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Apple May Face Antitrust Inquiry
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the NY Post:
"According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple's new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple's programming tools. Regulators, this person said, are days away from making a decision about which agency will launch the inquiry. It will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kills competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can run only on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform-neutral, and can be used on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Microsoft, and Research In Motion. An inquiry doesn't necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers. Typically, regulators initiate inquiries to determine whether a full-fledged investigation ought to be launched. If the inquiry escalates to an investigation, the agency handling the matter would issue Apple a subpoena seeking information about the policy."
This falls into the "not all" category though, I think, since it's an investigation of whether Apple's engaged in anticompetitive tying. The iPhone / Apple devtools tying is somewhat reminiscent of the car-makers / car-parts antitrust investigations, which happened even though no carmaker actually held a monopoly in the car market.
I think it'd be a problem for Apple if it were possible to show (e.g. by discovering an unwise internal memo) that the main purpose of the restrictions is to restrain trade, e.g. to harm the market for competitor development tools, or to make it harder to port apps to/from Android. Apple would want to be able to show that the tying was done for legitimate reasons not related to restraining trade.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think Apple is in trouble because they decided to change their developer agreement *days* before the public unveiling of Adobe CS5. Adobe had been promoting for many months before that the new version of Flash would support export to iPhone. And Apple pulled the rug out from under them days before the release of their product. What happens if a subpoena finds an email between Apple employees suggesting the optimal time to change the licensing terms to damage Adobe (who put a lot of time and money into this feature)? IANAL
Apple does not require developers to use Apple tools, only the approved languages, which were not invented and neither are owned by Apple: Objective C, C, and C++. XCode is the IDE provided by Apple, and it uses GCC to compile the code.
You are free to use whatever you want, as long as the code is originally written in one of those languages and not ported from a different platform.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Up until recently, there was *no* way to get compiled apps on the phone. You were stuck with web "apps". Apparently that was fine, but allowing apps and restricting the development language is not ?
A web app though is more or less platform neutral though. The entire point of this inquiry is that when you develop an app for the iPhone you have to almost completely re-write it for every other platform discouraging developers to port to other OSes.
Most (not all) antitrust legislation is aimed at preventing monopoly exploitation of alternate markets. There is little evidence that Apple has any sort of monopoly unless the category is defined so narrowly as to be useless.
The point of the investigation is to investigate if the point of Apple's restrictions is to create more or less an app store monopoly by preventing the approval of apps that would work on multiple platforms.
For example, lets say I just made the game Zombie Attack. If I made it in a platform neutral language like what Adobe has I would be able to ship the game on PC, Mac, iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Linux, etc. with minimal changes. On the other hand, if I wrote it for the iPhone with the iPhone SDK, I would have to completely re-write the game to get it to run on any of the other platforms.
This, in essence allows Apple with a large percentage of smartphone sales to dominate the market by effectivly "blocking" their apps from appearing in competitor's stores because of the pain it takes to recode the program.
I still don't see why Apple aren't allowed to set the terms of participation in their program. If you sign up as an iphone/ipod/ipad developer, you know what you're getting into, and you know they can change their rules at any time. Don't come whining when you don't like it any more
Because their terms of participation is blocking free competition for most users who don't jailbreak.
The problem isn't that Apple can set the terms, it is that Apple is setting the terms -only- to prevent people from coding the same app and running it other places, so Apple can have the app exclusively and keeping people tied into the iPhone rather than the cheaper, diverse and more feature filled Android, BlackBerry, and other phones.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
if apple went ahead with that policy, and tried to practice it, Eu would eventually bitchslap them into changing it. And what Eu does is nothing like what FTC does - When microsoft tried to stall compliance with Eu's decision, Eu started fining them 500,000 Euros a day. Suddenly microsoft managed to come up with a compliance plan that was implementable in acceptable time. Now we have ballot boxes in ms oses sold in europe.
FTC would be way too soft on american corporations, due to the lobbyism plague there is in america.
apple should thank ftc.
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Inquiry != prosecution.
The point of an inquiry is to determine whether there is a basis for an anti-trust case or not.
There isn't some pre-inquiry inquiry to decide if the company has enough market share or has behaved in ways that violate anti-trust laws, so there's no point in crying about how Apple doesn't meet the criteria for an anti-trust case.
Well, there is some prior case history on this. Back in the late 90's, MS was found guilty of exploiting a monopoly with Windows with regards to Netscape and Internet Explorer. They used their market position with Windows to push IE onto Windows Users. Never mind the fact that alternative operating systems existed. Never mind the fact that people COULD install other browsers once they installed Windows. They looked at the market space that was defined by Windows programs, and looked to see if MS was abusing that space. It's not a far fetched idea to translate that to the iPhone issue. Apple is locking off their internal market space by using what is a monopolistic hold on their operating system. The difference here, is that people CANNOT install competing software from another source than Apple. So in a sense, it is a clearer case than MS lost.
And people were free to chose a different OS from Windows. Yet they still found the MS exploited a monopolistic hold on the OS to push IE. Apple clearly does have a monopolistic hold on the iPhone OS (Even stronger of one than MS did). The question is not are people free to choose another device, but are those with the device free to choose another avenue of operation (away from Apple). The average user isn't told that their phone won't run non-Apple approved apps before hand. The average user isn't told "If you don't like these policies, don't buy this phone". They are told "Check out what this phone can do!", and "Look at all these apps it can run!". Not to mention that once they buy the phone, they are locked into a multi-year contract which will cost them money to terminate. So at absolute least, if this is not an abuse of monopolistic power, it is a case of deceptive advertising. They are not presenting users with a fair and complete choice. They are showing one side of it, and then locking down the other. So yes, users are free to choose another device, but they aren't given enough information (without going out and knowing what to look for) to make that choice intelligently.
Well, it's quite simple. They are allowed to set the terms of participation. However, I don't think they should be able to change their rules at any time (And/Or enforce them retroactively). If I signed up and agreed to their terms 6 months ago, I would be abiding by their rules to develop in {insert language x here} and convert to ObjC for submission. So I spend 6 months working on my application, only to be told today when I submit that it's no good because they "changed their rules". In my mind, there are few clearer examples of abuse of market position than that. It's an arbitrary rule set out do nothing but exact control (They have reasons why they did it, presumably to stick another knife in Adobe). But it does have significant collateral damage (being the developers who now have lost time because they were following the rules a month ago). And those interests do need to be protected.
Just my $0.02...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Let's not be too drastic with these inquiries. Apple might get mad and move all its manufacturing jobs to China or something.
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It seems like you're overstating the case. As an app developer I can code something for Windows, but will have to separate the API calls if I want to easily port for KDE (for instance). Assuming I write in C/C++ I can do this, with extra effort. I could also write my app in Flash so that it is portable, but I then have to accept the limitations of Flash. In this case, for the iPhone it seems to be the same situation, with the limitations for Flash being that it does not work. So I can still develop an app that I want to market for the iPhone as well as other mobile (or even desktop) environments, and the situation is no different than it has been at any time in the world of computers. That is if I want to easily port my app to different platforms I will have to abstract the platform dependant portions so that I can re-use the rest of the code directly, and have separate bits of code for the various APIs and such. While I don't necessarily agree with Apple's iPhone policies, I don't see anything anticompetitive with regards to this particular policy (you must develop only in C, C++, or objC).
1) Seriously? Either you're joking or you truly are a hardcore "fanboi". And even for the phones which couldn't install software, at least they were non-discriminate about it. That's sort of what this "anti-trust" stuff is all about.
3) So what? Apple have proven that they'll screw over anyone who doesn't fit in their scheme. I don't see why we should give them any benefit for "apparently talking with Unity"
4) Anti-trust, or competition law, is to prevent anti-competitive behavior. There's a myth going round here on Slashdot that companies have to be a monopoly before they have to obey the law. But that's just fantasy.
5) The same could be said for any business or government. That still doesn't make their actions right.
6) We're discussing whether Apple has acted illegally, not whether or not it fits in their EULA.
If you can't use the undocumented APIs, and you can't use a wrapper around Apple's APIs, and you can't access hardware directly, you're directly tied to Apple's documented APIs, which ties the application very tightly to Apple's device.