If I tilt my head just right, we could be discussing the way WalMart purchases products. They sell a product in their store, they decide they want a certain margin, and then they tell suppliers to meet a certain price target if they want their products in WalMart.

Apple is the sole buyer of All App Store Products, and you cant buy those products anywhere else. Which as far as I understand it, is what the argument Monopsony is trying to make. Buying Power instead of Market Power.

Edit: After rereading the article, the start of the article also pointed out, it was the developer that set the price of the App, not Apple. Giving them the power to price their product. Even if Apple were in this "Monopsony", it isn't really evident to me how this had harmed consumer.

Also if you think at the clients of store A and B this fake competition costs them more so the only people that benefit are the store owners, free market should always push for competition and consumer good not for making more oney then a nation. If all this crap is legal then laws need to be changed and this would include limitations for Wallmart or physical stores too.

If you believe these are core OS functions, and therefore not subject to competition, Microsoft has a old story to tell you about Internet Explorer web browser and Windows 95 OS.

But yes you can install a third party app like Google Voice with its own phone number and send text messages through it.

You would really trust any third party to intercept your sms messages?

On top of that, the third party dialer integrates with the native dialer and call history.

Not OP but I trust Thunderbird on my PC to access my emails so why I could not also trust a Mozilla or other trustworthy company to access my messages on my phone where in my case the SMS is used by companies to send me notifications about billing , I am the type of person that will call someone(people in my group don't send SMS)

I install any random crap on my phone and tablet because I know they can’t do too much damage between the better permission model and sandboxing.

And how say allowing a reviewed and sandboxed Firefox or a side loaded version that I would enable using some convoluted steps affects you personally? I don't demand Apple to make you less secure just want competition and no restriction, if I need say a power tool like a firewall or to run some custom scripts as root let me as a power user do that in a way you won't be affected - there must be such a solution because I do not see OSX user getting hacked left and right.

There is competition - you can choose the same mobile operating system that 85% of mobile users choose - Android.

there must be such a solution because I do not see OSX user getting hacked left and right.

A company you may have heard of corrupted user’s operating systems if they had system integrity protection turned off....

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en

Or another “trustworthy” company installed a web server surreptitiously on users computers so even when they uninstalled the software, it reinstalled itself.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/articl...

Spotify - was complaining that there was no facility to integrate with Siri - Apple added intents in iOS 13.

Spotify also complained that they couldn’t do music streaming on watchOS - that was also added in the latest version of watchOS.

Spotify got access months alter after complaints to the EU were made so I am not convinced that Apple is still give equal opportunities to all developers especially when better browser engines exist and you can't use them.

Apple has a long history of developing functionality and using it internally before releasing them publicly. The alternative is releasing a half baked API that it has to support forever. It’s a lot easier to change an API that is only used internally than it is to change an API which people depend on.

Yes, Apple produced a better solution than allowing random third parties the ability to record everything you do on your phone. Would you prefer that they never increase privacy and security?

You owe me a new keyboard. Apple puts out half baked APIs constantly, and drops APIs constantly. Like literally, every release they do has APIs in those two camps.

Using this logic you should then ot have the freedom to read your emails outside Apple browser or email client on your computers, the solution is

1 let the user decide if the trusts the third party

2 for sensitive application like mail/sms/browsers review the top 5 alternative browsers/email clients etc and allow only those, I assume Apple has the ability to say discuss with Mozilla about allowing Firefox on iOS, what APIs and what privacy rules need to be respected and then have a team of lawyers ready if Mozilla breaches the contract/promises.

My point there are solutions between the extremes of not allow thrid party access and allow any random app access.

No one considers email to be secure because of if nothing else, the store and forward nature.

IMessage is end to end encrypted. Should Apple also allow third parties the ability to intercept iMessage or should they split iMessage from sms? Who does that benefit?

2. Now some developers are in a privileged position.

A more accurate comparison is a market hall which permit sellers to set up booths in return for a cut of the revenues. As an example I would look at stores around Olympics games, where the organizers holds enormous power in controlling who get to sell what, the price and the cut. The level of control they assert seems pretty similar to that of apple.

It is, in a lot of ways, like the market model you suggest. Not precisely; it is its own thing (and is popular precisely because it's so innovative in its business model, which lowers prices for its customers). So analogies with Walmart are always going to be problematic, but it's worth noting that their model is very different from the simple retail-reseller model.

https://spendmatters.com/2015/09/16/what-the-new-wal-mart-st...

As a customer, I have an account with Apple. When I purchase an app, I pay Apple, and I presume they give 70% of my payment to the developer.

As a customer, it feels like a retail store. I give money to the store, but I end up in a warranty relationship with the manufacturer, much like buying something from a store.

Imagine buying a nice desk to work on, and being told you could only buy paper and pens from the manufacturer of the desk. Maybe other vendors could be considered if 30% of their revenue went to the desk manufacturer. Preposterous, right? That's the world be live in and accepted as the norm for smartphones. Not a monopoly on a market scale, but the notion of selling someone a "platform" couldn't have really been foreseen a century ago. It's a similar idea, but it's more monopolism targeted at the market that surrounds the platform.

One particularly egregious example: Apple should reasonably be allowed to determine which products they sell on the App Store, but by preventing the installation of arbitrary apps from outside of the store, they've created a monopoly that they use for moral policing and anticompetitive practices. Apple not only disallows nudity-centric apps or apps that control nicotine vaporizers on their store, but effectively has banished them from their phones entirely. Which seems very suspect, and arguably they should not have the right to stop people from using what may be their primary computing platform as they see fit.

Then there's the issue of ebooks and music: Apple takes 30% of every in-app purchase, and developers are forbidden from using alternate payment processors to get around that. As such, Amazon can't reasonably sell ebooks in their app (you have to use a web browser and figure out the weird absence of buying capabilities yourself, as a user) since it would soak up the entire margin. Apple, however, competes with Amazon and sells ebooks themselves...which is questionable. Spotify cannot sign people up for their service without giving Apple an ongoing 30% cut of the subscription...meanwhile, Apple competes with them.

To be fair, on Android, you at least have the ability to sideload apps or use different app stores. Of course, not many people do, but the option is there.

How so?

If you want to buy X, and there's only one person selling X, then that person is the monopoly seller of X.

If you want to sell X, and there's only one person buying X, then that person is the monopsony buyer of X.

You can't swap the adjectives around; monopsony buyer is redundant in the same way monopoly seller is. You can think of them as the same word with different agreement forms, much like how "is" in "He is red" is the same word as "am" in "I am purple".

If you swap the logic around it would be like calling Apple a monopoly because they are the only seller of iphones, a contrived market that is actually just a subset of the smartphone market.