In which situation does the end user not pay for everything? Even a fine or a tax on a company ends rolled up in the price paid by the end user. Same thing with programs paid for by the government. It’s the taxpayers who foot the bill.
I’m kinda split on the whole Apple situation. I’m firmly in the camp of “monopoly bad”, but apparently people are fine with apple’s practices. It’s not like they have to buy an iPhone.
> I’m kinda split on the whole Apple situation. I’m firmly in the camp of “monopoly bad”, but apparently people are fine with apple’s practices. It’s not like they have to buy an iPhone.
There are many things that now require you to have a phone that runs iOS or Google-approved Android. They both monopolize their respective markets and charge 30%, locking out competitors with attestation systems etc.
Two incumbents that each divide up the customer base between them while locking out other competitors is called a cartel and it's not actually a competitive market.
Google-approved Android, at least for now until some judge hopefully shuts down the idiotic "verified developers" programme, has a range of app stores with different options. Unfortunately, Amazon shut theirs down, but charging a 30% convenience fee is a choice there.
Inside of the EU the same is true for iOS, of course, although Apple still somehow charging developers per install makes it hard to provide apps for free.
> Google-approved Android, at least for now until some judge hopefully shuts down the idiotic "verified developers" programme, has a range of app stores with different options.
In order for such a competitor to be viable for use by developers, it has to be installed on the devices of customers, which Google has acted to prevent. Google Play has over 90% market share on Android and has constrained OEMs from shipping devices with other stores installed and used other methods to prevent any alternatives from establishing a network effect.
And now that regulators are getting after them about doing those things, they've sprung this "verified developers" trap to keep it going.
This has the simplest evidence of anything. If other stores are a viable alternative, why do they have ~0% market share?
> has constrained OEMs from shipping devices with other stores installed
Every Samsung phone comes with the Samsung Store. My Xiaomi phone came with a Xiaomi store. I don't know about any vendors that even wanted to ship app stores outside of their own, but I don't recall Google preventing them from doing that.
> If alternative stores are a viable alternative, why do they have ~0% market share?
Because people like Google Play? All I ever read about the app store alternatives that do exist is that people wished they could get rid of them. Personally, I find Google Play to be the best app store around, even compared to iOS' app store, in terms of search functionality and responsiveness. And that's a low bar to clear, given the absolute garbage Google will throw at you with some searches.
With Amazon closing its app store, the only independent app store that has the ability to charge people money has disappeared. That doesn't mean Steam or Epic or Microsoft couldn't set up their own stores if they wanted to. Hell, even with the "verified developer" system, alternative app stores are still possible.
> Every Samsung phone comes with the Samsung Store. My Xiaomi phone came with a Xiaomi store.
Google got caught withholding search revenue from vendors who installed third party stores and punishing them in various other ways.
The phone vendor stores are all useless specifically because they're from the phone vendors, which means they'll be terrible because hardware vendors are notoriously bad at software, and on top of that they'll only be installed for people with that brand of phone, which again destroys the network effect.
> All I ever read about the app store alternatives that do exist is that people wished they could get rid of them.
Those are the phone vendor stores. Nobody wants those.
Actual competitors would be the likes of Amazon or Epic or F-Droid, but Google's shenanigans have meant they all have negligible market share to the extent that Amazon even gave up.
> Because people like Google Play?
That wouldn't explain it. If they like Google Play and ten other things then they would each have ~10% market share. If they only like Google Play, that implies something fishy is going on, because you'd otherwise expect there to be a thousand bad ones and at least a dozen good ones since it's not that hard to set up an app store. Unless it is that hard, and then why is that?
> Google got caught withholding search revenue from vendors who installed third party stores and punishing them in various other ways.
Interesting, do you have a link for that?
> Those are the phone vendor stores. Nobody wants those.
They have the same problem Apple's app store has: they lock you into a particular brand if you decide to spend money. Annoying, I agree, but 99% of app downloads are free anyway.
The real money is to be made with in-app purchases, but because people don't give alternative app stores a chance, they don't realize how much they're being scammed: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/bnbgmf/samsun...
> The phone vendor stores are all useless specifically because they're from the phone vendors, which means they'll be terrible because hardware vendors are notoriously bad at software, and on top of that they'll only be installed for people with that brand of phone, which again destroys the network effect.
The network effect never existed on desktop and Steam is doing just fine competing with the Microsoft Store.
As for software quality, 90% of smartphones is all software. If they were as bad at software as you say they are, smartphones would be unusable.
> Actual competitors would be the likes of Amazon or Epic or F-Droid, but Google's shenanigans have meant they all have negligible market share to the extent that Amazon even gave up.
F-Droid is widely used but only a fraction of consumers care about the things F-Droid cares about. Everyone who cares about open source on Android is served either by F-Droid directly or by another app leveraging the same ecosystem. There's no money to be made selling apps you can download for free elsewhere, though.
> you'd otherwise expect there to be a thousand bad ones and at least a dozen good ones since it's not that hard to set up an app store
But it is hard to set up an app store? The code for the app store itself isn't all that exciting, but convincing developers/publishers to use your app store is. Then things like localisation, payment, distribution, and in-app purchases pop up, which are technical challenges that are much harder to solve.
There's a reason Steam and GOG are essentially the only independent software stores left for video games other than buying games from publishers directly.
The lack of a network effect does make it hard to compete with the status quo, but part of that is that nobody really tries. What the big companies really want is to get the benefits of Google Play without having to pay the price. That's why they sued to "open up" the Google Play store rather than to force Google to make alternative app stores possible.
There are stores that do have the network effect, as they come pre-installed on billions of phones. But, as you said, "nobody wants those".
Trust me, I'd love for Google Play to get a repository feature where you can add and remove your own software sources so I wouldn't need to deal with the laggy F-Droid UI or the unmaintained Amazon App Store app, but the technical hurdles for getting app stores on phones is rather minimal.
For what it's worth, I think Netflix is the second biggest OS-independent proprietor of software apps, as their app comes with an Xbox Game Pass/Playstation Plus/Apple Arcade-style games catalogue available with your subscription. They use Google Play for binary distribution, but payment itself happens through your standard Netflix subscription. Again, a lot of people are angry that this alternative even exists because it's "bloat" but the network is there, ready to be leveraged.
> Interesting, do you have a link for that?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22632806/google-epic-prem...
They adopt the Google framing that they were "being paid" to exclude third party stores, but that's a subjective description. If you get paid X for search revenue and you get Y less if you include third party app stores, that's a penalty.
> The network effect never existed on desktop and Steam is doing just fine competing with the Microsoft Store.
Stores inherently have a network effect. To get users you need apps; to get apps you need users. That's a network effect. Which is why, if you can keep alternate stores off of most devices, you can suppress them.
Microsoft, for all their other faults, wasn't doing that, which is why Steam on Windows is a thing but Steam on Android is conspicuously lacking.
> F-Droid is widely used
No it isn't. It's good, but it has ~0% market share.
> convincing developers/publishers to use your app store is.
This is exactly the issue. Google put up barriers to getting people to use them.
> Then things like localisation, payment, distribution, and in-app purchases pop up, which are technical challenges that are much harder to solve.
None of these are that hard. Payments are the most difficult and every company that sells something still manages it somehow.
> There's a reason Steam and GOG are essentially the only independent software stores left for video games other than buying games from publishers directly.
Video games weren't traditionally sold through "software stores" to begin with. You'd just buy them directly from the publisher. Which is the other thing Google suppresses on Android. Try downloading an Android app directly from the publisher's website the same as people do with games on Windows and see how many hoops you have to jump through.
> No it isn't. It's good, but it has ~0% market share
Oh, I'll go tell my dad and brother who have been happily using it to update NewPipe for years. They'll be heartbroken but otherwise unbothered.
This isn't about the tiny percentage of people who are stubborn or technically inclined enough to make it work despite the barriers. It's about the other 99% of people who should have access to NewPipe too.
The cases are not about the consumer's choice to buy an iPhone. They're about other companies' options to reach consumers of iPhones. Apple (and Google) can not be in the middle of 2-3 billion phone owners and every company that wants to access those phone owners. Government are not going to allow it. No companies should have that much power.
> In which situation does the end user not pay for everything?
If you want to get technical about it the field of economics addresses this question. Its called Tax Incidence. The short story is that the side of the market that has the least elasticity of demand (IE, they respond to price changes the least, and don't buy more or less because of price changes) is the entity that suffers the costs of taxes and gets the benefits of subsidies.
Intuitively this makes sense. Imagine if there is a luxury good that you don't need. If taxes increase significant on it, you may just choose not to buy it. That has a high elasticity of demand. Meaning that the tax incidence isn't going to be on the consumer and will instead be on the produce.
Whereas, think about food. People don't eat much more or less based on how much it cost. You can't physically eat more than like twice as much, and if you don't have any you die. Meaning that its a low elasticity of demand, meaning that the consumer pays the taxes.
> In which situation does the end user not pay for everything? Even a fine or a tax on a company ends rolled up in the price paid by the end user.
New costs are covered by a combination of a cut from the seller's profits and an increase in the buyer's price, and the proportion of each varies greatly depending on economic factors.
For example, imagine you offer that ugly sweater in an online marketplace. Can you just charge whatever you like (cost + desired profit)? No way. You can only charge as much as someone will pay, and that may work out to be a loss - for less than your costs. If somehow your costs go up - you spill something on it and need to dry clean it - can you just charge more? You can try, but there's no reason buyers will pay you more because your costs have increased; they don't care. Now imagine an inventory of 1,000 sweaters to sell - you might get lucky with one desperate buyer, but it's even harder to raise prices when you need 1,000 buyers.
Companies sell some things for huge markups, such as a bottle of soda, and for losses - even if the cost is $500, $100 is better than nothing. Think of sales and clearance sales.
Like you, companies price things to maximize revenue, where R = price x volume. Theoretically, they already price things for maximum revenue before they incurred additional costs, so how can they raise the price?
One way is to shift consumer perspective by blaming X for the price increase - government is a popular excuse, or oil prices - saying they must pass on the additional cost, and persuading some consumers that they must or ought to pay more. But when they say that the new tax will have to be be passed on to the consumer, they are full of $#!+ - when they buy the CEO a new private jet, do they pass that on too? - because they also can and do pass on the cost to their shareholders.
> I’m kinda split on the whole Apple situation. I’m firmly in the camp of “monopoly bad”, but apparently people are fine with apple’s practices. It’s not like they have to buy an iPhone.
People don't necessarily choose the option that is better for them long term. The existence of monopolies stifles innovation, so users are worse off. For example, Apple's ecosystem works great if you go all in, but what would have happened if Apple had opened the garden to every one and embraced open standards?
That sounds like a fun thought experiment. What exactly would happen?
I think is why the EU and UK pushing so hard to open the gates is so they have the excuse to take control themselves and slam the gates back shut hard. I predict the outcome in even a ten year period is all apps will need governmental approval.
Opening the gates is not necessarily the best long term decision either.
You have to remember most governments are corrupt and it will devolve into a situation on who pays the best bribes over the current flat rate extortion.
> In which situation does the end user not pay for everything?
In situations where the company needs to continue to compete, and factoring fines into prices would push it out of competitiveness, so it needs to find other ways to offset the fine.
Apple's unlikely to be in this situation, and probably has massive buckets of cash just sitting around in various offshore places anyway. I doubt a couple of billion are much danger.
> apparently people are fine with apple’s practices
I'm happy my mum has a phone that can only install apps and stuff that are sanctioned by apple.
She's not savvy enough to know differently, she doesn't really do apps, and frankly her best defence against any sort of tech-based scammers is likely to be "Oh, well, I wouldn't know how to do that", but otherwise extra-strong rails are a really useful thing.
Monopolies are bad but the current ecosystem is so good, and for me other app stores aren't that interesting. And for some less savvy users they would be an outright threat.
> It’s not like they have to buy an iPhone.
I'm so sick of hearing this, the current smartphone market is an american megacorp duopoly, both of whom are locking down their phones to such a degree that you cannot even claim you own the hardware anymore. There is essentially no choice.
And not buying a smartphone is not a choice either, if you want to actually exist in the modern world.
Google is still held back by the fact that their Pixel line isn't selling. They can't dictate terms to Samsung or Xiaomi. Apple owns the hardware and software.
In a situation where profits decrease instead of price increase
But that would only work if the end user refused to pay whatever price the company asks for. In the specific case of Apple, people line up to buy their product.
Are you saying that every single person on the planet bought /lined up to buy iPhones? Or did a lot of people refused to pay whatever price?