The problem is not the exact thing Apple is doing, but the scale they are doing it at. If Ford and Chevy owned every single commercial plot of land on the country and if you wanted to start up a new brand, you are told you just have to buy your own unpopulated island, start a civilization, convince people to move over, and then you can open a new store selling your own product. That would be where Apple and Google sit right now.

Are we talking about phones or operating systems? Apple has decent market share of course but there are other companies out there. You can buy a Pixel, or any number of other phones.

And even so, many of these “issues” are not problems on Android right? You can use 3rd-party app stores and so forth right?

I’d also suggest.. why does the scale issue matter? I prefer that Apple enforces Apple Pay. I prefer that Apple enforced Sign In with Apple. That’s why I buy an iPhone. If those things bothered me I’d buy something else.

It’s totally out of the ordinary. Apple sells about half the smartphones in the US. There are many other options for manufacturers but they all essentially share one other operating system. This big of a market with this little competition and this much vertical integration would normally be an obvious example of a monopoly. None of your examples come close.

But why does Apple have 50% market share? It’s because of these exact things that I as a user prefer. And on top of that, while 50% is obviously a great position, the other half is Android. And then if you compare based on phones there are still tons of options. If customers hated things like privacy warning labels or sign-in with apple they’d buy other phones. But they don’t. So it seems pretty clear to me the best product is winning.

You may stick with Apple because you like all of these policy decisions. Many stick with Apple because changing is so difficult. You lose iMessage, have to move your pictures out of iCloud, and repurchase your accumulated app library. The mere existence of another phone option doesn't necessarily make it viable. This level of lock-in is by design.

It was always like that, and on Android too. This isn't even lock-in, you have to move your files after buying new SSD, or relocate your documents after installing a new OS. It is a lock-in in the same way `apt-get install coreutils` is, because you can't just move to Windows and expect the same workflow.

Yes. Switching from Android is difficult as well. But, I disagree it's always been like this. When I buy software directly from the developer/publisher, I often can get a license that works on both Windows and macOS (or can get a dual license for a nominal fee). It wasn't really until mobile app stores took off that I needed to repurchase software if I went to another platform. And repurchasing that software would not be cheap. It's an actual cost of changing platforms.

I switch between Windows, Linux, and macOS with regularity and while there are platform-specific services, the mobile platform is considerably more walled off. Mobile storage stagnated for years while the apps and any captured media became larger, really pressuring you to use their cloud services in a way I've never had with a desktop. I can store data on a NAS and access it pretty easily with any of the desktop platforms. I'm not sure how someone is supposed to be able to be able to migrate off iCloud when moving to Android without involving a non-mobile computer. It doesn't appear to be anywhere as easy as copying files from one SSD to another or using AirDrop/SMB/NFS.

The iMessage thing is another layer to this. You may not want to call that lock-in, but there have been extensive threads about this topic recently [0][1]. The Epic lawsuit surfaced some emails that strongly suggest Apple views iMessage as a way to lock customers in [2].

Regardless, the original point is switching platforms isn't going to happen without a fair bit of cost and likely some social upheaval. Switching platforms is technically an option, but it's not a realistic one for many. I don't think it follows that if someone has stuck with the same platform for several years that they tacitly agree with all the policy decisions made by that platform.

[0] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889492 [1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29851317 [2] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26753014

This doesn't mean anything when so many things are coupled in to one product. I buy iphones because they have the best hardware and get updated for a long time. I don't buy iphones because they force one payment processor.

That is a very different argument than the one I replied to. It’s one thing to say this situation is ordinary, another to say that you’re fine with it.

Remember that there's nothing at all illegal about having a monopoly. If you have such a superior product to everyone else then it's the expected market outcome.

What's illegal is anti-competitive use of monopoly market position.

Since it is a two sided platform, not a single product ("phone and apps"), and as Apple is constraining the payment downstream market, and causing harm to the consumer (30% markup), there is a case.

Some textbook rulings will apply, since Apple exces admit that if they do no constrain downstream, no one will use their 30% markup product. So consumers could be better off by definition

although Apple will argue that they will charge more to downstream producers directly, but this is also difficult to argue (they can do this anyway and extract rents from consumers and producers at the same time).

If you have a monopolistic platform market on which you also produce, it seems rather hard not to get sued

You'd be wrong about going to a Ford dealership and buying whatever you want in most states. They are independent operators that again, have a high amount of independence from the manufacturer. They will gladly but your old car and sell it on their used lot.

This is why we talk about Tesla direct sales all the time. Because we are moving car sales to the apple model.

> I can’t go to. Ford dealership and buy a new Chevy or go to Kroger and buy Costco brand

Bad analogy. A better analogy would be if a customer already purchased a ford car, and then tried to fix the car with a 3rd party repair person.

There are literal laws about this, for cars, that require ford to provide manuals, to 3rd parties, and require ford to sell replacement parts for 3rd parties to repair cars from.

The problem is that, effectively, it is customers making the decision to buy Apple products, but developers who have pay to get access to them. This split means the incentives don’t get to the people in power, and the mechanism breaks down.

It’s exactly the same dynamic as in net neutrality.

Developers have to pay Nintendo a lot to get access to customers with a SNES, Wii, Switch, etc as well, which is the OP's point - if someone makes a good product that gains a lot of market share (iOS, Nintendo Switch, Tesla, etc) that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.

I think the same thing should apply, but it's just not as harmful to society currently, because it's just one platform among many, many others, and it's just for games. Whatever the proper regulation is to counter this, it might very well apply to pure gaming platforms as well, making it so that anyone is allowed to make, market and sell games on them, no matter how small.

> Developers have to pay Nintendo a lot to get access to customers with a SNES, Wii, Switch, etc as well, which is the OP's point

The different here is that Nintendo is not a 3 trillion dollar company, that owns 50% of a massively important market in the US.

Yes, anti-competitive practices are allowed if you aren't a huge company.

Literally it is the law, that if you become a big enough company, and have enough market power, then certain actions become illegal, that were not illegal if you weren't as powerful of a company.

> that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.

It actually literally does mean that they are entitled to that.

For the same reason that 3rd party web browsers, were entitled access to windows users (and before you say it, yes I am aware that windows had a larger control of the market than apple, and it is not literally the same in every single exact way, but the same principle still applies, just in a smaller amount)

Payment processing trivially invalidates your premise: I can walk into a Ford dealership and buy any vehicle using any source of cash-like funds I'd like -- I don't have to use Ford's preferred lender.

Is that true? They aren’t required to sell you a car. I think they could require you to use their preferred lender as a condition of selling the car to you.