Apple has been getting more and more heat for being a monopoly, mostly due to charging for the App Store service, but I’m just not seeing it. They built the service and charge people to use it to sell products. It seems to me that software companies are free to not use it if they find the fees onerous/unprofitable, and there are other services out there (coding for pc, Android, Linux, etc). That means losing a big market, but that’s a decision companies of all types make every day, when they decide not make an Indian version of “Friends” or sell Captain Crunch in Algeria.
It’s a “walled garden” that Apple can regulate and almost arbitrarily exclude potential vendors or impose restrictions and fees. That being said, it also ensures a certain degree of quality and security in applications, and as you note, users and vendors ‘opt in’ to the system or else can choose an alternative platform to develop and use. In terms of an excess of capitalistic servitude, it is far less of a concern to me than companies requiring users to pay subscription for the use of hardware that they have already purchased or being required to pay undisclosed fees when purchasing concert tickets or renting a hotel room.
I’ve seen explanations that there are two types of “monopolies”. The most common meaning is when a business wipes out or buys up its competitors, so it becomes the sole source of some product or service. (I may be totally wrong in my thoughts on this, not being any sort of business expert.)
The other type is a “vertical monopoly”, in which the business buys up or controls every aspect of generating their own product or service, although they might still have competitors. No other agency gets a slice of the profits or can exert any influence over their operation. Example: a paper company might own the land where the trees grow, run the timbering operation that cuts the trees, own the trucks that haul the trees to the mill, own the mill that turns the trees into paper, and run it’s own sales department that markets the paper.
Back when Apple was just a computer company, and only their own operating system and software ran on their devices, it was more like that. Now you can run software from their competitors, like Word or Excel, on their computers, and outside companies can write and sell apps that run on their phones. In some ways Apple is less of a monopoly than they used to be.
I would not be surprised if a court ruled that they can’t restrict iPhones and iPads to only being able to run apps downloaded from Apple’s self-run app store.
I think there is an FQ answer. Apple has competition: it is not a monopoly. It does, however, have monopoly power, insofar as it faces a downwards sloping demand curve and can make sustained high extranormal profits, due to its cultivated barriers to entry.
Can there be a anti-trust cases against non-monopolies? Sure: it happens all the time. For example, there are certain anti-competitive practices, such as conspiring with other companies to fix prices, which can get them in legal trouble. So in general, successful antitrust enforcement is not only directed against pure monopolies.
Will the authorities prevail against Apple? I don’t know and I haven’t looked into it.
Android has a bigger share of the phone market overall, just over 70%, and Google has much the same practices for their Google Play store. The attitude seems to be that since Android is spread across multiple brands, it doesn’t seem to loom over everything. The irony is that this complaint used to be Apple’s greatest weakness as a business - you couldn’t run lots of popular software on their hardware, so people avoided it.
Well, plus Android doesn’t restrict their app store. Anyone can sideload apps. The Play store is more convenient than alternative and they take a big cut, but you aren’t forced to use it.
With Apple, there’s no alternative but to use their app store.
IMO, this is a pretty borderline case with no clear answer. Apple clearly has immense power and locks users into their ecosystem to a far greater degree than Android. But they do still have meaningful competition–at least overall. Among teens, Apple has 87% market share. That’s getting kinda dicey when it comes to competition. Perhaps the DOJ will focus on that.
While true, you can opt out of using the Google Play Store on Android. You can sideload apps, including other appstores. That’s what makes the difference, not the fact that Android is more “spread out” on more brands.
The anti-competitive angle is not so much on the users, but on the developers. You can’t develop for iOS without going through their store and their pricing.
It’s gotten very difficult over the years, with fewer benefits and more downsides. As far as I can tell, the entire “scene” has significantly declined, making it even less interesting.
It’s an irony that Apple finds itself in this position since its mere existence once served as anti-trust protection for Microsoft. It’s not a monopoly by any classic definition, but it has become a soft target for plundering governments (see the EU) and now the U.S. wants a piece of that pie.
My biggest issue with Apple is that they purposely do not convert videos from Android phones to a quality that an Apple phone can utilize, they come over as grainy and slow. My GF thinks that this is because Apple is a better quality phone and that my Samsung S23 must suck at making videos. Not true, but that is what Apple wants their users to think. This is part of the walled garden mentality that Apple fosters.
I think the “competition” reasoning is not about Apple vs. Android … it is that Apple does NOT allow (or heavily limits, beyond the reasonable) the competition within Apple-world.
So they are anti-competitive in their world … this IMHO has nothing to do with Android (you can’t run android on an apple phone anyway).
E.g. Spotify has to pay apple 27% of proceeds just b/c apple forces them to bill through their app-store system … and apple does not allow them (or makes it unreasonably difficult) for Spotify to bill the clients directly, saving 27% of the bill in doing so.
It’s largely indistinguishable from Nintendo’s dominance of the US gaming market in the late 80s and anticompetitive practices. Nintendo used a lockout chip to (mostly) prevent unapproved developers from selling NES games. Devs had to buy cartridges from Nintendo and could only release five games a year.
Like Apple, Nintendo justified its practices but pointing to quality control issues. The difference is those issues killed the video game market in the early 80s. Apple has no such history to point to in claiming that this benefits the consumer; Android phones are not walled and have no issues. Nintendo had a significantly greater share of the market, though.
The government never brought an antitrust suit against Nintendo but the FTC did pressure it to loosen its policies and ultimately succeeded. Most legal researches agree that Nintendo’s policies were monopolistic.
No, they don’t, though. That is the big difference.
I can download and install any 3rd party app I want to on my Android. I get a prompt- “are you sure, this may not be safe” - but I can do whatever I want.
On the one hand , you have the issue of in-app purchases. I can’t use the Amazon app to buy Kindle books because Amazon doesn’t want to pay Apple for billing through the app-store so that seems kind of monopoly- like.
But then there are some of the allegations that don’t make sense. For example the "green bubbles.
For example, if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages—the default messaging app on an iPhone—then
the text appears to the iPhone user as a green bubble and incorporates limited functionality: the conversation is not encrypted, videos are pixelated and grainy, and users cannot edit messages or see typing indicators. This signals to users that rival smartphones are lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse—even though Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the cause of that degraded user experience."
I’m not sure how Apple is the cause of the “degraded experience” - when I had a non-Apple phone, I couldn’t edit text messages , or react to them or see typing indicators. In fact, editing and reacting to iMessages is fairly new even to iPhones. And the DOJ complaint ( and Garland’s speech) don’t acknowledge that iMessages are not actually text messages and that when for some reason an iPhone cannot send an iMessage over wifi the message is sent as a text , green bubble and all. Somehow the fact that Apple combines text messages and OTT (over the top) messages in a single app and you can’t send an iMessage to someone who doesn’t have a iPhone is Apple making other phones look worse, even though people need to use the same OTT message app whether it two iPhones and iMessage , or two non-Apple phones and What’s App. If I have a Samsung phone I can’t send a What’s App message to someone else who has a Samsung phone but only Messenger.
My Samsung phone has all those same features, but only when I message another non-iPhone.
I think the issue is that there’s no technical reason why these features can only work iPhone to iPhone. The API can easily be translated from one system to another with a minimum amount of effort. Apple artificially added that limitation for brand building purposes.
Which features does your Samsung have? Can you send messages over Wifi without a separate app as long as it’s two non-iPhones? Because that’s the difference between green bubbles and blue bubbles, whether the messages go over Wifi or over the cellular network. My iPhone won’t show me that someone is typing if it’s sending messages over cellular even if both people have iPhones. I can send a message from an Apple device with no phone service without having What’s App or Messenger or anything like that. It will just show as being from an email address rather than a phone number.