Did Apple Secretly Crush An App Store Competitor In Japan? (theverge.com)

According to Nikkei, Japan's Fair Trade Commission is looking into whether Apple improperly pressured Yahoo Japan to shut down a game streaming platform that competed with the iOS App Store. "Yahoo Japan's Game Plus service allowed people to stream full games made for other platforms and to play HTML5 games on mobile phones, which would have allowed iPhone owners to get games without going through the App Store," reports The Verge. From the report: Nikkei reports that Yahoo Japan slashed the program's budget last fall, just months after it launched, and told partners that it was due to pressure from Apple. It's said to have begun filing complaints with Japan's FTC around the same time. Developers essentially have no good alternative to the App Store on iOS. Their only other option is the web, which is a wonderful place for websites, but the web is rarely as fast or flashy as a native app. There are a great number of features that only native apps can take advantage of, which requires going through the App Store and giving Apple a 30 percent cut of most sales. Yahoo Japan's service was meant, in part, to be an alternative to that, offering better terms to developers, according to Nikkei, and fewer restrictions around how games were updated and sold. Final Fantasy creator Square Enix had even signed on and produced an exclusive game for the platform, which has since been pulled.

Comments

Re: Front-Page Posts Out of Order

[stealth_finger]

/. Is turning into every other site where unemployed millennials bitch about things

I see a whole lot more bitching about millenials around here.

Re:Would like to hear more about this

[squiggleslash]

Apple has a long history of trying to prevent choice and innovation. They forced DR to lobotomize GEM, threatened Microsoft for the best part of a decade to prevent them from producing a decent UI for Windows (you really don't want to know what Windows was like pre-95), and until the late nineties was notorious for avoiding open technologies, even when there was no serious advantage to its own. While things warmed again under Jobs, the latter went ballistic over Google's Android despite the iPhone itself being a blatant copy of an LG design.

They're not the good guys, they're just a company that very often comes up with some good ideas.