Microsoft already does exactly this on console. When will we see the Google Stadia game streaming app on the XBOX? Does Microsoft really not take a cut of VBucks bought on the Microsoft store?
This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, if you think any of this is being said or done for your benefit I’m sure Epic has a plentiful supply of really tasty Koolaid for you. But no pie, sorry.
No, it isn’t the same. Far from it. Microsoft and Sony don’t prohibit linking to external signup & account management, which is why I can resubscribe my FFXIV account from a console.
Apple’s rules prevent vendors from linking to external service account setup/management. You cannot even mention the existence thereof, let alone link to it or advertise the options provided therein. Consumers are explicitly kept in the dark about any method other than payment through the App Store.
That’s the stunning uppercut. The size of Apple’s fee is merely a follow-up kick to the nads.
This is why service providers, from Hey.com to Netflix, have a special irritation for the App Store rules, and since this rule directly distorts markets by affecting consumer choice is why so many competition regulators have a file open about it.
XBOX might let you do some things Apple won’t, but you can’t buy a productivity app for your XBOX. They’re just different restrictions and rules for different devices, the whole point of competition is to be able to do things differently.
Fortnite is probably the most profitable mobile app out there and Apple's negotiating position is, effectively, "Fuck you, pay me!". So Epic turns to Apple's main competitor in Google. Google's negotiating position is, effectively, "Fuck you, pay me!". That's clear and convincing evidence that the app market is fundamentally broken.
If Microsoft was playing hardball with Rockstar over the next version of GTA, as an example, Sony would be falling over themselves rushing to get it as a PlayStation exclusive. The console market and app market just aren't comparable.
Google's position isn't so cut and dry. They allow alternative app stores, and even installing apks from any rando with a website. Google makes sure you know there's risks, but it's easy to do. That's an extremely different situation than Apple.
Google basically says, "we have a store. Sell through us and we take a cut. Or sell directly, or through some other store, and we'll warn users that we haven't vetted that stuff for security etc."
I can actually open Office documents, there is OneDrive for Xbox. I’m sure of myself with the App Store having read Apple’s rules thoroughly before developing our own app, but not so sure for Microsoft. Is there an actual prohibition against productivity apps for the Xbox? Or is it just a matter of natural segmentation?
I have no idea why you'd want to, but you can... UWP apps run just fine on Xbox and can be sold via the store - they just don't get access to the "exclusive" partition of the system (which you need to access certain system resources, such as > 2GB RAM). Sideloading prebuilt UWP apps is also possible. The exclusive partition is a different situation entirely - you need to be an approved developer to even access the SDKs.
I'd say there's a difference between what Xbox (and Playstation, and Nintendo) does compared to Apple by virtue of the consoles not being "open" development platforms (Xbox UWP aside). Anyone can grab the iOS SDK and start making apps, but only registered developers can do so on game consoles. Whether that's justified I don't know, I honestly haven't put enough thought into it. And whether courts would see that as a reason I definitely don't know.
I never thought about it like this. It could be viewed differently because the Xbox is a game console and the iphone is a general handheld computer, but perhaps it should be illegal to restrict users installing software on your device by any means they choose, though there's no reason for you to support those means.
Who says the iPhone is a general platform? It’s not, it’s a closed platform with specific features designed and implemented by its manufacturer. One of those features is a mechanism for installing additional software modules.
What is an open platform and how does it get defined? Installing software is a feature implemented by the manufacturer. Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps. Who gets to define those features and say which products should or shouldn’t have them? Who gets to certify compliance? Who gets to specify open as a technical standard that can actually be implemented?
If this had been done in the 80s, we’d probably still be stuck with consoles having an 80s style cartridge slot on them, with specs written in legislation and updatable only by government committee.
I think this is a great point. We could be opening pandora's box here from a number of perspectives including the security aspect of things. This issue of app stores is not as cut and dry as people are making it out to be.
Secondly, you can "side load" iOS apps as well. You just have to go through a process of jailbreaking your iPhone which is not illegal but it may void the warranty.
When you buy the iPhone you are also buying into the platform. If having multiple options for app stores is a necessity for you then an iPhone is the wrong device to purchase. Buy something else. There is nothing wrong with voting with your wallet as there are other phones on the market for people to buy.
This isn't really an option if you actually want iOS apps. It's an all-or-nothing play by Apple: accept all our rules, including the ones that greatly limit you, or get none of the benefits of iOS, including the large collection of high-quality apps. And the option of jailbreaking really isn't an option either. Apple does its best to prevent jailbreaking: they'd stop it outright if they could. This is their way of keeping that market unpleasant, small, and marginal.
The argument is that that approach is anti-competitive and unfair, especially since Apple itself gets a large cut of app sales.
I'm not coming down hard on either side, just yet. But I don't like the feel of this sort of lock-in, and almost no one would question the use of a term like "lock-in." Some lock-in is surely legal, even if almost always unpleasant. But it's only a hop, skip and a jump to full-fledged antitrust.
You go to Target looking to buy a Walmart-brand bottle of bleach. Is that anti-competitive?
Heading out but you pick up a few PC games. By the way, Target was paid to put those up on the shelf.
Grab a Sony Playstation gift card. They get a percentage of that as well.
At checkout, you sign up of the Target bank card save 10%. They get a nice initial chunk from that and the bank running that card pays a monthly percent to Target for sending them over their customer.
(don't look into the publishing companies' tactics cause that will send you over the edge)
I have no problem with people jail breaking their devices, which they own. In fact I did exactly that on several phones and an iPod touch back in the day when I handed down some of my devices to relatives in China.
> Who says the iPhone is a general platform? It’s not, it’s a closed platform with specific features designed and implemented by its manufacturer. One of those features is a mechanism for installing additional software modules.
Apple themselves? Part of their marketing is literally that you can do everything on their devices.
> Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps.
I can't see why not, the mobile app market has terrible competition, there's a big market issue here.
Consoles specifically are sold at a loss to make money on games, though. I wonder how competitive they would be with buying a gaming pc if they were forced to make all their profit on the console itself with no money coming in from games
This is untrue. The XBox started out at a loss as a specific strategy by Microsoft to break into a market that was controlled by multiple established rivals. Other than that, consoles are sold at a profit. That is, the revenue Nintendo gets from sale of a Switch is greater than the marginal cost of its manufacture.
What you may be thinking of is that the consoles are not the main source of profit. And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
Companies generally take huge losses at the beginning of the cycle and a very modest profit towards the end. Overall, it's probably a wash. I think the statement that consoles are sold at a loss is generally/mostly true. [0]
>And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
Yup, and during which time, they sell at a huge loss.[1]
You're right that Nintendo tries to buck this trend, but they also realize it's a delicate balancing act.[2]
"selling at a loss" generally means that the margin is negative, that is the unit price to manufacture (and ship, etc) is higher than the price the consumer pays.
Your alternative definition applies to pretty much everything with R&D costs. The first unit sold is pretty much guaranteed to not make up for R&D costs, but for some n the margin made on the nth unit covers it, and the seller finally starts turning a profit.
I think what your citations are actually saying is that even the last unit sold does not cover R&D costs, and it has to be made up in other divisions (such as games) in order for the whole venture to turn a profit. But each individual unit is still marginally profitable - if they could sell enough of them (perhaps far more than the size of their market) they would eventually turn a profit on the console itself.
Has apple ever blocked or threatened anyone for developing a rival OS? For an OS that could run on iPhones to be developed, it seems pretty clear that Apple would absolutely have to "support those means" in terms of publishing low level hardware and security chip specs. And distributing secret keys or offering an agnostic signing service.
But what I think you mean to propose is a restriction at the software level, not hardware level. That anyone who sells an operating system must allow any app to be installed within that OS. I think we leave it as an exercise for the reader to define "operating system" when it comes to our increasingly "smart" homes and cars.
Microsoft was dragged through court for it's aggressive browser install on windows back in the day. Now everybody is getting rich off apple stock and there's not much incentive to hold them to the same standard. They even started with a monopolistic policy - if it's duplicating functionality they'll remove it from the app store. People keep buying iPhones because they don't care.
The difference is market share. There was no effective alternative to Windows ecosystem at the time (arguably there still isn’t). The issue was also broader than just bundling the browsers: there were contracts with OEMs that effectively entrenched Windows as the only OS they were practically shipping (not dissimilar to Android contracts with the OEMs). Last time I checked most people don’t even have iPhones.
Except that nobody is alleging they have a monopoly on phones. The market of concern is the app store. Which they obviously have a monopoly on because a customer with an iPhone can't use any other store, and a developer with customers who have iPhones can't distribute to them using any other store.
It's like claiming that nobody can have a monopoly on electric car charging stations because the customer could just buy a gasoline powered car and electric cars don't even have majority market share. It's still a monopoly. It's a monopoly on charging stations, not a monopoly on cars.
If one company (let's say, Tesla) owned half the electric car charging stations in town, and another company (let's say, Nissan) owned the other half, and Tesla's charging stations could only be used on Tesla vehicles and Nissan's charging stations could only be used on Nissan vehicles, would you conclude that both companies have monopolies?
> If one company (let's say, Tesla) owned half the electric car charging stations in town, and another company (let's say, Nissan) owned the other half, and Tesla's charging stations could only be used on Tesla vehicles and Nissan's charging stations could only be used on Nissan vehicles, would you conclude that both companies have monopolies?
Yes, of course. The fact that you can't use the other company's chargers means that there are then two markets there, one for Tesla-vehicle charging stations and one for Nissan-vehicle charging stations. You can't substitute one for the other in that case, you need one compatible with your car. It's the same reason that gas pumps aren't the same market as electric car chargers, or that gas pumps aren't the same market as diesel pumps. If there is only one diesel pump in the state then it has a monopoly no matter how many gas pumps there are because you can't use gasoline in a diesel vehicle.
If you could use either type of charger with either type of car then they would be in the same market, because a customer who wants to charge their car could substitute either one for the other, so they would each actually be in competition with the other and neither would have a monopoly.
I think the fact that the "chargers" and the "cars" are hypothesized to be operated by the same company is what's messing people up.
Suppose you have two companies that each operate half the charging stations in the same region. One is Tesla, and you can only use them to charge a Tesla vehicle. The other is Exxon, which has started installing electric car chargers at their gas stations, and where you can charge any car including a Tesla. Well then Tesla hasn't got a monopoly on anything, because any Tesla owner can go charge their car at Exxon, and Exxon doesn't have a monopoly for Tesla vehicles, because they can also go charge their car at Tesla. But Exxon does have a monopoly for charging non-Tesla vehicles, because if you have a Nissan or a Chevy, you can't use the Tesla chargers, leaving Exxon as your only option.
So, under current US case law, the courts have generally found companies to be not liable for "aftermarket" antitrust claims if:
1) The manufacturer lacks sufficient market power in the "foremarket". (In the case of Apple, this would be the sale of the phone. In your example, it would be the sale of the car.)
2) The consumer was aware of the "aftermarket" restrictions when buying the original product. (In the case of Apple this would be the App Store pricing and rules. In the car example it would be the location and cost of the charging stations.)
3) The consumer does not face substantial costs to switch to an alternative product. (The cost of buying a new car would probably be considered substantial but I'm not sure a new phone would.)
The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions. If they went ahead and bought anyway, they knew what they were signing up for. It's like buying a razor and then being stuck with expensive replacement razor blades. Or buying a movie ticket and then being stuck buying expensive popcorn from that theater.
Yes, once you buy the movie ticket and enter the theater they have a "monopoly" on your snack purchases. No, you're not likely to win an antitrust claim against the theater.
> 3) The consumer does not face substantial costs to switch to an alternative product. (The cost of buying a new car would probably be considered substantial but I'm not sure a new phone would.)
The cost of switching phone platforms is massive compared to the app market. Phones can cost over $1000, apps are commonly $1, a difference of a thousand fold. And that's only the hardware cost. Then you have issues if there is any other app you need which is only available on one platform, or if you make use of Google or Apple services that are only well supported or supported at all on one platform and would incur substantial switching costs to move to the other.
You also have a different problem here:
> The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions.
Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
> The cost of switching phone platforms is massive compared to the app market. Phones can cost over $1000, apps are commonly $1, a difference of a thousand fold. And that's only the hardware cost. Then you have issues if there is any other app you need which is only available on one platform, or if you make use of Google or Apple services that are only well supported or supported at all on one platform and would incur substantial switching costs to move to the other.
Ultimately that is up to the courts to decide. But I will point out that in a previous case involving IBM S/390 computer systems, the court decided this requirement was not met, despite the hardware expense and associated software compatibility limitations.
> Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
I'm not sure which specific restrictions you are referring to here. If the complaint against Apple is that you cannot install apps from 3rd party sources on your iPhone, there is a competing product that allows you to do that on the market.
> Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
This is not relevant for antitrust purposes. Developers are not entitled to demand a specific company give them access to that company's users.
It doesn't matter if Apple has a monopoly or not, they can bully other companies all day long anyway since they got the most lucrative users and you can only reach them via Apple phones. If there is no law to handle this case then we need to create one since the current situation is obviously bad. It is kinda like how workers can get bullied by companies since the worker is so much smaller, Apple is way less dependent on app creators than the app creators are on Apple creating an unhealthy power imbalance. Such power imbalances needs to be regulated.
The App Store is an Apple product, of course they get a monopoly on designing and implementing it.
Any mechanism for side loading apps would also be an Apple product, designed and written by them. They would be responsible for supporting it, and ensuring it was secure. Maybe they don’t want to do that, so who gets to force them to, and who gets to decide if they complied with that directive? Who gets to specify it and take responsibility if it causes problems and incurs costs on Apple or issues for their customers?
You’re not talking about stopping Apple from doing something, you’re taking about coercing them by legal requirement to do new different things, and you’d better be very specific and careful about what you are forcing them to do.
Apple certainly has the majority of the market when it comes to app store purchases.
And the government doesn't classify trusts[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
If the state hadn’t intervened on behalf of defending Netscape’s commercial interests we may have gotten decent open source browsers a few years earlier than we did.
The market solved the problem in ways that the DoJ couldn’t have anticipated. It turned out that licenses fees for closed source web browsers were just not something that businesses and consumers were interested in putting up with.
Few remember how much of an equal offender Netscape was when it came to proprietary extensions to the web.
Microsoft was taken to court for three reasons - forcing OEMs to pay a license fee for each PC sold whether or not the OEM shipped the PC with Windows, Office Productivity monopoly and the browser.
It wasn’t until 2010 that IEs market share started eroding. It didn’t have anything to do with the government.
Almost 20 years later, MS still has the same market share in both operating systems and office productivity and no one cares about browser dominance except for Google.
When MS was under investigation they were the most valuable company in the US. Now they are number 3.
I'm not sure it's fair to equate smartphones to general computing platforms, regardless of the marketing speak surrounding the newest iPads.
Personally, I like iPhones precisely because they're not general purpose platforms. I'm also not sure the phrase "general computing platform" can even be well-defined in the era of "smart" everything.
One definition may be that you can use the device to write and compile all the programs it uses (any part of the OS, including the kernel itself), so that you don't need anything else. Kind of like a self-hosting compiler.
Not that you'd want to, but if you decided to do it, the option would be readily available.
Then modern game consoles and s smartphones qualify as well, they definitely have the resources to compile everything & only artificial limitations introduced by the manufacturers prevent that - which is sad & limits their potential.
> This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie
Yes, this is how capitalism works. The companies can be started by virtuous, far-sighted dreamers, like Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and John Lennon, but then they get infused by money from venture capitalists and investors who just want ROI.
Once they hire more than 5000 people, the edges of the company are not controlled by dreamers - worker bees are employed to make money by leveraging whatever is there to be leveraged. And so the mission drifts.
Or else, the company fails or disappears, which is what happened to John Lennon's company, Apple Music.
We need to rethink capitalism, so companies can grow to medium size, and stay there, providing good things to their customers in a virtuous, mutually beneficial way.
You raise an interesting point, ekanjo. What does "virtuous" mean? I think I know what you mean, and I would agree with you if it means something like giving benefits to others ahead of self-enrichment. Wozniak is probably recognised by most people as the virtuous one of the duo, wouldn't you think?
Jobs was the superior business person. At least, it turned out that way after he returned to Apple, rescued it from Scully, and spent decades turning it into a behemoth that changed the world.
Woz might have given the computers away just for the joy of it, but where would that have left us?
Tens of thousands of developers owe their livelyhood to Jobs' vision. They get to make apps and everything else, all because Steve created platforms and ecosystems that would sustain an entire industry.
Still, that doesn't excuse greed. Jobs is gone now, so he can't evolve the app store into what it should be becoming, which is a more mature version of the quality platform he created.
It wouldn't take much to fix this current hoo ha. Apple could just introduce a lower fee tier for trivial sales such as the re-supply of virtual currency in games. If they took 10% instead of 30%, the problem would be over, the platform would continue, the community would still have opportunity, consumers could play their games and buy their apps, and life would go on. Does that sound virtuous to you, eklanjo?
> Tens of thousands of developers owe their livelyhood to Jobs' vision. They get to make apps and everything else, all because Steve created platforms and ecosystems that would sustain an entire industry.
That's typically a broken window fallacy. You can't take this a proof of anything because you do not know what the world would have looked like if Apple did not exist - such developers could have gone and made other things on other platforms as well. A great artist will be able to produce great work even if they have to use spaghetti instead of paint. Tools are just tools.
> That's typically a broken window fallacy. You can't take this a proof of anything because you do not know what the world would have looked like if Apple did not exist...
I see.
Your original comment to me was about Steve Jobs, and what to make of his intentions and his legacy. Would you care to share your thoughts about Steve Jobs?
> Would you care to share your thoughts about Steve Jobs?
I recognize the fact that he was probably a good leader when it came to driving Apple focus to make quality hardware and solid software integration (the original iPhone was a big step in making portable devices actually usable by everyone).
However, I was reflecting that the word 'virtuous' was a poor fit for a person like Steve Jobs. You can typically think of someone virtuous as having high moral standards and principles.
Jobs was constantly driving his company to make ridiculous false claims (saying that Apple was the first company to invent X or Y) which is deceitful.
Apple's business practices consist in making walled gardens everywhere (which is kind of anti-competitive and entice users to be locked down in the ecosystem) instead of developing standards that can be used and shared by everyone, and this is also something that Jobs spearheaded from the get go (right since the beginning of Apple).
Of course, everyone has different standards, but being a good citizen is about taking and giving back. I can't remember Jobs ever giving anything back to the tech scene.
This is big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, and this is beneficial to consumers. That is how capitalism works. Some (somewhat small to some) amount will go directly to consumers (vbucks discounts), some (most likely most) will go toward creating a better product (hiring more developers, artists, designers etc.) and a bit might go to each of those developers, artists, and designers (and/or improve their working conditions, hopefully reducing the number worked to their limits like eg. the Rockstar employees who created Red Dead Redemption 2, and other game devs who sleep at work). Unfortunately some will be wasted on lawyers, etc., but IMO that’s not much worse than it staying in the hoard of the world’s most valuable company, and worth the benefits to everyone else.
I'm not sure what you mean to emphasise with your italics, boogies.
The article is about Fortnite being excluded from Apple's monopoly distribution platform. That platform enriches Apple at the expense of consumers and software developers.
Are you saying it's a good thing that Apple can exclude Fortnite for trying to get around the Apple tax?
I agree. Apple should not charge 30% for this type of transaction, which is just the resupply of virtual currency.
Apple should have a lower tier fee for this type of ongoing service transaction, which is clearly different to a sale in which a new customer is converted.
If Apple had a service tier with a fee of say 5% for virtual currency they’d still be compensated for providing the platform, but not excessively. Consumers and software vendors would benefit commensurately.
This two tiered model is just what happens in traditional pre-digital capitalism. Furniture stores charge 30-50% markup to cover the overheads of showroom rent and sales staff. Financial services companies like forex and credit cards charge 3-18% because they have different overheads and provide different value-add compared to retail sellers.
Then start with the Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox and Steam stores. They take 30% off the top as well. Epic's store is only doing 12% for now as they try to catch up to the bus they missed.
Wanna get a DLC? They all take a percentage. Also regardless of the money you spend on making your game. They all have to review it and only if they approve will it get published. Going to selling some XBox physical disc? You pay your percentage on what you print not what sells. Also you need to use a trusted disc manufacturer, they pay a percentage to XBox also, note this is all the same for Sony and Nintendo.
This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, if you think any of this is being said or done for your benefit I’m sure Epic has a plentiful supply of really tasty Koolaid for you. But no pie, sorry.