I love how we suddenly have better ideas for how the most successful public company should allocate their resources to serve their customers (developers are second tier, sorry). We sometimes forget they are sitting on mountains of money because they execute good company decision making, not because they are doing weird things to protect a monopoly. Like there is some meeting near the top between execs happening where someone goes "lets do X!" and another exec replies "no but doing X would harm our monopoly, we cant' do that". Do people think decisions are really being actively made to protect a monopoly?

With this rationale no monopoly should ever be investigated, broken up, etc.

The whole problem with monopolies is that they actually harm the consumer by protecting their monopoly from encroachment by someone else. So yes people really think decisions are being made by a monopoly to protect their monopoly (and their profits). A chunk of those billions they have is actually money generated by these monopolistic practices.

It's juvenile to imagine them sitting at board meeting and discussing "How can we protect our monopoly?", that's like saying the NSA is discussing by board meetings "how can we further invade everyones privacy?". But they most definitely are discussing how they can protect their market share and how to edge out competition.

I am sure they do discuss those things. This is why Google has onboarding training around not framing any communication around competition. The optimist in me says this is actually to help infuse a culture of good decision making and trying to combat this kind of monopolistic thinking. I guess there is another side to this that is not so good natured. I guess this is an argument around intent. Are they actually trying to be good, or hide evidence of being bad, by the highest level of these companies?

You're missing the point. Apple doesn't want independent App Stores because that's not what their customers want. Their customers want a simple way to install apps that they can trust and to pay for things in a way that they can trust. Independent app marketplaces are anathema to that.

> creating a set of rules for independent app marketplaces

How is this any different?

This implies - of course - that they will allow other app marketplaces to begin with.