This is going to be my last response on this topic, since this has devolved into a political and ideological thing——I can’t help you with that.

This post sums it up for me [1]: I think this thread is full of people who want Apple be considered a monopoly more than care about whether they actually are.

I think you are dodging the central claim against Apple, they prohibit competition on their platform. If Microsoft or Google did this, they'd be accused of anticompetitive behavoir, or being a monopoloy.

Nope.

Again, this is an ideological argument, not a technical or legal argument.

They aren’t prohibiting competition——there are over two million apps on the App Store[2], including ones by every company that is considered a competitor like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and others.

But here is a legal position: there’s nothing illegal about determining what they will and will not allow in their App Store and what they will and will not allow on their platform, especially when the companies agree to it when they sign the contract with Apple.

It’s only tech ideologues and free software zealots that think that their rights are being violated because Apple doesn’t permit other web rendering engines other than WebKit. There’s no legitimate technical or legal argument that can be made that users are somehow suffering due to this.

If that’s your deal, that’s fine; but don’t act like it’s the same thing as Microsoft/Netscape because it’s not.

Please read the history of that case on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

I wrote about why this isn’t like Microsoft, IE and Netscape in the thread [3].

Here’s the simplest way to make this plain:

* Microsoft had 95% of the desktop operating system market back in the day. Apple has around 20% of the global cell phone market[4]

* Microsoft was accused (after signing a decent decree with the US government saying it wouldn’t do this) of using its natural monopoly in operating systems to affect emerging markets, such as the browser market

* Apple doesn’t have a monopoly——natural or otherwise; it hasn’t been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice——Microsoft was

* Apple has direct competitors on the App Store in every category it has apps and services for: maps, music players and services, camera, file sharing

* Google makes more money from iOS than it does from Android [5],[6]

Last thing: like it or not, Safari is the fastest and most energy efficient browser engine that could exist on iOS because unless you’re Apple, there’s no way for a 3rd party to have the information of the firmware, custom processors, GPUs, etc. that would be required to do what Apple is already doing with WebKit.

It’s not like the HTML, CSS and Javascript rendering is significantly different than what the other engines do, so there’s no compelling technical reason that there should be 3rd party engines, other than to satisfy their critics and zealots.

There might be some there there if Google and Mozilla boycotted iOS because they weren’t allowed to use their rendering engines and otherwise made a big deal about this. Because they must be on the most profitable mobile platform in the world, they’re admitting that they’re okay with the situation as it is, even if you guys are not.

So in reality, your issue is with Mozilla and Google, who’ve left you guys hanging and don’t have your back on this.

Time to let it go.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983379

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-av...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985922

[4]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

[5]: http://bgr.com/2015/05/27/iphone-vs-android-advertising-goog...

[6]: https://gizmodo.com/5897457/google-makes-four-times-more-mon...