For many years, Apple has built a dominant iPhone platform and ecosystem that has driven the company’s astronomical valuation. At the same time, it has long understood that disruptive technologies and innovative apps, products, and services threatened that dominance by making users less reliant on the iPhone or making it easier to switch to a non-Apple smartphone. Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives. It has deployed this playbook across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others.
Apple’s conduct also stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple’s smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone—or make users device-agnostic altogether. As one Apple manager recently observed, “Imagine buying a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and it works fine … And you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are.” Simply put, Apple feared the disintermediation of its iPhone platform and undertook a course of conduct that locked in users and developers while protecting its profits.
Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries–and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone.
↫ DoJ antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple
The United States Department of Justice is filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
Hmmm … just checked the calendar and it’s not April 1st (yet).
So … wow.
I am surprised too. The complaint makes a very strong case right out of the gate. For years we just brushed it under the rug and it seemed like it might be the new normal forever. Of course this will run several years and apple might get off scot-free, but it’s probably the best chance to give consumers freedom from corporations imposing device restrictions that take away control and rights from owners on their own hardware.
Can you fathom Apple? That an Apple Zelot like myself that fell in love with MacOS6 onward is not bothered by this? You need this wakeup call? Are you listening Mr Cook? I want a Macintosh Personal Computer, not an iOS/Android style gadget on my desk. I welcome your grandma-safe mode of App Store only by default. But if you lock me out, you are no longer a Personal Computer. You better learn your lesson on iOS. Don’t you dare tough my Macintosh!
mattsaved,
That’s just it, it’s fine to have safe defaults but ultimately the owner of a device should have the final say.
Consumer technology has been headed towards 1984, just like in apple’s ad all those years back. The twist is that nobody suspected apple to become the main culprit.
I have no idea if any of these lawsuits will change apple, but I hope so because owners should be entitled to the keys to their own hardware.
If you think this is New behavior by apple then you don’t remember Nubus, ADB, and the million other proprietary ports over the years. First iPod was mac/firewire only don’t forget.
The difference was that apple managed to succeed at finally gaining the lock in they always tried to achieve
Courts take time. This might be decided in maybe 6-8 years, it won’t be the current Attorney general that’s in place when this ends. I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t end up in a Microsoft like slap on the wrist.
I gather the most shock will come from US citizens, and that comes from the introspection that Apple marketing has created for US residents to believe it’s Apple then it’s the rest by some long margin. I know that won’t be the case here, as just as many develop outside the Apple sphere and outside the USA as in it, but we are all probably still surprised the US is having a crack at it’s own.
I’m expecting an inevitable fanboy barrage on this thread any moment now, but that just flags ignorance.
Switch *from* Apple? Not bloody likely!
It’s ridiculous that governments did nothing about this for a decade or more. It was obvious from day one that the various arbitrary restrictions around device usage were hugely anti-competitive and anti-user. But by the time governments do anything about it they will have made billions.