Even if Apple doesn’t have a monopoly over Android, it clearly wants one

Ben Schoon | Mar 24 2024 - 9:00 am PT

This week the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company has built and maintains an illegal monopoly. Whether or not Apple actually has a monopoly over Android in the smartphone market is up for the courts to decide, but what’s clear is that Apple really wants one.

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The DOJ’s lawsuit alleges that Apple has built a “smartphone monopoly” with the iPhone. At its core, the suit argues that Apple’s actions lock users into the iPhone through several means including suppressing app development on iOS, cloud gaming, messaging apps and Apple’s own means of messaging other platforms such as Android, hindering third-party smartwatches and making the Apple Watch incompatible with Android, and restricting third-party digital wallets on iOS.

Apple, in a statement to 9to5Mac, said it belives the lawsuit is “wrong on the facts and the law.”

And, really, I don’t disagree.

If the main point of the DOJ’s case is that Apple is a monopoly, it doesn’t feel like that argument will hold up. Apple, in the traditional sense, doesn’t have a monopoly. But, if there’s one thing the case does do a good job at, it’s highlighting the ways Apple has been pushing to become a monopoly.

There are the examples that have basically been repeated a thousand times at this point, like messaging. But the lawsuit also dives into some arguably better examples. For instance, there’s the hindering of third-party smartwatches on iOS. All of the APIs and connections needed to run a smartwatch exist in iOS, but unless it’s the Apple Watch using them, they’re basically useless. It’s artificially limited.

Google made (and still makes) Wear OS compatible with iOS for years now, but notifications are limited, voice replies are non-existent, and the connection is often broken by iOS not letting the app keep the connection going in the background. My father uses a Montblanc Summit with his iPhone and has to reset it frequently just because iOS doesn’t play nice. When I used the same watch on Android, I never experienced a single problem. While I don’t believe that Apple giving third-party watches the same level of access would actually make them better than the Apple Watch, that only emphasizes that there’s no reason for Apple to be holding everyone else back.

That was well-highlighted in an interview with Beeper’s Eric Migicovsky published by Android Police this week. In that interview, Migicovsky actually referenced more of his time over the years developing and overseeing products that worked with iOS, such as the Pebble Watch. He said that many startups he worked with at Y Combinator “constantly bucked against the restrictions and limitations of Apple’s App Store.”

But, I’d argue that Apple’s intentions are far more clear when you look outside of this ongoing lawsuit.

In the EU, the recent Digital Markets Act has forced Apple to make big changes to iOS, and while the company says it’s “fully complying,” it’s clearly doing so in a malicious manner. For example, there’s the company’s approach to sideloading. Apple requires that developers have already amassed over a million downloads through an approved marketplace before allowing sideloading from a website, and still charges developers €0.50 per install for that sideloaded app. That’s incredibly hostile towards developers, and the EU is rightly taking issue with that policy. There’s absolutely an argument for security in the former two aspects of the policy, but the install charges really don’t make sense beyond pushing developers to just stick with the App Store.

Actions like those signal that Apple doesn’t want to compromise on its experience or established standards for the sake of being competitive. As the DOJ says:

Apple repeatedly chooses to make its products worse for consumers to prevent competition from emerging.

To an extent, the DOJ is exaggerating here. Apple’s choices don’t always make its products worse for consumers, but in making its products worse for developers and others, it arguably does take a lot away from its consumers too. Apple says that’s in the pursuit of the user experience, and that’s fair, but not at Apple’s scale.

Scale is the thing that makes all of this a very different conversation. When you control half of the market, you can’t lock things down so hard. Apple’s choices with things like APIs and the App Store are directly hostile towards even the idea of competition, and have been for a long time. For a comparison, let’s look at Tesla. The EV maker, especially initially, was pretty tight about how customers drove their cars. You had to charge at a Tesla station. You had to have it serviced by Tesla. “Third-party” was kind of a foreign idea. And, at a small scale, that was a benefit to the consumer. But imagine a world where Tesla holds half of the car market. None of that is a good thing anymore. Suddenly a single company has so much control that it hurts the end user because they have fewer choices in a product that, ultimately, they bought.

Similarly, Apple’s policies and choices arguably benefitted users in the earlier days, but as the company has grown and the iPhone has really dominated, especially the US market, those policies have started to become a hindrance.

Apple genuinely does put out some amazing products and services, and they’d absolutely stand up to valid competition. But the company has shown time and time again that, ultimately, it’s not interested in that. Apple says this lawsuit “threatens who we are,” and that’s certainly true.

“Buy your mom an iPhone.”

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