Our benevolent overlords at MacRumors have published an article talking about a lawsuit alleging the App Store is a monopoly due to the inability to purchase apps outside of the App Store. The lawsuit is a few years old, but an appeals court has allowed the lawsuit to go forward. If the plaintiffs win, one of their attorneys said to Reuters that "the obvious solution is to compel Apple to let people shop for applications wherever they want, which would open the market and help lower prices."
Now, while "lower prices" would be unlikely because the sheer amount of mobile competition has driven prices low enough as it is for paid apps, and free-to-play apps work because they form their own self-contained economy, what would be interesting would be a situation where Apple would have to allow sideloading similar to Android. You might not be able to get emulators through the App Store the way you can through Google Play, but there could conceivably be fewer hoops to jump through. What's interesting is that this idea picked up a bit of steam recently in an interview that Epic's Tim Sweeney did with Glixel where he mentions the App Store's monopoly in the context of Oculus trying to drive people to only the Oculus store. I think it's ludicrous that they're not prosecuting more of the tech companies right now for their practices. There's a lot going on that's wrong. Apple has a monopoly on iOS hardware. That's fine. But they shouldn't be able to tie that market t...