But there's no consumer-facing or technical difference between a games streaming platform and a video streaming platform that would make it logical for one to be treated fundamentally different than the other in terms of pricing, right?

It's very obvious that the reason why Apple chose the largely meaningless difference between a video and a game to make this category is because they were negotiating with Amazon, and that was a convenient distinction to build a category around.

To extend from your argument, everyone also in fact makes a distinction between striped shirts vs solid shirts, and buzzcuts vs crewcuts, and green eyes vs blue eyes. Everyone would agree that those are different things.

So does that mean giving a discount to my friend Tim is totally fine, and I'm not carving out special exceptions that are designed to target him specifically?

> But there's no consumer-facing or technical difference between a games streaming platform and a video streaming platform

A games streaming platform is interactive whereas a video streaming platform isn't (unless you want to split hairs and call "picking something to watch" interactive.) That's both a consumer-facing and technical difference. Whether it's enough to treat them fundamentally differently, I have no idea (but I'm sure lawyers will have plenty.)

Where does Black Mirror: Bandersnatch sit on that scale? It’s clearly interactive.

The difference between colors of shirt is quite obviously not analogous to the level of difference between a game and a movie.

It’s hard to believe you don’t see this. Do you really not?

If your argument is that all apps are just like different colors of a shirt, then if movies are no different from games, movies are also no different from programming languages, or telemedicine apps.

If your argument is that Apple shouldn’t be allowed to make rules based on distinctions between what apps do, that is a reasonable position to argue on its own merits.

Claiming there is no distinction between what classes of app do, is not reasonable.

Your argument about making an exception for your friend Tim doesn’t apply here.

If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t.

And yes, there are huge consumer facing and technical differences between game streaming and video streaming services.

The biggest one is that a game streaming service can stream any kind of app, and bypass app review and apple’s payment services.

We might want people to be able to do that, but that’s a different matter.

The technical difference is very obvious, and it’s exactly what Apple has said - they don’t want apps bypassing app review.

> Do you really not?

Honestly, no, I genuinely don't. I do think the shirt colors are analogous.

The technical differences you and others are talking about are not differences that affect Apple in any way. It's not harder on Apple's infrastructure for someone to stream a game instead of a movie, it doesn't take Apple any extra engineering effort or development time. The technical differences people are talking about are mostly outside the iPhone and its core APIs. They don't affect Apple or users in way that's relevant to Apple's policies.

Likewise with the user-facing distinctions -- I don't think the distinctions that you're talking about are something that users care about, and I don't think there's a strong argument to be made that Apple is thinking about users when it makes those distinctions. I don't see how users benefit from games and Ebooks being treated differently than movies. From a user perspective, this is all just 'content'.

> If Apple were to make an exception and allow just one game streaming service, then I’d agree it was a valid analogy, but they don’t.

Oh, no. Anyone with a striped shirt, buzzcut, and blue eyes can get a discount. There are likely multiple people who fit that description, it's not just Tim.

But I don't want to get hung up on that analogy if you think that's too direct or contrived. Another analogy I'd point towards is VPNs and video streaming in regards to net neutrality. In fact, ISPs actually had a much stronger argument for treating video bits differently from other bits on the network, since services like Netflix did genuinely consume more bandwidth than services in other categories. However, we all (mostly) still recognized that the differences between streaming a video and streaming any other kinds of data weren't relevant to ISPs.

I think the distinctions people are raising between video and game streaming are the same -- they're not relevant to an app distribution platform. I don't think the Bandersnatch comparison is splitting hairs, I think it's a reasonable comparison to make. I don't think that bypassing app review is relevant to consumers for a streaming platform, since bypassing app review within a streaming platform introduces no security or privacy risks for the end user. The business-facing reason apps can't bypass app review and payment services is because Apple is providing a service that needs to be payed for -- but streaming apps fundamentally do not take advantage of any of those services. It makes about as much commercial sense to charge them as it makes to charge for transactions made inside a web browser.

I especially don't see a difference between a games streaming platform and a virtual desktop, another distinction that Apple seems to think is worthy of entirely separate rules. Consumers do not care about whether a virtual computer immediately boots into a game or whether it forces them to click on an icon first.

Even from a purely practical perspective, I don't think there's strong evidence that games streaming would break Apple's entire revenue model. There's a tangible, consumer-facing benefit to apps working offline that some app-makers will want to take advantage of. Streaming games is not an existential threat to the app store, at least certainly not a larger existential threat than web browsers are.

Finally, I don't think it's possible to separate the theoretical differences between games/videos/ebooks/virtual desktops from the context in which Apple chose to split along those categories. Apple didn't come up with those categories and then afterwards check to see what the market looked like. Sure there are theoretical reasons (weak as they are) that Apple could have chosen to build its policies around esoteric "what is a game" arguments, but the simplest explanation for why Apple chose to put so much weight on those distinctions is because it allowed them to bend to large players on the market who they could not ignore, while still restricting and gouging smaller players and upstarts who could not challenge them.

Thanks for articulating your position in more detail.

The way I read your argument is that you actually do think the distinctions are real, buy they shouldn’t be used by Apple to control the marketplace.

I think that’s a reasonable position and one worth exploring.

I actually agree with you that the distinctions are in place to allow Apple to retain control of the marketplace.

I just don’t think it makes sense to pretend they aren’t meaningful distinctions. Not do I think we can assume the reason is mainly about gouging. If you want to make a case for that - by all means, but it’s not a given.

I don’t agree that steaming games are no more of a threat to Apple than the web.

For one thing, the web as a platform is slow to evolve because of interoperability issues.

These would not be present with steaming Apps.

If you don’t think Games are a distinct category then you must concede that streaming games means streaming apps of all kinds.

Yes - offline is an issue still, but it’s becoming less of one over time.

Streaming Apps don’t need to be an existential threat to Apple or have access to local data in order to be harmful.

They can bypass age restrictions, phish, be scams, collect credit card numbers, do social engineering, promote hate etc.

More importantly - your argument seems to be that Apple shouldn’t be able to discriminate based on what apps do.

If that is the case, then you’re not arguing for a narrow carve out for steaming games since you’ve already denied they are a category that Apple should be using.

You real argument is against Apple being able to control what goes on the store or on their platform.

I think that’s a valid argument, however I think it can’t meaningfully be just about Apple. If we are going to say Apple shouldn’t have this control, then nobody should be allowed it.

And then of course we have to articulate how we’d deal with all the security, malware and trust issues in such a world.

> If you don’t think Games are a distinct category then you must concede that streaming games means streaming apps of all kinds.

Well, but this is the rub: Apple does allow virtual desktop streaming on the app store. Streaming an app is allowed, as long as the user clicks on an icon on a virtual desktop. Can we think of a consumer-relevant difference between streaming a game and booting up a game by clicking on an icon on a virtual desktop? Is it relevant enough that one of those two things should be banned?

The only difference that seems credible to me is that the distinction allows Apple to directly target Google Stadia and Microsoft.

> They can bypass age restrictions, phish, be scams, collect credit card numbers, do social engineering, promote hate etc.

But is this a distinction that it's reasonable to think that Apple actually cares about? You can buy illicit ebooks on an Apple platform as long as Apple gets a 30% cut from the purchase screen. Apple isn't filtering the content of 3rd-party digital purchases.

And if the distinction that we're drawing is, "we need to make sure that we're blocking hate speech", make a policy that streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Video, and Google Stadia can't make hate speech available. Given what we know about Apple's current policies, is a ban on games the type of thing you would expect from an app store worried about hate speech, or would you expect something direct that actually targeted the real problem?

> your argument seems to be that Apple shouldn’t be able to discriminate based on what apps do.

I don't think I'm claiming anything quite that broad. I'm arguing that if discrimination exists only to target a specific market, and if the company involved is one half of a duopoly, then we should consider antitrust implications.

There are technical reasons to restrict what apps can do: for example, limitations around the platform and hardware. There are also consumer-facing reasons to restrict what apps can do, to block malware, spyware, and security risks. There are even moral reasons to restrict what apps can do, to block hate speech, or to make safe spaces for younger users.

The distinction between a game and movie for an entirely off-device experience doesn't fit any of those reasons. There's no moral reason to treat games differently than movies; if you were worried about morals you'd create a general policy against hate speech that applied to all 3rd-party content. There's no technical reason; the engineering resources to support both use-cases are exactly the same. And there's no consumer-facing reason; remote applications are all sandboxed from the user's phone.

The only reason to choose that specific distinction -- games vs videos vs ebooks vs applications -- is because of what companies are involved in each market. We can theoretically imagine a world where Apple might make a distinction there for non-malicious reasons, but the most logical, obvious explanation for those rules is that Apple isn't interested in blocking hate speech or phishing scams, it's interested in blocking markets. We know what it looks like when Apple gets interested in blocking hate speech or phishing scams or improving privacy, and generally it looks different than this.

To go back to the original analogy, I can come up with some tortured reasons why maybe consumers really care about the color of people's shirts (fashion is a giant industry after all), and I can say I want to create a shopping experience where everyone is dressed well and that maybe a solid red shirt might have bad words written on it, and obviously I can filter on clothing in general because I'm allowed to say that my customers can't be naked. These are all theoretically possible explanations for my policy, it's just that they're obviously lies. It's obvious that if I cared about people showing up naked, I'd target that specifically. It's obvious that in this scenario I'm coming up with the policy first, and then trying to justify it afterwards as if it's a neutral decision.

To flip your earlier incredulity back at you: do you really, honestly believe that if Amazon, Hulu, and other streaming services weren't essential apps for iOS, that Apple would still be looking at them right now and saying, "clearly video purchases should be treated differently than ebook purchases."? We can intuit something of Apple's motivation here.

We clearly disagree that there is no consumer facing reason to distinguish streaming game stores from movie stores.

The clothing store analogy is not relevant in this argument, because it assumes there are no technical differences, but that isn’t actually something we agree on. I.e. it’s a case of affirming the consequent.

It doesn’t explain anything - it just hides the point of disagreement by talking about clothes instead of software, which in fact work very differently.

Streaming games can clearly do things that other interactive malware can do, and that includes fraud, phishing, collecting credit card information, promoting hate, funding terrorism, and any number of other things.

Movies can’t do things like phishing or collecting credit card numbers etc.

They can of course promote hate, and Apple has removed streaming video services when they have done so.

So there is a difference.

As for claiming Apple is lying - well you clearly want to make that case, but it’s not at all obvious to me that they are lying about anything.

Nobody is pretending Apple doesn’t want to block competitors from establishing their own storefronts.

Apple is quite clear that they are banning streaming video because they want to retain control of what goes in the store.

I also think they are quite clear that they don’t want anything that does an end run around their control, and their collection of in app payments.

Nobody is lying about that.

As for you ‘flipping’ incredulity round on me - is there something I’ve said that you don’t think I believe?

Everything Apple does with the store rules involves enabling classes of apps they think will be essential to their users while preserving their control of the storefront.

Streaming game stores would be competition with the App Store itself, and allow it to be bypassed.

Streaming video services obviously don’t allow the App Store to be bypassed.

There’s nothing secret or hidden about this.

As for ‘duopoly’ - as I say, if you want to make the case that they shouldn’t be allowed to block competing storefronts based on a legal theory that they are too powerful to be permitted to do that, fine.

But that’s not what this discussion has been about. You are claiming streaming games and streaming videos are the same for the purposes of this argument.

They are obviously not and I’ve articulated the reasons.

If you want to continue to disagree on that point, be my guest.