Supreme Court Says Apple Will Have To Face App Store Monopoly Lawsuit (theverge.com) 147
A group of iPhone owners accusing Apple of violating US antitrust rules because of its App Store monopoly can sue the company, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. From a report: The Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in Apple v. Pepper, agreeing in a 5-4 decision that Apple app buyers could sue the company for allegedly driving up prices. "Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Apple had claimed that iOS users were technically buying apps from developers, while developers themselves were Apple's App Store customers. According to an earlier legal doctrine known as Illinois Brick, "indirect purchasers" of a product don't have the standing to file antitrust cases. But in today's decision, the Supreme Court determined that this logic doesn't apply to Apple.
Too bad (Score:1, Troll)
Iphone, we hardly knew ye.
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All that this decision ruled on was whether or not the plaintiffs had standing, but having standing does not mean that your suit necessarily has any merit. More or less, they're allowed to sue, but it'll still be years before a settlement or ruling comes down, and even if it looks like it's set to go against Apple, it's likely that they'd settle, rather than allow that precedent to get set.
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If that isn't legal standing, why is this?
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Courts can make up what they want when it's convenient. I've seen judge's knowingly accept bad information from police because without it there is no case.
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More or less, they're allowed to sue, but it'll still be years before a settlement or ruling comes down, and even if it looks like it's set to go against Apple, it's likely that they'd settle, rather than allow that precedent to get set.
The results of civil law does not create precedent [wikipedia.org].
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Your link disagrees. It may not binding, but it’s precedent, nonetheless.
Re: Too bad (Score:1)
Wait, you guys are gonna shill for Apple's locked down hardware now?
Holy moly
Re: Too bad (Score:1)
I'm glad you and the modded down troll agree.
No one is stopping Apple from keeping their AppStore. How is opening up more stores going to hurt? If you want the trust and security stick to the Apple store. If you are more advanced and want to branch out, why not. I don't see the harm in competition here. Unless you are an Apple shill.
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I'm glad you and the modded down troll agree.
No one is stopping Apple from keeping their AppStore. How is opening up more stores going to hurt? If you want the trust and security stick to the Apple store. If you are more advanced and want to branch out, why not. I don't see the harm in competition here. Unless you are an Apple shill.
Open the Google store and search for something simple like a calculator app or a voice recorder. Go ahead. Admire the hundreds of results.
Now pick one that won't inject any spyware or adware or otherwise harm your phone. And because very little is vetted by Google, you have no clue what you're actually getting.
Oh but I forgot, you're an "advanced" user. You have some magical power *other* than shit for brains and the ability to leap logical fallacies in a single post.
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If you think iPhones aren't already shitty breeding grounds for various craptcular malware filled garbage, have I got news for you.
Not saying they're perfect, but they're worlds better than Android. And you still apparently suck at logic. Neither will ever change.
Oh yes, prison is soooo much better (Score:2)
Well, Apple *had* the more the secure app system. Once the Plaintiffs prevail and Apple has to allow third party app installation, Iphones will be virus filled diseased retches of technology.........much like Androids are now.
Apple's walled-garden monoculture has been far more harm to the iPhone ecosystem than help. You know, Apple and Android today reminds me of Texas Instruments and Apple in the 80's. TI sued anyone who produced 3rd party anything for their computers, while Apple (at the time) embraced 3rd party and an open environment. Now the tables are reversed. Android is more or less an open platform and Apple is doing everything they can to stifle 3rd party almost anything.
The consequence of choice is that some peopl
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Do you have your nose so far up some libertarian utopia's ass that you cannot see what a clusterfuck the
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Oh yea?
Good one!
I'll offer to you the same challenge I posted earlier: Do a search in the Google store for a simple calculator app......blah....blah.....spyware.....blah....blah...official......blah....blah
I have no idea what you're actually going on about. Are you trying to suggest I find the "official" calculator app in the Google Play Store? Whyever would I want to do that? I'm not sure it's there - it's built into every Android phone. That's like saying "go find where you can download notepad for windows". It's nonsensical.
If you're saying find a good calculator app that's not spyware, then sure. For something like that, I'd personally go to f-droid [f-droid.org]. A beautiful repository of great open so
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And choice for the consumer is just always, always better.
Before the iShill pipes up again, I'll clarify: Yes, that includes the choice of the iPhone. It ain't for me, but I'll be damned if I don't support your ability to choose to give up your choice.
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I would expect after these lawsuits, Apple will probably need to have better transparency on their decision making process, as well allow for some of the more questionable software to be released. Being the power in today's mobile devices, and how they are just going to get more powerful. I can see more App's that can drain the batteries, because Apple had to release an App, that uses a lot of processing power. Or worse having a poorly made port that drains the battery, but doesn't do so on the Android be
Re: Too bad (Score:1)
Allowing 3rd party iOS app stores does not imply iOS devs can skip Apple's app aproval process nor does it imply iOS devs can skip any of Apple's licensing fees.
Please stop with the FUD
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Allowing 3rd party iOS app stores does not imply iOS devs can skip Apple's app aproval process nor does it imply iOS devs can skip any of Apple's licensing fees.
Please stop with the FUD
See, in an antitrust context it very well could. The gyst of their argument will be that Apple is anti-competitive because forces Iphones to only use the App store thus creating a monopoly on unrelated products. The remedy to this would be exactly what happens on Android: Allowing app sources that Apple does not control.
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Re:Apple does decide the commission (Score:4, Informative)
So long as they follow Apple's rules for listing on the store, surrender 30% of the price as a commission, and surrender 30% of all purchased made through their own app as commission.
And if they don't like it, they can go to... nobody else. It's the iTunes store or nothing for the iPhone/iPad market.
Hint: antitrust violations are not limited to entities having gross price-setting power.
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It's the iTunes store or nothing for the iPhone/iPad market.
Um, isn't there a market beyond iPhones and iPads?
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But this is the point. iOS is an operating system. The APPS are the separate programs that run in iOS.
The iOS/APP monopolistic setup is impossible on MacOS and Windows, as we already know from 30+ years of software development.
Android and iOS are just operating systems, just like MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Seems a little strange to treat iOS as something special and separate from any other OS in the market place. The argument that iOS only runs on Apple hardware means nothing, as it means nothing in MacOS.
T
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Heck, you can't even side-load an app without paying the Apple Tax (developer fee, $99/year). I can at least download to my PC an app for Android, Bluetooth it to the phone, then load it - no store needed.
If Apple just allowed side-loading for free (which would cost effectively zero to implement), it would probably make this entire question irrelevant.
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With a 100 user cap, and with the developer of the app paying at least $99/year. We can read too [monaca.io], ya know. Even if you found a developer who would send you an app via ad hoc distribution -- and you won't -- 100 rounds to 0 in the iOS market.
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No, I'm not making Apple's point, since the app purchasers purchase from Apple, which imposes a non-negotiable 30% commission on the app's price as well as other restrictions, most importantly the restriction that the consumer must purchase only from Apple through the Apple store.
Also, I'm not making Apple's point because Apple's point was argued and definitively lost. There's no further possibility of appeal. There's
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That's not the issue here. The issue is that Apple, by requiring all payments go through them, and by charging an exorbitant fee for those payments (an entire order of magnitude higher than traditional credit card processors charge), effectively drives up the cost of services bought through iOS apps, including both the apps themselves and goods/services bought through the app.
The canonical example is Netflix. They eventually concluded that Apple's tax was too high to pay, and stopped making subscriptions
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You're comparing apples and oranges. 30% was reasonable for a brick-and-mortar store, because the costs of selling products in a brick-and-mortar store are relatively high. Each product takes up shelf space that can't be used for another product, each product
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Re:Apple doesn't decide the prices. (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost of the platform is built into the price of the hardware. The cost of purchases should reflect the cost of selling software, which is mostly disconnected from what you're talking about. At best, you could say that the app review process makes the platform safer, and justifies the cost, but either way, the problem with that argument is that developers don't have the option of deciding for themselves whether the cost is justified or not. They are simply forced to pay that cost if they want to reach customers on the iOS platform, which is what makes it likely to be an illegal tying agreement.
If you ship an app on any platform, you start with the benefit of tens of thousands of man-hours that you didn't have to fund up front. And other platforms don't demand 30%. So that's really not a bargain. It's an act of desperation by developers who have to be on iOS, and have no other option for avoiding the fees.
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That's true for small companies, but I think the tipping point is a lot lower than you think, with the exception of developers who rely on micropayments (who benefit from aggregation fee-wise). I mean, even small nonprofit groups and companies with single-digit employees take credit card payments these days, using Square and other similar services, most of which charge considerably less than Apple.
More importantly, even if it truly is a bargain right now, the inability for anyone else to compete to drive
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They're not asking for injunctive relief, so Laches doesn't apply. As a rule, you can sue anyone for damages at any time, whether you've owned the product for a week or twenty years.
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Good alternatives? :-)
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Uh...not exactly. You can charge up to $999.99. You can't charge $2.00--you can charge $1.99 or $2.99.
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Any vendor on the store can set their price to whatever they want.
And add 30% to the price they'd otherwise sell at outside of the App Store to cover the Apple Tax taken when sold within the App Store.
Wait a minute here.... (Score:4, Funny)
"Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
So does this mean we can mark Kavanaugh as publicly against gerrymandering? Just wondering it case it happens to come up again. Say, in the decision for the recently argued Rucho v. Common Cause
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California (Score:2, Insightful)
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Martin Omalley openly gerrymandered Maryland.
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Maybe if you were not so blind and partisan you could see that. But please keep up the stupidity about Kavanaugh so we can get one more conservative on the court.
Uh, the other gerrymandering case before the SC involved Maryland gerrymandering to flip a long-held Republican district Democrat.
Gerrymandering vs. Redistricting (Score:3, Insightful)
When Republicans to it, it's called Gerrymandering and it's bad.
When Democrats do it, it's called Redistricting and it's good.
Same with vote harvesting.
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"Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
So does this mean we can mark Kavanaugh as publicly against gerrymandering? Just wondering it case it happens to come up again. Say, in the decision for the recently argued Rucho v. Common Cause
Justice Kavanaugh is a lawyer. Lawyers excel at finding and making fine distinctions. The differences between this case and gerrymandering of voting districts are big enough to fly a 747 through, particularly since he's using "gerrymander" by analogy, not literally. So, no, I don't think this means you can pin him down. Not that Supreme Court Justices are in any way required to be consistent, anyway. They generally are, but if they decide to change their minds no one can tell them otherwise.
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No the only thing we can mark Kavanaugh as is a fan of beer.
So what does Apple do now? (Score:3)
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I'd offer a variation on the theme...
Suppose, for example, I want to develop a "Strip Poker" game. It will feature various people in varying states of undress. Now you can point out that Apple could accept this app but mark it as downloadable by adults only. Perfectly reasonable thing for Apple to do.
On the other hand, since I'm not a big-shot media company and it's just a silly titillating game, Apple could decide that they don't want my product in their App Store. Which is arguably a legitimate thing-
Apple isn't the only app store. (Score:2)
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And of course, the scammers from the overseas call centers will tell their victims, "Ignore that warning. It's the malware on your iPhone trying to prevent you from getting rid of it. Once your install ou
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"No one is forced to buy an iPhone" I don't think you know what ownership is. If you bought a Ford and only limited to Ford gas stations would that be alright with you? I think this doesn't go far enough. The phones should be owner accessible if they were purchased. The fact that a company can lock the owner out of certain functionality should be made illegal. Let's take it a step further and when marketing uses a term such as buy it should be illegal for a contract to indicate licensed.
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No, but his point was that, knowing in advance Ford did this, you would choose to vote with you wallet and buy something other than a Ford.
Developers have to pay fees even to put free apps (Score:2)
Developers have to pay fees even to put free apps into the store.
Re:Developers have to pay fees even to put free ap (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell I'd have to pay the Big Apple Tax (new computer system) just to be able to *develop* an app, never mind get it into the store and sell or give it away.
No (Score:2)
You have to pay fees to be able to develop apps for iOS. You can put free apps into the store for free.
Similarly, you have ot pay for a computer to compile Android apps. That they charge $99/year for the dev software makes it more expensive to become a developer, but doesn't change that people can produce as many free apps in that year as they like.
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You don't need to run Linux to develop for Android. You can run OSX or Windows. But, you still need to buy a computer.
Yes, it's cheaper to buy a Windows/Linux machine than an OSX machine, and therefore it's cheaper to make Android apps than iOS ones (and Apple makes you rent the software fro $99/year). But that's not the point. The post claimed you had to pay to pubnlish free apps. You don't. You have to pay to develop apps. You can publish 10,000 apps/year if you want for the same price as someone w
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No, I can rent a virtual computer for a few bucks an month, and use a free computer at the library to log into it. I do not have to buy anything. And if I did want to buy, the computer needed to build Android apps will be significantly lower cost than anything needed to build iOS apps. Heck, I could develop Android apps on Android; a free phone would be sufficient to build apps.
And I won't have the additional $99/year cost, either.
And the original post was correct; you have to pay to publish. Do I hav
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Signing. But it's for a signing cert. If I were to say "it costs money to receive emails at addresses in my custom domain", sure that's true cause I have to pay for the domain. But I don't have to pay for each subdomain. I don't have to pay for each email account. And I certainly don't have to pay per email received.
And, you can also rent OSX machines in the cloud you want.
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apple also bans developer from makeing app compete (Score:4, Insightful)
apple also bans developer from making app compete with apples built in ones.
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This is false on its face. Lots of people have Google Maps installed. I've tried about 10 different email apps. People make apps that compete with the built-in ones AL THE TIME.
I did some quick searching, and I couldn't find any immediate evidence that this isn't purely fantasy. The ONLY thing I found was that developers aren't allowed to duplicate the functionality of the App Store, which is of course what this lawsuit is all about.
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Developers duplicate the app store all the time. In China there are numerous alternative app stores, although when you click "install" it takes you to the Apple one for the actual download. They seem to like having different/better ways to discover apps over there.
As for duplicate apps they certainly used to ban them, maybe that changed: https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I think apple is in the right (Score:5, Insightful)
I consider the Apple walled garden a feature, not a bug. In fact, its existence is one of the reasons I bought an iPad for my mother, and got rid of her Windows PC. It is impossible for her to be tricked into downloading malware. That has saved me more hours of effort than I can guess at.
Open to the door to sideloaded iOS apps, and you'll have criminals drooling the world over. Just wait until the "your PC is infected" scammers switch to "your iPad / iPhone is infected" phone calls. Whatever it takes to walk users through the sideloading process, they'll do it. The Apple ecosystem is too lucrative a target for it not to happen.
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That's a rather weak argument.
You would use the built in security controls to disable installs from outside the app store.
Done and done.
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And if the user can access those security controls (which is the entire point), then the scammer on the phone will simply talk the user through the process of disabling them.
Have you ever played along with a "your PC is infected" scammer, just for fun? They'll talk you through setting up a VNC session to get access to your desktop. It may take 15 or 20 minutes, but they'r
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Technically, the users are not the ones who should be complaining about a monopoly. As you said, it's self-selected (although not always). The app developers are the ones who should be filing a lawsuit about the App store. They're just afraid to because of possible retribution by Apple, who could lock them out of the App store as punishment. Which of
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It's your phone not theirs. Apple should have no right to "sell" the iPhone if they don't intend to sell the iPhone. If Apple wants to rent out iPhones then they should state that it's a rental. If we let marketing continue in this direction there will no longer be a term for ownership in the English language.
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The problem with Apple's behavior is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes they did. They sold the phone. They didn't rent it. It's not theirs and yet they kept the keys from the owners.
Re:The problem with Apple's behavior is (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually fine with Apple not allowing an alternative on iPhone and consider the "walled garden" everyone whines about a feature, not a problem. I switched back to iPhone 8 Plus after leaving Apple back when I had an iPhone 3GS. I stuck with Android for many years and several different phones and I experienced firsthand the dramatic drop in the quality of Android phones from Samsung, HTC, LG, and so forth. Phones went from being innovative and streamlined to overpricd bricks filled with preloaded crapware that would barely last a year before needing replacement and Google tracking every aspect of your phone usage along the way. I went from being able to take a brand new Android out of the box and using it to having to go through the process of rooting the phone just so I could uninstall worthless junk that was otherwise not removable. The Facebook app is not a "system app" and users should be able to completely remove it from an Android phone, not just "disable" it. I recall a similar app called Yahoo Yellow Pages and Gas Prices that was also not removable on my old Galaxy Note 4 without rooting the phone. I don't care what sort of contract an app developer entered into with the phone manufacturer, if I don't want the app on the phone I should be able to completely remove it. Offering up a paltry "disable" feature is not sufficient. I should not have to root a phone just to remove preloaded garbage.
Another issue I had with Android phones was the excessive tracking and permissions needed by apps. Sure you got the "freedom" to install whatever you wanted, if you didn't mind that the app wanted access to your contacts, your location (Network and GPS), access to your phone's sensors, camera, and microphone, etc. Even Google's built-in apps demand permissions far in excess of what's necessary. On my last LG Android phone, I blocked access to location, phone sensors, camera, and microphone for the built-in Gmail app and from then on the app would pop up a dialog every few seconds insisting that an email app needed these types of permissions. An email app does not need access to the phone sensors, microphone, or location. Period. Full stop. This is another major issue I have that drove me back to Apple. Sure you get all this supposed freedom to install whatever you want, but there's very little policing of the Android app store and for every one honest Android developer who's just out to make something useful or entertaining, there's a dozen other developers shoveling ad infested, spying junkware onto the Android app store. If Google did a better job of policing the app store and removing apps/banning developers that demand permissions that aren't related to the app's core functionality or purpose, I'd consider going back to Android. Until Google cleans up their act and stops treating the user and their personal information as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder and Android phones return to their former quality, I'm going to enjoy the view in Apple's walled garden.
Pssst. Game consoles. (Score:2)
I wonder how many people complain about Apple's 'walled garden' and then later in the day, fire up their game console to play the manufacturer-approved title of their choice.
Standing Only (Score:3)
Precidence (Score:2)
Goddamn Commie EU shaking down US corporations (Score:2)
Oh wait
surprising source? (Score:2)
Will probably stay with App Store (Score:2)