Whatever side you favor in Apple’s court battles, can we all agree on this one thing?

Apple has for years been fighting antitrust battles all around the world, most of them concerning the App Store, and most of them coming down to a single issue: having monopoly control over the sale of iPhone apps.

Opinions on both sides of the debate are strongly held, and there’s little sign of that changing anytime soon – but it seems to me that there is one thing we could perhaps all agree on …

Briefly addressing the monopoly issue

Let’s just quickly address the monopoly issue, before some commenters get side-tracked with it.

Regulators argue that Apple holds a monopoly on iPhone apps because, prior to being forced to allow competing app stores within the EU, there was no way for a developer to sell an iPhone app other than through the App Store.

Apple has argued that it doesn’t have a monopoly because we shouldn’t be looking at iPhone apps in isolation, but rather the mobile app market as a whole.

But antitrust legislation has literally never been about monopolies (hence the name), and today refers to any anticompetitive behavior by a powerful player in the market. Believe Apple has a monopoly or not; it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

There has been unreasonableness on both sides

This isn’t a black-and-white issue. Apple can quite reasonably argue that it has invested a great deal of time and money into developing the App Store, Xcode and so on, and it should be entitled to recoup those costs through commissions. The US DOJ and the EU can both reasonably argue that the law can and does impose limits on the degree to which companies are able to benefit from their market dominance, and Apple isn’t exempt from those controls.

But it’s also undeniable that there’s been unreasonable behavior on both sides. Apple clearly acted ridiculously when it defied the judge in the Epic Trust case to circumvent the clear intent of her ruling, and the judge quite understandably told the company it didn’t get to do that. And that’s even without the absolute insanity of a senior Apple exec lying under oath!

But the EU isn’t entirely innocent either. It has at times told Apple what it cannot legally do, but has declined to offer clear guidance on what it can do instead. It was recently revealed that the EU objected to Apple using sketchy warning labels and demanded that the company change the wording. Apple offered to do so, but the EU told it to wait – and then fined it for failing to make the change!

Can we all agree on this one thing?

I’ve argued for a great many years that Apple would be better off skating to where the legislative puck is headed, get ahead of the game instead of constantly running defence, and that it wouldn’t even lose much money by doing so.

But say you don’t buy that, and you think the iPhone maker should continue to fight tooth and nail, even if it ends up being dragged through the courts on a regular basis. There is one issue on which I would have thought we could all agree.

Apple should accept a change which benefits consumers and doesn’t cost it a single penny.

Namely, where it’s not economically viable for a company to allow Apple to take a 30% cut of content and subscription sales, and where those companies instead disallowed purchases through their apps, that Apple simply get out of the way of app users.

Amazon is an example. Millions of us have the Kindle app on our Apple devices, but we couldn’t buy ebooks through the app because of the business model of the publishing industry. If Amazon let Apple take a 30% commission on those sales, that would take almost its entire margin – sometimes more than its entire margin.

That wasn’t viable, so Amazon had to disallow book purchases in the app, and that undeniably harmed consumers. We had to go through this convoluted process of seeing other books promoted at the end of the one we’d just read, but not just being able to tap on them to buy them. Instead, we had to open a browser, manually search for that same book, buy it online, and then wait for it to be delivered to the app. Apple’s policy was giving iPhone users a terrible purchasing experience for absolutely no reason.

Spotify was another example. Most of a Spotify subscription goes to the music labels. Spotify gets to keep way less than 30% of it, so it’s simply not possible for the company to let Apple charge its commission. Again, free users who wanted to subscribe had to figure out how to subscribe (because Spotify wasn’t allowed to tell them), leave the app, open a web browser, login to the Spotify website, buy a subscription, then return to the app to use it. Again, a horrendously convoluted iPhone user experience.

Apple’s new rules currently allow both Kindle and Spotify users to benefit from a significantly more streamlined experience, but still not as slick a one as it should be. While they are finally allowed to include links, the purchase process still boots users into their browser rather than a simple in-app purchase.

Even this semi-solution may not last, because Apple has only implemented it on a temporary basis while it continues to battle it in court.

Seriously, where’s the harm?

Before the changes, users had a horrible experience, and Apple made no money.

After these changes, for an unknown period of time, users have a better but still not ideal experience, and Apple still makes no money.

Apple makes no money in any of the scenarios. It can’t make money, because there isn’t the margin for it to take. So why not offer iPhone users the best experience in these sorts of apps, and allow commission-free in-app purchases? It literally won’t cost Apple a dime.

Can we all agree that Apple should put consumers first, at no cost to itself? Let us know in the comments.

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