Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> When your work poses a risk to the bottom line of another company, they have every right to be protective and implement the policies they feel will bring in more customers and money.

The issue is when that interacts with this:

> I do believe Apple is anti competitive in the US due to this

For two reasons. First, if the flea market is being unreasonable, you can just flip them off and go set up your stall in a less unreasonable flea market. Whereas if it's Apple, you have to find a way to get a working account with them or you're done.

And second, because of that, it allows them to be unreasonable because the developers have no other options, whereas normally the different stores would be competing with each other for both suppliers and customers.

But it's not that different with Google, because of this:

> People want to be on the Play Store and not FDroid or the many others because that's where the customers are

And specifically because of why that is the case.

Why are all the customers on Google Play? There many companies in a good position to create a competing store. Major retailers like Walmart and Amazon already have your payment information, already have a system for vetting third party sellers, how come they don't have Android stores as popular as Google's? Shouldn't Paypal be in a good position to put up a store where you can buy apps via a URL to the developer's site? Where are these things?

It turns out Google suppresses them in various ways. Notice how there are zero major Android OEMs who ship a preinstalled third party store that isn't their own. Normally that sort of thing is like free money. OEM gets like $1/device from each of Walmart and Amazon just to put their store on the home screen. But that's nowhere. Weird, right?

Alternate stores in theory is not the same as viable alternate stores in practice.

So to reiterate, the problem is not that they can boot you out for arbitrary reasons, it's that they can boot you out for arbitrary reasons and then you have no viable alternatives. Then innocent people reasonably try to create a new account or do whatever they have to do given the circumstances.

Back to the flea market example, if that's the only market available, you can either abide by their policies or not, if not you can't sell.

The fact that Apple has made itself the only market available is what makes it anti-competitive. Even then you could argue that's what you bought on to when you opted into their currated ecosystem.

Apple and Google's customer reach is a direct result of them footing the effort to create a store and relationship with OEMs and currating the store in a way that works for the customers that use it.

If Google hadn't tightened the rope on the Play Store polices, it'd be a mess, just like it used to be and like some 3rd party stores are, not user friendly and full of low quality or malicious apps.

This doesn't change the core of the argument. Companies and customers have their free will. If a company doesn't serve quality products in their store, customers will leave, if they make their store too painful for other companies to host in, so will they. If you agree to a contract and don't follow that contract and get booted, that's in your.

If you want reach into Apple's customers, you have to buy in to the whole deal, doesn't make them right for being the only store for their ecosystem, but doesn't make you right for giving them the bird and crying foul when you violate the policies agreed upon.

I won't buy the argument for Android you're throwing out there. Publish to another store of you don't like the Play Store, I do. Google's store is their customers, and their customers to make policies to protect from bad apps. If another store was better, people would use it readily, and they have the open option to. That's why FDroid exists, don't like closed software, well it doesn't exist there, and the customer made that wants it uses it.

Bottom line, you sign a contract and agree to the policies, don't cry foul when you get bit for violating it, like anything else. You put yourself and your company at risk by not reading and understanding what you agreed to.

> Even then you could argue that's what you bought on to when you opted into their currated ecosystem.

The developers haven't opted into anything, that choice is made by the device customer who is a different party. It's like there being a monopoly on retail stores in California. Even if the supplier moves their own operations to Colorado or Japan, they still have customers in California. Meanwhile their customers may be unwilling to move to Japan for reasons entirely unrelated to retail stores.

> If Google hadn't tightened the rope on the Play Store polices, it'd be a mess, just like it used to be and like some 3rd party stores are, not user friendly and full of low quality or malicious apps.

But this is exactly how they should be getting people to want to use their store, both in terms of false positives and false negatives. By having the best store that has what people want and not what they don't, not by suppressing alternative stores.

> Publish to another store of you don't like the Play Store, I do.

Then you have to forego the majority of the market, which is unreasonable. You don't have to do this with ordinary retail stores; if you don't want to sell through Target then the same customers can buy your product from Walmart or Amazon without having to move house to somewhere that Target doesn't have a dominant market position.

> If another store was better, people would use it readily, and they have the open option to.

App stores have a network effect. It takes effort on the part of a developer to get an app into a store, which they won't do if the store has no users. Users have no reason to install a store with no apps. For traditional stores this would be solved by the store paying to have it preinstalled on a lot of devices, and then developers would target the store because it has a large user base, but this is the thing Google suppresses.

F-Droid exists because enough free software people are purists to pay the cost of creating the store with no intention of ever recovering the investment from fees, and then the operators of the store themselves can add any open source Android apps that exist even before the point that it's worth any app developer's time to bother with the store, so F-Droid exists and has apps. But it still isn't preinstalled on anything, and only allows open source apps. And then that is the most popular alternate store on Android -- which then provides no competition to Google Play as a general purpose store, e.g. as something that would charge a lower cut for paid apps or provide an alternate distribution channel for the bulk of apps which are closed source, so Google has no need to suppress it and can point to it as "competition" even though it's only serving a specific niche.

> Bottom line, you sign a contract and agree to the policies, don't cry foul when you get bit for violating it, like anything else.

I'm generally of the opinion that a contract with a monopoly is coerced and should therefore be unenforceable. If that makes it hard to operate as a monopolist, good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com