[basch]

Closed ecosystem technology service conglomerate is a better way to say it. The word monopoly gets used interchangeably within antitrust conversations all the time to mean abusive market position and behavior.

Apple is forcing anyone that uses Sign in With Facebook or Google to also support Sign in With Apple, or they will be removed from the app store. Quite a power play. (hence the title of the article)

Can you make the argument that they are abusing their position as one of two mobile operating systems to force unnatural adoption of their service, at the expense of their competition, Google and Facebook.

[gimmeThaBeet]

The fact that they don't have anywhere near a numerical majority of devices always makes me pause on this stuff.

The weird thing with Apple using its market position to get their way is that they don't have all the customers, not by a long shot. It's that they have the customers you want.

I'd hazard to guess Apple looks more dominant by some customer money-weighted metric.

When Apple directly competes against companies on its own platform it does seem a bit shaky a la Spotify.

But in the general case, the idea still bites at me that you don't need Apple to access a sufficient customer base, but you want them because you want to access Apple's customers.

[basch]

well said.

Heres where I think it is anti-competitive. Lets say you are building a streaming service. You choose to be android only, because you want the majority of the market, and calculate that you dont need the Apple users. Your competitor complies with more apple rules, and goes cross platform. They win because they chose to be cross platform.

It's hard to win (and by and large you usually need to be a winner, to exist in the long run) without offering your product to people, whichever device they choose to access it from.

Apple, despite being a non majority of the market share, is a king maker, they can choose the winners. And if they want to, they can cripple their competitors through a combination of app store rules, payment processing requirements and limited api access (streaming, payment, maps, etc)

[scarface74]

How is that any different from game makers choosing not to support every console?