Excellent news! Any other industry and the execs would have already been in jail. Imagine a car company telling you that you have to buy all accessories from their store, and ones bought from anywhere else will just not work. And the makers have to get their products approved before they can be sold, by a somewhat arbitrary set of rules, and they have to pay 30% to the car manufacturer commission. What?!! All authorized parts do come from a dealer. They do not allow you access to the underlying software or even engine without voiding your warranty. You always have the option of jail breaking at your own risk. Also, the comment about not allowing web apps is totally false. Google is a web app native is better but requires access to to much of the OS to let it be the wild Wild West. App should fight this or just cancel the App Store and let all apps go back to being web apps like it was for the first year or two. Why bother investing billions into a platform for a bunch of bozos to decide you should give it away for free.
Forcing Apple to allow competing stores on iOS is not as terrible as many are making it out to be.
I prefer the peace of mind I get from downloading apps from the App Store. If other stores are made available I will simply not download apps from them. If a developer wants to reach me as a user they will need to submit their app to the App Store.
Yes these are the assholes who claim they have consumer interest at heart. Guess Target and Walmart et al should go before the House Judiciary for their monopolistic business practices too. Everything that comes through their doors have to play by their rules also. It’s time to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington. It reeks!
3. And if you want to replace an original part in your Ford car with a part made by third party supplier, be sure the last one have already paid maybe much more than 30% to Ford for the rights to may produce this part.
I'm not really arguing with your main point, but it sounds like you don't understand something about patents. Third party suppliers do not have to pay Ford for the "right" to produce the part. They have to pay onlythe patent holder for anything that they make that is patented. In some cases Ford doesn't even own the patents for the parts they make; indeed Ford has to pay other car manufacturers patent fees for hundreds of the parts that Ford makes. And it's not just for the parts, as patents also apply to processes used to make parts, which is a separate idea.
Patent laws are complex in no small part because each country has its own laws. Some countries (like the EU) have banded together with unified patent laws. but similarly some companies have banded together to avoid conflicts with other patent holders. Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla and Volkswagen AG are members of the LOT Network, a non-profit consortium in which companies pledge to continue to make their patents available to all members even if they sell them to another firm. This saves on lawyers' fees.
Ford is granted about 1500 patents per year. Here are two of them: "Ford won rights to (a) sensors that gather data from other vehicles, and (b) a system to measure customer satisfaction by expressions or statements made while driving." If any other care manufacturer builds a car with these two features, they have to pay Ford a patent fee. However if the manufacturer is part of the LOT Network, they tend to agree not to charge each other fees in a reciprocal arrangement.
Patent laws are generally good. They encourage innovation by telling inventors that they can get compensated by patent fees when other people use their patents. But just as importantly, they encourage people who want to avoid paying patents to invent different ways to build a similar thing in order to avoid having to pay patents to other people, and I feel that this is a crucially under-appreciated effect of patent law.
The House is concerned with anti-trust issues surrounding Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. The interesting thing is that Apple is the only one of these four companies whose anti-trust issue is an exceedingly small portion of its business. Apple could voluntarily shut down its App Store completely and lose under 5% of its overall profits, but if the other three had to shut down their advertising and sales businesses they would lose 95% of their businesses. So Apple is in relatively good shape not only to weather the storm, but to fight back if it wants to. And by fighting back I'm referring to shutting down the Third Party App Store. However I don't trust Apple to put up any aggressive and creative fight, it will all be a defensive reaction to Congress.
That's because the App Store is the only method to distribute apps on iOS, and Apple doesn't allow non-native app stores to be installed on its mobile devices. Citing iOS developers, the report adds that Apple "actively undermines the open web's progress on iOS" to push companies to build native apps on iOS, instead of web apps.
Funny definition of "actively undermining the open web" they must be using?
If you look at what a web app could do on the first iPhone compared to the current iOS devices.
I guess all those Apple engineers working on activitely improving open web support must be worried for their jobs now politicans have exposed the company as working agianst those ends.
Forcing Apple to allow competing stores on iOS is not as terrible as many are making it out to be.
I prefer the peace of mind I get from downloading apps from the App Store. If other stores are made available I will simply not download apps from them. If a developer wants to reach me as a user they will need to submit their app to the App Store.
Exactly, and if other stores existed then other people would have the choice to download from those stores, and you can choose to download from the Apple App Store.
Google, Microsoft and all the others ALSO charge 30% fees. How is it highway robbery for Apple and not the rest?!
Those other companies don't force a developer to only use their App Stores. If someone started a store that didn't charge those fees developers could choose to list their software on that store instead. Your argument points more to a cartel than anything else.
Google, Microsoft and all the others ALSO charge 30% fees. How is it highway robbery for Apple and not the rest?!
Those other companies don't force a developer to only use their App Stores. If someone started a store that didn't charge those fees developers could choose to list their software on that store instead. Your argument points more to a cartel than anything else.
According to Epic, Google is forcing users to use only the Google Play store by "making it too difficult" to get software from other stores. So have you been ranting against Epic, to be consistent? And that's not even the clearest case of other companies forcing developers to use a single store.
Even by Congress's already low standards, this wins the Utter Stupidity Award.
What a clueless bunch. This will be thrown out on its a** by any reasonable judge in this country.
Keep in mind the courts found against Apple in the book selling case. This is not going to end well for consumers and courts most likely are not going intervene.
This just another example of you think you have a problem now, wait until you see the solution the government comes up with.
Even by Congress's already low standards, this wins the Utter Stupidity Award.
What a clueless bunch. This will be thrown out on its a** by any reasonable judge in this country.
Keep in mind the courts found against Apple in the book selling case. This is not going to end well for consumers and courts most likely are not going intervene.
This just another example of you think you have a problem now, wait until you see the solution the government comes up with.
This is exactly why Apple needs to shut down (or threaten to) the Third Party App Store and replace it by an Apple Only store. Then the government will come back begging for forgiveness because there's no way any government can force any company to do any business in any market segment if the company doesn't want to. But Apple isn't a company that likes to fight so they will cave to whatever the government wants. It's bad for shareholders to cave to every government. Sometimes you should fight instead. Short term pain, long term gain.
Comments
iPhone is very popular due to iOS and differentiated app store policy.
iOS is very popular due to their setting on iPhone.
So, there is an interplay between iPhone and iOS, which makes AAPL so successful.
To other companies: They could be more powerful by being broken up as they are really "data-driven" companies.
Break up --> more competition --> more data collected driven by more competition --> more powerful.
Patent laws are complex in no small part because each country has its own laws. Some countries (like the EU) have banded together with unified patent laws. but similarly some companies have banded together to avoid conflicts with other patent holders. Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla and Volkswagen AG are members of the LOT Network, a non-profit consortium in which companies pledge to continue to make their patents available to all members even if they sell them to another firm. This saves on lawyers' fees.
Ford is granted about 1500 patents per year. Here are two of them: "Ford won rights to (a) sensors that gather data from other vehicles, and (b) a system to measure customer satisfaction by expressions or statements made while driving." If any other care manufacturer builds a car with these two features, they have to pay Ford a patent fee. However if the manufacturer is part of the LOT Network, they tend to agree not to charge each other fees in a reciprocal arrangement.
Patent laws are generally good. They encourage innovation by telling inventors that they can get compensated by patent fees when other people use their patents. But just as importantly, they encourage people who want to avoid paying patents to invent different ways to build a similar thing in order to avoid having to pay patents to other people, and I feel that this is a crucially under-appreciated effect of patent law.
Please give one example of software you can buy for an Apple mobile device outside the Apple App Store.
Someone who recognizes a monopoly?
What a clueless bunch. This will be thrown out on its a** by any reasonable judge in this country.
This just another example of you think you have a problem now, wait until you see the solution the government comes up with.
I love how they bitch, but have no answers for their perceived problems that Apple has.