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US Appeals Court Revives Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple (reuters.com)
iPhone app purchasers may sue Apple over allegations that the company monopolized the market for iPhone apps by not allowing users to purchase them outside the App Store, leading to higher prices, a U.S. appeals court ruled. From a report on Reuters: The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling revives a long-simmering legal challenge originally filed in 2012 taking aim at Apple's practice of only allowing iPhones to run apps purchased from its own App Store. A group of iPhone users sued saying the Cupertino, California, company's practice was anticompetitive. Apple had argued that users did not have standing to sue it because they purchased apps from developers, with Apple simply renting out space to those developers. Developers pay a cut of their revenues to Apple in exchange for the right to sell in the App Store.
Anti trust implies controlling prices to the detriment of the consumer. Apple in no way sets or controls the pricing. An app developer is free to charge whatever they want or make it free.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
...users did not have standing to sue it because they purchased apps from developers, with Apple simply renting out space to those developers.
This may bite Apple.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or historian.
This appears to be an attack on the fundamental principle of the "walled garden". I don't think this is a good idea. You may not like it, but then fine don't buy it. Apple sells this as a feature, that benefits the users by improving quality control, a problem that non-walled appstores have to deal with more all the time. It's not bulletproof, nothing is, it just improves it quite a bit. I find it reassuring that I don't have to sweat it when browsing the app store, "I wonder if this app is legit?"
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
situation.
Because it wasn't that long ago that Apple was fending off a suit from a patent troll and was saying the opposite. That it was Apple who was selling through their app store and only they needed a licence (which they had) to do that, not the devs.
So call me a bit surprised that the original judge went along with this argument.
also go after the hardware lock in and VM lock in as well.
The VM one is a realy killer as apple does not have any rack-mount stuff and they don't let you run os-x in a VM on any hardware (it works but Legal says no)
Side-loading seems to be the issue. Not easily allowing it makes the iPhone less prone to malware infestations. I turned off the ability to side-load on my Android phones. It's too risky to not get everything you need from the appropriate app store.
apple censorship issues can be fixed with an adults only store.
Apple is known to block apps that might in any way compete with its business model. For example, Apple blocked a developer from publishing an app that allowed wireless iTunes sync before later adding it as a feature exclusive to newer iPhones. Apple also blocks any apps that might compete with their NFC payments, they block voice assistants from having any meaningful functionality, and they block web browsers from having their own rendering engine.
At any rate, if you don't want to use third party app stores on Android, you don't have to. I have an Android watch made by Sony, and I don't use anything other than Google Play, so I'm not sure what crack you're smoking.
I never understood why there's such a thing as standing, and why you have to have it to sue someone. If someone is hurting a psychologically, physically or financially weak individual, then the victim will probably not sue, and the aggressor will probably get away with it. Also, if the district attorney is too busy or biased against the victim, then a bunch of crime will just be ignored, since nobody else has standing.
A lot of the anger behind the BLM movement was because of this. The district attorney was basically in bed with the cops, and since he's the only one with standing to sue, he could give the cop a free pass.
More theoretically, if there's a clearly unconstitutional federal law being passed, nobody can overturn it because nobody has violated it or be sued under it, so nobody has standing to sue. To get it overturned, you have to intentionally violate it, be sued for a felony, and appeal to the supreme court. In other words, you'll be taking a huge risk on a court that doesn't hear most of the cases they get. So the more likely scenario is that someone will eventually unintentionally violate it, but that could be a very long period of time, and the unconstitutional law will be limiting all sorts of legal behavior until then.
That's only true if app stores could select what apps they sell. Since you can't download Amazon Video anywhere but Amazon Underground, and you can't download Samsung Gear apps anywhere but the Samsung store. Sure, you can say that the Gear isn't an android watch, but most consumers can't tell the difference since it requires an android phone. A lot of apps are exclusive to one app store. So unless you are willing to only use a fraction of the quality apps you can't limiot yourself to one app store.
Why do you think its OK for a app developer to have choice over where their app is sold but the store doesn't? Nevermind, don't answer that, because iPhone has Cydia. Let me guess, you want to complain about how users shouldn't have to work to install apps the main store doesn't want to sell.
That logic is irrelevant. You have the choice to only use "a fraction of the quality apps". Nobody is forcing you to use Amazon Video if they don't want to make it available in the Play store, and if most of the potential user base said, "Screw you" to Amazon and then refused to install a separate app store just to use their app, they would be forced to either make their products available through more than one store or fail, replaced by some other company that does. The reality is that most of the apps that most people use are available fairly broadly, so as the GP said, nobody is forcing you to use another app store. You're choosing to do so because it gives you an advantage.
The problem here is that Apple isn't letting the market decide whether those other app stores matter; instead, it is interfering with the free market in a way that actively harms consumers and developers in a number of ways. More on this in a moment.
No, it has nothing to do with work. It has to do with Apple deliberately making it harder and harder for Cydia to even be possible, in ways that directly harm consumers.
Either one of those by itself should be enough to get a judgment against Apple in any sane universe. There is no valid technical reason why Apple could not trivially allow a configuration profile payload to add support for a third-party app store in a manner that fully maintains security (assuming that the third-party app store prevents malicious apps, anyway). Apart from a few extra lines of code to allow multiple app store root certificates, it should literally be a matter of installing a certificate in the right place. The only plausible reasons are either anticompetitive or are bizarre control-freak reasons.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I can either have a safer but less flexible phone, or a mouth-breathing malware box?
The Apple ecosystem works in part because the only real way to get your App to iPhones is through the Apple vetting process. If a bunch more "App stores" popped up that charged a little less [or whatever] then well-meaning but non-tech savvy users would use them--and then iPhone would nolonger be the "safe smartphone" and instead would turn into the "little malware box that you have to be afraid of"; just like computers were in the 90s and Android phones are today.
Now that's probably exactly what you want--return us to the days when non-technical people were scared to use anything with technology--because it gives you some bizarre feeling of superiority over them. But I, for one, have no interest in going back to that world.
I like the world the way it is. People have a choice when they purchase the phone on the flexibility vs. safety tradeoff, thus creating two separately thriving ecosystems.
Only on apple hardware to be Legal
What an exciting way for the government to attempt to get a back door into our communications. Pitiful
Actually, that's not entirely true. To some extent, the need to break even sets the price. Because Apple controls the only access to the platform, Apple takes a cut of revenue. If the app developer wants to turn a profit, they must charge a high enough price on iOS to make up for the money that they give to Apple. This is particularly problematic when it comes to subscription revenue, where they have to pay Apple on an ongoing basis. That does, in fact, raise prices for consumers, as has been demonstrated repeatedly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Isn't the average price of an iphone app like a few bucks?
All the things you say are correct except for where you conclude that this means the behavior isn't anticompetitive. What makes something anticompetitive is the result in practice, not whether or not it is technically possible for a company to avoid it. In reality, a number of companies tacked on a 30% markup for their subscriptions so that they could sell them in the app, because a sizable percentage of users primarily used the service through their app rather than through the website. The result was that iOS users paid a lot more than Android users, who were offered the option to pay the cheaper amount with a credit card using the companies' normal merchant account systems. Q.E.D.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Apple is known to block apps that might in any way compete with its business model. For example, Apple blocked a developer from publishing an app that allowed wireless iTunes sync before later adding it as a feature exclusive to newer iPhones. Apple also blocks any apps that might compete with their NFC payments, they block voice assistants from having any meaningful functionality, and they block web browsers from having their own rendering engine.
None of these cases "lead to higher prices" as claimed - quite the opposite, because Apple's offerings are free.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
All the things you say are correct except for where you conclude that this means the behavior isn't anticompetitive.
All the things you say are correct except for where you conclude that this means the behavior is anticompetitive.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.