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Comment by _aavaa_ | Hacker News Reader

It will help customers though. It helps no one but Apple that Apple collects a 30% tax on everything with no real way of cutting them out. It helps no one that I can’t buy kindle books on my iPhone, or subscribe to certain streaming services.

But this focus on the customer is irrelevant to whether they’re being anti-competitive. Apple actions in creating a walled garden are detrimental to their direct competitors (Spotify, Netflix, epic games) by either entirely locking them out or forcing them to compete with unfair structural barriers (nobody’s taking 30% of Apple Music subcsriber revenue).

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> But this focus on the customer is irrelevant to whether they’re being anti-competitive.

Yes, this is exactly my point. Consumers are going to get a worse experience so companies besides Apple can make more money.

That may or may not be a good thing—all I'm saying is consumers will get hurt.

> Consumers are going to get a worse experience so companies besides Apple can make more money.

Do you really believe that taxes just hurts company profits and doesn't hurt products used by the people?

I believe that the 30% fee does not in itself hurt the iPhone experience enough to justify the kinds of actions that are being taken to dismantle other aspects of the iOS ecosystem, and the net result will be harm to consumers.

Apple's odd choices for enforcement of the fee (like Patreon) do create a problem for many kinds of apps. I'm just hesitant to dismantle something that mostly works for most people without a very clear idea of what it is we'll end up with.

Consumers who wish to stay entirely within apple’s app store can continue doing just that. There’s no change for them.

See my reply to another thread where someone made a similar claim: that's simply not going to be possible.

The endgame here from the perspective of the companies that are pushing for this is to arrive at a similar place to where we are with streaming services: they each want their own store where they will distribute their own apps without a middleman. That's great for the companies, but choosing to stay exclusively in the Apple ecosystem will necessarily be choosing to not use any apps from Epic, Meta, Adobe, Amazon, and whoever else thinks they're big enough to justify their own store.

It's going to be a disaster for app consumers on the same scale as unbundling Netflix was for streaming.

This horrible scenario you’re describing is the World Wide Web: each company free to sell their software on their website directly to consumers.

This is the reality on Apple’s own macOS.

This is a pretty weak boogeyman.

You've been enjoying having to juggle five streaming services to access all the content that was previously on one?

Remember that I choose Android for the flexibility. I like the wild west of the WWW. I'm here defending the interests of a group that isn't well represented on HN: Apple users who actually like having exactly one App Store that they can count on to look out for them and moderate what apps can and can't do.

We already have Wild West platforms. For a while we had one that was better regulated, and people flocked to it. Large companies are lobbying government to dismantle that platform for their own selfish interests, and you're cheering it on rather than just picking the ecosystem that already provides what you want.

See my other comment. Streaming services are not comparable; games purchased on one store do not leave your library the way shows leave streaming services. And there’s no “juggling”, none of these have ongoing costs.

If people can juggle getting weather in one app, videos in another, and banking in a third, they can “juggle” the hassle of a one time search to find where to purchase the game.

The streaming problem doesn’t disappear when your streaming services are served to you via the App Store

No, but in short order every company of any size will have its own app store which will be the way all their customers have to download their apps, same as every media company has its own streaming platform.

So when you say “every company of any size” you actually mean “a small handful of the largest companies”, right?

Because I’m happy to identify 100 media companies for every 1 that you identify that offers their content exclusively on their own streaming platform

You are describing websites and the state of desktop computing.

I already replied to that argument above and am not interested in going in circles any further.

"There’s no change for them."

They would fundamentally have to change how app stores work with Apple. Yes, things will change for everyone.

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