Re:Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it
by manicdee on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @07:53PM
(#22060621)
And then you find that people are buying Apple specifically because Apple does all this stuff to control the iOS app marketplace.
The whole point of a walled garden is that it’s walled, and you don’t have to learn about gardening to enjoy it. Your experience with the garden is to simply walk through it chat with friends, and never think more about it.
Allowing side-loading means suddenly you as the customer have to learn how to identify legitimate visitors to the garden apart from miscreants and pickpockets. How do you know who to trust?
Why are people so keen to remove the gatekeeper from the walled garden?
This is only about forcing Apple to provide a backdoors to their Secure Enclave. I am not falling for it.
> 2. Apple is a monopoly/monopsony and should be forced to allow more user choice of apps, allow sideloading, lower their prices, lower their app store cut, &c.
> Which one is is?
It's both, because they're two different contexts. There is no monopoly on phones; Android phones are direct competition. But what about app distribution? If you make apps and you want to buy app distribution to reach all customers, who is Apple's real competition for reaching customers on iOS? They haven't any; it's a monopoly. And it's not just like Walmart having a monopoly on shelf space at Walmart, because most Walmart customers will also shop at Target or Amazon, but most iOS customers don't also shop for apps at Google Play or Amazon. Apple is the only path to reach them.
Saying they could just buy an Android phone is like saying that a retailer with a regional monopoly in California doesn't really have a monopoly because all your customers could just move to New York. That's an unreasonable barrier to buy a $1 item, and on top of that it isn't even under the control of the app developer who wants to buy app distribution.