[AnthonyMouse]

District court decisions don't set precedent and the case is still under appeal.

But I also notice that you're not providing a counterargument in any logical sense and only an appeal to authority. We're not in a courtroom, we've having a public policy discussion about what the law should be.

If you have prospective customers with iOS devices you want to distribute your app to, name a feasible distribution method that isn't Apple.

> But by that logic Shopify has a monopoly on distributing Shopify apps, and McDonalds has a monopoly on Quarter Pounders.

Anyone can make and sell a Quarter Pounder to anyone. They may need to call it something else if McDonalds has a trademark on the name, but that doesn't cause it to be a different market when the product is a substitute and the customers are the same people.

Maybe Shopify does have a monopoly on distributing Shopify apps? That presumably depends on whether you can install the apps in some other way. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on distributing Windows apps, for example, and the fact that there is a difference between that and what is going on with Apple is demonstrative.

[scarface_74]

> But I also notice that you're not providing a counterargument in any logical sense

because judges are kinda the authority on the interpretation of the law. That’s how the legal system works.

> Anyone can make and sell a Quarter Pounder to anyone. They may need to call it something else if McDonalds has a trademark on the name,

Only McDonald’s can distribute a McDonald’s quarter pounder. Anyone can make a distribute a smart phone too. There are dozens of white market smart phone makers that a company can get a run of smart phones made and put their own version of AOSP or Linux on it.

> If you have prospective customers with iOS devices you want to distribute your app to, name a feasible distribution method that isn't Apple.

The web….

[AnthonyMouse]

> because judges are kinda the authority on the interpretation of the law. That’s how the legal system works.

Unless you have a Supreme Court opinion, their authority is limited to one courtroom or one Circuit. And this still doesn't tell you what the law should be, which is ultimately up to the public.

> Only McDonald’s can distribute a McDonald’s quarter pounder.

You're talking about the trademark, not the product. Anybody can distribute a hamburger. It can even be indistinguishable from a McDonald's Quarter Pounder as long as you don't call it that.

The issue is not that Apple has a trademark on Apple App Store so no one else can make a store with that name. It's that there are millions of people whose only mobile device is an iPhone who can't reasonably use any other app store no matter what you name it.

> Anyone can make a distribute a smart phone too.

The question is whether anyone can make a store that distributes apps to everyone with a smart phone. If they can only distribute apps to some subset of the people with a smart phone, that strongly implies that these are separate markets.

> The web….

I want to install the Firefox browser engine, my favorite VPN, BitTorrent and the Epic Games Store on an iOS device. Can I use the web for this?

Notice that you couldn't list Google Play either. Why is that if the market is supposed to be something like "smartphone app distribution"?