[pdonis]

> If app store was a standalone offering that aimed to benefit the user, there shouldn't be any problem allowing multiple competing app stores people paid for the convenience of vetted and curated apps and letting the market forces decide the winner.

And if all that would benefit users more, users would be demanding it, or switching from iPhone to something else. But they're not. Users seem overall to be quite satisfied with what they are getting from their iPhones. So your claim here appears to be empirically false.

> strongarming the ecosystem and stifling market dynamics is the unethical move here

All this depends on your factual claim above being true, which, as I have noted, it appears not to be, based on actual user behavior.

But let's put that aside and assume that your factual claim is true. If that makes what Apple is doing unethical, then probably every single large corporation on the planet is unethical. Certainly every large corporation in the tech industry is. They all do these things; they just don't all do them with an app store.

[acituan]

> Users seem overall to be quite satisfied with what they are getting from their iPhones. So your claim here appears to be empirically false.

A lack of reduction in observable demand doesn't imply an absence of cost.

Let's say the cost of having a singular app store for the user can be expressed as 99$, but the average utility they derive from using their iPhone is valued at 100$. It would be rational for that user to still prefer iPhone despite incurring great cost and we wouldn't see any drop in demand.

> Certainly every large corporation in the tech industry is. They all do these things; they just don't all do them with an app store.

That is appeal to tradition. Indeed, monopolistic nature of tech combined with vertical integration is a large unsolved problem of our era and it haven't completely played out yet.

[pdonis]

> A lack of reduction in observable demand doesn't imply an absence of cost.

Waving your hands and throwing random numbers around doesn't imply a presence of cost.

> That is appeal to tradition.

It is no such thing. I'm just trying to figure out what your actual position is.

> monopolistic nature of tech combined with vertical integration is a large unsolved problem

Which makes it clearer what your position is: you think the problem with tech is "monopolistic nature combined with vertical integration".

I disagree. I think the problem with tech is that it is giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets. Apple is actually the least guilty of this of the major tech players; I'm far more worried about Google and Facebook and Amazon than I am about Apple. But at any rate, that problem is not a problem of monopoly and vertical integration. It's a problem of shortsightedness in general--putting short term gain and convenience over long term stability and trust.

[acituan]

> Waving your hands and throwing random numbers around doesn't imply a presence of cost.

Come on, let's not go in circles. I posited there is a cost to user in being locked into a single app store. You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand. My handwaving numbers were to demonstrate that it doesn't have to be true, there can be substantial user costs without any decrease in user demand.

> giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets

You're close but not there. Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration. Google has a compute platform that runs a search engine/youtube that sells adds that is viewed through their browser that runs on their mobile phone. Those are multiple integration points (though not all are monopolistic). If for example Google were to pay for an external compute platform that is not theirs, they would have to pay for the profit margin of the service provider, but without is all of that money stays within the company, and that is one of the factors that enable them "giving away valuable things for free".

Data integration is a completely different game. Selling data to outside is the least powerful way to make money out of it, especially if you have other data and products. It is akin to a 3rd world country selling their raw resources. What makes the most money is the integration of multiple data sources through multiple products and even 3rd party vendors. The magic of an SQL join is that joining table-a and table-b can yield more information that neither a and b had alone. When you join the data of a browser and a search engine and 3rd party information you bought to sell more clickable ads, that is when the most money is made out of the data. The more money you make, the more you can run loss leaders, buy competitors, create barriers of entry (a la app stores), and meanwhile damage the entire ICT ecosystem in the name of even more money. That is why ensuring market health is important.

[pdonis]

> I posited there is a cost to user in being locked into a single app store.

And the person to judge that question is the user, not two people having an argument on an Internet site. And not app developers either.

> You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand.

I said that if there is no discernible change in user demand, that means the users, who are the ones in a position to judge, evidently don't see a significant enough cost to change their behavior. Any change in the cost-benefit relationship will change the behavior of some users. Sure, they won't all switch from iPhones to something else, but some percentage of them will.

> Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration.

No, it comes from having some other source of revenue besides the users of the thing that is being given away for free. "Monopolistic vertical integration" might help in getting other sources of revenue, but it's not the root problem. The root problem is that the actual users of the service are not the paying customers, someone else is, so the incentives of the provider are skewed.