[ben_w]

Potentially — loss-leaders, company towns with company stores, and state-run businesses all come to mind — but at the moment I don’t know of any examples of physical stores having this problem even across a single capitalist nation.

First-party apps made a lot of sense in the early days, and still do for brand-new features, but I think it would have been better if Apple had promoted existing AR tape measures rather than preinstalling their own; ditto time monitoring.

[qppo]

> at the moment I don’t know of any examples of physical stores having this problem even across a single capitalist nation.

Retailers bully wholesalers and manufacturers all the time when they represent a significant amount of total sales.

You always hear stories of "this was great until the bean counters told us we needed to shave 25c off the production costs and that killed its longevity." What you don't hear is that the bean counters were told by the sales managers that the retailer wouldn't list the product at $X because they didn't think their customers would pay more than $Y, and $Y would make the project unprofitable. And the retailer does 50% of our sales in the US, so we can't tell them to screw off!

One solution to all these problems is to enshrine direct-to-consumer sales in law, for digital and physical goods.

[Talanes]

I've never heard anyone talk about that issue without actually saying "Walmart" before.

[qppo]

I didn't mean Walmart when I wrote that.

[ben_w]

That sounds like a different problem, though still a real problem.

[dantheman]

Yeah, I mean why have nice built in stuff - far better to go and buy everything separately. For instance cars should have seats, stereos, gps, etc... it'd be better for you to go to 3rd party sellers and buy them.

[ben_w]

I think the analogy in this case would be a car company which gives you a choice of three different types of seat, five different types of stereo, and the option of built-in GPS from whoever when you configure your new car in the first place.

I’m not even against first-party apps, I just want them to be competing fairly instead of being mandatory pre-installs (with the exception of security-critical parts like the OS, the phone and SMS apps, the wallet apps, the App Stores themselves; but even then, there is room for them to be opened securely, it is just harder to do right, and should probably be replaceable later rather than during setup).