> I see no evidence that this harms consumers at all. Quite the opposite.
When there is no competition the prices are higher. That is one way the consumers are harmed.
> I like the walled garden and have no interest in it going away. I like that my mom can install apps and not worry about them spying on her.
And you can have your walled garden and your mom can still install apps without worrying if they are spaying on them. Just use apples app store, simple as that. This is a non issue.
> I like that developers aren’t allowed to use their own payment processors. I don’t want to input my credit card into your black box payment system that might or might not charge me correctly.
You still have the option of using the apples app store. Again, a non issue for you.
> You still have the option of using the apples app store. Again, a non issue for you.
Except apps GP uses will leave the official App Store in favor of the jenky "type in your credit card to each individual app" app store. So it actually is in GP's favor for there not to be an option.
Not saying that is justification, but let's not just pretend it's all roses.
> Except apps GP uses will leave the official App Store in favor of the jenky "type in your credit card to each individual app" app store.
This is an assumption. A weird assumption, at that. Apps wouldn't tarnish their brands by being distributed on badly implemented stores, in the same way you don't see apps worth using being advertised on porn sites or 4chan.
Couldn't Apple offer a reasonable compromise that they only allow competing App Stores on their phones if those App Stores don't allow exclusive apps? App stores would still be able to compete on prices and payment methods.
I suppose that all apps would still have to be approved by Apple, though, otherwise an app creator could just hide something that Apple objects to in their app somewhere, causing it to be disallowed from Apple's App Store but allowed in third party ones.
> Couldn't Apple offer a reasonable compromise that they only allow competing App Stores on their phones if those App Stores don't allow exclusive apps?
This would not be a reasonable compromise, as one of the primary reasons for wanting competing app stores is because of Apple's insane overreach in trying to control what you are and aren't allowed to run on your own phone.
When I last had an iPhone, I wanted to install a heavy computing application that I had previously used on Android. I found out from the developers of that application that they had been rejected from the App Store because their app used too much CPU power. Apparently you're meant to just use the phone for decoration?
Google has some similarly nonsense policies (good luck finding a good adblocker on the Play Store), but at least it takes all of five seconds to circumvent that. Apple allowing competing app stores while still having complete control over the content available on them does very little to solve the problems that their monopoly causes.
> When there is no competition the prices are higher. That is one way the consumers are harmed.
They can also be lower (a monopsony), because the middleman in a two sided market can extract value from the provider and deliver it to the consumer. This is how universal health care, Amazon, etc work.
> Just use apples app store, simple as that. This is a non issue.
And how do you install other App Stores? Just visit epicgames.com/ios, see a popup asking "do you want to install this app store" and click "confirm"? That's no different than the exact thing that caused Windows to be known to need an antivirus (at least, until Windows Defender and smartscreen became good enough for 'common sense' users). Anything more is going to be met with criticism for 'too much of a barrier to install' for competing app stores.
When there is no competition the prices are higher. That is one way the consumers are harmed.
> I like the walled garden and have no interest in it going away. I like that my mom can install apps and not worry about them spying on her.
And you can have your walled garden and your mom can still install apps without worrying if they are spaying on them. Just use apples app store, simple as that. This is a non issue.
> I like that developers aren’t allowed to use their own payment processors. I don’t want to input my credit card into your black box payment system that might or might not charge me correctly.
You still have the option of using the apples app store. Again, a non issue for you.