[013a]

Whole Foods stacks their stores with their 365 brand products. In some cases, competitors to certain products aren't even sold.

Of course, there are other grocery stores you can shop at. Just like how there are other mobile platforms you can use. (well: there's another mobile platform, singular. that's a problem).

I don't understand the argument for the App Store being a monopoly. Apple can do whatever they want in their store, just like Whole Foods can sell whatever they want in theirs, or Walmart, or Target, or whoever. If an argument can be made that they're actively trying to destroy the competition in the market of mobile platforms, then we should be much more concerned.

Beyond that: there's a very unique argument that the "platform" (iOS) and the "store" (App Store) are separate entities in a capitalistic market sense. If this is the case: the onus is NOT on the App Store being more open, but rather on iOS for supporting multiple different storefronts. And, again, I think that's not a very interesting argument unless iOS itself is being anti-competitive in the market of all mobile platforms, which doesn't seem to be the case.

[gamblor956]

It's hard to explain from a mobile, but in a nutshell generally retail stores buy the goods they are selling, whether store brand or third party, so they can differentiate the products in store how they like.

Suppliers can and do use leverage like withholding popular brands from stores that go too far in favoring the house brand.

Apps however have no such leverage, and due to the way the store is set up, the retail defense doesn't apply.

[013a]

I'm not convinced that its so different, at least from a "we should be concerned about it" angle.

Yes, retail stores have inventory that they, generally, have to purchase and hold before the sale. This is a natural limitation on the amount and variety of goods they can offer.

By comparison, app stores don't have inventory. But they do have natural limitations. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fees the App Store charges, which is a translation of underlying fees that Apple pays to host and distribute applications, whether paid to credit card networks, engineers, cloud infrastructure providers, supporting services such as iCloud, etc. There is a per-unit cost to app store downloads; its just that most of it is paid on the purchase, download, and use of the application, not hosting.

Additionally, App Store search result rankings are absolutely a limited resource which very closely resembles aisle space in a retail store.

When thinking about this specific issue (which dates back over 16 months ago? and has been fixed? why are we talking about this?): I don't see a philosophical or legal problem with Apple doing this. I see a usability problem. Its just bad results that aren't delivering what customers expect or want.

[gamblor956]

. There's a cost to each sale, represented by the 15-30% fees the App Store charges, which is a translation of underlying fees that Apple pays to host and distribute applications, whether paid to credit card networks, engineers, cloud infrastructure providers, supporting services such as iCloud, etc. There is a per-unit cost to app store downloads; its just that most of it is paid on the purchase, download, and use of the application, not hosting.

This is false. Payment transactions cost under 1%, especially at Apple's scale. In the case of many of the competing apps like Netflix and Spotify, only a de minimis value is provided by iCloud hosting (i.e., the mandated iOS app) because the majority of the content is hosted by the third party on external (non-Apple) platforms. If we're using Apple's costs as justification for the 30% cut, they definitely aren't providing services worth 15-30% they're charging for the vast majority of App Store transactions.

Additionally, App Store search result rankings are absolutely a limited resource which very closely resembles aisle space in a retail store.

I don't know what sort of weird grocery aisles you shop in, but in the real world grocery aisles are two-sided, with multiple levels, and every product fronts the aisle so that customers can see all products at the same time (though some products are easier to see than others). This isn't even remotely the same as the ordered, multi-page list that the app store provides, in which many competing products can't even be seen until you take further action.

When thinking about this specific issue (which dates back over 16 months ago? and has been fixed? why are we talking about this?): I don't see a philosophical or legal problem with Apple doing this. I see a usability problem. Its just bad results that aren't delivering what customers expect or want.

It's the same issue that Microsoft had with bundling IE. They're abusing their market position in one market to interfere with another.