But they're nowhere near "distressingly close" to a monopoly - even picking the most Apple friendly metrics, they have only 25% of the smartphone market, with Android constantly closing the gap (and e.g. Blackberry actually ahead of them in some areas). The Wii, on the other hand, has around 50% of the current generation console market.

They seem to have a monopoly on marketplace hype, I won't doubt that. But to claim they've a monopoly on smartphones is just plain wrong.

Wrong metric. You may as well choose "Shiny plastic devices market" as "smartphone market," because neither directly affects third-party devs. What matters here is app market, and Apple is utterly dominant there.

So Apple has a monopoly on the iPhone app store - no great surprise there. I may as well claim that Microsoft need to open the 360 marketplace to my personal ideals, because they have a monopoly on licensing XBox 360 games.

The Android app store certainly exists, and is doing quite well. The web is free for all platforms. Apple don't, by any realistic measure, have a monopoly on application sales for smartphones. They just couldn't - with only 25% of the smartphone market, and an app store that targets only that 25%, how can they have a monopoly on smartphone app publication? What they might have is a monopoly on the wealthy gadget consumer with large amounts of disposable income to spend on apps. I'm not, however, that Apple's clever demographic targeting, coupled with the inability of their competitors to eat into this market via fair competition, is reason to force them to change their business model.

Here's hard numbers: Apple was responsible for more than 99% of all mobile app sales last year. cite: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-...

So I don't think we can say "they just couldn't" — in fact, they just did.

And I might be skeptical about the numbers (Gartner isn't infallible), but every story I've heard from cross-platform mobile dev houses agrees with this — you'll get almost 100 times the sales on iPhone that you will on other platforms. I've never heard a contradictory story either, not even from Google trying to puff itself up. That's pretty much a monopoly.

The iPhone is the first, and in some cases still the only, platform to target if you're doing anything in the mobile consumer space. RIM competes with businesses only, there is no meaningful "app market" there, nor with Windows Mobile. Android is doing well, but it remains a distant second.

Wrong and wronger. Each of the console gaming companies you mentioned has more market share in consoles than Apple has in smart phones (and Apple's share of mobile phones as a whole is trivial). While the iPhone might garner 95% of Hacker News entries, it's only selling about 15% of smart phones. (That's a lot, especially at the markup Apple gets off of it, but it's less than any of the console makers has.)

Regardless, one does not need a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive actions and for them to be illegal.

I think the distinction that is confusing several people is that between the market for cellphones and the market for applications which run on high-end cellphones/mobiledevices. Using some of the numbers thrown around, it's the difference between saying Apple has only a 15% share of the cellphone market, vs., 99% share of the paid smartphone applications market. It's that latter market that Apple is clearly the dominant player in, and their change to the 3.3.1 could, by a reasonable person, by seen as a move to stifle development on competitive platforms. I think this is the basis for a potential investigation.