UK to investigate Apple and Google's 'effective duopoly'

OK. So Airbus and Boeing, clearly in a duopole situation on commercial airplanes, are to be fined , dismantled ? (to leave room for China, of course ...)

I'll tell you what "could be creating problems for consumers and the businesses that want to reach people through their phones": This stupid government!

As a developer, I don't want to have 20 different mobile phone operating systems to code for. I want one or two, because every extra platform costs me time and money, but there aren't *more* consumers to sell my apps to.

When a coffee shop opens on a street, you get, say 40% of people trying it. Another one opens, but 40% of the remaining 60% don't suddenly want a coffee. There is a market of consumers, and they have decided that Apple and Google are just fine. They decided against the Facebook phone, and they decided against the Windows Phone. The market has already decided.

If the CMA decide that the two companies, Apple and Google, have "too much power", maybe they should go after, oh I don't know, the Conservatives and Labour? Those two political parties have "power" all sewn up between them!

I don’t know why they can possibly expect? You’re not exactly preventing competition and holding back the little guy when Microsoft couldn’t compete for crying out loud. Market preferences are not going to shift and OEMs and developers are not going to want to support yet another platform that further complicates their businesses. 

Middlemen and malware. That appears to be what both the EU and UK believe is of the most benefit to consumers. 

darkpaw said:

There is a market of consumers, and they have decided that Apple and Google are just fine. They decided against the Facebook phone, and they decided against the Windows Phone. The market has already decided.

that’s not strictly true as while Android and Apple became the two major dominant platforms, some consumers still liked Microsoft and RIM. Those private companies chose to shut down their cellphone business though, if they were still in operation, they likely would have a user base, albeit much smaller than android and Apple. 

But you have to remember that from a government point of view, they tend to prefer that consumers in any market place have choice. So no one or two suppliers grow so dominant as to stifle innovation and prevent competition. This is the government world view: to protect consumer choice.

Remember when at&t used to be the dominant phone company in the USA, the government broke it up and now we have Verizon and at&t (we used to have others like cellular one, but they somehow merged back into at&t again.)  

So when there is a duopoly like you have rightfully pointed out, governments want to ensure that consumers aren’t being shafted that there is adequate choice, and also that innovation isn’t being stifled. 

On the Apple App Store, Apple is the gatekeeper of what apps can and cannot be on the iPhone and iPad. This may be stifling innovation as Apple might deny apps that would otherwise be very popular with consumers. For example, what if we had apps that replaced the default homescreen on iPadOS with better multitasking and windowing support, users might pay for that, but Apple would never allow such a thing on the App Store, thus preventing competition, as well as preventing an ambitious developer from making any revenue on this idea. 

This is why governments are looking into this issue.  Should Apple have that much power? Who is Apple or even Google to say that certain ideas shouldn’t be able to come to market (like a better window manager than the iPadOS default) ?