In which world is "iOS apps" an industry? The industry here is apps in general. In which case you have hundreds of other devices and tens of other stores, of which Apple is a minority player in both.

> The user should be able to control the product they bought, all the way down.

To what degree? Should the user be able to swap out the kernel code? Should they be able to switch out the phone CPU? Clearly the notion is ridiculous. To enable the user to customize this deeply requires implementing additional functionality to do so. It is not as simple as "not interfering."

> You don't have to enable anything, just don't actively interfere with it.

And in doing so, you compromise the security of your product. If I allowed my consumer to edit (compromise) my product arbitrarily, I can never make a secure product, and making a polished product becomes that much harder. Integrating against a generic interface always requires more work and thought than integrating against a known one.

> Apple prohibits you from doing that to begin with, which is half the problem.

This is why I phrased it as a thought experiment and not a reality. You are sidestepping the question.

> The one where it bears no relation to underlying costs and is that high only due to the lack of effective competition.

Just about zero storefronts have commissions that even remotely align with business costs. Walmart's 12-17% commission is far in excess of the operating costs. So is the Play Store's 30%, or Amazon's own commission.

> Platform monopolies are like regional monopolies. Android customers are not a substitute for iOS customers

How? Moving from Android to iOS or the other way is trivial. It is not nearly like moving from state to state. You either buy an iPhone with an App Store, or an Android phone with something else. There is no artificial lock-in besides your own wallet.

There is plenty of customer choice here.

This functionality already exists on macOS.

The one where the set of customers is almost completely disjoint.

> To what degree? Should the user be able to swap out the kernel code? Should they be able to switch out the phone CPU?

The vendor should take no measures to prevent the device owner from doing these things.

> And in doing so, you compromise the security of your product.

Products should not be "secure" against their owners. You need not concern yourself with the experience of people who willingly choose to take matters into their own hands.

> This is why I phrased it as a thought experiment and not a reality. You are sidestepping the question.

I answered the question. You should not take any measures to impair the owner from doing as they please. You don't have to make it easier, just don't actively make it difficult or take steps to purposely impair competition.

> Just about zero storefronts have commissions that even remotely align with business costs. Walmart's 12-17% commission is far in excess of the operating costs.

Competitive businesses have margins that align with business risk and the cost of required capital, because that's what competitive means -- it means that somebody else exists who is reasonably able to take your customers by undercutting your price as long as doing so is still profitable enough to exceed their own capital costs.

> So is the Play Store's 30%, or Amazon's own commission.

Google Play has a weaker app monopoly than Apple because their mechanism is different -- OS APIs that require Google apps, which in turn require Google Play and cause it to be the default app store on nearly all Android devices. But it's not as if that's the canonical example of a competitive market either. And then you look at some of the competitors they do have, like F-Droid, which operates with zero margin at all.

> How? Moving from Android to iOS or the other way is trivial. It is not nearly like moving from state to state. You either buy an iPhone with an App Store, or an Android phone with something else. There is no artificial lock-in besides your own wallet.

You can't be serious. Once you have one device or the other, your data ends up on that vendor's services in those data formats, the builtin apps are different and you become accustomed to them and incur retraining and data transfer expenses, both platforms don't have exactly the same apps so if you use an app which is only on one platform then you have to use that platform and are locked into that app store for all other apps, once you've paid hundreds of dollars for a phone the resale value drops immediately and switching would require eating the loss which can be more than $100 compared to an app cost of only $1. You may prefer one platform over the other for any number of reasons having nothing to do with the app store but those reasons discourage you from switching and thereby tie you to the app store of that platform.

Its exactly like moving from state to state. The numbers aren't as big because a phone doesn't cost as much as a house, but they're the same relative to the cost of apps when an app costs around $1 compared to the typical trip to a grocery store of several hundred dollars, and have the same kind of switching costs where you have to move all your stuff and make labor-intensive changes to many other things that are independent of the app but not the location/platform.

This does not constitute an industry. Industries are defined by product space.

The Pixel and iPhone compete in the same industry. The Play Store and the App Store compete in the same industry. There’s no question around this.

> You don't have to make it easier, just don't actively make it difficult or take steps to purposely impair competition.

This completely ignores the concept of a physical security model. The owner cannot be trusted. Enabling the owner to modify their device arbitrarily introduces physical security bugs.

Your model prevents anyone from making secure devices. At least - not without a lot of extra thought and engineering time, which they should not be obligated to in the first place.

> it means that somebody else exists who is reasonably able to take your customers by undercutting your price as long as doing so is still profitable enough to exceed their own capital costs.

Case in point: Android and the Play Store which directly compete with iOS and the App Store. You cannot claim that Android and iOS compete while simultaneously claiming that the App Store and the Play Store constitute different industries. And there are few more obvious examples of competition than Android and iOS, or the Play Store and App Store.

> Once you have one device or the other, your data ends up on that vendor's services in those data formats

This is no different from me not being able to transfer my purchases from the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. No platform is obligated to give you the tools necessary to switch off said platform. If you buy a game on the PS4, you have no reasonable expectation of getting it on PC for free, regardless of how nice a feature that may be.

Transfer of purchase has never been an expectation of any storefront.

And you're back to arguing that brick and mortar retailers in Florida compete with ones in California because they sell largely the same products.

> The Pixel and iPhone compete in the same industry. The Play Store and the App Store compete in the same industry. There’s no question around this.

By this logic, if Samsung announced a competing phone platform that nobody uses and a competing app store that only works on that platform and has no apps but charges 5% fees, everyone could switch to that app store and sell/get all their apps there even though it has no users and no developers.

> This completely ignores the concept of a physical security model. The owner cannot be trusted. Enabling the owner to modify their device arbitrarily introduces physical security bugs.

The vendor cannot be trusted. The owner is you. If you can't trust yourself then you've already lost.

> Case in point: Android and the Play Store which directly compete with iOS and the App Store.

So you expect that if Google Play reduced their fee from 30% to 15%, developers would switch from distributing their apps on iOS to distributing them on Google Play? How is that even possible when they already distribute them on both?

> You cannot claim that Android and iOS compete while simultaneously claiming that the App Store and the Play Store constitute different industries.

Suppose that two companies make power plants. They all burn carbon to make heat to make steam to make electricity. One company's burns coal, the other natural gas.

When you're buying a power plant, there is competition between them. You can buy either one and they both burn carbon to make electricity.

But suppose, Standard Oil style, that the company making coal fired power plants has a monopoly on coal and the one making natural gas fired power plants has a monopoly on natural gas. Then those are two separate markets -- once you've bought your power plant you're locked into one or the other. Trying to combine them into the "fuel market" only works if you can switch from one to the other without replacing your very expensive power plant, but you can't. Which is why they're two different markets.

> This is no different from me not being able to transfer my purchases from the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. No platform is obligated to give you the tools necessary to switch off said platform.

It's not a matter of being obligated to help you switch. It's a matter of the switching cost being a barrier that segments the app market.

Exactly. This is how the free market works. If Samsung’s App Store is more palatable to developers and users, they will move there. This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store.

> The vendor cannot be trusted. The owner is you. If you can't trust yourself then you've already lost.

How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not.

Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought.

> Then those are two separate markets -- once you've bought your power plant you're locked into one or the other.

You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant.

But let’s avoid silly analogies. The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone. Buying an iPhone does not segment them into a different industry. They can easily get the same apps from an Android phone. The barrier to entry via device cost does not create an industry. Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps.

That it is expensive to switch from an iOS App Store to an Android App Store is a factor that is left to the user to make when they decide to choose one of the app stores. This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry.

Except that they can't do that when they have to create an entire ecosystem in order to compete in app stores, because of the network effects. Microsoft tried and failed with Windows phone, despite having its own desktop monopoly to leverage, pouring a fortune into it and by most accounts creating something that was actually quite good, because you can't get developers without users or users without developers. The barrier to entry is a mile high.

> This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store.

Which is only possible because Google doesn't prohibit that. Apple does.

> How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not.

> Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought.

That's all software. As soon as you lock the device, the decryption key should no longer exist and require the thing in your brain to recreate it.

If the software is designed correctly -- and nothing about that needs to be a secret -- there is nothing the thief can do to decrypt the locked device even with unlimited control over the hardware.

The thing hardware lets you do is allow you to use weak authentication, by having the hardware remain in possession of the real decryption key but rate limit the number of authentication attempts.

But that has absolutely nothing to do with app stores or anything like that. All you need for that is a tiny piece of special purpose tamper-resistant hardware that can store a strong key and then release it in response to successful authentication, while rate limiting the number of authentication attempts. Then when you lock the device the main processor discards the key and the only way to get it back is the rate limiting authentication hardware, which can be completely independent of the rest of the device.

> You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant.

But that's the point. If you have to spend hundreds to have a choice of where to buy a $1 app, that isn't a real choice. If the alternative app store has the same app for $.01 instead of $1 -- a 99% discount -- all you can do is shrug because it's not worth spending hundreds of dollars to save $0.99. There is no amount of discount the other app store can offer to get you to switch. They could pay you $1 instead of charging you $1 and the switching cost would still put you deep in the red. That's what a lack of competition looks like.

> The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone.

If Walmart has a monopoly in California and Target has a monopoly in Florida, you can know that before you decide where to live, and pick whichever state you like, but either way you're living somewhere with a monopoly.

> Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps.

So you can't have a monopoly in California if there is a brick and mortar competitor in Florida, because you both sell similar products?

> This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry.

Yes, that is exactly the same, and the consoles should not be doing it either.

Purchased iTunes has been DRM free for over a decade and you can even transfer movies bought on iTunes to other services at least from four of the major studios.

What do you think would happen if the Facebook or Instagram app weren’t available for iOS? What if you could only use Netflix or YouTube on Android devices?