[the_solenoid]

I like your takes on this.

To me, theres two issues:

1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.

2) taxes, is you want to line apples 30% up with those, are just part of business. No, you cant write off the 30%, but if you want to keep adding 250million new phones to your potential customer base every year.... wtf, pay up and be happy? To be fair, taxes arent the same - taxes take money out of an economic system usually based on economic activity to make currency actually worth something. But they kind of are the same in that they keep the infrastructure that lets you reach customers going.

I guess we can move to the windows model and place the burden on the customers, pay your $99/yr for updates or whatever, but then youd have ... like no one buy the phone.

Apples stance is - if you generate economic activity on the phone, you should have to pay to upkeep the roads that keep the phone working. I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.

[lozenge]

The difference is taxes are set and disbursed democratically. Apple taxes are whatever they want them to be and are disbursed according to their board.

Heck they could introduce a tax on Amazon deliveries when Amazon is installed through the Apple App Store and nobody would be able to do anything about it. Except the EU that is.

[gretch]

> nobody would be able to do anything about it

Just don’t use an iPhone. And Amazon - just don’t put an app on the iOS store.

I mean it really is that simple. If customers actually cared about any of this stuff they would just switch. If there was enough demand another competitor would emerge (windows phone, black berry, foss)

[lxgr]

If "just don't buy at the monopoly" would work, we wouldn't need antitrust regulation.

[gretch]

So your thesis is that it doesn't work.

We are all enslaved to keep buying iPhones and have no free choice?

Or is it that even if no one bought an iPhone, Apple as a company would be able to keep it's market position?

This is why Apple keeps winning in the court cases, because the argument as you just presented it lacks any kind of rigor.

[seec]

There is only one other choice and for the first 5 years of the iPhone this choice was less competitive. Stop pretending things like that happen in a second and stop pretending every user can make the effort to switch after investing so much (money, time) on a particular platform. You also need to understand that for many, changing phones (or even tech in general) is something that happens only when it truly becomes necessary and this is every 3 to 5 years at best. You can't pretend that telling people to go buy a new hundreds of euros device just to fix an issue created by a corporation greediness is a realistic solution. It's not even something that someone who isn't into tech could realistically foresee before making their purchasing decision, pretending otherwise is bonkers.

You are just as disingenuous as Apple is and it is sad that you are defending the greed of a trillion dollar corp.

That being said, considering their behavior I'm pretty sure Apple has lost the good will of quite a few people, that are indirectly influential on the purchase of many tech devices of their social circle.

I am personally an Apple customer since the first iPod (was a teenager back then) and lots of Mac's plus many iPhones including the first but now I am pretty sure that my next smartphone will definitely not be an iPhone. Not that hard decision considering the insane pricing on Apple Silicon Macs (RAM/SSD) I had already started using my Mac less and my PC a lot more. And I make sure to avoid recommending anything Apple to anyone and actively discourage any purchase from them. I'm pretty sure I am not the only one doing that and I am pretty sure that Apple will feel this after a while...

[pdonis]

> I am sure Apple and MS would love to do this with desktop, but the ship sailed on that ages ago, and probably wouldnt have ever worked.

Charging third party app developers never worked on the desktop, but Microsoft had a lot of success with building the key features of popular third party Windows applications into their own products, thus taking away the third party developers' markets. Which is worse for the third party developer than just having to pay a fee or a percentage.

[dudeinhawaii]

You've posted this same strawman like 5 times in the comment threads. How about sticking to the thread you were on and debating the push-back others have made? Is this a new astroturfing strategy?

If both Apple and other companies have engaged in taking away a 3P developer market by building their product features into their own, then what is the point of your whataboutism? You're trying to imply that paying a fee is better than having your product copied -- when in fact the comparison is 'pay a fee AND risk product copy/delisting' vs 'no fee, no delisting, risk product copying'. Stop trying to obfuscate.

[cedilla]

> 1) this push is all driven by big businesses looking to just get free money for nothing, which is why I worry that the EU is so taken up with it.

Do you just assume that? Because in the article, two decidedly small businesses are mentioned as leading the charge: Tuta and Proton. Not exactly friends of big business either.