Gonna sue Nintendo if they don't let your game in the eshop?

Nintendo should be forced to allow homebrew games/sideloading. These locked down bits of hardware are a disservice to society.

I understand this question, but I believe an eshop is different from a major platform used by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis to run their lives.

It is possible that some of those people would list "only one app store & gateway for digital payments" as a feature for which they bought devices based on that platform. I'd list lots of the things devs complain about on iOS as reasons I favor it as an end user, in fact. (for the record, I've also done iOS and Android dev)

They're not perfect at all and I wish very much that they had competition, but for me to consider it real competition with the product they're providing it'd have to be similarly locked-down. The locking-down is part of the value. There are already far-less-locked-down phones and tablets available for people who want that.

Lock it down by default, but allow users to unlock it. Make it a bit hard, like the carrier-lock. You have your walled garden and I have my device.

I’m totally cool with that provided it’s not easy enough that another App Store is able to become a de facto necessity via that install method. The current official side-loading methods are almost good enough to suit the case of power users running a few custom apps from outside the store. If there’s a way to take off the time limits and not open up the possibility of the above scenario, that’d be wonderful. I have a couple non-App Store apps I’d put on mine, in fact.

Isn't Fortnite just some game?

Fortnite is a game, but the lawsuit only uses Fornite as a concrete example of what Apple is doing. Epic Games if fighting for everyone--all app developers and ios users.

Much harder, but it wouldn't surprise me if the do later, depending on how this goes.

app store "monopoly"? No one's forcing you to use the Apple ecosystem. it's called Android.

Where you're pretty much stuck google play store, which has also banned the app...

There is side-loading, but there's a lot of friction there that I wouldn't expect normal users to withstand.

Its a monopoly for developers. As a company you can not not use the app store because half of your customers are there and very few companies can afford to give up half of their customers.

Developers can chose to target other platforms.

There are countries with 0% iOS market share, half of zero is still zero.

I personally don't like Apple and will never buy an Apple product, but I fully agree. People who buy Apple products are perfectly fine with the way Apple restricts their platform. If you don't like this as a developer, then just leave and stop developing for iOS.

A single big company doing this just to cut down on some fees just reeks of greed.

It is not a single company, Google also kicked Fortnite, and it has been a thing in game consoles, car infotaiment systems, pre loaded apps on TV settop boxes and blue-ray players,....

The world is unfair, no one is expected to do charity for developers.

We are not a special snowflake job that isn't expected to give others the necessary payments to keep the whole chain working.

For most business that is not a choice. If you are making a utility or game then maybe, but can a company like uber decide that they will only be available to android users?