And if I have a MacBook, for instance, do I have a choice in downloading the app from the iPad store or the iPhone store? No, there’s just one for my device!
And do I have a choice to use a non Apple App Store? No!
So while there might be multiple stores for Apple, there’s only one for my device from Apple
It’s like arguing that any monopoly isn’t actually a monopoly because the company has multiple physical locations. But the consumer has one choice, constrained by geography
I’m no lawyer but this is clearly a Hail Mary, perhaps suggested by some law firm to get a little more money out of Apple
> And if I have a MacBook, for instance, do I have a choice in downloading the app from the MacBook store or the iPhone store? No, there’s one for my device!
If it's an Apple Silicon MacBook, yes.
It's actually the same App Store application but it can be used to download mobile apps. I think in this case the line being drawn at what frontend is used to interact with the stores is splitting hairs.
I tried to do this recently to download some apps to my Macbook - a few 3rd party apps and the new Journal app from Apple. As far as I could tell, only some apps are directly installable on the laptop, despite this claim? It seemed like I basically needed to sideload the file directly from my phone to the computer.
I tried googling and chatgpt, but would love to hear that I missed something!
Developers have the option to disable iOS apps from being installed on Apple silicon macs. Unfortunately most 'big' apps just disable this for whatever reason.
I don't believe you can 'sideload' unsupported ipas from an iOS device any more.
The reason why everyone disabled their iPhone & iPad apps on macOS is because nobody wants to license their software for unified purchases. Either because they want to charge different prices for each platform (which means they have to sell them separately and charge you twice), or because they're a streaming app with different licensing requirements between mobile and desktop.
This isn't even exclusive to Apple. When Microsoft added Android app support to Windows 11, they also updated the Amazon App Store version of Minecraft so that it'd only work on a Fire tablet, because they want you to buy the more expensive native port. The alternative would be getting rid of the $7 tablet version and making everyone pay $30 for Minecraft just in case someone wants to port their licenses over to Windows.
I believe the reason behind it is more petty or silly (pick you poison).
A lot of bigger developers, especially streaming services, got spooked by the fact that users can inspect the .app bundle and look inside, with assets easy to copy.
In response a lot of big developers disabled the option because I guess security through obscurity sounds appealing.
Even if that was part of the threat model, Apple doesn't encrypt bundle resources; only the binaries[0]. Before they got rid of iTunes, you actually used to be able to download IPAs through it to sync them onto your iPhone[1]. The IPA files were right on the drive and could be opened by anyone. The underlying interfaces to do this still exist and you can still get IPAs today using Apple Configurator 2, iMazing[2], or straight off the Apple CDN[3].
This is also why you can't run iOS apps on unsigned macOS - the secure enclave will refuse to decrypt apps unless the currently booted OS is Apple-signed, with the usual integrity protections in place.
> Unfortunately most 'big' apps just disable this for whatever reason.
Probably because they already have Mac apps built with native Mac controls designed specifically for use with a mouse and keyboard. Why would they enable the option to run a shittier touch-centric user interface and confuse their users with two different versions of the same app?
The Journal app doesn't have a Mac app and neither do any of the other apps I was hoping to use. I understand what you are saying, but personally I'd be more than fine with the touch-centric UI - I recognize that as a trade off. In particular, I want to use the Journal app more - but I'm just not going to write very much on a phone.
In some cases it’s just testing effort. If they don’t see a use case for using their app (e.g. they have a website with equivalent functionality), it is easier just to disable it and not increase testing scope.
Except Apple doesn’t let every app do that. They effectively decide which company wins while blocking all others. The same argument was made against Google since they charged a lower Play Store commission for Spotify.
This is categorically not true. 1) You can run every Mac app sold by a third party store that's designed to run on your Mac. 2) Anyone can make a Mac app store.
The only apps Apple blocks from arbitrary sources are known malware. Even that can be turned off if you're either a masochist or a malware researcher.
Nice straw man there. I wasn’t talking about the Mac App Store which is not even the target of anti-trust investigations. Macs allow you to install apps from anywhere. It’s the iOS App Store that doesn’t allow apps to be app marketplaces within. Setapp is a subscription service, not an app marketplace.
> Setapp is a subscription service, not an app marketplace
That's a really weird way to draw that line. I go there, goods are marketed to me, I pay money to use them. That's the definition of a market and the site and its desktop app are a marketplace.
Unless you're arguing that if Apple finished transitioning the iOS app marketplace to purely subscription, it's no longer a marketplace. That would be a really unusual stance.
> But the consumer has one choice, constrained by geography
Even if their choice wasn't so constrained, the choice between shopping at the Walmart next door, or the Walmart down the road, is not very helpful. It would have been laughable if the Northern Securities trust [1] had argued they were not a monopoly because consumers could choose between multiple railways (all owned by Northern Securities). In fact, it would have been an argument in favor that they are a monopoly.
As much as it sounds like a BS argument to you, the argument isn’t actually of Apple’s making. I don’t blame you for thinking otherwise though, it’s mainly poor reporting by Reuters and subsequently 9to5 that fails to explain this.
The EU was first to look at the App Stores separately to determine how many users each store had and if they’d fall under the DMA, primarily driven by the idea that each OS has its own functionality and limitations and different purposes.
I’ll owe you a citation because I don’t have it on hand, but if memory serves me right iOS and its App Store came out as the only one with sufficient EU users.
This was undesirable from the EU’s standpoint as it meant that they weren’t able to regulate the other OSs/App Stored so the EU reversed course and started treating them as one and the same.
Cue Apple, who now appeal this finding, and argue that they are in fact separate. But as said above, that argument isn’t of Apple’s making, that’s how the EU saw it initially as well and how they started their threshold tests.
> And if I have a MacBook, for instance, do I have a choice in downloading the app from the iPad store or the iPhone store? No, there’s just one for my device!
This is not really a relevant argument, as it suggests that storefronts only exist as separate storefronts if you can download from it. The Google Play store is definitely a different store than the Apple App Store, but you can’t download from it.
That said, on Apple Silicon MacBooks you can definitely download apps from the iPhone and iPad App Store.
> And do I have a choice to use a non Apple App Store? No!
On the MacBook? Yes, definitely. You can use Steam for example, or no store, or SetApp, etc, etc.
> So while there might be multiple stores for Apple, there’s only one for my device from Apple
Again, opinion on the argument notwithstanding, this is a non sequitur. Whether you can only use one store on your device says little about it and how Apple’s App Stores are separate. There are actually some decent arguments to be made that Apple’s App Stores are not separate, but I don’t think this is one of them.
> It’s like arguing that any monopoly isn’t actually a monopoly because the company has multiple physical locations. But the consumer has one choice, constrained by geography
This is not a good analogy, because monopoly and monopoly powers are not analogous to running multiple stores. You can run multiple stores, say under two different brands or one for consumers and one for business customers and still be a monopoly for example.
> I’m no lawyer but this is clearly a Hail Mary, perhaps suggested by some law firm to get a little more money out of Apple
I used to be one in a former life, specialized in EU law and other international law, and for better or for worse this is not a Hail Mary. It’s actually a pretty solid argument within the context of the DMA because of the way DMA determines gatekeeper status (which was why the EU originally looked at the OSs and storefronts separately).
That said, I think there are some bigger issues with the DMA and how it’s applied, suggesting that the EU is bending some of the regulations to target specific companies and services beyond plausible deniability.
We’ll have to see how those shake out in court, because that’s generally a no-no.
I expect some degree of compliance and some degree of long legal proceedings to get some clear boundaries set for both companies like Apple as well as the EU. The latter will then try to amend the legislation in an attempt to achieve their goal and the cycle will start over. With some luck by 2030 the dust has settled and everyone knows what they’re up against.
I download all my apps on my MacBook from brew/cask. I choose not to use the app store. I don't put my faith in corporations, but I'm also not putting the security of my phone in the hands of a 3rd party app store either.
I agree with your position regarding Apple’s statement being bogus. That said, I don’t understand the monopoly comparison. Complaining there is only an Apple App Store is like buying a Ford and complaining Chevy parts don’t fit. Or a Samsung dishwasher only accepts Samsung parts. Or a PC only accepts the user’s password. Or a lock only accepts one key. Or a pet fish cannot fly.
If you buy or use a product that has constraints, you will be subject to those constraints. If you do not want to be subject to those constraints, do not buy or use those products.
The people who argue for antitrust action against Apple seem to badly misunderstand anti-trust, at least compared to my own understanding. For instance, the above poster says “if I have a MacBook” - the fact that there are other products for consumers to buy besides MacBooks, without the constraints of a MacBook, is testament to the fact that Apple’s position is not monopolistic.
Except that you can buy games in a local store and play them on your Switch. When was the last time you bought an app in a convenience store and then installed it on your phone?
Games for which Nintendo has chosen to grant licenses and manufacturing to produce the cartridges and been paid for the privilege. It's exactly as limited as the online store, but sold as plastic instead of bits. There's no homebrew Switch games at your Best Buy.
The method of distribution isn’t the point at argument here, is it?
For this argument to participate we have to assume it implies that people could develop, compile and deploy Switch games to commodity memory cards and then install them.
Otherwise it is the same behavior, from the perspective of prohibiting competition.
What are you arguing about then? Nintendo controls the Switch platform much more strictly than Apple does, it’s cheaper and much easier to ship a game on iOS
How exactly? You can still only run applications approved by Nintendo. Also besides this the Switch is still massively more restrictive than the iOS appstore
The store itself is the point I had in mind as compared to the App Store as a means of distribution. I agree that these things seem anti-competitive but it is a good point on that topic that Switch games can be distributed without the software store.
> The people who argue for antitrust action against Apple seem to badly misunderstand anti-trust, at least compared to my own understanding.
It is your understanding that is bad.
It really hinges on two simple facts: in modern life, smartphones are essential, and Apple is one of only two players in that market. This gives them absurd amounts of leverage vs other parties.
Yeah, the ideas expressed by the person above seem to lead to a lazy and incorrect argument that there's aren't any things to argue anti-trust. Google doesn't have one android store, they have 57, across 57 countries with different arguments. And in the they even have two, one focused on English and one on Spanish or something. Divide their total revenue by 100, see it is not so much!
And cars aren’t essential? Further, Apple is not one of two players there are a handful of manufacturers of phones for sale in the US. The comparison to ford, and ford parts, maps directly to apples situation and it is instead people like you trying to change the historical understanding of anti-trust with arguments about how this tech is different because you don’t seem to grasp said history.
Cars are essential, but there are 14 companies controlling some 54 brands. If you don’t like what the Volkswagen Group is doing, you can go to GM. Or Fiat Group. Etc;
Conversely, if you don’t like iOS your only other option is Android. Two players.
Technically you have alternative means of installing apps on both those platforms, but none of those have been commercially viable.
You have the wrong analogy. It's not that you bought a Ford and Chevy parts don't fit. It's that you bought a Ford, and can now only buy parts for it from Ford.
> ...is like buying a Ford and complaining Chevy parts don’t fit.
Actually, many car companies source all sorts of parts from elsewhere. Not just tyres, though you'd be pretty pissed if your new Ford could only use Ford tyres. It's also under the hood (literally (literally)); Bosch is pretty big in that space, for example.
Are you a lawyer, by chance? Because this is the exact argument I keep making and the part that I really don't understand at all at the anti-Apple positions people take. If they were truly a monopoly, I'd be all for breaking it up but they're really not and I don't see how this falls into that definition for exactly the reasons you've stated.
All 5 app stores have centralized user management. I login to the same account in all devices, using the exact same credentials. Watch store does not have fewer users than iPhone store, does not have fewer users than Mac store, does not have fewer users than iPad store.
All 5 app stores have centralized payment card management. Every app I buy charges the same card. I remove that card, it disappears on all stores. A payment fails on one App Store, I get asked to verify my payment info on all other stores.
I assume purchase notifications come from the same email. You manage your account on the same web UI.
All app stores are the same, but of course you need a different UI and possibly backend. In fact, don't I buy apple watch apps from iOS? Aren't there universal iPad/iOS apps?
Sometimes it feels like the level of conversation at these companies is below high school level.
You can get your company banned from all stores, not just one. You have to sign up a dev account for all stores, not just one. You pay to publish to all stores, not just one.
They should just argue that every single account accesses their very own unique store.
A judge or jury should be insulted by Apple framing it this way. It’s very much a “this only works because I think you’re an idiot.”
I don't think the way you productize something in order to extract more money makes it a different platform. I'm sure on the backend you just have different subscriptions on the same database.
Wasn't it previously that you had to pay a separate $99/year fees for Mac App Store in comparison to the iPhone App Store? These days I think you can do with just one $99/year payment.
Ye they were two separate programs, but in June 2015 they unified them.
I presume this was preempting the addition of native 3rd-party app support in WatchOS 2 in September of the same year, so they wouldn't need another developer program and/or app store.
But how can those stores effectively compete while being controlled by the same entity? The EU breaking up Apple into separate companies for each "store" because of this argument would be pretty funny, though.
The EU accepted that Safari for Mac, Safari for iOS and Safari for IpadOS are different browsers hence why the Gatekeeper clause doesn’t apply to Apple.
Apple just using the same argument they’ve successfully argued before already.
Apple doesnt fit the description of a monopoly, but this lawsuit was launched anyways. If making the correct arguement doesnt stop you from getting sued, you still have to come up with something to say. It might not be a coherent argument, but then neither is this case.
> However, the term is used more generally to refer to laws designed to prevent companies from engaging in any kind of anti-competitive action – that is, do anything that would tend to artificially distort competition within a market.
> One common myth is that antitrust laws only apply to monopolies. This is very much not the case: They apply to any company large enough to have a dominant position in any market.
> Not so, said Apple, as the App Store isn’t a single entity.
And yet, here's Apple's own description of the App Store: "For over a decade, the App Store has proved to be a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps. But the App Store is more than just a storefront — it’s an innovative destination focused on bringing you amazing experiences. And a big part of those experiences is ensuring that the apps we offer are held to the highest standards for privacy, security, and content. Because we offer nearly two million apps — and we want you to feel good about using every single one of them."
It doesn't matter how Apple markets it to consumers.
The law was written in a certain technical way, and what's relevant here is whether it counts as 1 or 5 stores according to the law.
It's the same way you could claim Amazon is 1 store, or 58 stores (1 for each country) or 2.5 million stores (for each third-party seller).
They're all correct for different purposes, and none of them have anything to do with whatever Amazon writes in marketing material.
Likewise, it's perfectly valid for Apple to argue that the law considers the size of an app store per operating system, since an app for one OS doesn't necessarily run on another.
The argument might succeed or it might not. But it doesn't have anything to do with marketing copy.
> The law was written in a certain technical way, and what's relevant here is whether it counts as 1 or 5 stores according to the law.
It's the same way you could claim Amazon is 1 store, or 58 stores (1 for each country) or 2.5 million stores (for each third-party seller).
IMO this culture of "Rules Lawyering" and being technically correct is one of the reasons why everything is so shitty and why companies always seem to get away with bad behavior in the US. This is the corporate version of a six year old waving his hands 2 millimeters in front of his sister's face saying "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!"
Yes, the marketing material is totally irrelevant and should be considered fiction, but I would hope that a judge would look at the actual end-user experience is in totality, rather than accepting some silliness like "look, it's 5 different IP addresses, so ackshually it's 5 different stores!" or whatever the technicality-driven argument will be.
All good intentions that hope to have an impact on the real world have to be reified as policy, which has to be implemented as law, which usually delegates specifics to rules-making. We can be disappointed that ultimate product of that process often falls well short of the original intention, but laws and rules are wildly preferable implementation of policy than judgement alone.
That's just not true. A lot of judicial systems give leeway for judges to rule using the spirit of the law and not just the letter of the law. Especially for obviously fake arguments, or when laws need updating to newer norms or unforeseen technologies.
Judicial interpretation is essential. Half the artifice of western civilization is built on the word 'reasonable' and its interpretations in caselaw. However judgement cannot be the primary definition of a policy. 'I know it when I see it' couldn't even be the definition of obscenity - the court repaired it 10 years later with a more clearly delineated test in Miller.
The definition of 'platform' or 'monopoly' or w/e in the context of TFA is necessarily going to be technical and detailed, and encourage the entities it regulates to drive right up to the lines it draws. The job of the policymaker is to draw lines that accomplish her intentions.
The problem with "I know it when I see it" definitions is that there's an inherent lack of consistency, in that two different judges aren't guaranteed to reach the same conclusion.
For instance: fair use of copyrighted content. The only way to know for sure whether something is fair use is to go through a lawsuit. You can be pretty confident in advance, but you genuinely can't rule out the possibility that the judge will disagree with you because of something entirely subjective.
Writing an objective technical definition can lead to rules lawyering, but the fix there is to improve the rules and close the loopholes. Otherwise you're always at the mercy of being sued and happening to draw a judge in your case who makes a weird decision.
The system already acknowledges that two judges are not guaranteed to reach the same conclusion. First of all, because there's a system of appeals. However, an even stronger example is that you need a majority of judges in certain cases - e.g. in the US Supreme Court and other courts.
Yeah, and that's needed even in cases where there's supposed to be an objective standard! In cases where it's explicitly subjective going in, "we might flip on appeal" can be pretty terrifying.
Laws are imo somewhere between code and natural language, and imo closer to the code end of the spectrum.
If you go full “natural language” approach that’s open to whatever interpretation, that’s how you get kingdoms and dictatorships. Everything seems cool and all with the “natural language” approach to a legal system, up until the point the person in power decides to arbitrarily use it against the interests of the people they are governing.
This is pretty much why laws in countries with at least somewhat functional legal systems tend to be treated more like pieces of code rather than whatever someone thinks things should vaguely and generally.
The culture of “rules lawyering” is imo the best we can do if we want the legal system to treat everyone equally and impartially. Do you think that all the people involved in legal systems over thousands of years were just not enlightened enough to ever consider “why do we have all those ultra specific and codified laws, let’s just issue a list of general things like ‘don’t harm other people’ and ‘respect property of other people’ that would cover pretty much any undesirable behavior, and then call it a day?”.
If anything, legal systems became more “rules lawyered” and more similar to code over time, precisely because the world has been moving in the direction of more fairness and equality. I mean, not that long ago at all, we had some of the most advanced nation-states being ruled by a single king/queen/emperor/etc. And their word was not only a de-facto “absolute definition of the law”, but also de-jure (as opposed to some contemporary modern nation-states, like DRPK or Russia, that where laws technically exist on paper, but de-facto their codified definition doesn’t matter much at all,).
Some dictatorships are doing stricter rules lawyering than any democracy, the "issue" being that there's an unambiguous rule somewhere that the King is sovereign without limits on their power.
Mostly because while dictatorships might have “strict laws”, they are typically left as vague and generally-applicable as possible, precisely so that they can be used in whichever way the dictator wants.
Also, those “laws” don’t matter anyway in a dictatorship, and “rules lawyering” we are talking about here wouldn’t apply there. More specifically, “rules lawyering” isn’t a thing in a dictatorship, just like they are not a thing in a kingdom[0]. Do you think someone would be able to lawyer up and win a case by finding a loophole in the laws, against someone in a dictatorship? I strongly doubt it.
Dictatorships are imo just kingdoms, but with the ruler not “chosen by divine powers” or having to be a descendant of the previous dictator in power, and with the whole pretense theater of a legal system that only “matters” until someone in power doesn’t get involved (and then it becomes purely about who has the higher rank within that structure of dicratorship). It is basically the same, but at least old school kingdoms (unlike dictatorships) weren’t acting pretense about it and often plainly and openly just went “yeah, i am a king, who is a descendant of that one king who was chosen by some divine powers, legally i can do whatever i want, and i will be in the right.”
0. Talking about an old type of a kingdom, not talking about something like modern day Kingdom of Sweden (which is still the current official name of the country).
I’m with you on hating Apple but I actually like when judges stick to Rules Lawyering. It can be tempting to ask them to “consider the whole situation” and bend the rules towards justice, but that’s how we get unelected people doing stuff like a court unilaterally removing abortion protections in the US.
Yeah but for a legal reason. Not “eh it felt unjust”. But more materially: yes I bite that bullet that was a bad procedural move that saved millions of women. If the Supreme Court really was taking a stand about turning back the mistakes we made with jurisprudence in the 19th century, I would’ve supported the overturning of roe v wade. Instead (and I hope this is a non controversial, HN-friendly statement) they were very clearly and somewhat openly driven by ideology.
There wasn't any new evidence, though, and the circumstances hadn't changed, other than the composition of the Supreme Court.
Their argument was not that circumstances had changed, but that the the case was decided wrong to begin with, comparing Roe v. Wade to the case Plessy v. Ferguson, famous for deciding that laws enforcing racial segregation did not violate the U.S. Constitution so long as each race was given equal quality facilities ("separate but equal").
Apparently not, given that we have had to re-run the “Should we prohibit this thing that was previously considered a personal decision” experiment yet again.
The ruling was 50 years old, not 250. Sure, the general process can change. But, it should be hard to remove freedoms that already exist, and the fact that they were able to change a 50 year old ruling on a whim is bad.
Considering the spirit of the law while judging is a different thing from the expansive de-facto law-making that RvW epitomizes.
You cannot expect lawmakers to predict every technological quirk that companies will employ to escape antitrust oversight, so invoking the spirit of the law in those circumstances is just fine. RvW massively expanded the definition of some constitutional rights in ways that have always been contentious. It's a completely different thing.
Then they falsely advertise their Appstore, claiming it's one unified system when in reality it's not.
And after that's settled, then it's just a matter of taking this case and breaking it into the number of stores they have, because they still have the monopoly of each system.
Hopefully, the EU courts can see past this silliness and just steamroll over it - as an EU citizen, I do hope we've passed the point of having massive corporations dodge their responsibilities due to legal technicalities.
> The law was written in a certain technical way, and what's relevant here is whether it counts as 1 or 5 stores according to the law.
European judges don't really look favourable on defendants attempting to circumvent laws on technicialities - they also take the reasoning behind a law into account. This crucial difference is what many American companies learn the hard way when they try to bulldoze their way through European laws.
Uh, that sort of depends on what part of EU you are speaking of. The Romance countries does not have the same legal traditions as as the ones based on the English way (even if uk is gone, there are others that share tradition with them), and the Scandinavian countries are different to both.
The court relevant to this case is the General Court of the European Union. Each member state can put forward up to two judges each. Given the current composition of the EU, that seems to me to be broadly equal between the Germanic and Romance traditions (although I am quite aware of the limitations of such an academic division).
It's not that cut and dry -- "the spirit of the law" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poorly-drafted legislation. That's why we have courts. They'll weigh the text of the law versus the drafted text versus the equities of imposing this level of regulation on Apple.
The beauty of being a regulator is that you have a lot of leeway when it comes to interpreting your rules. Apples disrespectful approach is certainly not going down well and even if it is intended play for time will cost them more than they gain.
The DMA is an antitrust statute. While sure, you can argue that Apple operates different stores as a matter of implementation, it strains reason to claim that they somehow compete with each other. No, this argument is silly. Silly arguments aren't illegal, but it's hard to imaging this swaying any judges who aren't just looking for an excuse to find in one direction (which happens! which is why lawyers sometimes construct silly arguments to act as excuses).
This is a simple bar the DMA set up that an app store has to be a particular minimum size for the law to apply.
That has nothing to do with whether the app stores compete against each other. They don't have to. That's not the purpose here.
There's nothing silly about Apple's argument. It's no different as to whether Microsoft has one app store for Windows and one for Xbox. It's not silly to say they're separate. Same thing for Apple Watch and Apple TV.
> "This year’s winners include developers from across the world, whose apps and games were chosen by the App Store’s Editorial team for providing users with meaningful experiences and inspiring cultural change."
Note: not "the App Stores' Editorial team"
> This year’s winners showcase the scope of creativity, technical innovation, and design possible across the App Store and Apple’s ecosystem.
That sounds a lot like one App Store for the whole ecosystem?
They also break out the awards per platform. There are best apps for iPhone, iPad, Watch, TV and Mac, same with games.
I seriously doubt that simple grammatical usage examples from a page like this would be enough. More likely the structure of the app stores and whether they're separate or not would have to be outlined in detail in a legal document like their Terms of Service (which admittedly I haven't scoured very thoroughly at all).
Sure, and if my grocery store had an awards ceremony for best foods of the year with separate categories for produce and chips and desserts does that mean each aisle is a separate grocery store?
They wanted to make a point about the usages on that page, I simply provided more usages from the page that run counter to their argument. I’m not arguing the merits of the usages on the page in general; I think it’s not very relevant.
The strongest point that I think could relate is that you can’t download an app from the Mac app store onto an iPhone to run.
In this light, it’s like a corporation owning separate fruit stand, bakery and butcher shops.
You half expect them to try saying "Umm actually, the App Store running on each device is a distinct store so we have two billion individual App Stores."
The DMA was deliberately written with Apple's app store(s) in mind. Apple's argument is silly because they know their argument directly violates the letter and intent of the DMA. In the unlikely event that Apple wins this argument, the DMA will be updated so they lose.
When dealing with antitrust, the general assumption is that you cannot trust the company (heh). It is rather obvious that a company will do their best to interpret themselves in a way where legislation is less applicable.
In this particular case, the argument is silly: The users are presented with one storefront under one name, where apps can have different degrees of support, and apps can be installed on platforms they were not made for (e.g., iPhone apps on iPad or macOS) despite that they claim those are served by different "stores".
If this argument was valid, you could also say that the Google Play store is not one store, but a gajillion stores for each individual Android device series - e.g., a Google Pixel phone store, a Google Pixel tablet store, a Google TV store, a Samsung phone store, a Samsung tablet store, a...
It is incredibly silly, and serves only to avoid applying the legislation to e.g. Apple TV so they can keep avoiding sideloading and forcing subscription cuts there.
It is also rather obvious that companies are allowed to defend themselves. "Trust" is irrelevant here -- this is a court case about facts.
And your Google Play example isn't analogous, because this isn't about "device series", it's about operating systems. Samsung and Pixel phones have the same OS and generally share the same set of installable apps.
I'm not saying Apple's argument is necessarily going to win. I'm just saying that it's not "silly" -- we shouldn't dismiss it like that. Because this isn't about some "common sense" idea of what constitutes a store in consumer's eyes, it's about how this particular law defines a store, for the purposes of this law only, in technical terms.
Defending themselves in this case takes the form of a desperate lie. I very much find it silly and made up in the last minute as it does not align with any prior communication or how the user experiences things.
The Google Play example is accurate. iPadOS does not differ from iOS in this context in that they both run exactly the same applications from the same app store - application that themselves can implement iPad or iOS specific behavior of course, but that is internal to the app, not a difference in the store.
In the same vein, Android TV is a separate OS from that in Google Pixels which is very different from that for a Samsung Galaxy - but they all run Android apps. Whether you give a name to the shared foundation (Android here, and what used to be iOS before they decided that iPad-specific features deserved distinct marketing) is not important - Apple users know that they see the same store with the same apps on all their devices (with an apple TV caveat as fewer developers add app support).
(An app can itself declares requirements and dependencies that will hide it for particular devices, but if those filters counted the number would be way higher than 5 - it would be per-model, per-OS-minor)
The Mac App Store has been marketed separately, so that makes two. An Apple TV compatible app also have to live up to some different requirements, but having apps filtered to a device based on its declared support and requirements is not different than similar restrictions within iPhone apps, and so it is not itself enough to fork the singular App Store. It is still presented as one familiar entity to users.
> Because this isn't about some "common sense" idea of what constitutes a store in consumer's eyes
You misunderstand the law.
Common sense is bedrock defining feature of the law.
There are all sorts of laws that have words and interpretations which could be argued either way.
And the way that we choose between those interpretations is often through things like juries. IE, an every day layman's "common sense".
> it's about how this particular law defines a store,
And how that law defines a store, and could be interpreted between competing definitions is through common sense. It's through a human, a person, using their common sense to understand the law, and ultimately decide if that is how a store is defined.
> You misunderstand the law. Common sense is bedrock defining feature of the law.
But common sense isn't all there is. The law is also full of technical definitions, and words which in a legal sense don't correspond to their "common" sense, which is why people spend years in law school.
And like I said, there are multiple valid ways of defining the scope of a digital store. What matters here is the technical, legal definition in this particular case. Not the "common sense" of somebody on the street.
Both sides have to be consistent. If they lump all the app stores together to make an argument just about phones, for example, that won’t fly with judges.
This is on the same shelf as when they tried to convince EU that iPhone is not in fact a phone, so their ask about using a standardized charger doesn’t apply.
A friend got one of them new notPhone with a USB C charging port a week ago.
Sometimes EU does good things, this is one them. I’m so looking forward to alternative app stores.
Mixed feelings. I’d like a GNU store but that’s about it. It will be annoying when people start using the Facebook spyware store or some other junk. That’s their choice I guess, but it makes the ecosystem work (typo edit: work should be worse) I think.
Why do you care if other people „start using the Facebook spyware store“? No one is forcing you to use another store. Android has alternative app stores and you can still use the Google Play Store for everything if you want to.
5-6 years ago, when smartphones were new in India, ShareIt was most popular application for sharing files across phones. It's an ad-ridden piece of spyware. Because everyone were using ShareIt to share music and photos, and I refused to use it out of paranoia and a general dislike of intrusive ads, I got some reputation of being the "weird nerd".
Thankfully Google Files got popular later.
It's pretty easy to imagine how a bad application like ShareIt or TikTok may be required to be considered socially normal.
People care what other people think, it's how humans work. If this is missing, it usually shows up in behavior where one routinely hurts themselves or others.
Another thing to consider is that when people casually leave someone out. For example, they regularly share their experience on a platform, because most of their friends is on that platform. If someone is not on that platform, they get left out of that experience sharing, if someone doesn't proactively reaching out to them, which I'd say is rare. This leads to the non-majority getting more and more isolated from the rest of the society.
Another angle is when people in power, businesses, or other significant figures like teachers exclusively use such platform. If the kindergarten instructions are on Whatsapp, the young parent better install that, fast.
This is all related to the network effect, whereby the value of a good or service comes not from the intrinsic value of the thing itself, but rather of its users.
The obvious disadvantage is I couldn't get music and photos from other people, because they were using shareIt and I couldn't ask them to install and use an OSS alternative.
Thanks to Google Files / Android NearBy share, today ShareIt has practically disappeared.
Because they'll be friends and family. Or just have some of my data because I talked to them. Anyone being insecure means everyone is (somewhat) insecure.
Of course, "side-loading" should still be possible if it has sufficient barriers for casual users.
I’m pretty sure Apple will keep positioning their App Store as the official authorized way to get software for iDevices. I’m also pretty sure that there’s going to be huge inertia there and most of the apps are going to be on App Store still. So your ability to live in a walled garden won’t be affected much. Yes, some apps will move away from the App Store, and I suggest you to vote with your wallet and not use them.
I for one absolutely cherish the ability to install software I choose on the device that’s supposedly mine.
Sure, this is why I have mixed feeling rather than straight up opposition.
Would it be nice to be able to install third party apps? I’d like… a GNU store, maybe a Suckless store, Panic is decent. There are pros, it isn’t all cons.
There is a downside, though, snooping companies like Facebook and Google are going to use this to circumvent Apple’s privacy rules.
I disagree that this is a case of “vote with your wallet.” I already voted with my wallet by opting into a less open ecosystem for my phone. In general, individuals voting with their wallets have limited reach, this is why people do things like join unions or co-ops.
It was good to have at least one popular platform that enforced at least some bare minimum standards that we could opt in to, that most app authors wanted to support.
> In general, individuals voting with their wallets have limited reach, this is why people do things like join unions or co-ops
Correct. There are two problems here:
1. Apple won't let people install the software they want on their phones
2. Lots of companies want to get their software installed on your phone by whatever means to control it and turn it against your interests
Both of these are bad. The DMA fixes 1, but HN users consistently complain that in doing so it will prevent Apple from mitigating 2. But relying on a company like Apple to stop other companies from abusing users is not a reasonable state of things. People should, through collective action (probably a law) prevent this abuse. And the DMA does not preclude this.
Maybe living in the US has made me unnecessarily pessimistic about the likelihood of having consumer protection laws make that last step. I’d be happy to be wrong but I suspect we’ll end up in the local pessimism.
Oh, but then you don’t have anything to worry about. As far as I understand nothing will change in the US regarding App Store policies. It’s just the EU where this would apply.
Let's say Apple gets forced to allow third party app stores. Would there be anything stopping Apple from requiring those app stores to have real, actual individual be responsible for the actively policing those stores for things like fraud and actual malware? For example if there are too many reports of fraud or abuse though some store Apple could hold that individual responsible and or withdraw the signing key for their store? I would guess something like could help.
Yes, the EU. It forces Apple to allow sideloading - that means installing apps with no restrictions, from any sources such as any random website. A store is just an app, thus there will be no way for Apple to force alternative stores to anything.
There doesn't even need to be a person that could be held responsible, or they could be easily masked behind anonymity of the web or layers of white horses / phished identities.
I definitely can see a “store is just an app, you must allow third party apps” as a sort of maximal approach. But treating app stores as a sort of special thing that requires extra permission and coordination doesn’t seem totally impossible.
It could be sort of nice if each store was isolated inside a different sandbox and had it’s own filesystem. (I wouldn’t be that surprised if something like that happened because it is both justifiable from a security point of view, and also mildly annoying for people who want to use third party stores, which I guess Apple would prefer).
It's what they did, the law is approved and will come into effect soon. A store is just an app like any other apps - e.g. your browser. If you can download an app from the web, you can download a store, and the store can download other apps.
I find it weird that this comment was downvoted while my comment up two was upvoted. If you agree that a store should be something other than just another app, then you ought to agree that it is unfortunate if this is their plan.
If you agree but downvoted because you think it isn’t their plan, maybe you can show us why the person I responded to here was wrong? That would be reassuring!
But from my perspective sideloading is not necessarily a separate on-device store.
An on-device store would be equivalent to Steam which first need to be installed on the device for example via the regular iOS App Store or sideloading or another already installed app store.
Sideloading would be downloading from a web page or secondary device or similar method.
Separate stores would be a decent middle-ground for my part when less tech-savvy people inevitably ask me "can I trust this app" I can reply with "are you about to install it from store X or Y or download elsewhere?". If the answer is "that store from Epic Games" I could sigh quietly and say "it's likely okay".
Yes, and you if sideload a store app from a website (a random one, or Facebook, MS, etc), Apple is out of control in that case. They could ban the altstore from their own App Store, but not from the web.
My problem is exactly with these "safe stores from well known companies". Apple helps me. EpicStore and MetaStore helps them sidestep the anti-tracking and anti-spam rules of App Store.
That's a bit of a stretch. Apple, much like every other business, cares about you insofar as you're a paying customer. That's why they don't let you use... well, stuff like third-party payment processors.
That’s not quite true, lots of other businesses don’t care about you insofar as you’re a paying customer, they care about insofar as you are eyeballs for their actual customers.
Apple’s business model is mostly: give money, get services and devices. That they are able to sell this as a nice special plus is a huge indictment of the computer and OS market.
Which is great, I much prefer Apple Pay and their overview of all subscriptions etc and them actually enforcing what changes I make there, as opposed to the situation on Android where I was charged by custom payment gateway implementations after cancelling the subscription many times and Google just told me to take it up with the app vendor who never responded.
Hey, more power to you. The good news is that after the DMA rolls out, Apple doesn't have to stop offering any of that. You can keep using it until Apple stops providing the function, same as you would have without the DMA.
I'm glad we have passionate Apple enthusiasts helping us prove how harmless market regulation actually is.
The problem is that app vendors will no longer be forced to use it. That seriously hurts my sense of security as a user of the platform - the very thing why I chose it.
But it doesn't affect Apple's 1P app store, app review process, or other security processes at all, so if you are content exclusively using Apple's App Store then there's no impact. If you look at the Android ecosystem, there have been all kinds of app stores for years. Some run by hardware OEMs, some open source (FDroid), and some that are run by app review sites that basically function as sideloading hubs for pre-GA versions of apps. Arguably, things generally work and overall I don't believe system security has been negatively affected.
The real issues here are with the payment processing captured by Apple & Google, and why their gatekeeping (net negative to competition) should be a profit center for them while at the same time being a net negative (arguable) to consumers.
All of my non-phone devices are Linux. I like the separation there. Phones are not really good devices for working on, and as a result, aren’t that fun to tinker with. I’d rather just leave it locked down.
The app based model that phones use is kind of crap. I will happily pipe together a bunch of little scripts and programs in bash to make a workflow for my niche usecase. But, phone apps don’t seem to focus on inter-operability. As a result, in the phone ecosystem you just have to find an app, or the task is basically impossible. If I’m not going to use third party store, and there are fewer apps in the official App Store, I’ll probably use my phone less.
On the bright side, maybe making the phone ecosystem worse will open up room for more proper Linux phones with the full desktop suite of tools.
True. Generally when I looked into those, the reviews focused on the poor build quality, high prices, and limited software. But it was a couple years ago, though, so I bet they are doing better now.
I think for my next phone I’ll look into them again. I like Linux. I like tinkering with my computer. I don’t really enjoy the smartphone form-factor that much, so I’m worried that I won’t enjoy tinkering on my phone as much, so I’ve got somewhat tepid feelings there. But we’ll see how things evolve.
>The company contends that iMessage [doesn’t fall within the scope of the DMA] as it is not a fee-based service and it does not monetise it via the sale of hardware devices nor via the processing of personal data.
oh, cool. Where do I go to get my no-fee access to iMessage with my pixel phone?
Although it is on app stores, iMessage updates happens with the iOS updates itself. It is just there because you can actually remove the Messages app and then re-install it later if you want.
Last I heard, Apple announced (directly to 9to5Mac for some reason) that it will support RCS this year, probably to head off litigation. Google, on the other hand, still doesn't support RCS in Google Voice and has announced no plans to do so.
OS updates on iPhones frequently list new emoji in the release notes. It would be interesting to see what the most mundane reason for an iOS update is.
Its pretty funny because one of the only decent arguments against Beeper was that iMessage isn't actually free because it is a service that is funded by hardware sales so therefore Apple is under no obligation to provide it to non-customers.
Apple is saying, separately, «our reason to run iMessage isn't selling hardware» and «funding for running iMessage comes from customers and we won't provide it to non-customers». Both paraphrased by me. I've no idea why they do develop and run iMessage, but I also don't necessarily see a conflict between the two sentiments.
It is a bit of a weird quote, they are quoting Reuters but I’m not sure if they are arguing against them or what. They also say:
> While iMessage has so far not been deemed a platform – as it doesn’t have enough regular users in Europe (WhatsApp is far more popular there, even among iPhone users)
You don't. You get no-fee access to iMessage with your Apple devices (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops). Why is that relevant though? Why should Apple be forced to support apps on their competitor's platform?
They say they don't do that. Here's one way it could have happened:
Suppose Apple had plans to monetise iMessage at the time it was developed and eventually decided against it for whatever reason. This would leave the company with a an app running on most phones. What to do? I can easily imaging someone standing up in a meeting and suggesting: "Well, running it costs very little, why don't we just minimise the cost of running it and keep providing it for as long as the cost is low?"
You mean that whenever an organisation pays for a loss-making operation using income from its hardware sales, that operation is monetised via hardware sales?
That doesn't make sense to me. It makes monetisation be a synonym of funding.
Surely, monetisation means that you do x in order to earn income from hardware sales. That is to say, your motivation counts, or rationale. The rationale is of course only known to people who attend the relevant budget meetings.
I don't know, it doesn't to me. To me it sounds like they provide a convenient free service like many other free services (Telegram, WhatsApp, ...), but limit it to their actual customers so it stays limited in scope and they don't need to start selling data and ad space like others do to support it.
This might be true in Europe, but not in America. In Europe, nobody uses iMessage, because WhatsApp got there first. iMessage is locked down and therefore less useful than WhatsApp. Despite the fact that iMessage is pre-installed in iPhones, and you can't change your default messaging app, and everything about the iPhone encourages you to use it, people still download WhatsApp instead. That's how things are supposed to be; the more useful, more open, more technically capable service won out. And no, WhatsApp does not have ads, nor does it collect your data due to its E2E encryption.
In America, iMessage got there first. Even though it's technically worse than WhatsApp, enough people use it (a majority) that it doesn't matter that it handicaps its own users with SMS and green bubbles. People think it's all the other phones' fault rather than the iPhone's fault. It's a massive driver of iPhone sales, and Apple execs are on the record acknowledging that.
That's not how it's supposed to work. The better messaging platforms should be competitive. Apple stock would tank if they were forced to open up the iMessage API.
> Apple stock would tank if they were forced to open up the iMessage API.
If I were on the board of Apple, that's precisely why I'd be pushing for it to be open. I would be terrified if my company's value were in a stupid chatting protocol. It's the difference between accidentally driving off a cliff and purposely driving off a cliff with a parachute. I'd choose the parachute and make money/goodwill from the exposure vs. losing everything because the "blue sheeple" woke up.
I don't think you can use 1Password passkey without turning on the default password manager; at least, you cannot login using apple account passkey on the computer with 1Password.
Not OP but one that is usually contentions is the ability to act as an SMS client. Facebook's Messenger can or at least used to be able to do this on Android. It cannot on iOS.
When a service reaches a certain size, it is not just a small free service for its users. This is the point of gatekeeper regulations: Ensuring that services large enough to have significant impact on people are well-behaved and compatible.
The argument that iMessage is a service provided by Apple for Apple products and that they should be allowed to do whatever with their products is the same argument they've used to restrict App Store, force developers to use their payment systems and charge outrageous cuts of every payment a user might make through there.
iMessage plays quite a notable role in this, as a user whose friends use iMessage (more prevalent in parts of the U.S. I think) might feel unable to move away in order to be connected to their iMessage-using friends, in turn ensuring that they keep buying iPhones and paying Apple a 30% cut of all their app subscriptions from Duolingo to Disney+.
free in that case, being subsidized by other purchases and the value of lock-in on those users. Doesn't sound like free. Sounds likes a calculated offering where users are paying, not in terms of their data, but their inability to change platforms and guarantee of future purchases being spent on Apple products.
Because the EU specifically wrote a law requiring (among other people) Apple to support apps on their competitor's platform, as a response to a bunch of anti-competitive nonsense the tech industry does with messaging apps.
To clarify: The Digital Markets Act includes a requirement for large message services to be interoperable (e.g., that you can chat with a WhatsApp user from Telegram), but Apple argues that iMessage does not have enough users in the EU to qualify.
Apple might be correct in this regard, as iMessage is not very popular in EU specifically. For this to apply here, either Apple would have to be caught lying about their numbers (not impossible), the EU would have to lower the minimums, or the US would have to create their own counterpart as iMessage is much more popular in the US.
Everybody really use WhatsApp to send messages to friends here, especially in group chats. I'm using Telegram with some friends and for some groups but WhatsApp is bigger. Anything else is a rounding error.
It's not even easy to know who's got an iPhone now: it's just a big phone with lots of cameras as any other one. However it's likely that two close friends, families, etc all using iPhones could decide to use iMessage for their own messages. Same as for... (had to google it) FaceTime.
The bullet points-read of the DMA do's and don'ts is Apple is only obliged to not impose barriers to installing third party messaging apps, browsers, mail clients, camera apps, etc.
That's interesting. I wonder which of the built-in apps Apple regards as being monetised via the sale of phones and which not.
(Just to be clear: I have no problems believing that it is like that. I've worked at a company that spent a lot of effort on a service that earned nothing, I asked about it, the CEO looked at me blankly and just said that that service wasn't monetised. People make choices I don't understand. Why shouldn't Apple do that?)
I honestly don't understand why everyone misses a very important fact: iMessage is not an app, it's a service that uses Apple's servers and Apple's engineers to maintain it and you have not paid for it. No, as an Android user you do not have a right for free access, use SMS for that. It would have been nice if there was an Android iMessage App, but demanding for someone else to pay for you is dishonest.
If you want to be pedantic in this way, SMS isn't free, either. You pay your carrier for access to that (and their servers and engineers to support & maintain it).
Technically a carrier is only needed for receiving messages and not sending. Sending a SMS to someone who is on AT&T is just as simple as sending an email to [phone number]@txt.att.net.
No need for SMS. There are more than 10 free messaging apps, starting with Signal.
To add to that, in most countries iMessage has irrelevant market-share and I know people who don't even know what that word means (we tech people live in bubbles). So an Android iMessage is not really sought after in most places anyway.
I honestly don't understand why everyone misses a very important fact: iCloud email is not an app, it's a service that uses Apple's email servers and Apple's engineers to maintain it. No, as an Android user you do not have a right for free access to other people's iCloud inboxes. It would have been nice if there was an Android email client, but asking for someone else to pay for you is dishonest.
So what did you say? You actually want access to others' inboxes? I don't understand what that means. That's usually password protected and considered private data.
They highlighted that the original logic was somewhat faulty, and could be applied to say "Non-apple users should not be allowed to send emails to Apple users, because they have not paid Apple to maintain the iCloud email infrastructure!".
> Nobody forces you to use iMessage/Telegram/WhatsApp/...
The EU strongly disagrees with this statement in case of the the latter two, which is why they are being targetted by the DMA and must provide interopability so that you cannot continue to be forced to use them.
If iMessage had users in the EU, the same would have applied there.
Being forced to use something does not mean you are being held at gunpoint or that no other options exist. For messaging apps, being in a location where your entire social network uses one app is indeed a case where the average person ends up forced to use that app as picking another option means not talking to your social network (unwanted) or having to convert everyone else (unreasonable). This harms both competition and users.
The EU strongly disagreed about many things that it later admitted were wrong (or just quietly changed its stance on), for example nuclear energy policy or biofuel additives. It also kind of does its own thing without really consulting the general population. Practically nobody even knows what's happening there in my country.
"They have previously been wrong, therefore they cannot be right" and "I do not know what they are doing, therefore they cannot be doing the right thing"?
I think that clearly marks the end of any useful discussion.
I don't think your arguing in good faith. I dont like to throw around the word "shill" but it gets hard sometimes.
Assuming you are just misunderstanding. The comment about iCloud email is talking about interoperability. Where someone with a gmail account should be able to send an email to someone with iCloud account. And vice versa.
The argument is that it is not OK to prevent this sort of interoperability, and requiring this does not mean you have serve the users of other services with servers and hosting, you just have to allow WhatsApp to send messages to imessage and vice versa. Just like email
That's a great reason why your dinner table is not covered by the Digital Markets Act. But here they're trying to argue the law shouldn't apply because Apple isn't getting money from iMessage, when it's clearly been part of their strategy for selling more iPhones for a long time[1][2].
The DMA defines a 'gatekeeper service' as one that has more than 45 million European users. Thus, this would be more like you've laid a table for 45 million Europeans and invited them to eat your food on condition that they don't eat any other food apart from yours. I think you'd get a fair amount of scrutiny from EU officials if you did that!
Yes, and in this case the food is still free. Buy one get one doesn't make the second one not free. You bought access to the table and we provide free food to entice you into the purchase, but we're allowed to revoke the food at any time because you're not paying for it. It's like how mobile carriers will give you access to Netflix/HBO Max for free while you use them.
> The company contends that iMessage [doesn’t fall within the scope of the DMA] as it is not a fee-based service and it does not monetise it via the sale of hardware devices nor via the processing of personal data.
This seems to undermine one of the main arguments that was used against Beeper Mini, mainly that iMessage access was "purchased" by buying an Apple device, and so Beeper Mini users were "stealing" iMessage.
> The company in its argument to the EU competition enforcer said it operates five App Stores on iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs and Apple Watches, with each designed to distribute apps for a specific operating system and Apple device
They might as well count the iphones with different aspect ratios and inflate the number beyond five.
Considering how arbitrary Apple's demarcation of the five App Stores is already, it's not much of a technical leap to go further. I'm no expert on the Apple developer tools, but if it's anything like Android, apps for a 2022 iPhone are a lot closer to apps for a 2022 iPad than they are to a 2018 iPhone.
With Android, new API/ABI versions are released with breaking changes, forcing a different set of apps to be available for each version, but the codebase remains mostly the same across form factors at any given point in time.
I think the Commission are more than capable of seeing through Apple's artificial distinctions here, but the question is whether the General Court will!
> But Apple may succeed in arguing that its app stores for other devices should be excluded. (The Mac App Store should already be safe, as users are free to download and install apps direct from developers.)
And I imagine Apple would just love to close this historical "loophole", but is probably afraid of the backlash...
That would not be possible because Macs are much more open by design. There are so many methods to subvert such a restriction, and most of them can't be removed without significantly degrading the utility of the OS. And even if we suppose they did do that, users would just stop updating and stop buying new hardware incapable of running old OS versions.
They tried it with Safari too. Unfortunately for Apple, turns out that their marketing department came up with the tagline "Same Safari. Different device." when advertising how seamlessly Safari works across all their different devices.
I'm not sure the marketing department cares. Apple has literally said their customers had lied about the butterfly keyboard issue for years, when they did the lying.
They cannot be damaged, they have a populist demagogue-like effect.
Is Apple trying to pull an Amazon when they said they were a half dozen entities in EU and therefor did not qualify as a big company? ( perhaps even a small business.. )
Btw they might have many "stores" but the market is single and so the brand and "store front", but let's entertainment yet another childish tantrum from Apple..
I wonder what the thinking is with this argument. Make the EU come up with an argument that they need to open the apple watch and apple TV to third party app stores too because that seems more silly? Or are they just trying to split it up so iphone numbers are smaller? Or do they hope that they end up with a precedent that they can apply to all their devices instead of just one?
The long and short of it is that the EU, in determining the gatekeepers, looked at the monthly active users for each store separately on the premise that each OS (i.e., iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS) is separate from each other with its own constraints, functionality, and purpose.
The EU then realized that the only App Store that meets the monthly active user threshold is the iOS App Store (and maybe iPadOS, I am not 100% sure as I write this, the preliminary findings were a while back), which wasn’t desirable for the EU as they want to regulate as much as possible. Hence, the EU basically said: “fuck it, we’ll treat them all as one; the DMA is written vague enough that we can get away with this.”
Apple is now appealing this finding and echoed the EU’s original stance that these are to be considered separate, with each their own monthly active user threshold to meet.
Android is quite a bit more popular than iPhones in the EU (roughly 66% vs 33%). And the iPhone app store is likely the most lucrative one for Apple. So it makes sense to try and isolate it. It will be interesting to see how the iPad affects this.
I'm not sure about the wearable/smartwatch market. That could be more skewed towards Apple Watch. Doubt anybody cares about Apple TV. macOS store is likely exempt as - for now - Macs can install software from anywhere.
Well one of them (on Mac) is certainly not a monopoly, on my Mac I have like two apps from the Mac App Store, the rest is bought directly or via Homebrew.
>The Mac App Store should already be safe, as users are free to download and install apps direct from developers
Not a Mac user/dev here. If I am not going through the store, if I don't use xcode to sign my executable, won't MacOS force the user to go through cryptic command line changes to let them install my software?
Unless it's changed recently, it's just a right-click and then Open on the app. Older versions let you select radio box in the Security tab in the settings app to allow all apps.
That sounds misleadingly easy. The misleading part is that if you yep to open it the normal way, instead of getting an error that tells you that you can do that, you get an error that makes it sound like the developer did something wrong and there's nothing you can do.
That's exactly what companies do when they are faced with "companies of greater than size N must follow extra rule" regulations, although many here will say that is just cheating.
I'm going to have to ask for a source of this claim that people who want antitrust action against hypercorporations would somehow be dissatisfied with the stated goal of antitrust, which is to break up trusts.
Do you honestly think the iPhone would be less successful if it was broken up into a separate company from the mac business? And the complaints aren't really based on Apple's size, but its market success.
An iphone seperated from the mac business would either need to run it's own icloud that is open to other companies (e.g. mac if it still wants to sync with mac) or it needs to use 3rd party integrations (e.g. icloud if it's its own company or still part of mac). In one case iphone is making more money and is more open in the other it's spending more money and is more open (which is which; who knows) in either case mac and iphones incentives are no longer aligned on keeping a closed icloud and one (or both) of the products would likely become more open which is good for customers and the whole point of anti-trust.
The sucess of iPhone/mac/icloud doesn't really factor into it (some of them will shrink and some will do better as they're not subsidizing other parts of Apple or can canibalize other parts of Apple's market). You'd be right in asserting the success of Apple is a factor, as those who are arguing for such a seperation would say, it's making outsized profits by not competing fairly in several of the markets it's in.
What makes you think my goal is to make the iPhone less successful? What I want are markets with a wide array of healthy competitors, not our current shambling duopoly.
AFAIK Japan is also working on the Google and Apple monopoly or abuses with the store, so for the ones that always will use the same anti-EU arguments try to make them generic to also work for Japan.
Apple is the classic defector in the prisoners dilemma. Hard to think of a company that has cooperated the least. Between anti-consumer behavior, cutting edge anti-tax behavior, and anti-competitive behaviors, they are defectors.
It very much reminds me of a Machiavellian / Nietzsche style.
Not that other companies don't do the same, but most aren't as brazen as Apple.
I honestly learned a lot from Apple, although as an Individual its seems significantly more frowned upon to lie.
> The company in its argument to the EU competition enforcer said it operates five App Stores on iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs and Apple Watches, with each designed to distribute apps for a specific operating system and Apple device.
This is absolutely true. Each OS has a different set of apps. And the catalog is different for each OS.
And this will now bite them hard. MacOS has alternative app stores from third parties. iPhone does not have an alternative app store. So iPhone is not following the same rule. Same argument goes for the iPad.
And if a simple OS filter can dictate the "number" of app stores Apple maintains, then allowing third party app stores is just another filter away. A new app store by --Company X-- can be added with its own catalog of apps and curation on the front page as well as its own search engine and own roster.
Interestingly, I use the AppStore perhaps 10 times per year.
I suspect most people don't interact with it. Yes, I get updates, and yes I make use of the payments facilities, but I'm not really an active user on the app store..
Depends on the app but basically, yeah. For example, the Ivory for Mastodon app is a Mac/iPhone/iPad application, and the "Mac App Store Preview" shows screenshots for all three devices.
>The company contends that iMessage [doesn’t fall within the scope of the DMA] as it is not a fee-based service and it does not monetise it via the sale of hardware devices
My issue with that is Apple's own polices aren't about consumer wants. Look at how they limit Steam Link and Netflix to prevent payment from customers. That doesn't help consumers in any way, but just Apple wanting more control and fees.
Then it forces consumers to use a browser to pay like Netflix or Spotify, that consumers have no way of knowing about because the app can't mention it. Or have the entire app as a PWA like Xbox Cloud Streaming and Geforce Now because Apple don't care about the single App Store either, so I'm forced to find the "PWA app store".
So even without caring about developers, I think this monopoly needs to be regulated. The other way to regulate it would be to force Apple App Store to carry all these, and allow all these different payments. I think you'd agree with me that that'd be even worse.
In general it’s bit of a give and take. Yes sure Apple prevents certain things that some consumers might want, but they also introduce and nudge (if not outright require) developers towards practices that are pro-consumer.
Family sharing and being able to share purchases with 6 family members is such a move. Another would be universal purchases that give you access to iPad/Mac/watch apps.
Easy refunds is also one that comes to mind or preventing developers from granular targeting of devices, motivating that developers put out apps that don’t just work on the latest iPhone with the big screen.
> Look at how they limit Steam Link and Netflix to prevent payment from customers. That doesn't help consumers in any way, but just Apple wanting more control and fees.
Then it forces consumers to use a browser to pay like Netflix or Spotify, that consumers have no way of knowing about because the app can't mention it.
Eh… there are customers that prevent to have all their payments through the App Store so they can manage subscriptions at one place and don’t have to deal with dark patterns.
Also keep in mind that Spotify and Netflix are free to offer IAP in addition to their payment via their website and direct customers to their website to sign up (Netflix does this), but neither Spotify nor Netflix want to offer the option of IAP. They prefer to lose out on new subscriptions directly via the app, in favor of nudging people to their website to sign up and pay via the website.
> Or have the entire app as a PWA like Xbox Cloud Streaming and Geforce Now because Apple don't care about the single App Store either, so I'm forced to find the "PWA app store".
Not sure if I follow. But both the concept of Xbox Cloud Streaming and GeForce Now is allowed as app, provided they submit app containers for individual games so they can review it on a per game basis.
But PWA support is also offered, Amazon Luna worked closely with Apple to get it working smoothly in Safari for example.
> So even without caring about developers, I think this monopoly needs to be regulated. The other way to regulate it would be to force Apple App Store to carry all these, and allow all these different payments. I think you'd agree with me that that'd be even worse.
Personally I don’t think regulation is necessary because Apple hasn’t abused its market position. Many of these restrictive rules were set at the introduction of the App Store when Apple was a nobody in the market and everyone was applauding how much better it was then what was known at the time.
Since then they haven’t tightened the reigns, instead they’ve introduced a lower commission rate for renewals after the first year and introduced a small business program with lower commissions.
It is because they didn’t abuse their newly gained market position to strangle developers that I think regulation isn’t necessary, it would be weird and unjust to start regulations just because they’ve grown despite the rules that are now considered a problem.
> Personally I don’t think regulation is necessary because Apple hasn’t abused its market position
Apple is blocking competitors. It's anti-competitive.
I'd argue these examples are abuse of Apple's market position as their "take" part of the give and take. Just because you're fine with their give and take doesn't mean everyone else is. There's never going to be a consensus on the balance of the give and take.
> it would be weird and unjust to start regulations just because they’ve grown
That's the whole basis of anti-trust: a bigger company requires more regulations to prevent them from hurting competition. No one cares when Softbank owns ARM, but it's an issue for Nvidia to buy it. Same with Figma and Adobe.
> Apple is blocking competitors. It's anti-competitive.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point.
Every company works against their competition to one degree or another and every company has a monopoly to one degree or another.
If I would launch a new smartphone tomorrow with its own OS via which I restrict access to apps from sources approved by me, I effectively have a monopoly over it.
This all legal in the US antitrust framework, otherwise it would cause issues at all levels of commerce.
In fact, the Sherman Act, the first antitrust legislation in the US has section 2, the plain reading of which prohibits any form of monopoly. This was recognized to be so problematic that a whole history of case law was developed to prevent issues.
This lead to terms such as “innocent monopoly” to indicate monopolies derived from merit.
The DOJ has done a pretty good job going into the intricacies with copious amounts of citations to relevant cases[0], so I’ll leave you the link below instead of rehashing it all here.
The gist of it, however, is that mere monopolies aren’t so much the issue in modern US anti-trust enforcement (provided the monopolies weren’t attained by illegal means, which is not the case here), but rather abuse of power derived from that monopoly position or market dominance.
So when I say “Apple hasn’t abused its market position”, I’m saying Apple hasn’t used the market position they’ve gained over the years to force or influence others in an unlawful way. Which would be an anti-trust issue.
When Apple set the rules for their App Store they had no weight to throw around, they were a market entrant, some even argue that they created the market by doing so, but that’s not really relevant for the discussion. Because of that, they were unable to violate anti-trust law at the time, because they didn’t have market dominance.
What is relevant in the anti-trust context is when they gained dominance and if they since used that dominance in unlawful ways.
My argument is that they haven’t tightened the rules and in fact have lowered the commission in some cases, so there’s no anti-trust issue here.
This isn’t some standard of my making, this is an essential point in anti-trust actions.
Back during the Epic case I phoned in pretty much daily to follow the hearings and multiple days were spent trying to pinpoint when Apple gained market dominance (as it’s not something that happens overnight, so it takes some effort to come to that determination).
This was important, because it’s from that moment onwards Apple’s actions elicit more scrutiny.
Had they introduced stricter rules or increased commission after gaining market dominance, it would’ve been a clear case of anti-trust violation.
A good example close to the subject at hand is carrier bloatware and carrier influence in general. When Apple launched the first iPhone (i.e., when they were a market entrant with no significant market power), Apple told carriers that they wouldn’t be allowed to install their bloatware.
This was fine at the time because Apple had no market power.
Had they not done that and had they started to impose this restriction around the iPhone 6 for example, then that becomes a potential anti-trust issue, because now it can be argued that Apple is throwing its weight around to force carriers to do as they want (e.g., which was the crux of the issue in the MS case, where MS was throwing their weight around to get OEMs to do what they wanted).
Years later, when Apple introduced functionality such as Hotspot, Apple was too big to tell carriers what to do, as a result a lot of carriers in the US impose certain limits to the Hotspot functionality through carrier settings that are loaded in.
These are clear examples of issues that can rise to the levels of anti-trust violations.
The App Store doesn’t have these issues because they imposed the restrictions at its inception and lessened some of the detrimental sharper edges by lowering commissions in some cases.
This is all from the US anti-trust framework. The EU approaches this differently, but it too has limitations and it’ll be interesting to see how the European courts draw the lines.
> That's the whole basis of anti-trust: a bigger company requires more regulations to prevent them from hurting competition. No one cares when Softbank owns ARM, but it's an issue for Nvidia to buy it. Same with Figma and Adobe.
That’s only one aspect of anti-trust, specifically mergers, where horizontal mergers gain a lot of scrutiny and vertical mergers, while not an issue per se, can also elicit scrutiny.
In the context of Apple however, we’re talking about vertical integration through internal expansion, which is wholly outside the purview of anti-trust.
Because again, in the US, organic growth or merit based growth if you will, is almost considered sacred.
To legislators and courts alike, it’s merely a sign of success and we wouldn’t want to punish success in our hyper capitalistic society now would we?
All that said, I wasn’t talking about mergers. I was talking about actions that were retroactively deemed anti-competitive just because the company in question has grown exponentially (which is what the whole App Store issue would boil down to).
That’s just not going to happen in the US, because it opens up a whole can of worms that will reverberate throughout all levels of commerce big and small.
Sure the DOJ might take some pot shots, but unless they get Apple on unlawful acts borne out of their market position (i.e., imposing restrictions on things after they introduced it and after they gained a dominant market share in the relevant market), it won’t really go anywhere.
Hell, Microsoft was actively throwing their weight around and bullying OEMs into doing what MS wanted, and even then the DOJ didn’t manage to break up MS, instead they ended up settling with MS after an appeal overturned some of the key points in their case.
By comparison Apple is way smarter about it all. They don’t outright bully people around and they always introduce new stuff with restrictions from the outset, because they know they can always loosen up restrictions but they can never tighten them after the fact because of their size.
I doubt that'll happen. Android has had the possibility to create alternative app stores since the very beginning and even though there are other stores like F-Droid or whatever Samsung calls their bloatware nowadays almost no one uses them. Apple will not bloat their devices with that crap (talking about the Samsung stuff F-Droid is great and I'd love to see an equivalent for iPhones) from the factory and the vast majority of users will still use the default because it's what they are accustomed to and what's recommended by the manufacturer.
All mainstream apps will remain in the Apple store and everything will be pretty much the same with the ability to side-load whatever you please to the device you bought.
Can't you avoid the horrible mess on windows by not installing any store you don't want ?
I assume you're thinking about Steam for instance ? Forgo Steam, and you're back to the iPhone situation where you only get a small portion of the ecosystem in nice and clean walled garden. You're in the mess only if you care about getting the full choice of applications, which Apple will never allow on its own.
Even with steam I can buy a game on steam and install it on steam. Then when I go run it, I need to first install another company's launcher. This includes signing up, confirming my email, etc.
Even single player games will require you launch, sign up, and auth with EA's servers before you can play said game.
Is all of this worse than not playing the game at all ?
I don't play any EA games so I don't know how it feels on each platform, but the games I care about on steam are just not available, or have been extremely cut down on the other platforms, so it's not like there's an equivalent polished experience to fall back on.
Hilarious argument, I cannot wait for Apple to open the walled garden this year.
Especially for the feeling of vindication here on HN. A lot of people would basically go on you as vultures if you dared voice your opinion that Apple should not have absolute control over the platform and that it doesn't matter what their ToS says..
Look and behold the wall is coming down. And tbh it does feel pretty good after arguing about this on HN for the last couple of years.
> The company in its argument to the EU competition enforcer said it operates five App Stores on iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs and Apple Watches, with each designed to distribute apps for a specific operating system and Apple device.
With a straight face they said this, or were they stifling a laugh? If they all say Apple on them, and all the money goes to the same place, and users share an account, and the payment processing is the same, and the same dude is running all of them, and... come on.
Even if they do it, for the sake of argument, which they don't, it won't fly the way you'd like it because unless it comes with lots of red tape ensuring you cannot just whitelist/blacklist a certain type of client on a whim, it's useless. Apple will continue to enforce its authentication scheme where you have to come from iCloud, and you have to attest your device and OS too. What good is it for you to know it's XMPP under the hood if only a blessed client can connect to it?
Because they are the ones that can exploit lax laws of the US (or lax execution). The reason the big companies became big is since 80s almost no company got broken by the US.
The US is mostly a single culture and people mostly speak a single language. It is already easier to found more successful companies in the US. Then the laws give much more leeway in workers rights, privacy rights and environment protection in the US.
When those companies enter EU market, they try to steamroll the existing EU ones who did everything by the book. They can exploit loopholes better, they can get better loans (sometimes at the expense of natural persons' accounts) and sell for a loss for longer, they can hire lawyers to delay decisions while forcing other competitors into bankruptcy.
This reduces actual competition and innovation. Not the best, most beneficial product with better operational cost, customer benefit or even the best profit wins. The one that can inflate their value the most wins.
Amazon is a great example of that. Their store sucks in every single way. Filtering sucks, search sucks, quality sucks, delivery sucks, returns except the Amazon center suck. There are way better stores in just Germany than Amazon. But everybody buys at Amazon because they can strong arm sellers to reduce prices to unreasonable levels and avoid strong tax laws.
Some people in the EU see this as an actual problem for the economy and act. They try to level the playing field. The US government sleeps on the laws so the companies grow stronger and try to do even more misdeeds globally which also negatively affects EU.
> The company in its argument to the EU competition enforcer said it operates five App Stores on iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs and Apple Watches, with each designed to distribute apps for a specific operating system and Apple device.
What a fucking joke. It’s like this guy that intentionally plays obtuse with his actshuallllly.
And if I have a MacBook, for instance, do I have a choice in downloading the app from the iPad store or the iPhone store? No, there’s just one for my device!
And do I have a choice to use a non Apple App Store? No!
So while there might be multiple stores for Apple, there’s only one for my device from Apple
It’s like arguing that any monopoly isn’t actually a monopoly because the company has multiple physical locations. But the consumer has one choice, constrained by geography
I’m no lawyer but this is clearly a Hail Mary, perhaps suggested by some law firm to get a little more money out of Apple