[nixpulvis]

It's an antitrust issue. If I own the market and some of the fruit, I'll clearly put myself in a better position to attract customers, and thus make sales. The rest of the fruit vendors are 2nd class.

Not to mention Apple employees are banned from making apps outside of company time, since they are aware of the issue with insiders having power to make apps that out compete the rest.

[zaroth]

How can it possibly be an anti-trust issue for a minority player in a competitive market to choose which products to display in their own retail store?

This is markedly different then, for example, Google altering search results to promote their own products, because Google owns something like 90% of Search.

[gamblor956]

The app store is not a retail store. That's one of the major factors in the antitrust analysis.

In the retail/wholesale model, the retail store buys the third party products and their own store brand products, and sells them both. It might favor the store brand with more promotion or better shelf placement, but both products appear on the shelves, and the third-party has generally already been compensated for their goods (or is contractually owed compensation). In uncommon situations, such as with new products, compensation may be contingent on products sold through (to end customers), but that is not the norm.

In the appstore model, third-party app makers sell apps in Apple's store. Apple sells apps in Apple's store and promotes its own apps ahead of competing apps. It even promotes unrelated apps ahead of competing apps in a blatant attempt to push competitors off the first 2 pages of search results (i.e., off the shelf). Apple also frequently bans apps that compete with Apple's own apps or features, even if such competing apps existed for years before Apple's own apps.

Any one of the aforementioned acts by Apple could be treated as an antitrust issue. And that's not even a comprehensive list.

[Despegar]

>The app store is not a retail store. That's one of the major factors in the antitrust analysis.

Well no. What you cited was related to the Supreme Court's analysis of the App Store case, but that was only related to the issue of standing.

How it differs from brick and mortar stores buying inventory isn't relevant to the actual merits of the case, which hasn't been in court yet.

[henryfjordan]

An Android app and an iPhone app are not compatible goods. You cannot replace one with the other. Try installing an APK on the iphone and let me know how that goes.

The "market" is smaller than you think. A classic way to determine alternatives to a product is by asking "if I raise the price of all apps, how many people will buy something else?" Iphone owners are kinda stuck eating the increase, aren't they?

Apple controls 100% of the iPhone app market. An iPhone owner made a $1000 investment into their phone and cannot just switch to Android. Apple takes advantage of that fact for their own benefit.

[zaroth]

Every manufacturer controls their own supply chain, and can choose what to put in or take out of their own product.

And everyone makes a choice when they purchase a product— you could say invest in a product—if they want to buy into that.

Of course it costs money to buy something different. The salient point is that there is a obvious and competitive choice before you buy, that Apple does nothing to restrict you from making that choice before you buy, and that you can switch if you feel like it, which makes it not a monopoly.

Monopoly is not defined as the lack of compatibility between two competing products. Monopoly is also not defined as having a closed ecosystem.

I think it’s fair to argue if you think it should be illegal to have closed ecosystems. Personally I strongly disagree because there are clear trade-offs involved and the market should be able to decide if it wants a closed ecosystem product offering from Vendor A or an open ecosystem offering from Vendor B.

The problem with a closed ecosystem is when it is combined with a monopolistic market. In this discussion I believed the two points have become conflated, but while Apple certainly has a walled garden, there is compelling evidence the smartphone market is highly competitive.

[Wowfunhappy]

I don't agree with this notion that you can't engage in anticompetitive behavior without 80%+ marketshare.

Imagine a world where Apple continues to clamp down on 3rd party services that compete with their own offerings, like Spotify. Apple could completely ban Spotify from selling subscriptions outside the App Store, and raise their fee to 70%. Google, wanting to push their own Google Play Music service, eventually adopts similar rules on Android, or perhaps implements them in a theoretical successor like Fuchsia.

This would basically mean you cannot build a music streaming service without also building your own mobile platform. That in turn would effectively mean we can only ever have as many streaming services as we do mobile platforms.

Even though neither Google nor Apple have 80%+ marketshare, this behavior strikes me as deeply anti-competive. It's not a world I want to live in.

[zaroth]

The Venn diagram of things that you are capable of doing, and things that are legal to do, changes when you either are or are not a monopoly.

Offering rebates for using your product and not using someone else’s, for example, may be illegal if you are a monopoly but not illegal if you are not.

There are innumerable things a given company could do that harms its competition. Up to a point, that’s kinda the whole idea! It doesn’t become illegal unless it is done by leveraging a monopoly market position.

[Wowfunhappy]

I'm arguing the law (or our interpretation of it?) should be stricter than it currently is, in light of how much power modern technology gives platform holders, and the situation I outlined above.

[zaroth]

I think as long as Apple does not have a monopoly, history has shown us that competition will take care of this.

If Apple clamps down on 3rd party apps to the point where it is no longer serving its user-base, the user base has many good alternatives, and Apple would lose business.

I think the Spotify example is a good one; if Apple kicked off Spotify, there could be millions of people switching to Android just because of that. Apple might love the idea that only Apple Music should exist on their iPhone (in fact they was kinda Steve’s original vision) but they can’t get away with it specifically because they would be clobbered by the competition if they tried.

Even as (if) Apple’s reputation shifts away from “walled garden that protects you from junk and malware and spyware” toward “overlord trying to control what you can buy” this causes some users to leave.

As long as there’s viable competitors, I’d rather let users vote with their wallets. This is actually the best way to give people the choice of which system you would prefer using. If the fully open system is preferred by most users then most users will choose that product. But because there are actually huge trade-offs and very hard unsolved problems with a fully open system, it’s important to provide consumers both options.

[Wowfunhappy]

> I think the Spotify example is a good one; if Apple kicked off Spotify, there could be millions of people switching to Android just because of that.

We'll never know unless/until it happens, but I think you are 100% wrong on this point—most would just switch to Apple Music. Phones are much too expensive to switch immediately, and while some users might initially want to switch at their next upgrade cycle, they would need to sign up for Apple Music in the interim, and then they'll become accustomed to it.

iPhone users are a captive market. The costs of switching are too high, both economically and in terms of inertia.