a shorter time-limit you should give a good rationale for it. Why you want it 6 weeks but not 1 week?
Whereas those who didn't propose any change to Roe vs. Wade do not really need a reason for NOT making a change. There must be a reason when we make or try to make a change.
I'd laugh, if it wasn't a situation with so much real harm to real people.
* Google started out pure good and turned pure evil.
* Amazon started out mostly decent and turned mostly sleazy.
* Apple started out sort of in the middle and stated there.
"Middle" for Apple includes extremes in both directions. They do some pretty bad things with DRM, locking down devices, anti-repair, government corruption. They do some very good things with privacy, security, long-term support, and similar.
If it's a specific litigation (Epic v. Apple), courts are random. Very random. Legal processes have little grounding in any sort of objective anything, and kind of resemble a chaotic die roll.
It's probably this that GP is confused over
It's addressed, if not in this article, then others - the Apple trial wasn't a jury trial. Google lost the motion to not have a jury trial
But of course there are plenty of HN users from outside the US. Another quick search suggests Android is around 66% in Europe, and iOS is only at 33%. Asia is ever more tilted toward Android, at 79% to 20%.
Even then, that assumes HN users' mobile OS preference mirrors that of the country/continent they are from, which feels a little unlikely to me; my gut feeling is that HN users to prefer Android at a greater rate (even if by not that much) than the rest of the people where they live.
But let's go back to assuming that HN's readership mirrors the mobile OS market share from country/continent they're from. It's not hard to drop that US 58% iOS number below 50% by subtracting US users from the total and adding users from literally anywhere else, where iOS usage is much lower.
Regardless, though, I think even if somehow the iOS numbers are still higher than the Android numbers, I think it's probably not that case that obviously everyone who uses an iPhone would side with Apple in this matter. Many/most would, but still likely not enough for it to be accurate to say that more than 50% of HN are a bunch of Apple apologists who will side with them in a legal matter and against Google in the exact same legal matter.
"The court system" is not a collective entity with a shared set of thoughts. Different judges, different arguments, in one case (but not the other) a jury, these things make a difference.
The appellate process and the system of binding precedent goes with it serves to somewhat make things more consistent overall than individual trial court processes would when considered over a longer time and a larger number of cases, but cases very close in time ending up with different trial court decisions despite broadly similar fact patterns are not really surprising.
Lots of things that are legal/illegal are only so because they haven't been tested in court. Precedents are also specific and sometimes the details of a case make it different enough that the precedent does not apply.
I literally described how that impacts things: "The appellate process and the system of binding precedent goes with it serves to somewhat make things more consistent overall than individual trial court processes would when considered over a longer time and a larger number of cases".
Lookup "jury nullification" if you're curious to learn more about juries giving arbitrary decisions.
Nullification only applies to criminal cases (the discussion here is about civil, not criminal, law) and only in one direction. Lookup "directed verdict of acquittal", "judgement as a matter of law", and "judgement non obstante veredicto".
I think what loaph is saying is that a jury, when making a decision, can make any decision it wants, without consequences (except in exceptional cases, e.g. jury tampering).
The jury might never get to actually make a decision, and a guilty verdict can be overruled by a judgment notwithstanding the verdict (or as a result of an appeal, etc.), but legally, when a jury has made a decision, they can't be punished for making it, even if they were unreasonable in reaching that verdict.
I wanted to point out that juries can make arbitrary decisions, nullification being a kind of example of this.
I dunno, the fact that precedent is only binding when it is from a higher appellate court to a court subordinate to that appellate court isn't what I'd describe as "funny", just rather sensible.
> Thus precedents mean nothing
Not that I've seen any inconsistent legal ruling offered between the two cases. The fact that the broad outline of the case is similar doesn't mean the decisive legal questions are, but, yes, precedent from a trial court decision isn't binding (same or different court), only, at best, persuasive, and then only if it is a citable (published) decision in the first place, which most trial court decisions are not.
> Jury is free to give arbitrary decisions.
Well, no, the jury is "free" to give answers that the trial judge finds to be reasonably supported by the evidence to the questions the trial judge poses to the jury.
And that's not directly affected by precedent anyway, precedent only governs questions of law, not fact, and juries don't answer questions of law, only fact.
Your derision is misdirected. It's literally what the court case was about.
Regardless, at this point you're arguing against the court here. Google lost; they have a monopoly on Android app distribution. Maybe that'll get overturned on appeal, but I hope not.
Google still has the content of all of my email. Well, I guess except for the transactional stuff that comes from automated sources.
At some point in the last decade, large newspapers saw their local ad monopolies being disrupted by Google search ads so as the lost ad revenue they started running negative headlines on Google left and right for years. Apple also took advantage of this and portrayed themselves as the saviors of privacy. That created a negative perception of Google and a positive one for Apple affecting the society as a whole including HNers and these random sample (jury).
Why stop there? Smart TV manufacturers? Cars?
Since you brought up the TV analogy - how would you feel about being forced to pay a Samsung tax every time you buy new groceries for your Smart Fridge? That's basically what Apple does. So they can, respectfully, get fucked.
People have agency to buy devices that meet their needs and desires, yet they purposefully buy devices that are on average twice as expensive than the literally hundreds of alternatives and then complain.
Why if you wanted to sideload wouldn’t you buy an Android phone? Why buy a game console and complain about it being locked down instead of just buying a gaming PC?
Okay this is one of the worst strawman arguments I've ever seen. Surely the closest ios comparison to an android phone isn't AirPods. Maybe the iPhone?
Would you also buy a moped and complain that you couldn’t tow your fishing boat with it?
It's like living in a place where solar panels are illegal to install and you're suggesting to move house. How about we remove silly restrictions?
And have you actually paid attention to the trade off of “openness” on PCs? Viruses, malware, ransomware, etc?
And regulatory agencies and car manufacturers are never going to let you install what you want on car screens.
It's nearly impossible to do certain things without a cell phone nowadays. For example, without a cell phone I literally can't pay for electricity or heating on my apartment.
I dislike both Android and iOS. But there's no option. I picked the lesser of two evils out of necessity.
Anyone can decipher what the difference are?
I think smartphones should be more like PCs.