Apple apologists will blur this by taking about the smart phone market as a whole. But once someone has bought a device, they are no longer in that larger market. They need apps, and there's only one place to get them.
That only leaves the question of whether they are abusing the monopoly.
Google has a similar monopoly over Android applications, but it's not as tight, because of side-loading and fragmentation by Amazon and others. Still, it's a near-monopoly because few people bypass the Play Store.
Until you can find a judge willing to endorse your definition of "market", it's not just "Apple apologists" but "legal precedent".
I think it should be illegal to deliberately interfer with a devices owner's ability to run the software of their choice. This means that owners of iPhones, PlayStations, Switches, Tractors, Cars, etc should not have to treat the manufacturer as an adversary in their ownership of the devices.
I also think that content exclusivity contracts should be illegal and that all content creators that license content to a service should be required to offer reasonably similar licensing terms to that service's competitors.
Apple for iOs and software distributors and computer store retailers for the windows application market.
Microsoft dominated the market for operating systems for home computers, and they did a bunch of nasty stuff, including using their dominance to effectively restrict and/or prevent bundling of other operating systems with new computers, and there were shenanigans done against a handful specific products made by others, but AFAIK Microsoft did not make any attempt to dictate what applications computer stores sold. If you could convince distributors and retailers, your software could be on shelves. There were made for windows labeling programs, and those are now compulsory for drivers, but that's outside the Microsoft abuses time frame and there's not the same kind of pushback.
Google's control of Android is similar, but not nearly the same. Developers can make apks available for users and users can pretty easily install them; the experience seems to be getting consistently better, my newest phones will show a warning on opening that links to the checkbox and when you tick the box you can install the apk directly, without having to find it again. It's not quite as easy as running a setup program on windows, but it's darn close.
Sure, most developers don't provide apks, and most users don't use direct apk links when they're provided, but it's an available option vs jailbreaking an iOS device which requires a lot of fiddly steps. There's also a concern about Google enforcing some terms on downloaded apks that are also distibuted through the Play store, at least a few years ago, they didn't like non-google in app payment, even if it was only in the direct apk; and Google Play's security scanning apparatus runs against downloaded apks and sometimes shows scary messages which may be anti-competitive.
I think there's certainly a legal question about if Apple's captive market can be considered a market for anti-trust purposes. If so, there's a clear case of anti-competitiveness, IMHO. If the relevant market is applications on smartphones or tablets, I don't think Apple has enough marketshare that the anti-competitive things they do are prohibited, because IMHO, they only do things that are prohibited in combination with strong market power.
Google, on the other hand, probably has enough market power, regardless of segmentation, but they also are signficantly less restrictive.
They used that position to force OEMs to sell Windows only. BeOS was going to be on <vendor> desktops [0], but MS went to them and said, in short, "If you do this, you will have to pay retail price for our OS. And if you have to pay retail price, you will have to raise your hardware prices when selling Windows desktops. And if you have to do that, in this cutthroat low-margin industry, you won't be able to compete with the other OEMs."
The anti-trust case is really interesting reading (to me at least), and worth checking out. Most people only know the headlines of what was covered by it ("it's about browsers") but aren't aware of the deeper and over decade long issues that were covered by it.
Embrace, extend, extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
It wasn't just the browser's hooks into the OS (or the OS dependency on IE). It was the deliberate non-conformant manner that MS developed it in. It literally did things in the opposite way the standard described at times. See also their effort at implementing Java as part of their developer suite, where they were later forced to drop the J++ line because they were making an incompatible, non-standard Java.
[0] Compaq? It's in the suit, I may track it down before the edit window is closed.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
Also, iOS has 60% of the mobile operating systems market in the US[2]. Apple's App Store is responsible for 100% more revenue than the Play Store[3].
Apple and Google are certainly leveraging their duopolies in both the mobile operating systems market and the mobile app distribution market in order to prevent competition in those markets and others.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
0: indeed, can, without stupedous efforts of reverse engineering that they actively oppose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
Part of their punishment was to open up APIs and allow 3rd parties to audit. If this wasn't the main part of the case why was this used to remedy?
The browser was not special, the abuse was the issue and the browser case was solid to use as a central claim against MS.
And this bears repeating again and again:
The browser was not and is not special. It does not matter. It was the abuse that was at issue, not the browser itself. The browser was a symptom of the abuse. Again, the browser was not the issue, only a symptom of abuse of their monopoly position.
Any claims against Apple about the Safari browser on mobile being like the IE situation on Windows is the result of a shallow reading of the case.
>34. Viewed together, three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to Windows.
Viewed together, three main facts indicate that Apple enjoys monopoly power. First, Apple's share of the market for smartphones is extremely large and stable. Second, Apple's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Apple's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to iOS.
