Apple's dominance in the market is due in part by their products, but I have to say, it's hard to argue that isn't also due to the terrible synergy between their practices and their user base. Apple doesn't want to talk about their inner workings? No problem; their users aren't interested in knowing. They managed to make a faulty product? Fire the bastards behind it, because every Tom, Dick and Harry wants top shelf gizmos, and in their minds, clearly those developers weren't top shelf enough. Apple is, in most ways, no better or worse than any other massive tech company, but they can get away with it all with much fewer stains on their reputation, and in some cases, their fans become so defensive that they're willing to go on the offensive in their efforts to trash other companies.
I've been reading about the shutdown of iFlow Reader, the iOS ebook reader app who claims that the new rules in place for in app purchases have destroyed their business model. A lot of the responses from iOS users have been something along the lines of "They signed the contract, so they knew what they were getting into." This is the kind of ignorance that allows Apple to dick around in ways that Google or Microsoft would be slammed for. The iFlow folks certainly agreed to a set of rules when they first started; the problem is those rules are changing in such a way that pretty much every option I've seen these people recommend, are in fact going to be outlawed by Apple.
And those same new rules are going to affect google and Amazon in a short amount of time. All of this information is clear as day in many of the news pieces covering the shutdown, which of course means that people are willing to simply scream at Apple detractors without even bothering to read. Par for the course on the Internet, but it hurts to see it happen to a company who at the very least seemed to have a belief behind the app they were making. If I had to make a criticism against them, I would ask them whether they had to make their business rely on the sale of ebooks, and if they had to resort to an Adobe DRM scheme for said books. Looking at the current state of ebook sales, neither of those seem like good ideas for a small company. Still, that doesn't change the fact that Apple's new rules for ebook sales allow them to act as an extra middleman on top of the middlemen like iFlow, Amazon or Google, and I wouldn't be surprised if even a few tweaks to iFlow's business model wouldn't be enough to save them.
I don't expect any rapid change, but I wonder how long they can keep this increasing stranglehold without someone deciding it's worth looking into. Or maybe I shouldn't - if Apple were slammed with an antitrust case, the resulting apologist editorials might make me sick.
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