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Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

The Google monopoly seems way worst and straightforward to me. Why it isn’t addressed first and why does everyone seemingly ignore them and obsess with Apple is a mystery to me.

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It has been already pursued and is being addressed. There's just a lot less divisiveness/attention in such cases:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

https://apnews.com/article/google-android-play-store-apps-an...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-wraps-up-antitrust-case-aga...

Note in some of these were chased even though Google has been less restrictive than Apple (e.g. on the Play Store payment case Google has always allowed 3rd party app stores on Android).

It's just incomparable.

Sms - android choose 100 apps that can deal with SMS, iOS - one app, no one else can touch SMS

Phone - same

Wallet - any app can be a payment wallet, my own bank, privat24 has this functionality - iOS, only Apple can use NFC

Photos - only iCloud can sync them

The list goes on

But you can still buy an Android phone, iOS is only around 65% in the US (way less in the rest of the world btw). Compare with Google with the Chrome platform (> 90%) and Search engine (> 90%). Try being a web dev without Chrome or a web business without Google, way harder than having an Android phone (like the rest of the world do btw). Apple abusing its power is one thing, but Google has a way bigger monopoly.

But what about ism isn't a solution, the problems above still exist, they exist for 65% of Americans, who thought they were buying a general purpose phone, but actually are buying a device for running apple software.

The downsides to the apple monopoly are much more straightforward. "Apples iMessage policy lead to this kid being bullied and because of that they did x" is a much easier sell than whatever sound bite you can come up with about google.

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