> They want to be part of a small exclusive group of store owners who get to share in the benefits of Apple’s investments.

Exclusive? Why can't I write an app store?

For the same reason you can’t build a phone.

You’ll be competing with multi-billion dollar corporations who have exclusive content and nobody will bother with your store.

> You’ll be competing with multi-billion dollar corporations who have exclusive content and nobody will bother with your store.

What does me building a store have anything to do with its adoption? I build lots of low/no-adoption software for fun or for small/personal use. This line of thinking, that if you can't be a top-level player in a competitive market, you can't build anything is foolish. You shouldn't confuse the building and marketing concepts, especially not to support disallowing the former.

But that's not anti-competitive.

All manner of well-funded corporations would be able to start app stores on mobile, and several (Epic, Valve/Steam, Microsoft) would start app stores the second they were able to.

They'd also be competing for software - as there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed in those 30% margins.

The competition, which would be fierce, is more than enough to solve the issue of price fixing.

Any fat trimmed in the margins (which is less than you think) would not accrue to developers because they’d have to deal with multiple stores and multiple rules sets.

They also wouldn’t have to offer the same terms to every developer. All they would need to do would be to lock in some exclusive popular apps. ‘Competing for developers’ doesn’t mean making things better for all developers. It just means securing enough exclusives that people can’t ignore your store.

On Android there is the F-Droid software repository, and there is no issue of competition with the Play Store. Would things be different on Apple phones?

Developers can safely ignore the F-Droid store because it represents no significant market share.

This will not be true of the stores that Epic, Facebook, and Google, and Amazon et al would start up on iOS.

F-Droid does not offer any form of payment, anyway. All the apps offered by F-Droid are open source and the majority of them ad-free, and it's honestly a fantastic resource for me. It actually has quite a lot of apps, including games, productivity tools, utilities, and other things. Something like this wouldn't be possible at all on Apple's platform.

> As of June 2017, the Google Play store hit 3 million apps by 968,000 developers, trumping the Apple App Store. In comparison, the Amazon App Store only has around 600,000 apps by 75,000 publishers, as of Spring 2016.

https://www.businessofapps.com/news/amazon-app-store-vs-goog...

Interestingly, there appears to be more revenue made per user on the Amazon store than on Google Play:

https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/re...

I think this confirms my point.

Note that as per Epic’s other lawsuit, the Amazon App Store is working at a severe disadvantage to Google Play.

It refutes your claim that developers will end up having to support alternate app stores or risk losing on market share. Despite the potential for greater revenue on the Amazon Appstore, developers don't seem to be flocking to it.

People seem to be buying into Epic's own claims of self-importance. They may be the ones to have finally advanced grievances against the App Store to the lawsuit, but they do not- nor should they- have the ability to frame the entire discussion. Their standards for openness are debatable.

It doesn’t really refute my claim. For one thing for most developer, Android is an afterthought in terms of profitability because of iOS, and for another, secondary app stores don’t function on an equal footing with the play store, which is why Epic is also suing Google.

Android just isn’t a model for what would happen on iOS. Obvious really, because Android has never had anything like the same success in app sales.

Android also have a lot of malware issues. I’ve had to help factory reset Android phones quite a few times because friends and family ended up getting spammed with sex notifications and had their search engine hijacked. Windows and OSX suffers from the same problems. The reason these platforms suffer from malware, while iOS does not, is because they allow third-party installations.

From what I've seen, the majority of Android malware either comes from Google's Play Store, or gets included on the phones by certain OEMs. F-droid in particular, due to its open source requirement, hasn't ended up hosting any malware so far.

This is incorrect. Google's own statistics (https://source.android.com/security/reports/Google_Android_S...) indicate that devices that use side-loading have an 8x relative higher incidence of malware compared to devices that only install apps from the Google Play Store.

(Note: I believe Google's absolute numbers are significantly underestimated due to the poor performance of Google Play Protect compared to other malware detection tools, but so far they are the only source I have found that publishes relative numbers between the Play Store vs side-loading.)

As some high profile examples:

- HummingBad infected 85 million devices primarily via direct-download on malicious adult websites. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-android-malware-has-infec...)

- Agent Smith infected 25 million devices primarily via a third-party app store. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20688885/agent-smith-andr...)

F-Droid is even more locked down than the App Store, and even if they turned it into the default app store then Android would still be riddled with malware.

As to how the Android users keep acquiring malware, I have no idea whether it’s from the Play Store, or if they download free apk files of paid apps, or if they download it through ads or from emails or whatever. I just know I have to help fix them regularly, and if iOS is forced to open up then iPhones will suffer from the same malware issues that you see with OSX/Windows/Android.

IMHO there would be a large market for local stores that promote local apps. It would usher in an era of local discovery and decentralization. I think it would be a huge win for everyone except companies abusing the monopoly like characteristics of demand aggregation.

> Which is why I absolutely reject Epic et al’s position.

> They want to be part of a small exclusive group of store owners who get to share in the benefits of Apple’s investments.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

I don't see how that's relevant. Epic isn't suing Apple so that they can have exclusive rights to open a second app store, they're suing to allow third-party app stores in general. If Epic wins, they aren't going to be part of a small group of store owners; anyone would be able to open their own competing store.

Almost no stores will be able to compete with Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc, who already have giant reach and network effects,

Consumers will have to deal with them all, as will developers.

There will be a small group of store owners.

> Almost no stores will be able to compete with Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc, who already have giant reach and network effects,

First of all, that is not true at all.

And second, even if it were true, it'd be a far better situation for developers than the current status quo.

We have already been through the multiple "app stores" model and it was fucking awful. Back before the iPhone and Android there were dozens of different stores for PalmOS, Symbian, and PocketPC/Windows Mobile, even boxed software sold on CDs.

There were no guarantees with any of the stores. Many didn't even host stuff they sold. So you'd buy from the "App Store", download from the developer's site, and then deal with whatever license system the developer used. Since there was no standard way to work with the store there was no standard mechanism of distributing licenses. Signing was also a joke as there was no good way to let end users validate, in a usable way, the signatures of apps or even that the signing entity was who they claimed to be.

Piracy was rampant because stores sucked, prices were onerous, and cracking the software or just sharing licenses was too easy. The current App Store model developed as a response to a broken market for mobile apps.

Hate on the App Store model all you want but it solved significant problems that plagued the industry for years.

Having to deal with multiple stores would be strictly worse for developers than the current situation.

And worse for consumers. No way I'm dealing with entering my CC again and again. The current situation is not perfect, but it does have advantages for both consumers and developers.

Really?

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple already have my CC number. If I could buy all my apps through (ex:) the Microsoft store that exists on PC, Android, and iOS I could delete my CC info from Google and Apple. That's a win in my book.

Maybe the competition would force all of them to innovate a bit. Wouldn't it be nice if you could give your CC number, but set a hard limit on in-app purchases? Ex: Here's my CC, but you're not allowed to charge more than $50 / month to it. I bet there are a lot of people that have gotten multi thousand dollar IAP bills that wouldn't mind a better system for some of that stuff.

So if Apple had entertained the original pre-lawsuit request, would epic have fought until Apple allowed app stores other than Epic and Apple existing?

What does it matter? They're fighting for something that benefits everybody (except Apple) now.

There is no evidence that what they are fighting for would benefit anyone other than a small group of already rich companies.

There is plenty of evidence from Android that it would benefit both users and developers.

Android is not a model for this. Stores on Android simply don’t have equal footing with the play store.

Epic is suing Google too over this.

Epic is suing Google for pressuring OEMs against preinstalling its app store on devices, not for preventing users from installing its app store themselves. It's true that app stores not signed with the system key can't automatically update apps, and users would benefit even more if they could, but users already benefit from being able to install apps outside of the official app store at all.

You just confirmed my point.

Android app stores other than google play aren’t remotely on a level playing field with the Play store.

I never disputed your point (though it is technicall bwrong because some phones have other app stores installed on the system partition) because as I already pointed out, your point is irrelevant. The fact that users can install apps from other sources at all has massive benefit, as Android has already shown. There would be even more benefit if other apps could do automatic updates, but there is already benefit with what is available.

"They want to be part of a small exclusive group of store owners who get to share in the benefits of Apple’s investments"

False.

Epic made very clear, early on, IN THEIR COURT FILING that their case was an attempt to legally force Apple and Google to allow for third party app stores to exist equitably on iOS and Android.

Does that benefit Epic substantially? Of course it does. They want a mobile Epic Games Store on both platforms. But it would also break the stranglehold duopoly that Google and Apple have over the mobile software marketplace.

Example to prove the point: Nothing in Epic's proposals or court filing would prevent Steam Mobile or the Microsoft App Store from launching on iOS and Android on the same terms that Epic prevailed on in court. That's about as far away from anti-competitive behaviour as this court case could possibly hope to be.

Nothing I said is false. Third party stores will not exist equitably on iOS and Android because there don’t exist equitably anywhere else.

I said a small group, not just Epic. That group would be made up of the usual suspects - Epic, Amazon, Google, Facebook, various other TenCent properties etc.

Nothing about it would make it either developer friendly, nor consumer friendly.

> Nothing about it would make it either developer friendly, nor consumer friendly.

That doesn't sound too bad to me from either side TBH. As a developer, it would be useful to have a choice between multiple publishers with the advantage of only needing to deal with one at a time instead of three. I also think competition in app stores would spur a bunch of innovation.

As a consumer with an Android phone, a Windows PC, and an iPad as a tablet, the idea of buying all my stuff from one company's app store and having the licensing work across all 3 devices is extremely appealing.

I think one of the biggest fears of Apple, Google, etc. is that it's very possible someone will come along and build a better app store with better policies for both developers and consumers.

Here's a concrete example of "better". Judging by this [1] apps in iOS 14 can specify a DoH resolver to use for DNS.

> Apps will be able to specify a DoH resolver that will override the DNS resolver set by DHCP or RA for queries made from their app.

Guess what that means? Apple is going to let developers override MY choice as a network admin and DoH is going to be used for un-blockable ads. Why should they be able to do that? I would absolutely buy into an app store that forbid that behavior and forced apps to observe DHCP settings over app settings.

I'd also be fine with an app store that didn't force the use of sign in with Apple or Apple Pay. And that's where the problem is for Apple. Forcing developers to use Apple technologies isn't benefitting anyone but Apple. You might argue that it's better for consumers, but if those are features wanted by developers' customers, developers will add them without being forced to.

I don’t see what would allow developers to only deal with one publisher at a time.

If each one commands a significant percentage of user attention, you’ll have to deal with them all.

Android is already both more developer friendly and more consumer friendly than iOS despite not having full automatic update support for third party app stores. If that were in place, it would be even better.

This is clearly not true. If it were, developers and consumers would prioritize Android.

As a developer and a user, I do prioritize Android.

People don't buy luxury jeans because they are better jeans than Levi's. People buy luxury jeans because of marketing. The same applies here. Consider how many people in the HN comments say they like iPhone because of privacy even though it is so clearly worse for privacy (can't install an app on your device without telling Apple, can't get your GPS location without telling Apple, etc.).

Privacy is better on iOS because it’s not about what goes to Apple - it’s about what goes to 3rd parties.

Also you seem to be just wrong. iOS doesn’t inform Apple when apps make GPS location requests.

Android allows the user to prevent data from going to third parties as well. The difference is it also allows the user to prevent data from from going to the OS manufacturer. This is strictly greater privacy.

You are wrong about GPS location requests:

"By enabling Location Services for your devices, you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services."

It will also send your location to Apple when no app is requesting your location:

"If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations."

Unlike on Android, you cannot get your location without sending this data to Apple:

"To use features such as these, you must enable Location Services on your iPhone"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT20705

I’m not wrong. Your quote supports my assertion.

You seem to be ignoring these important words:

“...in an anonymous and encrypted form”

Apple doesn’t end up knowing where you are.

Even though colloquially we can say they ‘send your location’, they don’t actually learn where you are.

This invalidates support for your claim about how iOS privacy is worse than Android.

> “...in an anonymous and encrypted form”

This is not so hard to reverse given that Apple also has your location tied to your identity from other Apple services you use. Once you match that location to the encrypted user, who is often seen requesting their location data from work or home, you get the encrypted user's location data identified.

Compare to Android, where you don't have to send your location data anywhere to get your GPS location. iOS location privacy is strictly worse.

You also ignored the fact that every app install gets reported to Apple tied to your identity, which is arguably even more egregious.

> can't get your GPS location without telling Apple, etc.).

I'd rather an iOS app have location listed as a capability in the manifest than have Android send my location to Google for the purpose of selling advertising based on store visits.

Me too. Luckily, on Android, apps must also request the location permission, and you don't have to send your location to anybody. This is unlike iOS, where Apple gets your location no matter what.

In what way do consumers not prioritize Android devices? Android has about 75% market share.

Consumers do not prioritize Android devices as a market for buying apps. Android has 75% market share but iOS users have spent twice as much in total on apps.