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0 points3grdlurker5y ago0 comments

> Firefox and Chrome were able to dethrone IE because Windows doesn't have any gatekeeper preventing apps from being installed.

What’s preventing people from buying an Android, though?

This really is just a story of two businesses who can’t agree with the terms of engagement: Apple requires subscription-based services to use their payment system if the services want to be available in their platform, and Librem doesn’t want to share their profits. I’m struggling to see why Apple’s terms are unreasonable here. Any business that has an ecosystem of products isn’t and shouldn’t be legally required to support competing ecosystems/platforms—and Apple already does have Google’s and Facebook’s apps in the App Store, by the way.

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knubie5y ago

> What’s preventing people from buying an Android, though?

Nothing is stopping them, but the question was why Apple's policies are bad. If people need to buy a completely new device because they can't use the apps they want, then I would say those policies are bad.

They're bad for Apple because they make apps on the app store less capable or not available at all. They're bad for developers because they make it far more expensive to do business on iOS devices. And they're bad for consumers because they make apps on iOS devices more expensive, more confusing (unable to sign up / upgrade / manage account) or just plain unavailable in this case.

wmf5y ago

There's the issue of market power: given that >50% of the market already has iPhones, they won't switch to Android just to get one app. It's not about competing ecosystems/platforms; this problem applies to tons of apps.

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