[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.