219
Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’
(www.bostonherald.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
219 points (80.5% liked)
Technology
59219 readers
3230 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Correct. But hardware is not the problem here, I‘d say.
I guess it depends. If Apple made iOS available on other hardware this conversation would be different, I bet. The problem with Apple's practices is the "ecosystem" approach. You get one of their devices and you HAVE to use their OS, you HAVE to use their core app bundle, you HAVE to use their store. And in a number of things where you don't have to, you're heavily incentivized or the competition is made less competitive. And now you're on a software platform that only works with Apple hardware, so now you have an incentive to migrate your other computing devices (laptops, desktops, smart TVs) to be from Apple, too, because that's where your compatible software lives.
It's the sort of practice antitrust laws exist to prevent.
Google is no saint and will do as much of this as they're allowed, but at least the nature of their OS and the diversity of manufacturers and OS customizations means they don't control the ecosystem end to end. The biggest manufacturer is Samsung, and they will ship with their browser, an alternate store, a different mail client and a bunch of OS modifications Google doesn't control, so Samsung and Google give each other some plausible deniability within the Android ecosystem oligopoly.