>They have a duopoly in the mobile market, and they each have a monopoly on their platform. The deli comparison is asinine since there are millions of delis vs 2.

No, Apple is literally hard coded to be the only app store on iOS. You can not install apps not from the app store, and you cannot install other app stores. Installing your app every week by paying $99/year to be a developer is not a viable alternative.

On Android you could install another app store within the next 2 minutes if you so desired.

This is the perfect definition of a misleading argument.

You can sideload on both in Europe since it's required by law.

But yes, I agree that Google's strategy is more open, and they allow others to use the Android source code to make their own (Amazon app store, Microsoft, etc).

Apple is more of a walled garden and a strict monopoly on their platform (and hardware).

"You can sideload on both in Europe since it's required by law."

This is in the works, right. It's not possible at this moment, is it.

How will Apple prevent people in the USA from buying iPhones in Europe and bringing them back to the US.

Simply by iPhones being ~40% cheaper in the US.

But that's already true right now, irrepective of this coming change, isn't it.

To lure US customers, app developers could offer lower prices to users who sideload, to offset the higher price paid for iPhones in the EU. App developers selling to EU iPhone owners will be able to avoid the 30% Apple tax and can pass on the savings to customers. Developers could offer more features to users who sideload. There are a variety of possible incentives developers could offer to lure users away from Apple App Store. That is assuming developers see the long term benefit of getting people to stop using the App Store and avoiding the Apple tax.

Yes, that’s why no one (almost, of course) from the US would buy an iPhone in Europe anyway.

> app developers could offer lower prices to users who sideload, to offset the higher price paid for iPhones in the EU

So app developers should bear the brunt of Apple's hardware price strategy? Seems unfair.

One of the complaints about Apple from app developers is the cost of doing business on the App Store (15% or 30% or whatever it is this week). So you're suggesting app developers charge less for side loaded apps: isn't that just accepting that the apple fees are fair?

The thought I had was get users off the App Store. Once they are off, then developers could raise prices. But also developers would have more freedom to sell stuff as they like, without Apple's rules. Epic has its own audience, its own customers and it should be allowed to do what it wants with its software. Instead Apple has control over what Epic can do, merely because Apple sold the hardware to the customer. When I started using personal computers, the manufacturer of the computer had no say in what software I was allowed to use. Nor did it deliberately set hoops that software authors had to jump through. Microsoft did that of course, but not the manufacturer.

They'll probably tie it to your icloud region and billing address. Sure, bring your European phone to the US, but you won't be able to access any paid Apple services because it only offers you the European subscriptions and they can't be bought with a US CC. Maybe even Apple Pay will not take your debit cards.

Eh... Android has turned out to be a bit of a fraud. The great "open-source" OS that would free us all from vendor and telco tyranny has spectacularly failed to do so. Android users still wait months or years or forever for each telco to dribble out a hacked, proprietary version of Android for every phone model, one at a time. I wanted Android to be competitive, because Apple does dick developers and "partners" over. But it's just as much of a shitshow, if not worse.

It being required by law does not guarantee that it's possible.

I'm pretty sure I cannot sideload on iOS, unless you count using a free developer account to load self-compiled applications whose certificates are only valid for a few days.

> You can not install apps not from the app store

There are several ways to install apps that do not go through the app store.

Your company can have an enterprise certificate that allows in-house apps to be run on company devices without needing to go through the app store approval process or the app store. You are not supposed to use that enterprise certificate to publish apps to the general public, although companies have been caught doing so in the past.

If you have a paid developer account, you can test your own apps on devices owned by your company and your customers.

Anyone can get a free Apple Developer account that allows you to test apps on your own device.

Installing App for testing is not the same as installing app for daily use.

Howso? You can use the app daily.

From my understanding, don't you have to reinstall the apps every week since they expire and disappear from your phone? That's an awful experience for daily use.

Your device has to connect to the same wifi network as your Mac or Windows computer once a week to be automatically renewed for another week.

You can side load in other app stores in Android. iOS started out with side-loading, but then this was crushed by Apple's exercise of their absolute control of the operating system.

> iOS started out with side-loading

I don't recall sideloading ever being a thing iOS started out with. There was a trivial jailbreak and very easy third party app store install for jailbroken devices, but that was essentially a defect and not something iOS was designed for.

Yes, that's what I'm writing about. The feature existed (whether Apple wanted it, or in this case, not). Then they removed it.

They didn't remove the feature. They fixed the security bug.

You can sideload apps to your own device using a free developer account.

While acknowledging that most users are not a developer? Compare it with computer (desktop/laptop) market. Users can install any software they found in internet that they trust it is safe.

How well has the average consumer been able to ascertain the “safety” of apps on PCs over the last two decades?”

OK, but the usual counter-argument against the claim that there is genuine security benefit in the current situation, is that “nobody will use it”, “hide it several levels deep in settings”, or whatever.

You can’t have it both ways.

> While acknowledging that most users are not a developer?

You don't have to be "a developer" to install, for instance, the sort of retro-gaming emulator you use to play classic console games. You just need a free developer account Apple ID.

> Through an app called AltStore, you can install emulators onto your phone through a method called sideloading. If you're unfamiliar with the term, sideloading is installing software without using the App Store.

https://www.pocketgamer.com/next-level-gaming/how-to-install...

This is not at all comparable to proper sideloading/allowing third party access. For starters, unless you pay Apple 100 bucks a year for a developer certificate, you're going to need to renew the application every week and you're capped to 3 applications at most. AltStore does some fancy stuff (by which I mean that you need to run a separate application on your PC which can handle the renewal requests - that's what AltServer is) to minimize the difficulty of this as much as possible, but that's still the rules Apple works with.

Secondly, Apple severely limits the capabilities of sideloaded applications - those emulators for example aren't allowed to make use of JIT, or Just-In-Time compilation, which is extremely important for decent emulation. This is also the main reason nobody has even tried to bring over a non-Safari browser using this method - you practically need it to have a browser that's decently usable.

It's practically useless outside of development purposes. AltStore is a pile of (very impressive) hacks to get around a system that's crippled by design.

Compare and contrast to Android, where the only difference between the Play Store and a regular application is that the Play Store doesn't get the regular installation window (something which is set to change in the next version of Android, so that alternate stores can also request this permission).

Either way - this doesn't matter. The Digital Services Act has already been passed in the EU, and Apple is going to have to offer third parties proper access to iOS without being allowed to gatekeep the App Store.

> This is not at all comparable to proper sideloading/allowing third party access.

This is goalpost moving. The original claim was that it was impossible to sideload apps.

It doesn't nullify the app permissions system, but it's definitely sideloading.

iOS didn't start with side-loading. Do you have a source for this ?

What mullingtover refers to.

The first App Store was Cydia. Technically side-loading with how Apple failed to predict the dedication of breaking the (trivial, at the time) security to add more native apps to the home screen. https://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/debian-style-installatio...

Poor security wasn't a feature.

Did removing this "bug" make things any more secure than, say, welding the bios chip to a motherboard?

Genuinely, who do you think is convinced by your comment? You aren’t a lawyer making your case to a jury of dopes. You aren’t going to win everyone over with empty emotive language like “crushed”.

To argue that the existence of Cydia means that “Apple started out with side-loading” is intellectually dishonest. I know it, and I know that you know it. If you have a real argument, you shouldn’t need to resort to this.

> Genuinely, who do you think is convinced by your comment?

People like me who aren't programmers, or even power users anymore.

> I know it, and I know that you know it.

A long time ago I used to modify the Windows ME registry, and it genuinely created some features doing so. Then they removed this windows-altering ability from the particular feature I was modding and my mods were useless. Maybe the MS programmers saw this as a bug being fixed, but I saw it as a feature being removed. I basically haven't been a Windows power user since ME because of stuff like this.

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Nothing Apple is doing is materially different from what Microsoft was sued for in the 90s by anti-trust enforcers. In fact, it's a bit more, because it just isn't a default browser, it's control of every app. Apple's share of the US market is just slightly less than Microsoft's was at the time.

This is what Epic tried to define the market as, but the court instead went with "mobile gaming transactions".

That's how theses cases usually work. Antitrust claimants want to define the market as narrowly as possible for their own benefit. Defendants want to define it as wide as possible for the same reason. It's up to the court to figure out what the actual market is, and not what the (biased) parties want it to be.

There could be millions of phone OS makers. Nobody is stopping anyone. But nobody is entitled to have provided for them all the work that Apple has done over several decades to get to where they’re at now.

Better start working today because you’re gonna need to put in like 50 years.

You've described the counterpoint perfectly to your argument.

It would take billions of dollars and 50+ years of development to have a chance. You would also need phone partners, which wouldn't go with a small OS maker. So you'd need to make the phones + the OS + the app store.

A deli can start anywhere with ~$10k and they'll have clients if they're good enough.

It's not feasible to compete with Android + IOS, even Microsoft and Amazon failed.

They therefore have a duopoly of the mobile app store market.

I did state that nobody is entitled to effectively compete with behemoth companies. They’re going to have to put in the work.

Every behemoth company you see today did not start out that way. Apple was a couple guys in a garage. At that time, IBM was almost 100 years old, had revenues in the tens of billions and was sending hardware and software into outer space with government contracts. Guess how that company started out?

It’s also revealing that you think $10K is a low barrier to entry to a risky business with razor thin margins. And it’s also quite hard work, in terms of physical labor and ongoing time commitment. Most of my life that kind of lump sum was unthinkable, and I have to imagine it still is for many. Yet even in the face of that, some people do find a way.

They should do so with smartphones as well, if they feel strongly about it. I think the scales match in terms of barrier to entry to expertise if you want to compare delis and smartphone manufacturing.

I think the problems with your comparison are at least twofold:

1) it’s much much easier, in a technical sense, to start a deli vs manufacture a smartphone. Just in Apple, there have been tens to hundreds of millenia of person-time poured into the company.

and 2) most people with the expertise necessary to do so are happy with the options available today and would rather spend their time solving other as-yet unsolved problems.

You can absolutely make a huge company from barely anything if you're not impeded by a monopoly. Both the examples you listed were companies going for a new, different market than IBM's.

Microsoft actually lost an antitrust lawsuit for doing something extremely similar to what Apple is doing.

> Explorer web browser with the Windows operating system, which made it difficult for other web browsers to gain market share. Additionally, Microsoft was accused of engaging in exclusionary contracts with computer manufacturers to prevent them from pre-installing competing web browsers and of engaging in other anti-competitive practices.

Remind you of anything?

I do think there are important differences between MS and Apple’s behaviors. MS was getting their product out using other companies products, and then constrained the UX of those OEM’s customers. Apple would have to get an app store on some android devices and windows/linux machines and then try to enforce their rules there to be in the same ballpark. The fact that Apple puts rules on companies that use their platform is the inverse of this scenario: this would be like if a bunch of the OEMs were trying to dictate terms to MS.

What Epic wants to do is have their game store on multiple OSes produced by other companies and then call the shots on those. I actually think they are closer to the spirit of what MS was doing, and given the chance they would leverage any advantageous market position they could achieve (or run to the courts) to shape OS customers’ UX in a fashion that is more similar to what MS did.

Apple wants a sandbox in the world; Epic and MS want the world to be their sandbox. If Apple’s sandbox becomes dominant it will be de facto because of people choosing to use a better competing product; Epic’s and MS’ actions are attempts to create a de jure dominant sandbox.

> You've described the counterpoint perfectly

That we should punish success?

> That we should punish success?

That is a great bullshit whataboutism argument.

Nobody speaks about punishing success here.

Apple and Google de facto Monopoly on the app store gives them a 30% tax on everything that wants to live on the mobile ecosystem.

This is the problem here. And this is what Epic was fighting against.

Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. Antitrust is the abuse of monopoly power. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.

> There could be millions of phone OS makers. Nobody is stopping anyone.

It's actually a patent minefield.

Truthfully, everything... is a patent minefield.

OK, so fix patent law then. We are already talking about idealistic “let’s change the law” scenarios.

Hard work isn't a defense for breaking anti-trust law.

Nobody is entitled to have an abuseable level of market dominance simply because they worked hard.

Who broke anti-trust law? Not Apple.

Considering how high the bar of customer harm has been set, it's doubtful anyone will cross it except maybe Amazon.

Of course it's hard to prove consumer harm when there's so much vertical integration from day one. There's no before to compare it to.

Perhaps if Apple is forced to allow sideloading and other stores in Europe then the harms will be more obvious and comparable.

> There's no before to compare it to.

That's precisely the point. In order for Apple to have abused their monopoly, you would need to point to a change in their business model which occurred during the period in which they held nominal monopoly status.

Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.

But Google has competing app stored, Apple hasn't.