Having 3rd party stores will not prevent you for using the Apple App Store exclusively.
> As a user I will end up with 10 stores on my phone, each has my billing information,
Imagine if there is only 1 store, e.g. Walmart? Only Walmart has your billing information and it's the only store where you can buy things.
> Now let’s say if we have many stores
That would be great. These stores will be competing for customers that would drive prices down.
One store might decline to sell a specific product for many reasons but another store might carry the product.
Imagine that as a manufacturer, you can only sell thru Walmart. Walmart declines to sell your product and you have nowhere else to sell.
This is an interesting question. Let's say Apple will be forced to allow the Epic Games Store on iOS. Would Epic be forced to offer Fornite on the App Store in addition to the Epic Games Store? If not, bluesign's kid might very well force him to use another store.
It will if enough developers flee to whichever store has the cheapest rate and the fewest restrictions. It’s a race to the bottom and the consumer ultimately loses.
There's also the possibility of mobile equivalents to the Adobe CC installer/manager that act as their own "App Store" and aren't subject to any rules at all, which is even worse. After seeing what the likes of Adobe does on desktop PCs, I do not want to see what they do when granted effectively unfettered access to my phone.
Apple should have the ability to "shut off" unscrupulous third-party App Stores just as they do today with unscrupulous developers.
Adobe would find it tough going if they withdrew from Apple's App Store, and I can't imagine keeping 30% minus whatever it costs to provide an alternative would be worth it to the, given how many people would just stop using Adobe apps.
Like I said, I'm only now coming around on this, but I think a $2T company with total control of both hardware and software can probably work out a way to support additional stores without requiring a full-time battery-draining malware checker. In fact, I suspect most of us could figure out how to avoid that if we tried, rather than trying the opposite.
Sandboxing and limited APIs already exist, Apple doesn't need to review apps that don't appear in their App Store. As I've said, I suspect a very small percentage of people would be willing to install additional stores, and they can hardly complain if it turns out apps purchased there overshare PII.
That may or may not be the case, but I expect it'll be more fruitful to address it.
Cydia has existed for ages, and yet Apple's own App Store is still the undisputed market leader.
I'm having trouble envisioning a scenario in which consumers lose here.
This is not the case of Apple even if the OP made clear that Apple is making some business models impractical.
I am thinking Apple is like a union for their users. And they are regulating developers and they have huge negotiating power because they are gateway to user’s phone. I don’t see them as market participant, I more likely see them as market regulator.
But they are. There are competing apps to Apple's own apps on the App Store. Apple Music is an obvious example, but there's also web browsers, email clients, calendar clients, cloud storage, etc. Through their "market regulation" and using privileged APIs, they can artificially hold competitors back from reaching or surpassing parity of said competing apps.
Their "regulation" has forced all web browsers to use Safari on the backend without the benefits of things like content blockers. Their "regulation" has forced all apps to not be able to cut off a trial if they cancel the subscription renewal while hypocritically doing just that for things like Apple Arcade and Apple TV if you cancel the subscription before the trial is over. Their "regulation" has blocked out any competition to Apple Arcade like xCloud or Stadia. Their "regulation" has, until iOS 14 (still in a limited fashion), kept any other app from being a default and if those stock apps are deleted, annoy users to the point of reinstalling them due to popups when tapping an email address, date/time, or street address.
These are all ways that they secure their spot above the competition on their own devices and hold progression back until they're ready to implement competitive features (read: probably when competition starts poaching users from them despite the disadvantages they impose on said competition).
A participant in the market, which they most certainly are, should not be regulating that market and also profiting off of that regulation. This is how a manufacturer of only 3 types of devices is the most valuable company in the world. I can't think of any other company that has an entire market, or at least the size of App Store market, completely enveloped under their reign.
While I'm decidedly not Epic's side on this I think this is a misleading and dangerous argument. In a union, members get to vote to change the rules to benefit the membership. Apple never asked for my input on App Store rules.
[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
Regardless, 14% of 3.5 billion is still so ridiculously large that each phone OS should be considered their own market, not competitors within the same market. You wouldn't consider a microwave and a toaster oven to be in the same market, even if they're both kitchen appliances that heat up food because they're individual markets. Not all people want a microwave and not all people can afford a toaster oven due to space or financial priorities. In the world of tech, where there's no real definitive line between markets and any one company can have an audience of more people than any monopoly in the past, the old ways of drawing a line in the sand based on a percentage no longer works.
The link in my reference showed Apple at 14% of the global smartphone market for many years. Do you have a reference you think is more reliable?
Similarly, they have Apple in the US at between 40-49% the last 6 quarters:
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
While that's not 14%, it's certainly not a monopoly. Consumers don't have to worry that if they switch to one of those 51% that they're on a platform that nobody else will use. Epic and Spotify and Kindle could make tons of money selling to the other 51% of phones in the US; and if Apple's terms were actually difficult for them to make money from, they could just not make iOS apps, and be perfectly healthy companies. The fact that they do sell on iOS shows that they are making plenty of money, just not as much as they'd like.
Again, the smartphone manufacturing market isn't in question, it's the software markets that are tied to those smartphones.
But they really did.
They asked "Walled garden, restrictive app publishing, no BS", or "Sideload to your heart's content", you choose!
And Apple customers said "Walled garden, please and thank you!"
This is a completely respectable choice -- but of course it is not everyone's choice!
I was unintentionally (and unexpectedly) a unionized employee once. They didn't ask me to ratify their agenda, but they did require me to pay dues!
No they didn't. Choosing whether there is a walled store and choosing what gets into the store are two different things. And on top of that, you didn't even get the first choice independent of a hundred other variables like hardware, operating system, app availability, the network effect of peers with iMessage etc.
To really drive this home, keep in mind that the same argument could be applied to giving Comcast control over which websites and video streaming services you can use. If you don't like it, just choose to move out of their service area. So if you choose to subscribe to Comcast then you must want that, right?
> They didn't ask me to ratify their agenda, but they did require me to pay dues!
Actually they did. Union members get to elect the union leadership. Apple customers don't get to elect the Apple leadership. And if a union set your union dues at 30% of your salary, how long do you think it would take for them to get voted out?
...
Union members get to elect union leadership. Phone customers get to elect phone manufacturers. Equivalency restored.
That's why the analogy fits -- if you have an iPhone you're in Apple's service area. You can't get your apps from Google Play unless you move to their platform.
But having both a cable provider and a telco in the same area is actually very common. And even if there is a strong competitor (singular), e.g. FiOS, it's still hugely problematic. You choose Comcast and you only get Comcast video service, you choose FiOS and only get FiOS video service, no option for Netflix or YouTube because there are still only two of them and neither of them want you to use that over theirs.
The forces of competition don't actually work if they both know they can get away with it as long as the other one does and the market is concentrated enough with sufficient barriers to entry that they don't have to worry about newcomers. Which is true of both ISPs and phone platforms.
> Moving house is not equivalent to buying a different consumer gadget.
Buying a new phone (~$1000) compared to buying an app (~$1). Then re-buy all your existing apps, because new platform. Learn the other OS, training cost. Any apps that don't exist there, like iMessage? Problematic. Move all your data from iCloud to Google.
It's very much like moving house.
> Union members get to elect union leadership. Phone customers get to elect phone manufacturers. Equivalency restored.
Equivalency would be the customers electing Apple's board, which they don't. Equivalency would be an actual co-op store which you do get to elect the leadership of. The thing you're claiming is that it would be just as good to have an unaccountable union because you could always go work for another company (which had its own unaccountable union).
And we could do even better -- because it's not like unions are a panacea -- and have a co-op store which isn't tied to specific hardware or a platform, which you can choose to opt out of without simultaneously opting out of anything else. Which is what you would be able to have in a competitive market.
I do not agree that Apple has an obligation to develop this functionality for me.
I can think of plenty of reasons they would not want to do so (and almost zero of them have anything to do with protecting their 30% cut of app sales).
I think iOS is a better consumer product because it has never allowed ad hoc app installs.
If I felt differently, I could switch. Mobile platform mobility is very high. People do it all the time! Most people have fewer than a dozen apps on their device, which itself costs a couple dozen dollars per month with a mobile plan. Switching costs, if synced to your contract period, are really very low.
Apps which are platform-exclusive (Apple Messages) are a different kettle of wax, and I don't think germane here. Complicated product/ecosystems inevitably fan out to imperfect sets of compromises. Sure, this contributes to intangible switching costs, but that's hardly Apple's responsibility to mitigate on my behalf.
I have varied opinions and experiences with Comcast, co-ops, and labor unions (negative, positive, disappointing), but I don't think any of the analogies make sense.
The issue isn't they should have to do it for you, it's that they've taken purposeful action to prevent anyone else from doing it.
> I think iOS is a better consumer product because it has never allowed ad hoc app installs.
But this doesn't require the store to be glued to the device. You could get the same experience by using only Apple's store, or some other store you trust, even if others were available.
Linux package managers are a fine example of this. The large majority of Linux software is installed through them, and doing what the packagers require to get included is enough of a benefit that developers do it, but there is nothing at all preventing there from being multiple independent packaging systems or preventing people from installing software from the internet. They just don't, in general, because they prefer to get it from the package manager.
> Mobile platform mobility is very high. People do it all the time!
People move house all the time too, that doesn't mean the cost is low.
You're essentially arguing that it's possible for it to be low. If you're about to buy a new phone anyway and you don't have many apps and none of your apps only run on iOS, then all you have is the retraining cost of learning a different operating system and the differences between the hardware of different platforms and so on.
But this is just arguing that if you're about to move house anyway then the cost of switching away from Comcast isn't as high. For one thing it's still high, because the differences between different houses/platforms is still quite significant and decisions are made based on a multitude of considerations in addition to app stores. But for another, what happens to the people in the opposite circumstances? They're not halfway through their contract and have many expensive iOS-specific apps with a network effect, and then they want to buy your app. No way they can switch just for that.
> Apps which are platform-exclusive (Apple Messages) are a different kettle of wax, and I don't think germane here. Complicated product/ecosystems inevitably fan out to imperfect sets of compromises. Sure, this contributes to intangible switching costs, but that's hardly Apple's responsibility to mitigate on my behalf.
They don't have to mitigate it but then it's a significant component of switching costs. Eat your cake or have it.
The crux of our disagreement may lie here.
Apple did not take active steps to prevent other app stores from running on iOS.
They spent many years of active effort to prevent any app from escaping the runtime sandbox. As a side effect, I cannot load arbitrary phone applications, keyboard handlers, or app stores.
Demanding that Apple undo (or make exceptions in) this design, which provides runtime security across the OS, would be coerced development. It weakens the product, is contrary to corporate goals, and is not valuable to most customers.
It is reasonable to argue that sideloading is less problematic than allowing alternate app stores. The sideloaded app would still run in the sandbox. But it would break an important layer of defense-in-depth, and why would Apple willingly take on that extra risk? I can understand why some customers would consider it convenient if they did, but I cannot support forcing them to do so.
Re: switching costs: In what consumer relationship does the buyer not assume some risk in their decision? If I buy a car, but change my mind in a few months and prefer a different model, who eases that transition for me? Any complex product will come with compromises -- suitability for purpose is not guaranteed. The compromise on iOS is that you do not install arbitrary apps. Maybe this surprises some people, but they can return the device in-window, or they can choose differently next time. I do not see any level of extraordinary consumer harm in this practice.
At this point you're arguing that prohibiting them from doing something is coercing them to do something merely because they've already done it.
Consider the case where they have an absolute monopoly on phones. There are only iPhones, nothing else. Would you still object to a requirement to allow other app stores because it's "coercing development"?
What if they used the app store monopoly to monopolize the market for online payment processing, and from there the entire retail market? Can you imagine how that would harm the customer?
> Re: switching costs: In what consumer relationship does the buyer not assume some risk in their decision?
This is actually true for the large majority of consumer products. If you go to the grocery store and buy a carton of eggs, you don't have to buy the same company's sugar or flour or chocolate chips, and when you've bought those things and have them in your kitchen, you don't have to throw them out if you switch to another brand of eggs.
Moreover, the issue with switching costs isn't that they exist -- for many complex products, they will -- it's that they create a barrier which thwarts the competitive pressure on the company that would otherwise prevent it from abusing its market position, so then you need something else to do that, e.g. antitrust. Having a monopoly isn't, in itself, illegal; abusing it is.
Unions are broadly democratic institutions. Apple isn't.
So the tradeoff is a fairly large number of previously disallowed apps are now available, if you want. And a small number of previously allowed apps are only available outside of Apple's store.
Of course if this is worth it to you depends on how much you value either side of the equation but at least in the Android case it is a clear win to me.
In response to OP's comment, my first question is "fair to whom". Is it fair that suddenly that the ecosystem we consciously paid for should suddenly be forcefully changed, permanently, because vendors see dollar signs?
Very, very, very few developers are going to avoid Apple's App Store deliberately. It just doesn't make economic sense. Game-streaming services don't have a choice, of course.
Currently I have trust to Apple, if I am or my kid charged wrong or tricked into some subscription etc, I have proof with experience that Apple will fix it.
Now let’s say if we have many stores, some stores will try to be smart, will make exclusive deals, force people to install their stores to maybe play a one popular game.
As a user I will end up with 10 stores on my phone, each has my billing information, if I have a problem, not I need to go to that store to handle.
Oh than X app will decide to move from store A to store B, then he needs to move all subscribers there, good luck :)