zlacker

>>gorman+(OP)
" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google

This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.

It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

>>ocdtre+e3
The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.

A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to develop one with no certainty of success. This was also considered a very generous cut because getting on Steam was almost a guarantee of financial success.

>>rdw+w7
This is such a nonsense justification.

You want to sell software you wrote to run on an iphone. You have zero choice. Apple tax your revenue.

You want to sell software you wrote to run on a pc. Steam is not your only choice. I am not defending steam or valve here, I've never sold anything using their stuff, nor am I suggesting anything other than that their market power over pc compared to apple's store over the iphone is not remotely comparable.

It actually works against you to suggest apple's iphone software store and steam are comparable at all because it's so incredibly bogus.

You want to make the case that steam suck too but with loads less market power. Go right ahead. We're listening. You don't need absolute and total market power to be abusive of it. Apple will immediately attempt redefine the market to include android or people spending money on coca cola instead of apple product to suggest that customers have real choice so there is no market power abuse here.

>>harry8+Qt
The situation on Android shows us that consumers like consolidation and they like walled gardens and simple choices. These things benefit them. Plenty of Android phones come with 2 or 3 app stores. One for the carrier, one for the vendor and Google Play Store. There plenty are others as well, but the market has spoken. Even Epic had to fold and move to Play Store. Maybe Google played dirty, but I think it's perfectly clear users benefit from consolidation. They like the simplicity of having everything in one store and when they change devices they just set up their Play Store account and there everything is. That's a massive advantage to them. Fragmentation is a nightmare.

Developers have come to the same conclusion, it's to their benefit for the customers to all be on one store with one set of policies and features so that's where the majority of the apps go.

So what are you going to do, force Apple to become a fragmented Android copy with multiple stores and side loading that a tiny fraction of techies actually use? Those people already have that on Android if they want it. Honestly you'd just screw over Apple and a few other people over a principle hardly anybody actually cares about or benefits from. It certainly wouldn't make any significant commercial difference. We ran that experiment and the results are in.

The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%? It's crystal clear that's just the split the market has converged on through a competitive process. After all Steam has competed from day one with a default split of nothing for direct downloads from the software publisher but has thrived charging 30%. If that's not direct market validation I don't know what is.

>>simonh+4y
Fragmentation and walled gardens are a false dichotomy. Steam is actually a great example of this, there are many other stores (Humble Bundle, Fanatical, GMG, whatever) that sell you Steam keys so you can keep your game library in one comfortable place.