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.
Steam also don't engage in anti-competitive behavior and prevent billions of people from using alternative game distribution methods like Apple does.
What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market to determine whether or not that 30% is actually fair, efficient and competitive. As it stands, there is no competition in mobile app distribution.
You can't magic those preferences away. Even if you forced iOS to become an Android clone with multiple app stores and sideloading you can't force people to like those things. You'd just be giving an extra option to a very small subset of techies who have Android now to do that on already anyway. The market has spoken and it likes nice simple well managed choices because that's what the people want.
Why is it that Apple have to make the solution a small subset of people want. Why is that their problem to solve?
Maybe these stores converged on 30% because it's a nice round number and a roughly 1:2 split makes intuitive sense. Consoles, music stores, Steam, mobile app stores, they've all circled around about that number for a very long time. Some have tried around 20/80 to grab market share but it never worked, Nintendo tried 35/65 for a while before going to 30/70. In the end it's natural that competitive forces will tend to a convergence.
It's very true. Google acts in an anticompetitive manner to prevent competition in the mobile app distribution market, as well.
Google prevents mobile app distribution competitors from competing with the Play Store on feature parity because user installable 3rd party mobile app stores cannot implement automatic upgrades, background installation of apps, or batch installs of apps like the Play Store can.
Also, iOS has 60% of the market in the US[1], which is the highest in the world. Apple's App Store is responsible for 100% more app store revenue than the Play Store[2].
> Maybe these stores converged on 30% because it's a nice round number and a roughly 1:2 split makes intuitive sense
Instead of guessing, we should let real competition in the mobile app distribution market increase efficiency and drive costs down to their true values instead of letting a cartel decide what they are.