Apple’s App Store policies are bad, but its interpretation and enforcement are worse

CyberTech

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I started this morning all riled up and ready to write a newsletter about how Google is using its market power in one segment — Gmail — to give itself a potentially unfair advantage in another segment: video conferencing.

That was the plan, but then Apple decided to use its market power in one segment — the App Store — to give itself a potentially unfair advantage in another segment: buying digital goods.

I’m obviously going to focus on Apple. But to get Google out of the way quickly, its abuse was deciding not only to build Google Meet into Gmail, but to inflict a giant button on inbox screens for all G Suite users by default. It can be turned off, but the company is clearly sacrificing user experience to push its own agenda against Zoom. (I’ll come back to Google in a postscript.)

In Apple’s case, the decision was to tell the company that makes the brand new email app called Hey that it cannot distribute its app on the iPhone unless it makes it possible for users to sign up via Apple’s own prescribed methods — which gives Apple a 30 percent cut.

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Ink

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Not any different to exclusive ecosystems such as Nintendo Shop, Xbox Store and PlayStation Store. If you want your digital version games on these platforms, Microsoft and Sony will take a similar 30% cut.
 

CyberTech

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"If you look at the industry today, I think what you'll find is increasingly you're seeing app stores that have created higher walls and far more formidable gates to access other applications than anything that existed in the industry 20 years ago," Smith says of the App Store, adding, "They impose requirements that increasingly say there's only one way to get onto our platform, and that is to go through the gate that we ourselves have created. In some cases they create a very high price for a toll, in some cases 30 percent of all your revenue has to go to the toll keeper if you will."

Smith does not state that the app store he's referring to is Apple's, but Bloomberg confirms that he as referring to the Apple App Store, as clarified by a Microsoft spokesperson.

Smith also states, "I do believe the time has come, whether we are talking about Washington DC or Brussels, for a much more focused conversation about the nature of app stores, the rules that are being put in place, the prices and tools that are being extracted, and whether there is really a justification in antitrust law for everything that has been created."

 

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