The problem is all in this fragment: "as a vendor of dominant mobile operating system". We all know Apple makes more money than any other mobile manufacturer, and we all know they are culturally dominant, but in terms of actual market penetration, they own 20% of the global market. Samsung gets 27%, just to mention one competitor.
This makes it extremely hard to get any sort of antitrust leverage against Apple. We can keep screaming at them until we're blue in the face and nothing will change.
That's all well and good, but Google can't exactly ask all their users to download Xcode and deploy some workaround to get a prebuilt Chrome binary bundled with Blink on their iPhone.
Jailbreaking it and installing it via Cydia would be easier.
> We can keep screaming at them until we're blue in the face and nothing will change.
Well, unless you're Taylor Swift. Then Apple will do what you ask within 24h.
I know there's no Taylor Swift of the iOS software ecosystem, but I think that's attitude is defeatist. If more people complained about a lack of real browser choice on iOS, including developers and users, Apple would eventually have to cave.
Oh, and I don't think Apple had more than 20% of the U.S. ebook market, yet DoJ still sued them for price fixing - and Apple lost. So if we can find the will (political or otherwise), I think we can get Apple to allow other browsers.
In the U.S., where this case would be tried anyway, Apple has over 40% market share.
> If more people complained about a lack of real browser choice on iOS, including developers and users, Apple would eventually have to cave.
Nope. Don't you remember just a few years ago, when everyone was screaming at Apple for years to put Flash on its mobile devices? Apple never caved. Apple doubled down, because Apple was smart enough to figure out that Flash was a battery-sucking, security-ruining disaster.
Gee, kinda like allowing third parties to control the web browser on a mobile device would be. Fancy that!
DoJ sued Apple and a cartel of publishers which dominated the market: "The Publisher Defendants sold over 48% of all e-books in the U.S.". Big difference. Apple was central to the conspiracy to fix prices, but the main charge was really against the publishers.
This market share/mind share / profit share rhetoric changes nothing for the sizeable portion of Apple's iOS users. Last I checked there are half a billion of them - they have no choice but to use Safari.
Exactly. Occasionally I'll give Chrome, Firefox, among others a try, but I keep coming back to Safari. I hate the way the other browsers look, especially Chrome, and Safari is super quick while being easy on the battery.
Its being the only major browser that respects battery life is pretty much the only reason I use Safari. It hurts to see that "time remaining" indicator drop by 2 hours just because I have Chrome open.
I really miss Chrome's multi-profile support, but it's just so much heavier. Last time I used Firefox (admittedly ~3 years ago) it was even worse. System-wide beachballs. Much worse than having Eclipse open. That's what got me to switch to Chrome for a time, after being a FF user since the Phoenix/Firebird days.
That's because Apple actively provides Safari with advantages with regards to API access and performance. They royally screw over the other browser vendors.
Apple also owns the app store and the default configuration of the OS is moving towards only allowing app store software (has it already finished that transition)?
They can and will reject anyone who uses private apis that they themselves use.
In addition, because they own the OS they can require that a private API is only accessed by software signed by them.
It also could cause firefox to break on OS updates and would require firefox to keep abrest of those changes.
You can still install any software you want on your Mac. As that bugzilla page says, Firefox already uses plenty of private APIs, so this doesn't seem to be a big deal in practice. And Firefox was not rejected from the App Store, another XUL client was (IMVU).
> Safari is super quick while being easy on the battery.
That's not surprising, considering it's the only product not forced to use the public web view object in iOS. It's like Microsoft Office, which has always used private MS apis that other products running on Windows were not allowed/supposed to.
I guess the same can be said about all the people buying Windows devices in the 90s. Everything is absolute, 1:1 after all - you buy something and you must like everything about it 100%!
The "Apple is not dominant" retort is very correct but also very frustrating.
Apple is dominant in the sense that they command an outsize portion of developer/consumer mindshare. So issues like this just get drowned out in all the fawning.
Because if they did, "Tide users" and "Ford owners" would be their own markets too which would mean that all brands would be monopolists by default.
You don't get to throw anti-trust at Apple because you can't be bothered to switch to a different type of smartphone, just like you can't throw anti-trust at Ford because you don't want to drive a Chevy. The notion is absurd.
> Because if they did, "Tide users" and "Ford owners" would be their own markets too which would mean that all brands would be monopolists by default.
Which could (in a formal logic, not juristic logic, sense) lead to an argument why anybody should be allowed to install any software they want on their devices - a demand that I, as a hacker, fully support.
What does Ford do differently with respect to software on their, say, entertainment system or ECU computers that Apple doesn't do with their iOS devices to allow you to draw this distinction?
Meaning that you can easily replace an entire computer system with another entirely different computer system? What stops you from doing the same with your iPhone? (i.e. buying, say, an Android device)
Have you personally ever done so? I have, and it ain't so easy, especially if you are not just swapping in a piggyback system, but actually installing a whole new ECU.
Yup. I agree with you 100%. This discussion was brought up earlier this week on HN and someone mentioned how Samsung can't get in trouble for anti-trust because you can't install an alternate browser on their TVs.
I completely agree with you. But I would like to add that Apple holds most of the important users - those who are the most willing to spend time and money online.
Yeah, you could try to paint them as dominant in a specific market segment (rich people, whatever), but it would be very difficult. We're very far from the numbers Microsoft still has on the desktop, and a world apart from the 90%+ they had back in the Netscape-suit days.
9 out of 10 desktop computers still run Windows. 12% of those still run XP. There's still no 3rd option on the desktop; Linux has failed.
So, rather than fix a real problem, people start complaining about something a lot smaller: "18% of the world's phones run in a walled garden with a relatively modern browser."
98% of computer-using population will use whatever comes with the machine; Linux is viable but the hardware vendors are not pushing it, also because of Microsoft lobbying. On the other hand Android could be easily built on top of QNX and get the same market share.
It does though. If Linux & Apple didn't exist, Microsoft would have a much shitty product. Kind of like apple's browser, since it doesn't matter that they keep it up to date since they have lock in.
Sounds convincing but a lie. Unfortunately, those pesky facts just keep getting in your way. Microsoft has always been the laggard in browser standards.
Apple's mobile market share in the US: 43.5%
Samsung: 28.7%
LG: 8.2%
Motorola: 5.1%
HTC: 3.8%
It always makes me laugh when people still, in 2015, try to pretend that Apple isn't dominant and getting more dominant with time, in the mobile space.
The words "dominant" or "powerful" or even "market leading" are not even close to the same thing as a monopoly. And the difference is extremely substantive.
This makes it extremely hard to get any sort of antitrust leverage against Apple. We can keep screaming at them until we're blue in the face and nothing will change.