Darkseider
Senior Member
Yes they can. It's not an anticompetitive practice unless is substantially reduces competition. If sears were the only company that sold tools, then yes it would we be an unfair advantage. Fortunately I can go to walmart, lowes, or home depot if I wanted and buy those same tools. This company can develop it's Android News app for the android platform, blackberry, nokia, or WP7. Furthermore, apple isn't providing any android only news apps, nor is it providing one that the company personally maintains. So in the case of the market for android news apps on the iPhone, that market doesn't exist. You can't have anticompetitive practices in a market that doesn't exist.
I said "stay with me" in that post, but I guess I lost you at "assume Sears is the only distributor of tools on the East Coast". It was a hypothetical to illustrate a point.
This app competes with other news apps, such as Engadget among others, that are allowed in the app store. The Iphone user base represents a huge share of the smartphone market, so in that regard the developer is, in fact, arguably harmed by the arbitrary exclusion. Unintended consequence or not, whether Apple profits or not, doesn't change the fact that the action can cause economic harm. In the Netscape case, MS didn't even block it they just gave their own IE a much more favorable position and that was enough for the DOJ to balk at.
Again, the FCC smelled a rat when Apple tried to block Google Voice. I don't know what could be clearer in the message sent there. Apple is the gate keeper to a market which all developers/companies should be free to access. It's precisely this sort of conflict of interest when companies use that market power in anti-competitive ways that causes harm to other companies that leads to sanctions and break-ups of companies.
Apple anti-competitive? No. You mean the whole you can't use 3rd party environments to develop and cross compile apps? Ooh wait that was squashed quickly when the DOJ got involved.