It’s a duopoly, where one of the players offers people the thing that people are asking for I.e sideloading and alternative app stores.

Instead of choosing that product, many people here complain that the other company doesn’t give them what they want.

Doesn't really matter: if you are making a phone app or service (especially one that has any sort of network effect), you need to support both ecosystem which means you must submit to Apple's ukases.

Nope, only when targeting one of the countries where Apple market presence is actually relevant, which are just a couple of tier 1 countries.

The choices are extremely limited if you want a small handset. I don’t even know if there is a Google phone as small as iPhone minis.

I assume it won’t be long before there is a Samsung Galaxy mini.

That player also has a history of tracking, fingerprinting and privacy violations that not everyone is comfortable with, especially relating to a device that has as much control over you as a smartphone.

>That player also has a history of tracking, fingerprinting and privacy violations that not everyone is comfortable with

Forcing Apple to change their financial incentives would likely make them look to the value of tracking, fingerprinting and privacy violations too.

that's a bit of a false dichotomy though.

it is not like these 2 products were identical except for sideloading.

They don't have the same hardware, Apple has an unlimited ad budget, if you want to chat with somebody using iMessages, you are pretty much limited to iOS, you can't transfer app purchases between platforms, etc

If you go into subscription settings on iOS devices, they show a "try out apple music" ad -- you think this position is available to Spotify/others? They don't pay 30% on top of sales to boot.

Same thing with Google, they cross promote their own new properties everywhere in Gmail (left pane) and Google.com but no one else has access to those locations, they can destroy thousands of small business through this practice.

Honestly it is almost funny how Google has been mostly unable to successfully launch new products while they have the capacity to promote them to virtually all of the global north.

In particular with Play Music .. not going to complain, I don't think that this market needs another FAANG product but wow, failing to promote that service is one epic blunder.

Google has an unlimited as budget too. Indeed it has access to advertise on properties that Apple can never purchase access too.

Exactly! And it's a bad kind of duopoly. It's not like I'm customer and I only have two choices. Here, I only two choices and I pretty much to use them both since if I drop one I loose a lot of potential customers.

Just because the people are generally happy with 2 options? If enough people cared about extra app stores, someone would create an alternative as there would be money to make.

and they did, Cydia was a thing when people could jailbreak iPhones. And I definitely remember some of my less tech savvy friends using non-Apple-approved tweaks back in 3GS/4/4S days.