Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices?

Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?

Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.

Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..

It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.

The parent poster just said that customers can pay on his website so I’m assuming it’s a service surfaced by his app.

Yes! Why do people keep on asking this? Yes, practically every single tech product that you buy from Walmart will include links to their online stores in the packaging. Including Apple products! And this has been the case for ages.

I remember buying DVDs from Walmart and opening them up and the first thing you would see is a slip of paper telling you in giant letters to use some reward program or streaming service rather than buying the DVDs physically.

If you buy an iPhone from Walmart, there will be a link to the apple store in the packaging. If you buy a Switch, there will be promotions for digital downloads that directly compete with Walmart in your packaging. It's not just digital links either, when I bought a Roomba it came with instructions about how to order future purchases, filters, and parts directly from the manufacturer.

Apple bans developers from including links to alternative stores in bundled manuals and help pages. I can not think of a single physical store that does the same, and I can't think of a single tech company including Apple that doesn't link to competing storefronts in their manuals and packaging inserts.

Apple is worse than Walmart on this issue.

And that’s after you buy it. Are you willing to sell your software up front instead of a subscription? Walmart doesn’t distribute products for free that then you can pay for it after you take it home.

Apple's policy was also the same for apps that you bought upfront. There are paid apps on the app store, they also were not allowed to link to payment methods in-app for things like DLCs, add-ons, etc...

Which noteably, Walmart doesn't restrict.

----

Also not for nothing, but this was an impressively fast pivot you made from "well, Walmart wouldn't let you do this" to "Walmart is nothing like the app store" ;)

Like.. you asked the question. Would Walmart let you link to a competing store? Yes, and everybody does it. You are the one here who compared Apple to Walmart, I'm sorry if that comparison didn't go the way you wanted it to. If perhaps you want to suggest that Walmart is not like the app store.. well.. congratulations, you and the judge are in agreement on that.

> Thus the Court found:

> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.

Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart

Yet everyday, people seem to know that to use Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc on their phone, they have to sign up on the website since you can’t pay for either via in app purchases.

Courts understand that making things annoying but possible is not actually a counterargument.