Re:Startups threatened by iOS 14’s new features
by AmericanChopper on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @08:42PM
(#22552353)
All of that is very much just your opinion, and very much not an opinion shared by the courts or the legislature. It’s also a criticism that applies equally to all products or services that expose any interface that a 3rd party can develop integrations for.
Unless the answer to that question is a clear "yes" in every case, this behaviour is de facto - and possibly de jure - on the wrong side of anti-monopoly law.
The problem is that iOS and MacOS are not specifically operating systems. iOS especially is an OS bundled with a curated non-trivial application suite.
That suite puts Apple into direct competition with iOS developers. And of course Apple has an impossibly huge monopolistic advantage in that space.
The ethical and above-board option would be to buy the rights to these apps and/or acquihire the devs who make them.
Apple has done that in the past, but seems less and less inclined to operate like that now.