What a strange comment

if you don't like this thing we're talking about, why didn't you do anything to stop this other tangentially related thing that happened a long time ago?

I'm not even sure what you are describing makes sense. our supermarket sells hood brand milk, as well as their own private label milk. however the private label version is made at the hood factory using hood milk. in this case, I'm pretty sure the people at Hood don't care which one you buy since they get paid for making the "ripoff" brand.

your example would be fitting if Apple made their own clone of epic's app, but paid epic to do it

This is called a logical fallacy, a no true scotsman. No point in engaging on your point, and you say mine doesn't make sense.

Your comment would make sense if Hood was the only brand name milk they sold in that store.

While that may or may not be the case in this particular anecdote, it's certainly not the norm.

The difference really is that the Apple store is a monopoly.

It’s like there’s only one supermarket where you can sell your products, but they can still compete with you as you described.

I guess there are some things that distinguish this though - it's much easier to go to a different supermarket than to switch app stores, given there's no hardware compatible with both. It's also potentially easier to have your product in multiple supermarkets (assuming you don't agree exclusivity), you just have to scale up your manufacturing - on an app store you need to produce a different version. That's complicated by things like React Native and the fact that digital has no replication cost at all once written though. There are also more supermarkets vs 2 app stores, though they probably all do the same thing so I'm not sure how much that matters.

I even remember when Apple tried to forbid cross-compiling apps- you had to use their compiler. Their platform exists because of the devs, and yet they appear to have little respect for the devs.

Supermarkets aren't nearly as monopolistic as app stores. A supermarket "user" is free not just in theory but also in practice to use competing stores (and many people really do). Not just that: in most places, there are competing stores, quite a few of them, not to mention alternatives like online deliveries. If a goods producer can mass produce products for a supermarket, they're likely also capable of paying for super-market independent marketing; i.e. they have independant channels of communication with the consumer, and can use tools like MSRP to suggest reasonable prices to avoid price-gouging by the supermarkets, and the difference in customer access to ads by the store or by the manufacturer isn't huge. Additionally, a supermarket provides a valuable service to the producer beyond merely locked-in network effects: transporting tons of goods that last mile and distributing them to individuals requires quite a bit of work.

Compare that to app stores: users are in practice not free to pick another app store, even on android - network effects make using alternatives quite tricky and even risky, and the device/OS maker don't make it easy to pick reputable alternative stores. App stores additionally leverage their monopoly on that user to hide their costs from them; e.g. in apples it's not even allowed to mention the cut apple takes and where you might be able to buy more cheaply - and not just in the store, but even in the app itself, even indirectly! There's no MSRP by which to note that that 30% cut is extortionate. Finally whereas last-mile logistics are tricky for real-world goods, app store checkouts are not; almost the entire value provided is in network effects: i.e. the value is provided by the users of the app store, not the app store itself.

All of these disparate factors mean that app stores clearly are not a competitive market, whereas supermarkets aren't quite as bad. But let's not forget: just because supermarkets are "less bad" than app stores doesn't mean there's no potential for market manipulation; we should be vigilant there too - just that the kind of manipulations supermarkets can pull off aren't going to be quite as impactful.

TL;DR: not only are app stores much, much worse than supermarkets when it comes to harmful market manipulation, flaws in one market do not excuse flaws in another anyhow.

Or they pull a walmart, where they have the brand name product for a lower price than everyone else. Then one day they introduce their house brand product at that price and raise the brand name product's price. Then the brand name's product becomes more expensive than it would be at other stores.

> It can't be one rule for the tech companies, and another for all the other companies.

Says who?

> where were you when the supermarkets did this, literally decades ago?

This is whataboutism.

Many people around here were not old enough to be interested in politics "literally decades ago". And for those who were, the hindsight we have now is a good reason to start getting interested in the issue.

> It's a store, expect the store to take a cut and if you're too successful, compete with you.

The whole point of politics is to fix outstanding issues. "It's always been like that", "suck it" or "fuck you, got mine" rarely make for convincing political speech.

"Whataboutism" is a silly meme from Reddit not a real problem. Comparison of the current situation with other similar, but not exact, situations is literally one of the corner stone foundations of critical thought.

> Comparison of the current situation with other similar, but not exact, situations is literally one of the corner stone foundations of critical thought.

The issue here is not making a comparison, but calling people out for not having addressed the object of the comparison beforehand.