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> Apple's customer base

Interesting way to frame it. The customer belongs to Apple. Far be it for the customer to decide what they want or like, they belong to Apple after all, and if those corporations want access to what's Apple's, they need to pay up.

You're not wrong, but imagine a world where the customer didn't actually belong to Apple and the users could decide to play Fornite or shitpost on Twitter if that was something they wanted to do. I think that's an obviously better world, even if they end up on twitter as a result.




I don't understand how the customer wouldn't belong to Apple.

I can't go into McDonald's and order a Whopper. McDonald's owns me, so long as I'm in their store. If I want a Whopper, I have to go to Burger King.

"But Burger King is farther away, and thus, McDonald's has a monopoly on that customer" is a weird argument.


That analogy makes no sense. An iPhone isn't a restaurant. If Apple is McDonalds and Google is Burger King, who does Epic, Spotify, or Twitter correspond to in the analogy?


Make it literally any store, then. Target, Costco, Walmart, etc.

You can't walk into Target, demand they carry your product, refuse to pay them a fee for doing so, while claiming Target has a "monopoly" on their customer because the customer isn't likely to drive across town to another store that does carry your product.


This is more like target locking in half of all customers unless they pay a big fee and give up everything they ever bought there. After gaining control of all customers they take huge chunks of all product revenues. See, you can go to Walmart over the street and sell your product there. It‘s the same situation with them by the way.


Apple has always taken the exact same percentage from developers, since the launch of the App Store, and long before the iPhone was one of the dominant phones purchased.


Poor analogy


The Coca-Cola Company complains about 30% cut from Coke sales...


What a terrible analogy. Sure, you can't go in to McDonald's and buy a whopper but you can certainly buy a big mac and then you can do with it whatever you want since it belongs to you and not to McDonald's.




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