Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case

> ... the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.”

> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.

Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.

The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?

> why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors

Yeah, this is the fundamental problem, and not something this court ruling does anything to fix. Apple has full control over what software its competitors are allowed to sell. The court's solution? Tell Apple to be more fair when dictating rules to its competitors. Yeah... I'm sure that'll work great.

Yep, on their platform. Just like Wal-Mart and Kroger have full control over what products their competitors are allowed to sell too (in-store versus name brands). Microsoft only makes and sells their games for example for the Windows platform and doesn't allow portability.

As a pattern there's nothing wrong with it.

The crux of the issue is that creation of a mobile operating system that people actually want, like in some other industries, as resulted in two dominant platforms that don't compete all that much with each other. That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve than Apple/Google create competing apps on their software distribution platforms.

My phone that I purchased is not "their" platform. Better analogy would be if Wal-Mart sold me a fridge and then somehow managed to make it so I can only store groceries purchased from Wal-Mart in that fridge. Now if anyone wants to sell me groceries they need to sell them to me through Walmart, otherwise I can't refrigerate them.

As long as you understood the limitations of the fridge you purchased, i.e. you weren't defrauded, what's the problem? Do you really need a nanny state to prevent you from making bad purchases??

The problem currently is the duopoly. There are only 2 types of fridges we can buy. And both have the same conditions.

There are many other computing devices that can run operating systems other than Android and iOS, including devices that can run completely unlocked versions of Android. You're just lying.

We're not talking about computing devices in general, we're talking about phones.

So am I?

There's Linux phones and phones that run versions of Android that are completely decoupled from Google.

So your argument here is "Apple isn't a monopoly. The Fairphone is always ab option"?

I'll keep pounding it in people's heads that 30 years ago Microsoft was hit over a web browser. It's a shame these days people would instead revert that and say "just download Netscape". If that worked, sure. But we have decades of market lock in showing it doesn't

Well they aren't a monopoly. They have what, ~50% market share?

MS had 97% market share and were abusing their market dominance to push others out. Apple isn't doing this, so there isn't a valid comparison here.

Duopoly isn't a much better comparison here. It's big enough that both apple and Google should be addressed.

Seems like there are a relatively large number of competitors to Apple and Google. Eg. Samsung, Motorola, Lenovo, OnePlus, LG, HTC etc. Not to mention Asian brands.

Duopoly might apply if those companies were using their combined dominance to collude and push other competitors out but that isn't really happening as evidenced by the amount of competitors that are in the market.