Yes, in a way it's a rather good argument. But if you take it to its conclusion, if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.
> if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.
They already do this right now anyway, with App Store ads. Apple doesn't care about privacy. It cares about money, and it makes money any way it can. Unlike pretty much every other phone or tablet, iOS devices don't let you install apps without telling Apple. That privacy violation exists because it makes Apple money.
At that point consumers would be free to make a choice to switch away from Apple if they value their privacy enough. The problem right now is that Apple is 'abusing' the fact that privacy-aware consumers are drawn to their platform to charge onerous fees to app developers. They're leveraging their (de facto) monopoly on high-end mobile privacy-aware devices to restrict competition in mobile app fee charging. It's that business practice that's wrong - having a monopoly is fine so long as you don't start using your monopoly position to make money from people who are your customers for some other business.
Microsoft fell foul of this in the early 2000s. It wasn't their monopoly on desktop PC OSs that lost them an anti-trust case. It was the fact they used their monopoly on Windows to push users into adopting IE. They abused their monopoly position. That's the problem.
>At that point consumers would be free to make a choice to switch away from Apple if they value their privacy enough.
Consumers who spent hundreds of dollars in Appstore purchases and have 10+ years of photos, movies and data tied to Apple won't just suddenly leave all that and move to Android and start their digital life from scratch.
And the young consumers just starting their digital lives, are jumping in the ecosystem their friends and family already use (iMessage lock-in). It's basically not even your choice at that point, it's more that you're forced to.
No, the world is not either smartphone or no-smarthone, it's not binary. The correct alternative is not having anti consumer vendor lock-in practices in smartphones.
We had PWA even before we had locked in app-stores but then Apple saw the dollar signs of locking people and app devs in their graded and gave up on PWA and doubled down on draconian lock-in.
I don’t think the qualifier was necessary. I think it was used to describe the obvious nature of anyone owning the sole software distribution means on their platform, it gives them a de facto monopoly on that means as opposed to a natural? monopoly where they just got so big they fell into it.
Apple unquestionably monopolizes the App Store. Whether or not you consider it a substantial monopoly is it's own thing, but the App Store itself is segregated from competition.
> if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.
Schiller argued that App Store should be free after a billion dollars was earned from it. Apple execs pretend they don't even know how much money App Store makes or loses.
And App Store is already monetized: Apple's hardware pays for everything, and more.
Nobody will use an iPhone without Uber, their banking and transit apps. Apple used to think all 3rd party services will be accessed via Safari, but boy was that a long time ago.
