U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/technology/apple-doj-lawsuit-antitrust.html

by jcfrei • 2 years ago

2546 2501 2 years ago

IANAL but it's baffling to me that this one took so long. This has been the clearest-cut abuse of monopoly in tech for a long time. Why did they waste time trying to convince judges that "free" could be monopoly pricing, when this was in broad daylight?

Arkanum3• 2 years ago

Isn't part of the problem how US anti-monopoly law is worded requiring proof of "consumer harm" which is normally measured in increased costs? In the case of Apple's monopoly, its not clear how you would measure that let alone prove it to a court.

Jensson3• 2 years ago

Consumer harm is pretty easy to argue, Apple doesn't tax macos programs but it does tax ios programs. That argument results in billions of dollars of consumer harm. There are many arguments against that view as well, but I just wanted to show that it is easy to argue for consumer harm.

beeboobaa310• 2 years ago

Here is a recent example of consumer harm posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39773736

I am curious though, why is the iOS version €4.99 but the Android version is free ? I've seen this a lot actually and have always wondered, I figured it might just be Apple's annual developer license fee but not sure.

Apple users are being forced to pay more for equivalent software because of Apple's tax.

pvg2• 2 years ago

US anti-monopoly law is worded requiring proof of "consumer harm" which is normally measured in increased costs?

This is more a matter of interpretation, policy and practice rather than statute and these things can change over time. The interpretation you're describing was itself an innovation at one time.

Scubabear682• 2 years ago

“Your honor, my family has to suffer the Green Bubble when chatting with iPhone friends. This has caused us irreparable mental harm and anguish”.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

IANAL but that has been the modern interpretation whereas in the past that wasn't the case. Standard Oil was good for the consumer for example.

D13Fd• 2 years ago

How is this even a monopoly? That's like saying "Walmart has a monopoly on selling products at its stores." There are thousands of competing phones with their own software and app stores.

lokar4• 2 years ago

They have a remarkably durable market share. Some people are in effect forced to choose apple since apps they need (in some cases medical apps!) are iPhone only as the seller just does not bother with android.

kyledrake• 2 years ago

There's approximately 2 app stores, I wouldn't call that competition.

Even in the most egregious days of Microsoft's OS monopoly, you could still choose to install software. Apple makes it basically impossible to do this outside of the context of their app store, which they charge heavily for access to and have no qualms removing or preventing apps that compete with its own. If this doesn't constitute monopolistic behavior, the bar is so high I'm not sure anything would ever qualify for it.

ocdtrekkie3• 2 years ago

There is one competing phone platform with a store that has conveniently decided on identical fees. It's a duopoly. But also one where you can only shop with one of them.

The comparison is this: Walmart and Target are the only two stores that exist. They've also basically agreed to set the same prices on everything. And once you buy from Target once, you must buy everything else from Target too, and if you want to switch to Walmart, you have to throw out everything you bought at Target.

justrealist3• 2 years ago

If Walmart had a 60% market share then yes the JD would be on their balls for store brands.

for1nner• 2 years ago

Inevitable settlement with no real change in the market dynamics, or am I too down on the U.S. Justice system?

_chimmy_chonga_2• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240321143739/https://www.nytim...

_chimmy_chonga_2• 2 years ago

well, it still has the login stuff but just further down. -_-

SSLy• 2 years ago

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

ocdtrekkie3• 2 years ago

Tim Sweeney didn't get it done, so the US government will pick up the slack. I imagine they were waiting to see if Epic won before trying the case themselves, but Biden may have wanted to make sure it got moving before the election may take it out of his hands.

One of the most impressive successes in Epic's cases was just dragging the evidence into the open. A lot of illegal behavior is hidden in confidential agreements mostly to keep them out of regulators' view for as long as possible.

dagmx7• 2 years ago

This case has very little overlap with the Epic suite other than one of the defendants being the same.

I’m also curious what illegal confidential behaviour you believe was found in the Epic case? The one count that the judge found in favour of Epic didn’t require any form of discovery as it was based on public policy.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

The Justice Department, which began its investigation into Apple in 2019, chose to build a broader and more ambitious case than any other regulator has brought against the company.

As I was reading the specific charges detailed in the article, I was thinking this case seems like a stretch and will be difficult to prove. Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice, messaging, and Apple wallet. FWIW, I am a former lawyer and spent a little time doing antitrust law for the CA DOJ, a long time ago. Just my two cents.

ocdtrekkie3• 2 years ago

They will make that argument, and the government will point out that Apple is trying to charge 27% everywhere those choice decisions were taken away, pretty conclusively proving... it's all about collecting the rent.

mjhagen• 2 years ago

it's all about collecting the rent

Which is not illegal.

bink2• 2 years ago

Charging 30% is outrageous to me, but it also appears to be the standard used by almost all of their competitors. It'll be interesting to see how the government convicts Apple of doing something that almost all other large companies are doing.

It's a no-win situation for them. If once they established themselves as the dominant player in the cell phone market they started undercutting everyone else on fees that could also be seen as predatory.

flutas2• 2 years ago

I'm (legitimately) curious could the fact that (almost) all of that is now open in the EU due to their laws but not the US. Would that hurt their argument since they blocked off the change from the US. Or would that all be solved by a statement along the lines of "Well, EU iPhones are now less secure."

wtallis• 2 years ago

The arguments about performance and security aren't about whether Apple could open up, but about whether they should. The changes in the EU will answer the latter, but slowly.

causi• 2 years ago

The US government has let its definition for monopolistic behavior slip so much over the last few decades I don't think you could successfully prosecute for anything short of sending thugs to break your competitors' kneecaps. The days when the DOJ would prosecute a company for including a web browser with an OS are long gone.

nradov2• 2 years ago

The facts were different in the Microsoft case. If they had built in Internet Explorer as a "free" feature in a Windows upgrade it would have been tough to prove anticompetitive behavior. But they originally sold IE as a separate product, like as boxes in retail stores. They only bundled it with Windows later and there was clear evidence during the trial that they made the change specifically to kill Netscape.

rpdillon2• 2 years ago

A bit of hyperbole, but otherwise a fair assessment based on my readings. HBR has a piece from 2017 on this.

https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...

The golden era of anti-trust was 1940s-1970s, but faded with the rise of the Chicago School of Economics.

It does indeed seem to be coming back more now.

nradov2• 2 years ago

Sometimes these lawsuits are filed not strictly for legal reasons but to put pressure on companies, or as political payback to certain special interest groups (election year). Even if the case is eventually thrown out of court it may succeed in shifting Apple's behavior.

oatmeal13• 2 years ago

It seems easy to prove to me; anti-trust law is intentionally vague and broad to allow the government to prosecute all kinds of monopoly tactics. Apple had the option to give a warning to users that using an alternative app store may risk security. It doesn't have to block it all-together. Same with Apple Wallet.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

Yes, there is a lot of discretion in what cases are brought, and if a new administration comes in next year this may be dismissed/deprioritized. Still, I doubt Tim or other Apple employees will be making many donations to Biden's challenger! (Shareholders might be a different story.)

Even if the case continues, it will be a challenge to win. Apple has asymmetric information and knows what they can use to defend the various allegations.

EasyMark5• 2 years ago

it's quite often shot down by judges as well too because of the vagueries in laws, it's a two edge sword and you're commonly at the whim of the trial jurisdiction. Just look at recent 5th circuit vs most other circuits.

amelius5• 2 years ago

Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice, messaging, and Apple wallet

Then why, for the sake of the argument, do they allow third party browsers, messaging and payments on MacOS ?!?

Apple makes it sound like MacOS is horribly insecure.

basisword• 2 years ago

Legacy decision? Would they do the same starting a new desktop OS today? Much more high risk personal data on an iPhone (e.g. health data, biometrics) requiring stricter security? Many more sensors which could be abused by nefarious actors on iOS (GPS, lots of mics, lidar, cameras, etc) and these are always with us?

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

Performance is less of an issue on computers because battery life isn’t as much of a concern. Also, they allow other messaging and payments on iOS just like they do on MacOS. They just don’t offer the unique payment chip access on iOS to third parties.

audunw• 2 years ago

If a hacker got full remote access to my phone it’d be a complete and utter disaster. Especially since the phone itself is considered a two factor authentication device by several services and my employer.

And the attack vectors are more numerous. I have ten times as many apps on my phones, it’s always on, always connected, and may frequently connect to wifi networks I don’t fully trust.

The consequences and the attack vectors for a hacker to attack my laptop are fewer.

I’m on the side of wanting Apple to open up a bit more. But I it’s absolutely valid to want the iPhone to be more secure than a laptop. And I seriously hope Apple isn’t forced to let people install apps that aren’t signed and reviewed. I can guarantee you that critical services in your life will force you to install insecure and straight up dangerous apps. The banking sector in some countries is a prime example of that, especially back in the ActiveX era.

andrewmutz• 2 years ago

How do you think they would spin Messages interoperability as security or performance?

macintux• 2 years ago

End to end encryption can only be guaranteed if you control both ends.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

I think they'll claim security for Messages. I don't have nearly enough information to know if they can win that particular issue, and it sounds like there are reasonable arguments on both sides. But they don't have a monopoly on messaging — WhatsApp is huge, Signal and others exist. I don't think Apple lets you use Siri to send messages via other services, or at least they didn't used to let you. But other than that they are granted near parity on iOS.

toast06• 2 years ago

The messaging claim seemed to be about carrier based messaging; SMS and MMS, and I guess in theory RCS (but is that really carrier based if Google has taken it upon themselves to enroll most Android users on a Google server)

Apps that read inbound SMS may be malicious and use that ability to steal verification codes. Or they may not be actively malicious, and meerly handle the data in an insecure way that makes messages available to others.

Performance, I dunno. Maybe they could argue something about how time between user requesting an SMS be sent and it actually getting sent is very important, and similar for display, and that they're more likely to do that right. I've certainly seen some Android manufacturer provided SMS clients that do much better than others on that, although I have no recent performance notes since I no longer get massive floods of SMS from too simple monitoring systems.

dagmx7• 2 years ago

Security: there’s no cross platform E2E messaging standard they could have adopted. Given that the DoJ is already breathing down their neck for working with Google on search, using Google’s RCS extensions and servers might also be problematic.

I don’t think the government could force them to adopt RCS without new legislation or bring iMessage to other platforms.

quatrefoil• 2 years ago

I'm guessing the plan is to cast a wide net, then hope that you can dredge up some incriminating or morally ambiguous quotes during discovery. When you have a company of 100,000+ people, there's probably some "haha we're killing the competition" in there, which you can then use to prop up the case.

And then either use that to win the trial, or force Apple into settling.

bevekspldnw3• 2 years ago

They may or may not prevail, but in the meantime they will likely have to slam the brakes on any closed feature developments. That alone is good for consumers.

devsda• 2 years ago

As I was reading the specific charges detailed in the article, I was thinking this case seems like a stretch and will be difficult to prove.

If this case is thrown off how long can it take for them to make another antitrust case with a different set of stronger arguments ?

Given that they started in 2019 for this one, if lost there is real risk of waiting another 5 years for any meaningful change.

anonymouse0084• 2 years ago

The article leaves out a ton over the actual compliant // filed in Eastern NJ for a reason. They must be going for Verizon or Samsung witnesses? If the definitions set forth by the DOJ are accepted by courts, this is a slam dunk on Apple. If Apple can redefine things like 'Super Apps' and 'Mini Apps,' then this thing is a wet paper bag.

Personally I see avenues for both outcomes.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

If the definitions set forth by the DOJ are accepted by courts, this is a slam dunk on Apple.

This is a very low bar. It is of course the case that if you assume one party's definitions are accepted then they will win. The battlefield will be the definitions (just like in patent law the battlefield is the claim construction).

doctorpangloss2• 2 years ago

Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice

That's true, but odds are they have a lot of e-mails and a lot of employees who can testify to the browser choice decision being driven by lock-in. The iMessage emails were pretty unambiguous with regards to how it is used in an anti-consumer way. (https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...) Similar stuff will exist for everything they do, because they cannot distort the reality that in 2024 their software kind of sucks, and that their customers only use it because they don't have alternatives and Apple prevents those alternatives from being viable.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

Yeah it'll be interesting to see (via discovery) whether Apple has policies like Google's regarding "words not to use".

ChildOfChaos6• 2 years ago

"the reality that in 2024 their software kind of sucks, and that their customers only use it because they don't have alternative"

That's an extremely hot take. When devices are mostly just slabs of glass and the interface and what is done, is entirely the software, customers are choosing the device based on the Apple software, not in spite of it.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

I don’t think those emails are so damning. A company should not be required to write software for its main competitor platform, just to make it easier for people to adopt its main competitor platform.

gcheong2• 2 years ago

Perhaps, but I'm glad they're at least trying.

RNAlfons• 2 years ago

People waved the EU case away with the same argument. Actually it is a kind of iArgument.

However nobody buys it besides their most loyal customers.

katbyte5• 2 years ago

The eu case seemed to make more sense and was pro consumer: open up messaging / App Store and switch to usb c.

This one seems different at first glance,

sneak5• 2 years ago

Nah, users really are dumb and really will follow steps that will result in malware getting on their devices. This happens all of the time in Android-land. Burying the setting won’t change this, people will follow tutorials to disable the security protections if they think it will get them the content they want (and, in some cases, it will, wrt pirate apps etc).

There’s no real way to square the circle: either Apple (and the state) has realtime app censorship control (nominally for malware, as well as any other thing the state or Apple’s business model feels existentially threatened by), or the user can install any app they want, with all of the associated risks. Even with notarization and self-distribution you’re still in the first category because the state can compel Apple to treat protest apps or non-backdoored e2ee messaging apps the exact same as they do malware, and prevent them from launching.

Users mostly want the former, because most users aren’t worried about government censorship or oppression. Tech people and cypherpunks and pirates and protesters usually want the latter. Tech people usually want the former for their parents/grandparents for whom they serve as device sysadmin.

emodendroket5• 2 years ago

I agree and I question the wisdom of it, but the idea of this aggressive antitrust enforcement, which so far has more strikes than hits, seems to be to make a grinding, years- (or even decades-) long push to shift the understanding of what antitrust is and make major changes to the landscape; kind of an inverse of what the conservatives have been able to do with various issues, where their positions were initially laughed out of the room but now have the weight of Supreme Court decisions behind them decades later.

zer00eyz4• 2 years ago

> I question the wisdom of it, but the idea of this aggressive antitrust enforcement, which so far has more strikes than hits

We only really take these up when they are blatant (price fixing, apple and books, MS and vendors). Or lock ins where there is NO alternative (MS and browsers). This doesn't really meet those bars.

If Apple wins this one at home, then they can quickly cry about other countries regulations being "anti competitive".

I have to wonder if this political on some level.

gcheong2• 2 years ago

I think you're right: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/whats-coming-in-2024-on-t...

KKKKkkkk1• 2 years ago

Every employee that joins Apple goes through a course that teaches a few case studies about Apple's culture. One of those is how Steve Jobs made the decision to kill Flash. IMHO it was a no brainer and if this sort of thing needs to be litigated in court, it's a travesty.

dartos• 2 years ago

Everything needs to be litigated.

danesparza• 2 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but I agree. I was alive and working when the US brought it's antitrust case against Microsoft back in the early 2000's.

This feels like a vastly different case, and not one that they'll likely be able to win against Apple.

jwagenet2• 2 years ago

It seems to me the US would be better off copy-pasting EU regulation than trying to smush apples behavior into old school antitrust violations.

t8883• 2 years ago

The EU legislation wouldn’t fly for a second in the US system of law.

Wowfunhappy7• 2 years ago

Well, The Justice Department at least can't do that, because they can't write laws.

cactusplant7374• 2 years ago

Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to browser choice

Didn't work in Europe. The alternative browser growth in Europe is massive. Literally, an industry revitalized overnight.

mariodiana• 2 years ago

Perhaps this is essentially more lawfare against a party antagonistic to the political aims of Washington players. We know that our national (as well as state) law enforcement entities have been alleging for more than a decade now that Apple's encryption practices stymie their efforts to catch "bad guys." What better way to put back room pressure on a company.

sneak5• 2 years ago

This is a false narrative. iPhones back up full message history and all photos by default in a non-e2ee fashion that is easily readable by both Apple and the government unless the user and everyone they message with specifically opts into e2ee (which approximately nobody has, even in tech circles).

There is no “going dark” issue on iOS platforms. Apple has played ball in full with the USG on that front. In fact, Android backups are e2ee so the government can get more data from Apple on iPhone users than they can get from Google for Android users.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

yeah its a novel expansion of antitrust law to say that merely maintaining features that the market chose is an antitrust violation

if you weren’t anticompetitive to get to that place, thats been good enough?

lokar4• 2 years ago

As an iPhone user I am willing (and believe I am) paying Apple a premium for a well curated and reviewed App Store (vs android). I just wish they would stop “double dipping “ and charging far in excess of their costs (and in excess of reasonable profit) to the app sellers.

miguelxt• 2 years ago

You should be allowed to stay inside Apple's walled garden while the rest of users should be allowed to leave it whenever they want (at the very minimum at their own risk).

s3r3nity4• 2 years ago

...rest of users should be allowed to leave it whenever they want (at the very minimum at their own risk).

You can, though? Just go buy an Android. There are a billion different options there.

Heck, you can also still buy old-school type flip phones at Walmart.

lokar4• 2 years ago

I’m fine with more app stores, let others compete, and ideally compete on review security.

pb72• 2 years ago

The problem with this is that going outside of Apple's walled garden benefits 3rd parties who would prefer to do whatever they want so to use the same apps as before, everyone will have to submit to that risk. Apple's walled garden is a type of regulation.

Pfhortune• 2 years ago

I am willing (and believe I am) paying Apple a premium for a well curated and reviewed App Store (vs android)

There is a plethora of evidence that this is not the case. See this recent example: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/08/a-fake-app-masquerading-as...

(Yes, it was pulled, but that was _after_ the public noticed and LastPass had to issue a warning)

I just wish they would stop “double dipping “ and charging far in excess of their costs (and in excess of reasonable profit) to the app sellers.

That quarterly growth has to come from somewhere! Line goes up!

overstay89304• 2 years ago

There is a plethora of evidence that this is not the case.

Do you have actual evidence for this claim? Because it's pretty widely accepted that the App Store has higher standards and quality, and you just cited a single case.

samatman17• 2 years ago

It's always easy to show that something isn't perfect: just find a counterexample.

It's also easy to multiply that tactic by insinuating that this means that it isn't good, or isn't better than the competition. Which is what you're doing here.

kbf2• 2 years ago

That used to be my stance as well, but the App Store has gotten so bad in recent years. These days if there’s an app I want to install, it’s much easier to find the app store link on the developers page than to search in the App Store. At this point the “user experience” argument isn’t really there beyond easy payments and subscription management.

burrish2• 2 years ago

A premium for a well curated and reviewed App Store

Just 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685272

jocoda• 2 years ago

As long as I have to pay Apple a yearly developer fee so that I can load my own software (that no one else will use) on to 'my' phone, it does not belong me. Yes I know you can reload it every week. Not my phone.

I do not understand why Microsoft stepped out of the mobile market.

usernamed7• 2 years ago

I do not understand why Microsoft stepped out of the mobile market.

Because they failed. And not just once!

9999000009992• 2 years ago

This is apart of why I use Android.

It's understood that you can install random APKs from anywhere. As a hobbyist developer, I want to be able to set up a GitHub pipeline and then just download my APKs from that without fighting Apple or paying for an Apple developer account.

I'm actually open to buying an iPhone as well, iPhones are much better when it comes to music production, by understand I have to abide by Apple's rules and not be able to install my own software.

kmeisthax8• 2 years ago

When the iPhone App Store first launched, Steve Jobs claimed[0] the 30% was to cover the cost of certifying software as functional, well-designed, and nonmalicious. Part of it was an ego thing too: he didn't want people fucking up apps and making his pet project look bad, so early App Review focused on a lot of UI polish things in order to make people think iPhone software was just inherently better than Android.

Even a few years in there's already evidence that Apple was entirely aware of how much of a cash cow owning the distribution market for your apps is. There's an internal letter asking about reducing the percentage because someone was worried about the Chrome Web Store (?) eating their lunch. Today, App Review is far too inadequate for the level of software submissions Apple gets, and they regularly let garbage onto the store that's specifically supposed to be curated.

I occasionally hear people complain about how Tim Cook "ruined the company" and that Jobs would never do the kind of control freak shit that he literally pioneered and is literally the selling proposition of the Mac all the way back in 1984. The only thing Tim Cook did was scale the business from "luxury compute" to it's inevitable conclusion as a monopolistic nightmare. The way that the App Store business game is played is specifically that you don't keep spending all your money on better app review. Once you have users and developers mutually hooked on one another, you siphon money out of them for your other projects (or your shareholders).

At one point, you were paying a premium for a better App Store, but not anymore. The business relationship just doesn't work out that way long-term.

[0] I personally think this belief was genuine at first.

FullyFunctional• 2 years ago

To add more evidence to your point: SJ loved wall gardens and consistently fought against extensibility. The Apple II only got extension slots because the other Steve insisted. All of the compact Macs have very limited to no extensibility.

It's so ironic that Apple was pushing the (open) Web apps in the early days of the iPhone (out of necessity of course).

layer82• 2 years ago

It isn’t that well-curated though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685272

FredPret3• 2 years ago

Perhaps a hardware engineer can help me out here, but I don't think Apple makes an unreasonable margin on the iPhone. Overall they make 26% [0]. Really quite reasonable considering highly-developed proprietary software is bundled with the device

They make a lot of money because they sell * a lot * of iPhones.

[0] https://valustox.com/AAPL

lokar4• 2 years ago

And then, they make much much better margins on the App Store.

FredPret3• 2 years ago

You're right - I didn't think of the App Store. That's a proper monopoly. "Services" are 23b out of 120b in total sales for them last quarter, but at a much higher margin. It cost them 6b to provide those services, but 58b to make 96b worth of hardware.

Looks like 1/3 of their gross comes from services.

Only some of the services are App Store - some of that money is from Apple TV and iCloud storage.

App Store income looks to be app fees and also advertising.

snakeyjake2• 2 years ago

For practically any hardware startup if their margins aren't >33% they will fail to scale, wither on the vine, and die.

My employer makes space hardware and our overhead R&D expenses are so high that if we made 26% margin we would be bankrupt in a year.

So I think ~30% is probably a minimum floor to shoot for.

Just looked it up and Samsung Electronics has a margin that has ranged from 30% to 46% over the last couple of years.

I think the majority of people on HN are software guys who are completely oblivious to the challenges of building physical items that exist in the real world which is why your comment is downvoted.

That and beyond its stated purpose it seems that HN exists to allow people to complain about Apple in a public forum.

What makes all of this so strange is that large software vendors often have astronomical profit margins that hardware companies can only dream of. SAP (~70%) MSFT (~70%) TEAM (>80%)

https://ycharts.com/companies/SAP/gross_profit_margin

https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/gross_profit_margin

https://ycharts.com/companies/TEAM/gross_profit_margin

Perhaps it is good that software companies have such high margins because if they didn't HN would be flooded with stories about how every company they get hired at goes out of business and management is clueless.

FredPret3• 2 years ago

Apple’s 26% is a net margin - I’m sure their gross on an iPhone is a healthy amount

smoldesu16• 2 years ago

How do you think Apple will differentiate their case from United States v. Microsoft Corp., where Microsoft was implicated for almost identical monopoly misconduct?

The complaint literally says verbatim, "But after launching the iPhone, Apple began stifling the development of cross-platform technologies on the iPhone, just as Microsoft tried to stifle cross-platform technologies on Windows."

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

On the browser front, it’s easy. iPhones have batteries so battery life is a concern. That’s why Apple treats them differently than Macintosh computers, which you can choose your own default browser engine for.

smoldesu16• 2 years ago

That's a reason someone might prefer Apple's first-party browser, sure. How does it justify banning third-party browser engines though?

Are we ruling out the possibility that competitive browsers could offer better battery performance, too?

beeboobaa310• 2 years ago

Why do you think that apple should get to make this choice for their users?

If they are so concerned with not letting their users drain the battery if they wish, why do they allow games on their store?

gbear605• 2 years ago

Most Macs sold are Macbooks that also have batteries

ruined• 2 years ago

yes safari is preinstalled but on an iphone you aren't allowed to install another browser (in this jurisdiction) so there's technically no precedent yet

dagmx7• 2 years ago

Nit: you can install other browsers, but not other browser engines.

It might prove to be a significant difference in terms of how it affects competitors as a product.

adolph2• 2 years ago

you aren't allowed to install another browser

Currently, anyone can create a new iPhone browser, but with one huge restriction: Apple insists that it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari. [0]

And currently you can also delete Safari from your iOS device. An example of this is Firefox [1].

0. https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/

1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i...

mcphage2• 2 years ago

yes safari is preinstalled but on an iphone you aren't allowed to install another browser

A browser is a product, and you can install many other browsers.

A HTML rendering engine is a software library, and you can not install another HTML rendering engine.

The justice department definitely cares about products. It's not clear to what degree it cares about software libraries.

dagmx7• 2 years ago

One of the big factors was that Microsoft were doing things like paying OEMs to not include other browsers. This was also the crux of the issue in Epic v Google recently.

acdha3• 2 years ago

Or operating systems: things like BeOS, OS/2, and Linux couldn’t be offered on a given model without paying for a Windows license or giving up volume pricing for the entire line.

adolph2• 2 years ago

iOS started out closed and stayed that way for various reasons. Windows OS started with the ability of users to make various choices. One of those choices had to do with web browsers. MS's crime was "the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

bruce5112• 2 years ago

Is Apple even a monopoly though? In the Microsoft case Microsoft had 90+% of desktop market share. (And propped Apple up to create even a semblance of competition.) They were accused of leveraging that position to prevent manufacturers etc from getting out of line.

Apple, on the other hand shares the market with Android. Globally it's a minority share. Yes, in the US, Apple has a bigger market share than it has globally, but Android is a real competitor even there. So I'd suggest the two situations are quite different.

If it's not a monopoly (which would be fine by itself anyway), it's hard to make the case that they are leveraging that monopoly in unhallowed ways.

All that said, clearly the DOJ think they have a case, and I imagine they've spent a LOT of man-hours thinking about it and forming an argument. More than the no-time-at-all I've spent thinking about it.

realusername3• 2 years ago

but Android is a real competitor even there

Is it though? On the hardware side sure but on the software side I don't see any competition. Both stores have close to identical practices and do not look like they compete over to get developers onboard. The only pricing change ever made was also made in reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied verbatim.

While not a strict monopoly, the lack of competition in this area between the only two players seems obvious.

makeitdouble3• 2 years ago

What is meant by "monopoly" has been evolving, and a majority share acquired through anticompetitive means could be enough to warrant government action.

screamingninja8• 2 years ago

You use the term Android like it is a corporation or a brand. Are you comparing iOS to Android OS or Apple to Samsung, Google etc.? I agree that Apple commands a relatively small share of the US mobile ecosystem, but where do the competitors stand?

dragonwriter16• 2 years ago

Is Apple even a monopoly though?

Do they have pricing power? You can select any boundaries you want for markets to come up with any market share number you want, but the key empirical test is is there actual substitution effect or does Apple have the ability to charge monopoly rents. One of the major points of walled gardens is to create vendor lock-in and prevent price conpetition, and Apple has been masterful at that.

rtkwe2• 2 years ago

You're mixing the literal definition of monopoly with anti-trust laws. They have over half the market as a single company and the rest of the market is actually a fragmented zone of other companies so yes I think they are. You don't have to own the entire market to run afoul of monopoly laws they don't require there to be literally only one choice in the market.

patapong• 2 years ago

This depends on one important question: What is the relevant market? This is a fundamental question in all antitrust law cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevant_market

If the relevant market is found to be "Apps on iOS", or "Flagships phones in the US", Apple is more likely to be considered having a monopoly position than if the market is "phones in the world". The courts will have to decide on what the market is before deciding if Apple has monopoly power or not.

megaman8215• 2 years ago

Why do the app store policies and prices look so similar between iOS and Android? What competitive forces are going to change a duopoly with soft collusion?

InsomniacL8• 2 years ago

Is Apple even a monopoly though?

Apple has a monopoly though it's AppStore on over 2 billion devices though which it conducts $90,000,000,000 a year. That's more than a lot of countries GDP combined.

Saying Apple doesn't have a 90%+ share of phone market is irrelevant.

The question though, is if Apple as the Platform (phone) provider, maintains it's monopoly (AppStore) though anti-competitive means.

overstay89304• 2 years ago

Because unlike the Microsoft case, you have the option to buy a smartphone from a company other than Apple. 1990s Microsoft was quite literally a monopoly, nothing like what is going on today.

Apple is not stopping their competitors from making good phones, just like how Apple is not stopping you from buying a phone that wasn't made by Apple. Microsoft was doing both of those things, Apple isn't. The cases aren't even close really.

asadotzler12• 2 years ago

Phone sales are hardly the issue here. iOS policies are the issue.

And you could absolutely buy alternatives to Microsoft Windows in the 90s, from Apple or IBM or others. But that's immaterial. The availability of an alternative says nothing about the market power Apple has or how it's wielding that power. This is why we have anti-trust cases, to determine if that power is being abused.

madeofpalk7• 2 years ago

It's really worth a read about what that case was actually about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

It's reasonably clear why the Microsoft case was different

The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the web browser market for Windows, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.

Microsoft made deals with other companies to restrict competition. Apple doesn't need to make up a contract to prevent NFC payments as they just don't offer it in the first place. The Microsoft case actually has a lot more similarities to why Google lost the Epic case, by Apple won.

boringg2• 2 years ago

It looked surprisingly pretty weak to my non lawyer eyes. I mean I fully understand that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software but its almost a feature for their system and you buy it knowing that.

It feels like it goes back to Android vs Apple approach to their ecosystem.

ethbr14• 2 years ago

that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software

To me, this is the crux of modern antitrust, and the EU absolutely got it correct at a high level.

In simplest form -- doing certain things as an almost-monopoly and/or extremely large business should be illegal, while doing them as a smaller company should not be.

The scale of global businesses, in low-competition industries, allows them to engineer moats that are deeply injurious to fair competition, to their own profit and the detriment of everyone else.

you buy it knowing that.

I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.

ecshafer• 2 years ago

I don't consider myself an Apple fan, but Apple users definitely buy into the idea that "it just works" compared to Android or Windows, which the highly integrated software is a key component of.

whywhywhywhy6• 2 years ago

I think it's debatable whether the average iPhone customer buys it, knowing it allows Apple to heavily tax all AppStore developers.

I think if you explained it to the average iPhone customer you might be shocked they side with Apple. The concept of a platform where for free you can take advantage of it and just make 100% of the revenue without cutting in the owner of the platform is completely alien to how things work in what they consider the real world.

I can't just walk into Walmart and set up a stand and make money, if I want to sell in Walmart I have to work with them and give them a similar sized cut. If I even set my stall up on the street I have to pay for permits, certification, suppliers.

Not saying I agree with the App Store tax because I actually don't but I think the way they set it up as a "Store" was very clever in making it seem completely normal when it's completely abnormal compared to all personal computing up to that point, which maybe was an anomaly? Hope not.

baxtr2• 2 years ago

I’m a heavy and loyal Apple user AND an app developer.

I couldn’t care less about alternative App Stores. I don’t want them, I don’t need them.

I am very happy the way it is.

nvarsj2• 2 years ago

Indeed - it's modern day corporate feudalism.

Anyone arguing for Apple's side is akin to saying we should all be serfs for the King, because he takes care of us well and protects his kingdom.

mjburgess• 2 years ago

Monopoly law needs to be reinterpreted in light of network effects.

It's not merely the integration which is a problem, it's how that + network effects gives apple undue market power to dictate terms to its users, devs, etc.

Being a middleman between users and devs, say, takes on a different character when you're a 2-3T biz at the heart of the economy.

giantrobot2• 2 years ago

Since market cap is a determinant in behavior (the speculative value of a secondary market) where's the case for forcing nVidia to open up CUDA or for Microsoft to let Nintendo open a store on the Xbox?

starbugs6• 2 years ago

Exactly. From my point of view, nobody needs to be a lawyer to see that this can't stand as it is. There are two major operating systems for each form factor. In the last ten years, no other vendor has been able to successfully place a new OS on the market. If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened. And this appears mainly to be due to network effects and the high complexity of the underlying systems.

hgs32• 2 years ago

We need proactive antitrust laws that break up companies beyond a certain size criteria. There are many markets beyond the tech sector that need a breakup. But no, lets wait until there is enough outrage before the DoJ laggardly assembles a case against them.

fifticon• 2 years ago

Though the average hackernews reader knows all this, it is not my impression that the average apple consumer is aware of it. Anecdotally, many of the people in my social vicinity choosing apple, are the same people who make their choices based on what they presume the 'cool kids' believe is the 'in' choice. I don't experience iphone users as tech-savvy, as much as I seem them be 'anxious to be cool'.

Foxhuls9• 2 years ago

I think most people just like how simple the products are overall. I prefer that my family, who tends to need a lot of basic tech support, have iPhones because they’re able to figure most things out and there’s no real risk of them messing anything important up. I’ve also noticed this strange phenomenon that the majority of people who complain about iPhones and the apple ecosystem don’t even use them. If someone doesn’t like what the company offers, they’re not forced to buy any of their products. I hate the idea of needing to deal with multiple app stores in the future because people who don’t even use the products have some sort of issue with it.

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

It looked surprisingly pretty weak to my non lawyer eyes.

* tin foil hat on *

That may be by design. If the outcome of this is "no monopoly", then it's a win for Apple.

jpadkins• 2 years ago

the new form of corp + government collusion does these weak investigations and charges, tying up the space for years and ultimately losing. It allows politicians to claim they are doing something, while securing access for intel agencies and insuring pro status quo election messaging.

These charges also undercut the next administration's leverage to negotiate with Apple, now that the threat of anti-trust charges are taken off the table.

hooverd• 2 years ago

The problem with a software moat is that it's infecting physical objects. Hardware, sure. But things like your tractor refusing to work if you use a non-vendor approved component. Not sued, just bricked.

ericmcer• 2 years ago

It is a feature, interfaces between pieces of software is some of the most expensive and challenging parts of writing it. When every piece of software is written specifically with that interfacing in mind it will just run better. Now Apple hardware is starting to do the same thing?

I am pretty bullish on Apple right now and could easily see a future where Windows isn't even used for gaming anymore. When Macbook Airs start to be capable of running high end games what is the point of getting a huge Desktop running Windows jammed with bloatware from 100 different companies?

blashyrk2• 2 years ago

I for one would never trade my Windows (or Linux w/ KDE) for the atrocity that is the macOS UX :)

bigtones• 2 years ago

Here is the non-paywall link to the full NYT article I shared: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/technology/apple-doj-laws...

colpabar• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/SYlk5

Kon-Peki• 2 years ago

Direct link

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...

dublinben• 2 years ago

Here it is from Justice.gov as well: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

rvz• 2 years ago

Finally. It was about time that this would happen.

Google got one anti-trust lawsuit, Meta should get another one (by owning too many social networks with billions of users each) and after the failed anti-trust lawsuit that Epic tried to sue Apple under, this time the DOJ is finally going after Apple.

Good.

I'm really looking forward to the United States v. Apple Inc. anti-trust lawsuit that will actually make some changes to stop the 30% commission scam once and for all.

After that, now do Microsoft (again)

jwells89• 2 years ago

Google could use another pass to put a stop to their aggressive cross-promotion of Chrome, which is difficult if not impossible to compete with given how many Google products people use on a daily basis. Every time I visit Google, YouTube, etc with a fresh non-Chrome browser profile there’s a barrage of, “Download Chrome!” popups to dismiss, not to mention how Google iOS apps use link taps as opportunities to promote Chrome or all the random third party Windows software that has Chrome bundled with it.

nottorp9• 2 years ago

that will actually make some changes to stop the 30% commission scam once and for all.

No. The change they should make is to allow sideloading. I don't care if the developer pays less than 30% when Apple can still censor what I run on my phone.

screamingninja8• 2 years ago

I don't care if the developer pays

I think you, as the consumer, are the one who pays.

Nifty3929• 2 years ago

Apple has about 60% of the smartphone market in the US, and about 25% globally. That's a pretty big stretch to call it a monopoly. There are many non-apple phone options that many consumers easily avail themselves of. And at least one other OS choice as well. All of these are fully supported by the entire ecosystem of telcos.

Seems like bullying to score political points to me.

jqpabc1232• 2 years ago

Apple has about 60% of the smartphone market in the US, and about 25% globally.

This case is about the US marketplace, globally is irrelevant.

And it is about more than just marketshare. Apple's tactics restrict the entire marketplace --- not just Apple captives.

Whole classes of apps are simply not practically possible on Android without paying monetary tribute to Apple.

For example, universal messaging is not possible without paying the Apple gatekeeper. Few people will use a messaging app if it can't communicate with 60% of their friends. And the only to make this happen is to pay Apple.

Someone2• 2 years ago

Huh? Don’t WhatsApp, Signal, etc. work in the USA? Or does anybody pay for them?

roamerz• 2 years ago

>universal messaging is not possible without paying the Apple gatekeeper

There is in fact universal messaging - it's called SMS. You don't need to pay Apple to use it. If you would have added secure to your example then yes that would be correct.

AlotOfReading2• 2 years ago

Standard oil was at 64% when it was broken up in 1911. Absolute market share isn't the only factor that goes into determining monopoly. You also get different numbers from different definitions. Apple controls 100% of the iOS market, or ~80% of the mobile subscription market, etc.

CharlesW5• 2 years ago

Apple controls 100% of the iOS market…

This is like saying Y Combinator controls 100% of the Hacker News market, or that Amazon controls 100% of the AWS market. It's a non-sensical argument.

bigyikes• 2 years ago

“Apple controls 100% of the iOS market” as an argument sounds like satire lol. What point does this make?

Is the implication that Apple should allow iOS on non-Apple devices? There is not a single hardware company in the world that would integrate iOS to the degree that Apple does. A requirement like this would immediately enshittify Apple’s brand.

dmitrygr4• 2 years ago

Apple controls 100% of the iOS market

“AlotOfReading” controls 100% of your HN posts.

Topfi5• 2 years ago

> Standard oil was at 64% when it was broken up in 1911. [...] Apple controls 100% of the iOS market [...]

I find it maddening that a lot of people replying to your fair point have chosen to ignore the first half and decided to exclusively focus on the latter, when that part was clearly meant as an example of how market definitions can have an impact.

A fairly recent example of the latter being a commonly mischaracterized or (by members of the public) outright dismissed concern was MSFTs dominance in the Cloud Gaming market, which was often met either with "but MSFTs share of the gaming market overall is less" or the even less applicable "but nobody uses Cloud Gaming anyway", even though neither should count towards whether something rises to anti-competitive behavior in a given market.

bogwog3• 2 years ago

That's a pretty big stretch to call it a monopoly

The word "monopoly" needs to be banned from these types of discussions because it always derails the conversation into pointless semantic bickering. There is no definition of that word that will make everyone happy. Even if Apple had 99.999% marketshare, as long as there's some hacker selling DIY linux phones under a bridge somehwere, someone's going to say Apple CAN'T be a monopoly because they have a competitor.

There are many reasons why antitrust laws exist, and these lawsuits tend to be really complex. There's not a simple `if(company.is_monopoly()) sue(company);` program that the FTC and DOJ use to decide when to sue.

toast06• 2 years ago

The FTC is perhaps a biased source, but they say [1]:

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.

The US doesn't have antitrust authority for the world, only for the US. iPhone has had 60% market share (or similar) for a long time now, so it's fair to consider that Apple has significant and durable market power in mobile phones.

Is it a complete monopoly? No, but it doesn't need to be.

From a very brief skim of the claims, the clearest one that stands out to me is the one about smartwatches. If Apple does provide better integrations to Apple Watches than 3rd party watches, that's pretty clearly 'tying' which is prohibited when using a market dominant product to create market dominance in a new market (smartwatches). OTOH, it wouldn't have been a big deal if the Microsoft Band had better integrations than other watches on Windows Phone, because tying is allowed without market dominance.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

graeme4• 2 years ago

that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.

Apple doesn't have this power though. If they raised prices they'd lose sales. And they haven't been able to exclude competitors, there is a robust ecosytem of Android manufacturers.

There's a reason the FTC has been losing almost all of their cases recently. They internalized the idea that a large successful company is inherently bad and focus on that rather than any objective legal standard.

karmelapple3• 2 years ago

iPhone has had 60% market share (or similar) for a long time now, so it's fair to consider that Apple has significant and durable market power in mobile phones.

It has market power, but it's not significantly larger than its competition. It's not 60% for iPhone, and 10% split up amongst 4 other competitors. It's 60% vs 40%... and probably more like 58% vs 42% [1].

Does 8% truly make Apple "dominant" to the point that integrating their software with watches in a better manner is illegal? I find that wildly difficult to believe.

that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.

Apple has been able to raise its own prices, but it hasn't been wildly out of line with competitors.

And Apple both makes phones and the software on them. They might be excluding or making competitors to their software have a harder time, but excluding? Not really - they have only excluded other large companies who have distinctly decided to run afoul of their guidelines (specifically, Epic).

1. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users

zmmmmm4• 2 years ago

People seem to miss the concept of "market power" vs sales numbers. Apple loyalists love to brag about the fact that Apple users spend something like 7x more on Apps and other services than Android users. They don't brag about that so much when anti-trust comes up - on a weighted basis that would suggest Apple has about 95% of market share and should be treated in the same category that late 1990's Microsoft was.

nodamage3• 2 years ago

I've seen this quoted multiple times now and I do not think it is the slam dunk people think it is. A literal monopoly is 100% market share, of course that is not required for antitrust law to apply. But the people who quote this intend to imply that 60% market share is sufficient to declare Apple a monopolist in violation of antitrust law, and that does not actually follow from a careful reading of this quote.

I will reply with a separate quote from the DOJ discussing what thresholds of market share are likely to be considered monopoly power:

In determining whether a competitor possesses monopoly power in a relevant market, courts typically begin by looking at the firm's market share.(18) Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred,"(19) they have demanded a dominant market share. Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly; it is doubtful whether sixty or sixty-four percent would be enough; and certainly thirty-three per cent is not."(20) The Supreme Court quickly endorsed Judge Hand's approach in American Tobacco Co. v. United States.(21) Following Alcoa and American Tobacco, courts typically have required a dominant market share before inferring the existence of monopoly power. The Fifth Circuit observed that "monopolization is rarely found when the defendant's share of the relevant market is below 70%."(22) Similarly, the Tenth Circuit noted that to establish "monopoly power, lower courts generally require a minimum market share of between 70% and 80%."(23) Likewise, the Third Circuit stated that "a share significantly larger than 55% has been required to establish prima facie market power"(24) and held that a market share between seventy-five percent and eighty percent of sales is "more than adequate to establish a prima facie case of power."(25)

https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...

My reading of this is that below 50% is very unlikely to be considered monopoly power while above 70-80% is very likely. 60% appears to sit somewhere in between where it is possible but not likely. Historically, I have not seen any major cases where monopoly power was found at the market share level that Apple currently holds.

It is worth noting that the DOJ in their filing does not seem very confident in being able to prove that Apple's 60% of the smartphone market constitutes monopoly power either. They have instead opted to define a narrower market of "performance smartphones" where Apple apparently holds 70% market share, putting it above the thresholds quoted above. Whether this artificially narrowed market definition will be accepted by the courts will likely determine the outcome of this case.

nottorp9• 2 years ago

There are many non-apple phone options

One non-apple phone option. Or you're somehow deluded into thinking the hardware matters any more?

nox1015• 2 years ago

You realize the world market is irrelevant. If some company has a monopoly in France, they don't care whether or not that company has less market in other countries. Apple has a monopoly in the USA and so the USA is going to try to break that monopoly. Google has already been sued and lost on it's app store market share. Apple's is larger.

pquki43• 2 years ago

60% sounds good enough for DoJ to sue, as a US government agency. Why do you even bother to quote "25% globally", it's meaningless here.

InsomniacL8• 2 years ago

The smartphone market is irrelevant.

If my water provider said "We're the only water provider so we're raising rates 1000%, take it or leave it", you would still say that's a monopoly even though i could move house to an area with another water provider.

Apple has a 100% monopoly though it's AppStore on 2 billion devices though which $90,000,000,000 in trade is conducted. If that's not a market big enough to be considered for Anti-Competitive practices and illegally maintaining a monopoly then i don't know what is.

That's more trade than the entire GDP of Luxembourg!

Scubabear682• 2 years ago

The point the suit misses is that one can simply buy an Android phone if they like. Millions of people literally do every year.

Choice already exists.

Workaccount211• 2 years ago

If you want to have a functional social circle in the US, choice doesn't really exist.

overstay89304• 2 years ago

If your friends won't talk to you because you have an Android phone, you don't actually have any friends.

nottorp9• 2 years ago

I'm sure you've seen this before, but only the US uses text messages any more.

The rest of the world is on cross platform apps and couldn't care less what their friends type from.

samatman17• 2 years ago

Social pressure to use a particular phone and messaging app does not a monopoly make.

CPLX• 2 years ago

Here's the first paragraph of the actual lawsuit. So no, I feel like they probably didn't miss the point that Android exists:

COMPLAINT In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Appl e’s then-CEO about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Androi d smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “ message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch. ” Jobs was clear in his response: Apple would “force” deve lopers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform. Over many years, Apple has repeat edly responded to competitive threats like this one by making it harder or more expensive for its users and developers to leave than by making it more attr active for them to stay.

oatmeal13• 2 years ago

This article actually has the complaint: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-sued-do...

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

The actual complaint leads off with the iBooks thing, which is a terrible start. Apple lost that case and it shouldn’t have; to this day, that result enables Amazon’s effective monopoly on paid ebooks.

ayewo• 2 years ago

IIRC, Apple lost that case because they colluded with publishers to raise ebook prices rather than lower them.

I think they would have won if they hadn’t colluded to set prices.

Ezhik2• 2 years ago

I just want to code and sideload my own silly little apps that aren't important enough to be in the App Store. I can do this on my Mac and it doesn't seem to explode because of it.

sib3• 2 years ago

You can also do this for iPhone...

Ezhik2• 2 years ago

The apps need to be refreshed weekly though, requiring me to connect my phone to my Mac.

Right now my preferred approach is to make web apps, but Apple already tried to take PWAs away in Europe...

hbn• 2 years ago

If Apple's iPhone "monopoly" is illegal then sue Google for continuing to make Android worse. That's why I switched to iPhone and have no desire to switch back.

Apple's crime here is they made a good product and continued to iterate on it, while Google has churned for years, reinventing and rebranding every app, service, and product multiple times a year and only making them worse so POs can get promotions.

modeless2• 2 years ago

Google was already found by a jury to have a monopoly on Android app distribution. And if Google has one, Apple's monopoly on iOS app distribution is clearly stronger and more harmful in the US given their larger market share and complete prohibition of alternatives.

kmeisthax8• 2 years ago

Google's crime was not having a charismatic leader who could store all the mens rea solely in his own head and then conveniently die before legal scrutiny started over their App Store racket.

All of Google's monopolistic intent was conveniently detailed out in loads of e-mails. They were caught failing to retain these e-mails, which in a civil suit where the 5th Amendment does not apply, means the judge gets to just assume the worst (make an "adverse inference").

To make matters worse, Google promised openness and then tried to privately walk it back. Legally, this is admitting that the "Android app distribution market" already exists and is the appropriate market definition for a monopoly claim. It's harder to argue that an "iOS app distribution market" should exist when Apple is using power words like "intellectual property" - aka "we have a right to supracompetitive profits."

My personal opinion is that the DOJ probably will succeed where Epic failed, however, because of one other critical thing: standing. Epic did reveal market harms that are almost certainly cognizable under US law, but none of those harms were things Epic was allowed to sue over.

kmeisthax8• 2 years ago

I mean, you're not wrong, but the lawsuit isn't about the quality of the end product. It's about the economic leverage Apple has over other businesses by virtue of owning the chokepoints - i.e. the OS software and the signing keys it trusts.

I personally would love to switch to iPhone if Apple wasn't so much of a control freak about the software you run on it.

nottorp9• 2 years ago

That's why I switched to iPhone and have no desire to switch back.

Yes, Apple has exactly one competitor in the phone space and their offerings are lower quality so you get an iPhone.

So... they have a dominant market position... and they abuse it.

retskrad• 2 years ago

I've heard all arguments against Apple's practices, and to me, they all basically come down to 'it's unfair that so many people like to live inside the Apple walled garden'. When it comes to the law, Apple is not a monopoly. When it comes to competition on the market, Apple is competing with Android and Windows, and the vast majority of the world's middle and upper class willingly choose Apple products. Even if you literally tried to block people from buying Apple products, people will find a way. So, obviously, Apple customers are having a great time in the Apple warden garden and made Apple a $3T company. But for some reason, other companies and regulators feel like Apple and its customers are having too much fun and need to call the cops on their party.

Apple is no different than Google search. Even if you drowned people in search choice popups, 99% of the time people choose Google. Regulators say Google is doing something nefarious when in reality, their product is loved by billions of people. In these situations, like Apple products and Google search, we need to realize that both companies have won the game in certain markets they operate because they made products that people really enjoy using.

rtkwe2• 2 years ago

They're not the same. The critical difference is people CAN choose not to use Google Search while keeping their same computer/phone, something you can't do with iPhone and the App Store/Wallet/etc laid out in the article. That's the critical difference that takes it from simply creating a superior product to monopoly, when you use your advantage in one space to lock in customers in a related space.

chickenpotpie• 2 years ago

I think Google search and apples ecosystem are extremely different. Google search is trivial to leave, any one can switch to bing by just typing a different address in the URL bar. Switching off of apple products is painful and difficult and it's by design. My wife and I switched from iphone to Android over a year ago and we're still fighting with apple to stop routing some text messages to iMessage when it should be going to our phones over sms.

tarboreus• 2 years ago

From a legal perspective, monopoly just means holding undue market power. People seem to really focus on the "mono" part, it's irrelevant from a US legal perspective.

andix2• 2 years ago

I think the position oft the European Union is a good approach. It classifies companies like apple not as a "monopoly" but as a "gate keeper".

I don't have a very deep understanding of that topic, but it's possible to regulate those companies a bit. In the EU similar things were already done for the car industry. The manufacturers are required to allow third party repair shops the same access to documentation, diagnostics software and parts like their own shops (not for free, but for a reasonable price). And repairs at a third party shop doesn't void the warranty.

For computers, cloud providers and smartphones similar regulations could improve everybody's life by giving us more flexibility and cheaper products by creating more competition.

In the end apple is collecting a lot of money and seems to just put it on huge piles in their bank accounts. I don't see any reason to increase competition by introducing regulations. Give startups and smaller companies a chance!

mruszczyk2• 2 years ago

I feel like there's a difference between the car regulation you state and the regulation approach being taken in the EU. Specifically the ability of third parties to limit end user choice.

With vehicle repair, I can still choose to use the manufacturer operated/approved repair shops. I truly am gaining additional choice and can continue to service my car as I always have.

The EU regulations allow third parties to remove my choice to live in the walled garden if they wish. So while it could enhance competition for developers I don't know if it greatly improves the users choice, or experience.

atonse3• 2 years ago

I'm not so sure. We are fully bought in to the Apple Ecosystem (Apple One, Apple Fitness, Music, everything). In most cases (like Apple Home), I did enough research and found that it was much more well thought out security-wise and was good enough, compared to the wild west that is the Google/Amazon smart home ecosystem. Again, for the most part, the walled garden is way superior to what I see outside the garden.

Even the app store, I have all my complaints about Apple's arbitrary enforcement of App Review guidelines as an iOS developer. However, as a consumer, I love that I can spend _less_ time worrying about my non-tech loved ones finding garbage in the app store. Yes there's coercive "buy this game" garbage, and tons of it, but I'm less concerned about financial scam apps than I would be for third party app stores.

However, in certain cases (like only Apple Music supported on the HomePod speakers, or Apple Watch only sending fitness data to Apple Fitness), we feel kind of "forced" to use the Apple product when there are superior competitors, because of the (manufactured) ease of use of full integration.

oflannabhra• 2 years ago

Just FYI, HomePod actually supports multiple music services, and Apple Health (the data store for Fitness) supports integrations with other providers (both input and output).

madeofpalk7• 2 years ago

like only Apple Music supported on the HomePod speakers

FYI, this hasn't been the case for a while. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/homepod/apd3399d3179/1...

Spotify has elected to not support this API, presumably because of their beef with Apple.

ianlevesque2• 2 years ago

I like my iPhone, and want to be able to use Kagi as my search engine. Why can't I?

AlanYx2• 2 years ago

That seems like something they'd be willing to fix. They allow users to select Ecosia, an extremely niche search engine. Kagi should be on that list too.

Spivak3• 2 years ago

This is correct for one side of Apple's market but not the other. You're right that Apple doesn't have monopoly power on the consumer side because there are alternatives and if you cared a whole heck of a lot you could create your own. It's capital intensive sure but being expensive to enter a market and having a moat doesn't mean you have a monopoly. If all your friends hung out on Discord then you're gonna have to use Discord to talk to them, if all your friends play a Windows exclusive game then you're gonna need a PC to play with them, the green bubble thing is nonsense.

But Apple does wield real monopoly power on the other side of their market which is app developers. I don't think large developers have any real choice but to bite the bullet and take whatever terms Apple offers and be on iOS because that's where your users are. Developers aren't choosing Apple as the better product in the way consumers are.

tiahura3• 2 years ago

If Apple wanted to, they could drag this out for a decade. In the end, there are probably some details of what they've done with Imessage or the store that you could convince a jury are "unfair."

It's good to know that with everything going wrong on this administration’s watch, they’ve got their laser focus on vacuums, video games, and phones.

tiahura3• 2 years ago

Realtime: I'm actually watching the US Attorney General crying about blue bubbles.

I need a drink.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

Their brief will surely cite NYT articles about how some Gen Z kids don't date people with green bubbles.

metabagel6• 2 years ago

The article is chock full of examples where Apple prevents competition on their platform or in connection with their platform.

Apple's argument is generally that they are making the platform safer for their users, but I was just on the App Store looking for the Google Authenticator, and the first item listed was a scam third party authenticator which was intended to fool users looking like the Google Authenticator. This would be the easiest possible thing for a giant corporation like Apple to catch. The fact that it is Google's customers which are being scammed could be part of the reason why Apple doesn't prioritize safety in this case.

What we're dealing with here is a really duplicitous company. Their marketing is world class. The battery life of their products is world class. Everything else - not so much.

timetopay• 2 years ago

The fact that it is Google's customers which are being scammed could be part of the reason why Apple doesn't prioritize safety in this case.

this is conspiracy bordering on paranoia. apple has problems, but willingly abusing customers who use the competitors is not one of them

Aloisius4• 2 years ago

Pretty sure that's an ad and yeah, it is misleading.

However, there's no comparison between the Apple app store and Android stores. There is an outrageous amount of straight-up malware on Android. FFS, one actually needs third-party antivirus/malware scanners on Android it's so bad.

flenserboy• 2 years ago

The government does not want people to have secure devices. Whether or not Apple's are currently secure is not the point; that they are working to make them so is enough to make sure it doesn't happen.

screamingninja8• 2 years ago

On the contrary, secure computational infrastructure furthers national security. US happens to have a very large footprint of vulnerable infrastructure as compared to other nations that tightly regulate their Internet. Believe it or not, more secure devices are actually good for the US. There have been several articles and discussions around it and the government has been working closely with the industry for years to improve the security posture.

amiantos2• 2 years ago

There's also a news article every few months talking about how the FBI or some other government agency wants to make encryption illegal and how iMessage is a boon to pedophiles all over the world and protects criminals. So, not sure how you can confidently say "On the contrary!"

bhelkey7• 2 years ago

From the complaint, "Apple is knowingly and deliberately degrading quality, privacy, and security for its users".

Fgyu09093• 2 years ago

Apple genuinely deserves this lawsuit.

By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field where it grants its products and services access to core features that it denies rivals.

Once I read this I was not shocked. Apple is already pushing people to buy their separate apps that should have came in for free, with the purchase of the Iphone or at least make a bundle Apple users could buy. Disgusting Apple totally deserved.

kstrauser8• 2 years ago

Which apps are those?

Fgyu09093• 2 years ago

Some of those apps are iMovie, imusic, Apple tv, Apple tv+, Final Cut Pro etc. Also the app store has apple arcade and other subscriptions.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

One of the most annoying features of the iOS ecosystem is the great lengths they take to prevent easy export of data out of the iOS system to other non-Apple devices. E.g. ever tried exporting Safari bookmarks on iOS to a Linux system running Firefox? A simple JSON file is all it would take, but no, you have to sync with a MacOS computer or some such:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254567613

CharlesW5• 2 years ago

One of the most annoying features of the iOS ecosystem is the great lengths they take to prevent easy export of data out of the iOS system to other non-Apple devices.

Not only do they not prevent it, but they facilitate it. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208

Exported data includes users' bookmarks and Reading List.

phone8675309• 2 years ago

Only works if you use iCloud, which I don't.

hu36• 2 years ago

Can't Safari just have an export bookmarks button like Firefox and Chrome? https://i.imgur.com/DIgddVn.png

No need to ask Apple's website for some data dump and no need for iCloud. It's your data after all.

jmholla3• 2 years ago

While others are pointing out your specific case is supported, I do know for experience you need a Mac to be able to smoothly move to a different password manager. Otherwise, it requires you to unlock your passwords at least twice (really like three or four times to do it properly) to copy and paste passwords to a different app.

fidotron2• 2 years ago

Given iOS doesn’t have a monopoly, even in the US market, this is almost certainly a negotiation move thanks to Apple not being seen to be compliant enough with the US gov wrt privacy and security. Possibly App Store policies differences of opinion as well.

timmg3• 2 years ago

What's interesting about the legal system is that it is intentionally vague. As in, you can make all different kinds of arguments and the judge and jury decide.

iPhone is does not have an overwhelming market share of phones in the US. But Apple does have a complete monopoly on "iPhone apps" (and "app stores" and "iPhone payment services"). So the government certainly can make a case that they are abusing those monopolies.

Whether or not the judge and juries will agree is the thing we are all going to be watching for.

iosjunkie• 2 years ago

This hard for me to understand. Apple hasn’t changed its approach their wall garden in ages. The consumer market decided to reward that model with adoption of Apple products.

screamingninja8• 2 years ago

Market adoption is more than a function of ecosystem openness. Blackberry commanded a large chunk of the market back in the day, maybe or maybe not because of the value they generated for consumers, but definitely because of the network effect. Several factors at play here.

Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

creaturemachine• 2 years ago

There was a time when teens had to be on BBM or be left behind.

toyg• 2 years ago

Apple hasn’t changed its approach their wall garden in ages.

The same action might be legit with 10% marketshare but lesive of market competition when at 60% marketshare.

Take golden-era Microsoft: bundling a default browser was anti-competitive for them, whereas it clearly wasn't for any Linux distribution out there.

generj2• 2 years ago

I think it’s interesting this is one of the first large anti-tech anti-trust lawsuits that has actually materialized since the FTC/DOJ signaled interest in going after these giants.

Perhaps the case is less complex and this could be brought earlier? Or there were some really damning things in discovery proving other justifications Apple has (security, performance, etc) are secondary to punishing competitors products.

The case for consumer harm is much more vague than what other firms are doing in my view. iMessage incompatibility with Android group texts is going to be remedied and maybe deserves a slap on the wrist.

tarsinge2• 2 years ago

The Google monopoly seems way worst and straightforward to me. Why it isn’t addressed first and why does everyone seemingly ignore them and obsess with Apple is a mystery to me.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

It has been already pursued and is being addressed. There's just a lot less divisiveness/attention in such cases:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

https://apnews.com/article/google-android-play-store-apps-an...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-wraps-up-antitrust-case-aga...

Note in some of these were chased even though Google has been less restrictive than Apple (e.g. on the Play Store payment case Google has always allowed 3rd party app stores on Android).

HDThoreaun4• 2 years ago

The downsides to the apple monopoly are much more straightforward. "Apples iMessage policy lead to this kid being bullied and because of that they did x" is a much easier sell than whatever sound bite you can come up with about google.

mcfedr7• 2 years ago

It's just incomparable.

Sms - android choose 100 apps that can deal with SMS, iOS - one app, no one else can touch SMS

Phone - same

Wallet - any app can be a payment wallet, my own bank, privat24 has this functionality - iOS, only Apple can use NFC

Photos - only iCloud can sync them

The list goes on

lumb632• 2 years ago

What rubs me the wrong way about the Apple monopoly case(s?) is they sound to me like “we (the people) don’t want to actually solve the problem by through the totally-viable free market approach; we instead feel that we are owed some say in how this company chooses to develop its products; please strongarm them through legal means that don’t really apply, to make that a reality”.

People who are interested in Apple’s “walled garden” can buy iPhones. People who aren’t, can choose not to. Nobody is making people buy iPhones. Nobody is making people buy Androids either. Any company which thinks there is a sufficient market to be had in providing an alternative platform that does not use a walled garden approach can develop the hardware and software which would allow their customers a more open platform. There is absolutely nothing stopping this from happening today. The failure of companies and individuals to do so proves to me that nobody cares enough about this to take real action.

Contrast this with real trusts of days past like Standard Oil. If someone developed a competing company, they could undercut competitors by selling oil at a loss long enough to drive anyone else out of business. What would the parallel be in this universe? If someone developed a new smartphone, there is nothing in Apple’s walled garden approach that would prohibit that platform from taking off.

IMO when consumers buy products, they are entitled to the product they knowingly bought, not the product that they want.

kmeisthax8• 2 years ago

The free market approach went out the window when we decided software was copyrightable and DRM unlock tools are illegal. Otherwise Epic would just release a jailbreak that installed Epic Games Store and we'd be done with it.

mudil• 2 years ago

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

kmeisthax8• 2 years ago

The problem is that private institutions can become their own mini-governments. Reagan denied this, but his quite could equally apply to Apple or Google as it did to, say, late-70s US government.

bilekas• 2 years ago

I know its a small thing, but isn't the phrase "an iPhone monopoly" a bit redundant ?

I surely can't say shame on Mars for having a "A CocaCola monopoly" ?

From established writers at NYT, I suspect I am wrong, but it seems a weird expression.

airstrike7• 2 years ago

From established writers who are, perhaps, first solving for clicks rather than accuracy or journalistic integrity.

trothamel4• 2 years ago

I don't believe it is. I think we'd be upset if Tesla cars could only charge at Telsa charger (that charged 30% over the prices of electric supply). Using their position in phone sales to gain a monopolist position over apps and IAP feels wrong.

endisneigh12• 2 years ago

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.

In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device?

Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Why don’t people buy those?

The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives. It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay. Valid, but does it require legislation? Buy another car.

FWIW I would love if the government made it so all devices should have an option to run any of your arbitrary code.

globular-toast4• 2 years ago

trivial to not buy Apple products

Irrelevant. Monopoly doesn't mean coercing people into the market.

easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products

It's not only not easy, it's not possible. Your mistake is thinking of phones as computers. They are not computers, at least not to the vast majority of users. They are devices that connect to other compatible devices to do telecommunications. It's just like if plain old telephones ran a proprietary protocol and only one vendor could make them.

endisneigh12• 2 years ago

Let’s hear some examples? Even things like iMessage have fallback to SMS, not to mention dozens of alternatives that work on android, iOS and more. What’s the problem?

dataflow• 2 years ago

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products... Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem?

Is it trivial to move to alternatives once you've already bought said Apple products?

endisneigh12• 2 years ago

I bought a pixel and there was a process that transferred everything over. Not sure how much easier it can be.

sdfhbdf• 2 years ago

1. That’s moving goalposts.

2. It is fairly trivial to move, there are dedicated apps for that for iOS->Android and macOS is still kind of BSD so it’s very compatible.

bardak2• 2 years ago

The most compelling argument I can see is that due to its market share businesses cannot avoid dealing with the app store and it's fees.

endisneigh12• 2 years ago

But they can though, there are plenty of apps that are android exclusive.

__Joker• 2 years ago

Can a argument be made that by not supporting other software on their platform, essentially platform is inhibiting competition, which hinders true price discovery and customer loses ? Like if cars don't allow other FSD on their platform, what choice does the customer has.

visarga3• 2 years ago

Yeah, cars should totally allow third party FSD integrations, provided they are certified to be safe. We can't risk pedestrians getting hurt just so we can have more app choices.

But side-loading apps or having an alternative App Store only exposes you to liability, not other people. So it's not the same thing. We should be free on our own risk.

beeboobaa310• 2 years ago

easy to make alternatives to Apple products

Please, go do it. You'll be very rich very quick and I'll eagerly buy your products once you succeed.

Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.

endisneigh12• 2 years ago

The Pixel 8 pro has superior battery life and camera to the iPhone 15. And that’s to say nothing of OnePlus or Samsung.

sekai• 2 years ago

Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.

They really don't. iPhone is a status symbol, especially for the new up-and-coming consumers (teens)

multimoon7• 2 years ago

This is how the free market is intended to work. This opens up the range for several android phones (which have a near split in the US, and a majority globally last I recall) to offer better hardware.

Modern Samsung phones are very good. You’re asserting that Apple should be punished purely because they make good hardware and are successful - and if their hardware wasn’t good and competitive then you wouldn’t care.

Part of why I have Apple devices as a tech enthusiast is the good software and the ecosystem that comes with it.

Would I like to run an IDE and code on an iPad? Absolutely. But I’d rather have the iPad than the android tablet.

samatman17• 2 years ago

"Easy" means there are no barriers to entry, not that it's trivial to make a good product.

In particular, there are no barriers to entry imposed by Apple. For any product Apple sell, there are numerous competing products in the same category. Apple's versions uniformly dominate third party rankings of these products, but all that means is that they're good at what they do.

dmitrygr4• 2 years ago

My theory: the problem is iCloud encryption at rest. The solution is to hang this over Apple until they relent.

ergonaught• 2 years ago

This is basically the only actual reason for the suit.

cyberlurker2• 2 years ago

If that were the case, why wouldn’t Apple come out and say this is what is happening?

sedivy943• 2 years ago

I agree with this wholeheartedly. The USA is a surveillance state and Apple’s security posture combined with its market share is a considerable hindrance. The arguments against anti-competitive and consumer-hostile mechanisms ad nauseam pale in comparison to this. I very much want to see real numbers, perhaps survey data, supporting the narrative that customers are locked in, unhappy with their experience, or otherwise underserved by Apple. Because IRL, I see nothing but happy customers.

afavour6• 2 years ago

I fear we're going to see this argument in absolutely every thread on this topic for the next few years and it's going to be argued ad nauseam. "You can just buy an Android phone" barely scratches the surface of the arguments being made.

For example (given the EU gives great context to this): Apple owns and maintains the only App Store that's allowed on the iOS platform. So they have a monopoly on the iOS app market. Is that right and fair? I'm sure plenty will read that want to reply "yes of course it's fair, Apple can do what they want with their own platform" but that's your opinion. Controlled app stores are a dramatic shift from the way software used to be distributed and as a society/whatever we've never actually had a discussion about it. It just happened.

The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why?

I'd argue the government seems to want to make it illegal for a tight experience to be the only experience available. And it's not hard to see the argument for why: competition is good. Multiple app stores or whatever would open up the market, Apple would have to make the case for why they should get 15/30% of an app developer's revenue. They might be able to make that case very easily, they might not. But a monopoly means they don't even have to try.

IMO talking solely about Apple and/or arguing about whether they have a "monopoly" isn't going to be that effective (sorry DOJ). The reality is that we live in a world that requires us to be connected, that connection is currently controlled almost exclusively by two tech giants to the extent that even a slightly smaller tech giant, Microsoft, utterly failed in launching a competitive third platform. Is this duopoly good for us as a society? Is it what we actually want? It's fair to at least be asking the question.

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

The 0.01% who hate apple anyway can't live without the need to turn the iphone into an android because it's what's good for the children (users). It's really amazing the lengths folks talk about how superior android on these threads and apple is the root of all evil.

The other 99.9% could care less and I predict they will be unhappy with the results of forced-enshitification of iOS.

pornel2• 2 years ago

Apple + Google form a duopoly. Apple has locked down iOS to let them do whatever they want and overcharge as much as they like, and Google has no incentive to be any better, because there's no serious 3rd contender*.

For typical users not buying Apple means having to compromise on privacy with Google, which isn't a great option either. Both are trying their best to create vendor lock-in and make it hard for users to leave.

From developer perspective not having access to iOS users is a major problem. Apple inserts themselves between users and developers, even where neither users nor developers want it. Users and devs have no bargaining power there, because Play Store does the same, and boycotting both stores has a bunch of downsides for users and devs.

*) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine, but that's not mainstream enough to make Apple and Google worried, especially that Google has created its certification program and proprietary PlayStore Services to make degoogling phones difficult.

mrcwinn• 2 years ago

It's an interesting perspective, but as I understand this case, the case is not interested in a developer's bargaining power against their distributor. The case is interested in the impact on consumers (fewer choices, higher prices). There's certainly no argument to make that consumers lack a variety of apps and app features.

I care about you as a developer, but I'm not sure this case does. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong.

fsflover6• 2 years ago

*) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine

As you explained yourself, it's not a real alternative, because it relies on Google itself, who can always decide to break it. A real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. And yes, they are very niche and not easy to make.

majani• 2 years ago

Google has a huge incentive to compete because Apple has 50% of the US market, which is the most consequential market in the world

nox1015• 2 years ago

Your mobile device is a gateway to much of the world. You seem to think it would be okay for a car manufacture to make it impossible to use your car except to drive to business that pay the car maker 30% of every purchase. I'm guessing you'll say people should be able to opt into such a car if they want but if that car has 60% of the market now it's effectively influencing the entire economy. Prices of groceries are 30% higher. Prices of clothing are 30% higher. Any company who wants people to come to their store are forced to sign up to pay the car company 30% or else they won't have access to 60% of the population.

Can you see the issue now? It doesn't matter that people could by other cars. It matters that Apple's market is so large that its influence is too big to be left as is.

sedivy943• 2 years ago

Poor analogy. This is already an issue with servicing automobiles. Overly-complicated construction and proprietary tools that can only be acquired by licensed dealerships. Read: Audi, Mercedes-Benz.

frabcus• 2 years ago

Just a note that it is more like prices are 42% higher - because the 30% is a cut off gross, and 100 / 70 = 1.4287

nomercy400• 2 years ago

The question is, can you buy a car from a different manufacturer? When it comes to cars, yes you can.

Is apple a monopoly? Probably not, because you can also switch to android. Does Apple have a large enough share of the market to influence the market? Likely, which is why the EU has DSA and DMA now.

diego_sandoval• 2 years ago

I'd say that is the problem of the people that choose to buy such a stupid car, not of the one selling it, or of the people that choose not to buy it.

bb86754• 2 years ago

If you're genuinely interested in this below are a couple things you could read to help get some background. Its actually a pretty fascinating history.

Judging by your phrasing, your interpretation of antitrust stems from Robert Bork and has been the mainstream thought for a long time. Read The Antitrust Paradox by him to see how we got here and why the courts have acted how they have for the past 40 years.

The current chair of the FTC, Lina Khan, was actually an academic prior to working for the government and has a long paper trail of how she interprets the law. In short (and extremely oversimplified), it modernizes the Brandeis interpretation that bigness is bad for society in general, regardless of consumer pricing. EX: If Apple were a country its GDP would surpass the GDPs of all but four nations. They argue this is bad flat out.

Can't say it was the only cause, but Khan's paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox - note the reference to Bork's book - is partially what resparked a renewed interest in antitrust for the modern era if you want to check it out.

dgellow2• 2 years ago

You could read the linked document and see for yourself what they think the problem is

Draiken6• 2 years ago

If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?

IMO it's clear that without abusing its position, we would actually have competition for all of the bundled services from Apple.

But this is capitalism. The ultimate goal is always monopoly, so they'll keep chasing that by whatever means necessary.

easy to make alternatives to Apple products

What? This is plain false. Entering this market is extremely expensive and hard to do. The duopoly is there for a reason. Even giants like Microsoft tried to enter it and couldn't.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?

iOS today regularly updates with improvements across the full software stack, up to the Apple apps themselves. Sometimes these changes are major. In the world the justice department is asking for, big changes to —for example, Messages app— would have to be coordinated with every app developer in that category. Changes would takes much, much longer, and in many cases would have to be watered down.

skeaker24• 2 years ago

Their platform is big enough that it affects the market even if you never use their products. Idiotic decisions that they make can ooze into other unrelated products in order to compete with them. Try buying a flagship Android with a microSD slot and a headphone jack. Now recall where the trend of eliminating those two things came from. The average consumer is not very keen to these things. They see the biggest player, Apple, gut a feature and lie to them about it being a good thing, and they will believe it. Now to recapture the average consumer the other players in the market have to adhere to those changes.

stale20025• 2 years ago

The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives.
Buy another car.

That argument goes both ways.

Once Apple is forced by law to allow other app stores, then you are free to continue to just use the Apple app store.

Just don't install other app stores. It is even more trivial to do that. So please don't complain about other app stores in the future, as your own exact argument refutes it.

akira25013• 2 years ago

In lieu of this what is the problem?

You assertions are immaterial to the fact that they are breaking the law. Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.

You're also viewing this exclusively through the lens of the "consumer" experience while fully ignoring the effects on the "labor" and "supplier" market.

The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience

Is there some evidence that a monopoly is absolutely required to have a "tight experience?"

CubsFan1060• 2 years ago

Your first sentence is incorrect. Monopolies are not illegal.

From the press conference this morning: "It is not illegal to hold a monopoly, Garland said. "

"That may sound counterintuitive in a case intended to fight monopolies. But under US antitrust law, it is only illegal when a monopolist resorts to anticompetitive tactics, or harms competition, in an effort to maintain that monopoly."

https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/doj-apple-antitrust-l...

nodamage3• 2 years ago

Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.

You are mistaken.

Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

cush15• 2 years ago

This has absolutely nothing to do with consumer choice. Apple device popularity among consumers has created a market of apps and technology that exists. That market is larger than the GDP of most countries. It is governed by Apple’s policies, and those policies are anti-competitive against companies wishing to participate in that market.

Spotify, just by virtue of the fact that someone installs their app, must pay Apple 30% of their revenue. Imagine trying to compete in a market where you have to pay your largest direct competitor 30%… And on top of all that, Apple keeps the internal fancy APIs all to themselves. It’s insane this hasn’t come sooner

cush15• 2 years ago

Apple and Tesla aren’t competing in the same market

It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay

It would be like that if the Tesla dash App Store somehow generated $1.1T annual revenue while taking 30% off the top of third party app manufacturers, while using that revenue and their own competitive advantage (not paying 30%) to grow and erode secondary markets via their own first party apps

endisneigh12• 2 years ago

Why does the percent taken matter? How much is appropriate? Ultimately they’re transparent about the fee, the choice is the developers.

In any case there should be a way to put your phone into some insecure mode and then you can explicitly download any app you want, yes.

But about Tesla - if you could make money, lots of money, selling Tesla dash apps, who cares if they take 30%? The alternative is today, you don’t really make anything at all.

zmmmmm4• 2 years ago

You seem to totally misunderstand the whole concept of what the competition law is about.

It's not about whether people can choose not to buy an iPhone, really at all. It's about once they do choose iPhone, is Apple unfairly using their control of the platform to influence whether they choose Apple's product vs a competitor for future things they buy.

edvinbesic2• 2 years ago

Seems to me that if I already own an Android device and am in the market for a tablet, I would probably choose Android again because a lot of the apps that I have bought & paid for include a tablet version as well. Not sure if most would consider that anti-competitive.

aurareturn4• 2 years ago

I just bought Garmin GPS Watch. I'm appalled that it only let's me download apps from the Garmin watch app store. It's unfair that I can only install Garmin's OS on it. I bought the watch. I should be able to do anything I want to it. I need Garmin's software engineers to develop open solutions so that anyone can do anything on the watches they sell.

Do you see what the problem is with the above statement? How far does the government go? Shouldn't all products (electronic or not) be "open" if Apple loses?

jb19912• 2 years ago

easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products

For some users, this isn't true. More thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39784413

mhh__• 2 years ago

If Apple buy up all the fab capacity how exactly can you make yourself (with a spare billion dollars) an iPhone?

browningstreet3• 2 years ago

For every thing that the DOJ is complaining about there’s a Google version: Chat, Wallet, Auto, Pixel, etc.

This suit reminds me of the phrase, “I’ve been convicted by a jury of my peers… who couldn’t get out of jury duty.”

Apple is under the gun because their main competitors (at least Google and Samsung) aren’t as good / successful, even when they have greater market shares.

Also, Android is.. ahem.. “open source”.

alt22715• 2 years ago

The difference is that the underlying protocols in those android apps are open, and so can be communicated with by any other app that anyone chooses to write an app.

Apples apps are built on top of proprietary protocols which they do not allow anyone else to use, and so there are lots of features and functionality that can only be used by Apple giving them the edge over anybody else.

015a• 2 years ago

It may be trivial for a consumer to buy an Android phone; it is not trivial for a developer to decide to not support iOS or Safari.

shortsunblack• 2 years ago

The problem is monopolization of markets that are typically contestable. All computers are Turing machines and all the code is just assembly. There is zero technical rationale for the restrictions Apple imposes. And the assumption in free market capitalism is that of competition. In tech world this means adversarial interoperability. Which, by the fun fact, is how every current Big Tech company grew. Facebook used to interoperate with MySpace in dislike of MySpace in a manner that today we would even categorize as infringing on IP laws. Adversarial interoperability is demonstrably beneficial for the user. When a company implements social and technical barriers to it, the state has all the right to reign in such behaviour in the benefit of markets being contestable.

dugite-code• 2 years ago

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.

Swap the name Apple with Microsoft and you might see a different perspective. Microsoft was beaten over the head for anti-competitive practices with browsers back in the day and Apple is behaving no different. It's easily arguable that they are behaving much worse in multiple aspects to what Microsoft was up to.

eigenspace3• 2 years ago

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products

While it is easy to not buy Apple products, I think the thing that often gets missed is that once someone is significantly invested in Apple's ecosystem, getting out of that ecosystem is highly disruptive and difficult.

For example, suppose you are a person who for historical reasons owns a MacBook, and iPad, and an iPhone, and a large chunk of your friends group also has those. The default choice then for you to use a cloud storage solution is Apple's iCloud Drive. The default choice for you to store and share photos is Apple's Photos App. The default choice for you to message your friends is the iMessage App. The default way for you to store passwords is Apple's Keychain Manager.

If you then decide "you know what, I'm fed up with Apple, I'm going to buy an Android", suddenly your cloud storage solution, your photo storage and syncing solution, your messaging solution, and your password management solution are all not supported, so you not only need to find an alternative on your new device, but you also have to do so on all your other devices if you want your phone to be in sync with them. This is a really high friction environment, and makes it so that a lot of people feel trapped in Apple's ecosystem.

So you can be a person who would not choose to buy Apple products today if you were starting from scratch, but you can feel compelled to continue buying them because Apple has made it so that switching in the future is very inconvenient and impacts all your other devices. It's specifically people in this situation who are being taken advantage of by Apple and why Apple's practices are labelled as monopolistic.

Apple spent a long time acquiring customers and coaxing them into their walled garden, and now they're switching tactics to milking those customers now that it's inconvenient for them to leave the walled garden.

kjkjadksj8• 2 years ago

There is no hand forcing you to be so overleveraged in apples products.

Aerbil313• 2 years ago

There are android phones that are superior to iPhones

Sorry to report this is not true for my grandparents, father, mother, brother and sister and in fact my entire extended family. iOS is far easier to use by a thousand miles. Just some anecdata.

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

I think there's a large contingent of people who want more access and choice with apps and services on their iOS devices.

And frankly, that's what Android is for. Just go get a Samsung Galaxy.

EDIT: You can downvote it all you want, but part of the appeal of iOS devices is that you have your workable service for the device and there's no real thought to be put into choosing that service. Not everyone wants different app stores, and on the software side of things, it adds a very thick layer of complexity and headaches, especially if you're helping, I don't know, your 64-year-old mother with her iPhone.

bdcravens3• 2 years ago

A "simple" device isn't mutually exclusive with a configurable device. Just put it inside of the Settings app already available on the phone your mother already has. If she doesn't need it, she'll never see it.

I'd argue that the default experience for some is still too complicated; that's why Apple has Assistive Access, which lets you dumb it down:

https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...

trynumber9• 2 years ago

Good, computers should not be locked down by trillion dollar companies.

The problem with having the App Store is there is still no opt out (in the US). It works on Mac OS; there's no technical reason for them to avoid giving the user choice. It's all about capturing and holding an entire market.

monkeydust• 2 years ago

What kind of payout range is being anticipated here for settlement? Also remind me, where does all that money go exactly? ... could result in a massive redistribution of wealth... we had the banks now its big tech

patwolf• 2 years ago

By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field, where it grants its own products and services access to core features that it denies rivals.

I once worked on a large enterprise platform. We developed our own applications for the platform, and other third parties developed applications for the platform. We had to regularly scan our code to make sure we weren't inadvertently using internal or non-documented APIs that weren't available to third parties.

I always assumed this was related to some anti-trust lawsuit, but it always boggled my mind that Apple never seemed to worry about that. Remember the brazenness in which they booted third-party screen time and parental control apps from the app store after the introduction of Screen Time.

rgovostes• 2 years ago

Remember the brazenness in which they booted third-party screen time and parental control apps from the app store after the introduction of Screen Time.

You misremember. Apple sherlocked RescueTime and brought it to iOS, where no such app existed because the platform security model prevents an app from snooping on other apps and websites. Developers were upset that Apple didn't give them access to the same functionality; Apple eventually released an API (but it doesn't look like RescueTime uses it, even today).

Workaccount211• 2 years ago

iMessage is the most egregious monopolistic tool in Apple's garden.

If the DOJ accomplishes nothing else besides forcing Apple to open up iMessage, it will be a victory.

The lock-in of having functional communication with your friends and family is insane. Take that away and it becomes almost a no-brainier for people to consider competing devices.

And no, nobody with an iPhone is interested in switching to whatever messaging app you beg them to use, just so they can message you.

LargeWu• 2 years ago

It already works with SMS, though. You can choose to use 3rd party apps like WhatsApp. I fail to see how users are meaningfully "locked-in" any more than an android

supergeek1334• 2 years ago

Your average iphone user has no idea what this is.

All the know is "android makes the bubbles green and iMessage doesn't work as well with them, or at all".

pradn• 2 years ago

Teens get bullied if they show up as green bubbles in group chats. I've had people tell me they wouldn't want to show up as green bubbles to potential romantic partners. The iMessage lock-in effects are real.

AlexandrB9• 2 years ago

I totally don't get this perspective. There are so many competing messaging platforms and they all work reasonably well on iOS. Because my various family and friend groups use different messaging apps I use all the following: WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, iMessage, Viber, and once in a while Facebook Messenger. I would say iMessage is kind of middle of the pack here. If I had to pick a favourite it's probably WhatsApp, but unfortunately it's owned by Meta - so I try to use Signal whenever I can. What's so special about iMessage that people think it's a monopolistic tool?

Workaccount211• 2 years ago

Its the default iPhone messenger and it works really well when messaging your friends and family, who all also have iphones because it works really well when messaging your friends and family.

HN chronically forgets that the average american cell phone user might know what iMessage actually is. Nevermind even having the faintest idea what a WhatsApp is. Or ever even heard of signal.

supergeek1334• 2 years ago

Are your various friends/family all tech-y people?

My "normal" friends and family are majority iPhone users. I'm Android.

I "literally ruin" their group texts. I've seen people actually reject relationships because they don't date people with "green bubbles".

Don't even get me started about work group texts.

I know restaurants where some of the servers have group iMessage chats with customers for early notification about nightly specials, Android users literally can't be added.

Likely not maliciously, but this has created almost a "second/lower class" of phone users that encompasses ~50% of the country.

npteljes4• 2 years ago

There are so many competing messaging platforms and they all work reasonably well on iOS

And I'd love to have all of them opened up.

jonwinstanley3• 2 years ago

How is this a monopoly though? Everyone is free to move their family to WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Facebook messenger...

Workaccount211• 2 years ago

Sure, just set up the seminar to convince people to stop using what already works great so that they can include just you in their group messaging.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

If the DOJ accomplishes nothing else besides forcing Apple to open up iMessage, it will be a victory.

Couldn't Apple just make the shittiest Android iMessage client anyone could ever imaging and the go "See, there it is, nobody wants it"

My take is that Apple has engineered iMessage in such a way that if anyone could just use it, then Apple would be stuck with a massive bill for running the infrastructure, without any benefits. They could in theory charge people a small amount to cover the cost, but that would also just keep people of the platform. WhatsApp made next to nothing when they attempted to charge people and Signal rely on donations. There's no way to push a for-pay messaging app.

iMessage being Apple only isn't what keeps me from buying an Android phone (Google manages to do that all by themselves). I already have three messaging apps on my phone, and four on my laptop, there's plenty of choice on that front.

_ea1k• 2 years ago

Agreed. I remember seeing a YT review of the camera on the S23U and really raving about it.

Then he said that he wouldn't use it, because his family and friends won't let him... said they practically staged an "intervention" last time he used a device without imessage.

This wasn't a small YouTuber. Among teens, the pressure is even more real. imessage is being used to drive adoption in a really bizarre way.

anonymouse0084• 2 years ago

There are too many quotes 'from Apple management' in the compliant that need context. Something doesn't add up.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...

Either that, or Apple's management has become truly rotten. That would be the saddest realization.

alex_suzuki3• 2 years ago

I started reading it but the line spacing is just so infuriating…

dkobia• 2 years ago

Apple getting sued in the US and EU is really about finding an equilibrium between 3 stakeholders - Apple, Users & Developers. The status quo favors Apple and Users. Developers led by companies like Epic just want a bigger piece of the pie. That's it.

screamingninja8• 2 years ago

How does it favor the users?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/

madeofpalk7• 2 years ago

The status quo does not favor users.

How does it favor users that you cannot sign up for Netflix on iOS?

tempnow987• 2 years ago

It's weird that the focus is so heavily on businesses and alleged harms to businesses (to ie, scam customers with hard to cancel renewals).

One reason folks LIKE apple is because apple has the market power to do things that yes - hurt other businesses but that make the consumer experience better.

When I get my iphone it's not loaded with carrier crap. Seriously, android you might be getting tons of carrier junk on your phone.

When I go to cancel a subscription its super easy. Apple even REMINDS me to cancel if I delete an app with a subscription tied to it (ie, that renews annually). They also notify me in ADVANCE of renewals to let me cancel.

Trial offers with higher renewing rates, the renewal rate is at the same font size and right in the payment acknowledgement for any trials.

And the list goes on.

Look at this against the lack of enforcement against totally blatant scams (billions) from the elderly. Total ripoffs and dark patterns - unconcealable subscriptions etc etc. Of all the consumer harm - apple should be way way way down on the list.

oliv__• 2 years ago

I don't get it.

You build a successful product that people love, gain an important position in a market you basically created, offer a closed marketplace for apps to further provide value to your core product, again this is a resounding success and people vote with their $$$ to subsidize your growth.

In the meantime, your competitor comes up with their own product and marketplace. Consumers are able to freely choose between both.

Now your company is forced by the gov to integrate your products with the competition's inferior marketplace. Why? How is this not overreach?

EDIT: easy to downvote, why don't you give me answers instead

bardak2• 2 years ago

It looks like the DOJ doesn't believe that the closed marketplace doesn't add value to consumers or businesses but only to Apple themselves.

I think the crux of the DOJs argument is that apple is using their dominate marketshare to rent seek and create artificial restrictions preventing competition with their own products.

inasio2• 2 years ago

I'm sure there's an argument to justify making it super complicated to move your Whatsapp content from IPhone to Android, but at the time I was having to dump the Whatsapp DB to recover the last messages from a dead relative it sure seemed like a convenient way to encourage people to stick around.

londons_explore3• 2 years ago

Whatsapp themselves could easily solve this if they wanted... Just add a "backup to file" button in settings. Then add a "restore from file" option in Android.

Quite why they don't do this is a mystery to me - if a user loses all their chats in a phone migration, they're more likely to start using another messaging app.

inasio2• 2 years ago

I don't think Whatsapp gained anything by preventing this, if anything they gave people a little momentum to switching to another app. The one that clearly benefited was Apple, and I don't thing Whatsapp/Meta did it just to be nice.

toast06• 2 years ago

Edit: Actually looks you can do iPhone to Android transfer now: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1295296267926284 or Android to iPhone https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350

Original response below:

That's really a WhatsApp product issue, not an OS issue. There's some hints of an OS issue, because Android lets WA put a backup file on the 'sd card' that you can transfer across to a new (Android) phone, and iOS doesn't (or didn't), and with cloud backups the different OSes both tie into their own clouds.

But the main issue is the WA iOS app and the WA Android app have different schemas for their on device database, which makes it not so easy to move. Maybe that has changed since I stopped working there, but that was the biggest issue with a switch platforms feature that I was aware of. It's a lot of coordination for a feature that most users are never going to use, and if they do use, likely aren't going to use it more than once. When I recently got a new Android, I did see there's a new transfer data flow for at least Android to Android, so maybe there's hope for cross OS data exchange in the future? It's also helpful that there's only two relevant platforms now, instead of 7 (s40, s60, blackberry, blackberry 10, windows phone are all dead)

tssge2• 2 years ago

Yeah the feature exists on paper at least, but not in principle from my experience.

I switched to iPhone 15 Pro recently from Android and after trying to import my data from Android couple of times and iOS failing to import WhatsApp specifically, I had to resort to buying third party software to perform the message transfer via a Windows laptop.

Bear in mind the import process took like 3 hours each time and I had to keep both phones close to each other, couldn't use them while importing and had to keep power supplied to them.

After about 10 hours of trying, I gave in and put 100$ towards proper third party software to transfer my messages. This is ridiculous, as I have Google Drive on my iPhone with my WhatsApp backups from my old phone, however for one reason or another these backups cannot be utilised by WhatsApp on iOS.

Moving between two Android phones "it just works".

charrondev• 2 years ago

I recently tried to migrate my Grandmothers Galaxy S21 phone to an iPhone and we had to return the iPhone because try as I might I could not get get her 30000 text messages (including 1000s of images and messages from people that are now dead) to transfer over intact.

The built in services transfer failed as did third party software.

Honestly I can’t tell you much about transferring the other way, but interoperability is definitely not seamless in this respect.

thxcvs• 2 years ago

Posting anonymously. I worked on an app where Apple gave us special access to private APIs allow listed by the app ID and told us to keep it secret. This access gave the select few apps that got it a huge advantage in performance. I don't want to share too much details at the risk of identifying the app and getting it revoked.

kstrauser8• 2 years ago

Tim Cook came to my house and made my Wi-Fi faster.

coding123• 2 years ago

Probably should take down the food giants first.

bdcravens3• 2 years ago

Not mutually exclusive.

zer0zzz• 2 years ago

While I hate losing the feeling that the AppStore and iOS security policy make my device less at risk I sure am tired of not having chromium and Fortnite on my iPad. I’m also torn on how the current locked down state of affairs is the only thing keeping chromium and v8 from achieving 100% market share.

abhayhegde2• 2 years ago

I understand the evil practices of Apple to lock you up in their walled garden such as iMessage, easy sync between the devices etc. But, ultimately, wouldn't the choice of buying those products in the consumer's hand?

baal80spam• 2 years ago

Of course it would - last I checked noone holds people at gunpoint saying "BUY THIS".

Workaccount211• 2 years ago

Generally in the US, if you want to participate in friends and family group messages, it's either iPhone or be left out.

darkwizard423• 2 years ago

Perhaps societal customs should change instead of infringing on the business practices (which don't violate a law).

The anticompetitive preference for internal apps though is pretty bad and I think Apple should be nailed on that, but they shouldn't be punished for creating a "better" (in quotes because I think Android is on the better standard for messaging) messaging experience.

multimoon7• 2 years ago

That doesn’t sound like something that’s against the law. A company shouldn’t be punished based on their success, but if they violate a law or not.

choxi2• 2 years ago

There are dozens of other popular (group) messaging apps

abhayhegde2• 2 years ago

This is hideous though. Why should someone's preference for a mobile phone, chosen for their convenience, hinder them from texting those they care about?

thomasahle4• 2 years ago

This is my experience too. Either iPhone or find non-american friends.

micromacrofoot5• 2 years ago

The US should outright copy EU privacy and other related laws when it comes to big tech companies where possible, it's embarrassing how much we're lagging behind on this.

brink2• 2 years ago

Apple frustrates the hell out of me with their deceptive tactics to create walled gardens while pretending not to. They feign ignorance to keep you stuck and create the illusion of open doors out of their walled garden that are actually broken and they have no interest in fixing.

I've been paying for iCloud for my wife's iphone for the last several months because of how difficult Apple makes it for us to export our photos. Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook, exporting them off of the website is nearly impossible if you have over 1k photos.. meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks. In my experience, it feels like Apple makes getting out of their walled garden as difficult as legally possible.

londons_explore3• 2 years ago

Do they have a GDPR-like process where you can just export a .zip file of all your data?

mruszczyk2• 2 years ago

There is an option to request a copy of your data at: https://privacy.apple.com/

kstrauser8• 2 years ago

I exported my 27,000 photos to my Synology as a backup. There's not an inherent limit that makes what you're asking impossible.

applied_heat• 2 years ago

What did you use to do that?

rubatuga• 2 years ago

Not the answer you want but with an iPhone backup you can extract all the images .

lawgimenez• 2 years ago

I exported all my iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos. https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?hl=en

teeray• 2 years ago

I just want the auto-sync experience of iCloud photos to my own NAS. Paying Apple $2.99/mo forever just so I can have an offsite backup of my photos is so obnoxious.

jcurbo• 2 years ago

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... works great for me to do this.

mcfedr7• 2 years ago

I use photo sync for this, which was a one off payment. Of course you have to trigger it manually every few days because only Apple apps can actually work on iOS

Steltek2• 2 years ago

Sorry this isn't a helpful answer but over in Android-land, Syncthing does exactly this for me right now. I paired Syncthing with a script that pushes any new photos to a self-hosted gallery. It's as fast if not faster than Google Photos and totally independent of any Google ecosystem. Add another offsite Syncthing machine and now you have a magical offsite backup.

nirav722• 2 years ago

Take a look at icloudpd. I’ve been running it as a container for couple of years now and it’s been sync’ing photos down from my iphone to my NAS.

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

hylaride• 2 years ago

Some googling would find you several ways to do this (directly on the phone to external storage is possible, but yeah selecting all the photos on the iphone sucks as you have to click one and scroll-select them all): https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph480caa1f3/io...

The easiest way is to export them via photos for mac.

If you don't have a mac, then there's ways to get the photos on a PC: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201302#importpc

You can also setup icloud on windows and download them, then move them wherever. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108994

You can also connect the phone direct to PC and download them.

So it's not nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook.

fundad3• 2 years ago

I feel like “lock-in” means any reason they buy something

yolo30002• 2 years ago

If you have a Mac the easiest is to use the Image Capture app, which comes preinstalled. A lot better than the Photos app, in my experience.

samatman17• 2 years ago

It's amusing how often you see this sort of substantive claim which can be trivially disproven.

"Apple operates a walled garden! I can't get my photos out of iCloud!" [half a dozen ways to get the photos off the phone are proffered] "Well. Nevertheless!"

kstrauser8• 2 years ago

True. It's one thing to say "I can't do a thing", and another to say "thing can't be done".

mcfedr7• 2 years ago

But none of them work like iCloud. No one but Apple is allowed to make an app that reliably ships your photos to the cloud.

_23sd• 2 years ago

It is as much about perception and convenience as anything else. When I talk about smartphones with non-technical people, the top complaint (against both Apple and Google) is that they try to trap customers by making it hard to move your stuff from iOS to Android or vice versa. They're running into issues for different reasons (forgotten passwords, data migration tool not getting everything) but it's fundamentally the same complaint: why does this require some specific procedure instead of just working the way I expect it to work? This may just be the grumpy nerd in me talking, but all of this would be a lot easier if mobile apps dealing with interchangeable things like photos and text saved user data to files instead of inscrutable databases by default.

nouryqt2• 2 years ago

If you're on linux I can only recommend ifuse with the libimobiledevice package. I followed the guide on the arch wiki[0] and could simply mount my iPhone to a directory[1] and then just drag and drop them over. For some reason there were 1000 pictures per folder so I had a few different folders, but otherwise it was super simple.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Manual_mounting

badrequest3• 2 years ago

This is like that comment on the launch post for Dropbox all over again.

uticus• 2 years ago

Can also testify to this, also works for transferring files to the device from Linux if app supports (ref VLC, etc). However, the speed is mind-numbingly slow.

Faster and easier to just sync with iCloud, then download from iCloud.

So, why not just vote with my wallet, and get a device that either is more friendly to 3rd party software interaction or simply allows saving to a movable SD card? Because overall things work very smoothly, and it is easy to find and manage settings. These things balance out well against the frustrations, especially when I know from experience that non-Apple devices will present their own frustrations.

To be fair, the philosophical/theoretical/economic foundations of antitrust legislation confuse me. This has not been helped by media bites a la NYT. Maybe if I had months and years of free time and good material I could form a worthy opinion. But for now, I just have trouble seeing how statements like this from OP are contradictory: "The company says this makes its iPhones more secure than other smartphones. But app developers and rival device makers say Apple uses its power to crush competition."

0x38B• 2 years ago

I connect and disconnect my iPhone often, so I prefer Gnome's default file manager Nautilus with gvfs-afc and or gvfs-gphoto2 (1).

My devices show up when I plug them in and I can see all my apps that expose storage in Apple's Files, with accompanying icons (2). Device folders like Downloads are off limits, though (3).

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Using_a_graphical_file_...

2: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/Gnome-Nautilus-iPhone.png

3: This entails much pointless duplication of files on the iPhone just to be able to see them from my PC. Apple would prefer, no doubt, that I use AirDrop or iCloud. But my Linux laptop means staying out of Apple's walled garden.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

I simply installed Google Photos app and now every single iphone photo is automatically synced to my google account.

Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

mrtksn• 2 years ago

Do you have to open the Google Photos app to sync or you set it and forget it, like take a photo and in a few moments its available everywhere?

kelnos12• 2 years ago

I do that as well (Android user, so it's pretty much the default), but aside from not having to pay Google, there isn't a meaningful difference here: it's just trading one company's propriety cloud backup for another's.

rpmisms3• 2 years ago

a) this is a great solution, and b) I caught that reference

anon3738394• 2 years ago

I believe Google Photos visibly downgrades the quality of your images, so it is not a viable option if you care about preserving the originals.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

The parent post wanted to export their photos, not send them to Google. Why does Google need to be part of this equation?

userabchn• 2 years ago

I also suspect that there isn't an easy way to reduce the resolution that the default iPhone camera app takes photographs at (that I could find) because Apple wants them to be big so that you will need to buy cloud storage.

kstrauser8• 2 years ago

You mean other than Settings > Camera > Formats > Photo Mode?

Of the reasons I can imagine why Apple might want the camera to default to its best settings, "sell moar cloud" isn't in the top 10.

abawany2• 2 years ago

an option for easy backup in addition to the already-mentioned google photos is to use a hosted nextcloud instance (hetzner, shadow.tech) to backup photos from your phone. the nextcloud app available on the ios store will backup to the configured remote nextcloud instance and the corresponding nextcloud app on your laptop etc. can then sync these photos to you.

fakedang• 2 years ago

I want to add how much difficult Apple makes it to delete content in general from an iPhone. Deleting simple things like email, which are just a swipe away on Android, are notoriously difficult on the native email app, simply because Apple doesn't give a fuck. And this is the company touted as some design genius? I think it's all a ploy to just grab more users for iCloud, or get users to upscale to a higher storage on their next iPhone.

AnonHP2• 2 years ago

Deleting simple things like email, which are just a swipe away on Android, are notoriously difficult on the native email app,

Not sure what exactly you’re talking about, because deleting an email (from the mailbox list) is a long swipe to the left on iOS/iPadOS too, unless you have changed the settings for that to archive the mail instead of deleting. It has been this way for a very long time.

tempodox• 2 years ago

as difficult as legally possible.

I don‘t think they care much about legality. When called out, they drag their feet with malicious compliance.

samstave2• 2 years ago

to create walled gardens while pretending not to.

So ironically juxtaposed to the original 1984 Apple Commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

Terretta3• 2 years ago

I have ~200K photos in iCloud and do not have this problem of exporting, I “export” regularly onto new backup media.

However, I don't really export, I turn on iCloud Photos on Windows and set it to store on an external media with sufficient space (over 2TB now) and then tell it to locally store all media in full quality.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108994

Once it's synced, I have a local folder with all the media. I have accomplished an export. Then I can turn it off, remove the media, and go back to a c:\ folder and not saving locally.

Now, you wanted without iCloud, so then, Windows 10 or newer? Microsoft has a phone companion that can pull things, or there's file explorer for just photos.

But absent iCloud, what I've done is run OneDrive on the iPhone, and let that mirror everything to OneDrive.

(An alternative used to be Amazon Photos, but I can't keep track of their business model, and Google Photos I can't keep track of what makes them decide to replace my originals with badly compressed alternatives.)

I sort of don't understand buying an iPhone, though, if you're not buying into the ecosystem.

The ecosystem is the point.

The ease of use of iCloud, the paired camera roll for your family (not same thing as shared albums), the family sharing of apps and subscriptions, the bring-your-own domain email with "hide my email" throwaway accounts to put into spammy sites, it's all there increasingly seamless, increasingly secure, and none of it is selling you out into third party ad-tech.

If you're not into that, there are other phone systems and operating systems and other hardware all grounded on different and separate principles. There's only one place for a cohesive coherent curated "don't make me think" peace of mind, and consumers should have a right to choose that since it stands alone in opposition to the DIY bricolage everyone else offers.

ValentineC• 2 years ago

meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks.

Note that apparently Google Takeout doesn't give bit-identical files [1], which may be important for some (like me).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571747

perryizgr8• 2 years ago

Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook

Even if you have a macbook, it is not much better. The photos app kept crashing on me if I tried to copy more than 500 photos. Also, copying to photos is not enough, you need to export everything too. And that messed up the metadata so bad for me.

Iphone is useless as a camera to me. There is simply no way to get original quality photos and videos out of it. What good is camera if you can't access the media you shot?

kovacs_x5• 2 years ago

I sync my photos from iphone using dropbox. very simple and effective, no neeed for icloud / iphotos.

harkinian37• 2 years ago

Doesn't the iPhone present itself just like a camera to any PC? So you can use whatever you'd normally use on Mac or Windows to download the pics.

harkinian37• 2 years ago

Guess it's less obvious than some Android phones, which mount as a filesystem. But most of them don't.

dev1ycan2• 2 years ago

It's so funny I'm gonna go out and say it, this is only because Microsoft threw its weight into Epics lawsuit.

I believe, entirely, that Microsoft is the most important corporation in America, by far. In that anything they want, will get done. this is why the senators turned around on Sony claiming MS buying ActiBlizzKing was monopolistic and started threatening Sony instead, this is why Bill Gates gets to sit with Xi and Xi calls him a friend, this is why MS has unopposed access to sell its games in China.

They are an "arm" of the government and not even Apple can counter it.

bdcravens3• 2 years ago

To say nothing of the fact that Github is the cornerstone of the open source world, and Microsoft owns it.

dev1ycan2• 2 years ago

Microsoft bought it. Microsoft is also allegedly using private repos to train AI, Microsoft is not a benevolent entity.

mupuff1234• 2 years ago

Why does it seem like Microsoft is flying under the DoJ radar this last decade?

pie420• 2 years ago

Because Microsoft is the East India Company of the 21st century. It is the modern tool of american corporate imperialism.

FrustratedMonky3• 2 years ago

What is the crux of argument on how they prevent people from using Samsung?

EDIT: The title of the post is "Monopoly". I think it is ok to ask what the argument for this is, when iPhone is NOT the majority of the market.

Company

4Q23 Market Share

1. Apple

24.7%

2. Samsung

16.3%

3. Xiaomi

4. Transsion

stephc_int134• 2 years ago

Apple top management should have seen this coming ~years~ ago. Both Apple and Google could have prevented this by being smarter and less greedy in the first place, understanding the central role of developers and third party companies in their ecosystems.

Not sure about this lawsuit, I don't really care at this point, the whole process in unrolling and won't stop until this is over, and this won't end up in a nice place for Apple.

cyclecount• 2 years ago

Or, both Apple and Google did see this coming years ago, have been smart about supporting politicians in both major US political parties, and calculated that the amount of money they could make by maintaining their monopoly positions — even if only for a few more years — was likely far greater than any fine or other regulatory headache it might cause down the line.

stephc_int134• 2 years ago

Time will tell, for sure.

The thing is, they are both overflowing with cash, more than enough to afford being strategic about its use.

If you're only looking at cash flow for the next few quarters, sure, that was the smart decision.

LordKeren• 2 years ago

Apple and Google absolutely saw this coming and both have come to the conclusion that the outcome of this lawsuit will be less costly than trying to preemptively deal with the issue — and risk overshooting the target, leaving money on the table.

Even if the DoJ wins on every aspect of this lawsuit, it still would hardly put a dent in apple’s profits. They aren’t going after the big ticket money makers in a way that is going to impact apple’s profits.

kyleomalley2• 2 years ago

Security Engineering is mostly about control and minimizing attack surfaces. Apple iOS implements this exceedingly well, with defaults, while still being one of the most widely used platforms on the planet. I believe IOS gets it right the vast majority of the time with solid architectural changes and not just endless patches and knobs that are hidden and forgot about. This is the key difference of "It just works" verses other platforms.

If someone wants to run another platform, go for it. Of course are shortcomings in iOS (as with any system), but viewing entire problem space of security and privacy, the default install of IOS + Safari could rarely be any better for the average consumer. This is why Security and Privacy is literally a paid feature of the IOS platform, and anecdotally everyone professional I know (who isn't in tech) is using IOS devices.

Personally, I'm planning to blocking RCS and any third party app stores on any of my own (and families) devices -- again, control and minimizing attack surfaces and eliminating an entire class of issues is better than trying to manage them to no end.

nox1015• 2 years ago

Yes, if someone locks you in a prison cell you're safe. Except from the warden and guards. You get to read only what they let you, eat only what they let you. But, you're safe

kyleomalley2• 2 years ago

You have a choice here on your platforms, this isn't even remotely an honest comparison, is it?

bhelkey7• 2 years ago

Direct quote from the DoJ, "Apple is knowingly and deliberately degrading quality, privacy, and security for its users".

btown• 2 years ago

Direct link to the complaint itself: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/9765671b...

Pages 29-31 of the complaint are especially relevant to read for many of us in web development and who value open systems, as they detail the intentionality of Apple's strategy to restrict so-called "super apps" from becoming portals for arbitrary web applications. And page 42+ describes restrictions on alternate digital wallets.

There's a lot here beyond the original headlines, and it's incredibly relevant to read or skim directly.

synergy202• 2 years ago

I'm working on some apple airplay on non-apple platforms, what a pain.

Apple is worse than Microsoft from the past, I mean, 10x or more closed.

I don't want to touch Apple's development ecosystem after this project.

I don't even want to start on other items like PWA support, single app store, iTunes everything,etc.

lkrubner• 2 years ago

It's been many decades since the USA government attempted to go after a vertical trust. During my lifetime, almost all anti-monopoly action has been against horizontal trusts: companies that gain too much market share for some particular product or service. But there was a time, a long time ago, almost a century ago, when it was common for the government to do this kind of thing, for the benefit of the consumer.

Matticus_Rex2• 2 years ago

There's also a pretty large econ literature questioning that it actually benefited the consumer, much of which concludes that in cases where the trust's anticompetitive power didn't itself rest on government-granted monopolies, it probably hurt.

_pi5• 2 years ago

That's because the government's definition of anti-competitive is ticky-tacky and is rooted in bullshit.

US anti-competitive policy and enforcement has always been dancing around the double standards of who can do market manipulation, the double standards of white collar crime enforcement, the double standards of "consumer benefit" in a capitalist system, etc.

"Consumer benefit" for example is a cowardly way to say price controls. Consumer benefit is inversely correlated with price. That implies the US government should be doing price controls and setting acceptable profit margins for everyone, but in practice due to the enforcement issues and the way the law is constructed it means that the government regulates prices only in extremely detailed technical cases.

Meaning you can manipulate consumer benefit AKA prices AKA extract profits all you want as long as you don't get into these narrowly defined, often unenforced technical cases.

In fact all of these charges or facsimiles of them existed in different forms 10 years ago, they were there on launch 15 years ago. Apple is being sued now simply because other large powerful interests like Epic games, don't like the revenue split rules on the App store.

Most of these laws are written not as regulations, but ways not to regulate.

twojobsoneboss2• 2 years ago

You know all the incredible inventions that came out of Bell Labs (eg the telephone, the transistor, the C programming language)?

Yup, all those happened when they were an uber-monopoly and had the resources and breathing space to fund such bets!

Vt71fcAqt73• 2 years ago

I think Kodak fits what you describe, and it was decided in 1992.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Tec....

_cenw2• 2 years ago

Just here to point out that was 32 years ago. This could definitely fit within someone's lifetime, even more into someone's memory.

anonymouse0084• 2 years ago

“all that matters is who has the cheapest hardware” and consumers could “buy[] a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and . . . have a solid cloud computing device” that “works fine.”

This type of mindset will be the end of Apple.

fundad3• 2 years ago

Competing phone companies give up revenue to set low prices. Apple meets those prices by monetizing commerce.

crop_rotation6• 2 years ago

Great news. They should next should sue Ford for monopoly over the F150.

megaman8215• 2 years ago

If Ford only let you fill up at Exon stations and only allowed you to drive to Home Depot over Lowes, do you think they would get sued?

twodave2• 2 years ago

They probably would if Ford found a way to prevent any after-market accessories from being sold without taking a cut or made proprietary trailer hitches that you had to pay them directly for. Pickup trucks are some of the most hackable devices on the planet.

Fripplebubby2• 2 years ago

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims:

1. "Super Apps"

Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within it, like apps within an app). In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform. Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

2. Cloud streaming apps

Similar to "super apps", the document alleges that Apple restricts apps which might stream different apps directly to the phone (like video games). It seems there are several roadblocks that Apple has added that make these kinds of apps difficult to release and promote - and of course, Apple offers their own gaming subscription service called Apple Arcade which might be threatened by such a service.

3. Messaging interoperability

Probably most people are familiar with this already, how messages between (for example) iOS and Android devices do not share the same feature-set.

4. Smartwatches

Other smart watches than the Apple Watch exist, but the document alleges that Apple restricts the functionality that these devices have access to so that they are less useful than the Apple Watch. Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.

5. Digital wallets

It is claimed that Apple restricts the APIs available so that only Apple Pay can implement "tap to pay" on iOS. In addition to lock-in, note that Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay, so they get direct financial benefit in addition to the more nebulous benefit of enhancing the Apple platform.

segasaturn• 2 years ago

The messaging interop point is probably DOA since Apple has stated that they will be adding RCS support to iMessage.

The smartwatch point is interesting and not an argument I've seen made before, but it's a very good example of Apple's vendor lock-in.

baq9• 2 years ago

Quote from the article:

The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit.

I read that as 'interop' is a secondary issue, if an issue at all; the actual case is the green/blue segregation. If Apple embedded a fingerprint in every interoperable message and shown blue messages for iMessage-sent content, green background for others, it'd still be a problem even if messages are otherwise identical - unless all the features truly work on both, in which case the color split is purely status signaling.

Yizahi• 2 years ago

That would be an interesting development, because apparently the other monopolist in this game is implementing RCS with some proprietary crap, and Apple will deliberately implement the current standard feature set. So they will continue being incompatible but now because of Google. I'll continue investing in the popcorn futures :) .

mbreese• 2 years ago

I’ve never understood the messaging interop angle when there are so many non-phone network based messaging apps available. It’s just always seemed the weakest of the arguments against Apple w.r.t. the iPhone. SMS/MMS/RCS standardization was historically a train wreck so it made sense to me for Apple to just support the minimum and be done with it. All of my groups chats that involve a mixture of iPhone and Android users has usually been on something like WhatsApp for this reason.

The other points seem much more specific and actionable.

babyshake• 2 years ago

To be fair, Apple has said a lot of things. Wasn't FaceTime supposed to be an open standard and that never happened? If they give a specific target date I'd feel more encouraged.

theshrike792• 2 years ago

All of these are pretty sane, except for:

Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android

Will they force Samsung and Google to have their watches interoperate with iOS too, or are they exempt because they are bit players in the field?

Fripplebubby2• 2 years ago

Here's a quote from the complaint:

Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.

pquki43• 2 years ago

1. Samsung watch actually used to support iPhones. They dropped the support, likely due to business reasons and the limitations as described here 2. My naive understanding is that the question is not forcing anyone to support anything, but rather the ability to make it possible to do so. If Apple wants to have full support for Android phones, they are welcome to do so, but not vice versa -- nobody can possibly create a smartwatch that works as well as Apple Watch with iPhones.

n0us• 2 years ago

I think no because an android compatible watch would be compatible with any other android phone, not only Google Watch <--> Google Phone.

djaychela• 2 years ago

Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.

This is the reason I am now on an iPhone after being on Android since ~2009. But this could also apply to Samsung too. There were two watches I was considering - Samsung's and Apple's (for health monitoring reasons, I have a family history of heart problems, and am already nearly 10 years older than my dad was when he died). I would either have to buy a Samsung phone or an iPhone to get the functionality I wanted, and TBH I really don't like Samsung's take on Android (I've been either Cyanogenmod or Motorola for over a decade), so an iPhone it was. But I would have preferred to get an Apple Watch and have that work fully with my Android phone, but that's not even a starter, let alone the limited-functionality you would get with a Samsung watch with another Android phone.

I'm happy with the watch, and I now like a lot about the iPhone. But it was 4x the price of my previous phone.

ensignavenger• 2 years ago

Was this before the Google Pixel Watch, or did you eliminate it for other reasons? Also, newer Galaxy watches run Androids WearOS instead of Tizen, and from what I understand, work much better with other Android phones.

airstrike7• 2 years ago

1. Super Apps are notorious for tracking the user across the "mini" apps within it, which is the argument made by Apple for making them hard to get approval for. I'm on Apple's side here

2. I was able to use PS Remote Play on my iPhone even many years ago (pre-COVID). A quick google search shows that Steam Link and Shadow PC (my ATF) are also available on iOS. I'm on Apple's side here too

3. I think the situation has recently changed here as someone else has commented, so this feels solvable without a lawsuit. Also it's hard to single out Apple here when everyone out there has their own messaging platforms. It's not like WhatsApp is encouraging third-party clients. An argument can be made that iMessage blurs the line between what's Apple-provided vs. carrier-provided, so I can see the user confusion and the issues that come with it. I'm on the FTC's side here

4. Who cares about smartwatches. It's niche at best. Besides, there are countless other watches you can use and they work with many devices. I'm on Apple's side here

5. It's not like you can't tap your card instead of your phone. I don't think the phone needs to be just a husk with apps created by third parties, especially for things like wallets. I'm happy to trade away that freedom for increased security, Benjamin Franklin's quote notwithstanding. The payments ecosystem is made up of players charging fees from the next player down the chain, so also hard to single out Apple here, but I can see why there's need for increased transparency (I wasn't explicitly aware they charged any fees, even if I would probably guess they were if prompted). I'm on neither side here.

So based on my biases and incomplete understanding of the facts, Apple wins 3-1

It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves. Lena Khan literally said "you miss all the shots you don't take".

I would prefer a more focused approach with higher signal to noise ratio.

ApolIllo• 2 years ago

Who cares about smartwatches

219.43 million people use smartwatches

bearjaws2• 2 years ago

I love how whenever Apple makes a clearly anti-trust move it's always about privacy.

That would be true, if Apple couldn't literally write any TOS they want that allows other App stores or billing methods and then add "but you can't include tracking that invades our users privacy or resell their data".

That's just as enforceable on their end, and not anti-competitive, assuming Apple themselves don't launch their own ad platform and tracking...

tapoxi• 2 years ago

1) Apple makes an exception if you're China, unfortunately. This is how WeChat has taken off, and I bet WeChat could bully its way around the App Store rules to the detriment of competitors, another "special deal" from Apple.

2) This is about cloud gaming, when you're streaming the game from hardware in the cloud, like Xbox Game Pass. Streaming the game from your own hardware isn't as competitive to Apple since it requires you buy a $500 console or gaming PC.

3) The biggest issue was Apple not implementing RCS and defaulting every iOS user to iMessage, which has created a two-tier messaging system, friends getting locked out of chat groups, etc simply because Apple doesn't want to use the standard.

4) "Who cares" is not a valid argument in using your dominance in one market to dominate another, which is textbook anticompetitive behavior. They also do this with AirTags, Airpods, any accessory where the Apple product gets to use integrations with the OS and third-parties are forbidden from doing so.

5) Tapping your phone is more secure because the card number is randomized and single-use, protecting it from replay attacks.

rufus_foreman• 2 years ago

> Who cares about smartwatches

The Justice Department, 16 US states, and the District of Columbia, among others. Anti-trust violations are crimes.

notnmeyer• 2 years ago

in #2 you’re talking about something else. those are streaming games from a console you own.

_cloud_ streaming where the game is running a ms/sony owned server is only available in a browser.

i don’t know about the sony side of things, but apple rejected ms’s native cloud streaming app.

kubectl_h• 2 years ago

3.

Every single group chat that I use on a day-to-day basis has a non iPhone participant. The biggest argument against the way apple treats SMS vs iMessage I see is people feel ostracized for having green bubbles. I just don't understand why this rises to anti-trust.

jm4• 2 years ago

It's not just this administration going after tech. The other guys got the ball rolling, although they use a different narrative to sell it. I think most people recognize there are various problems with the industry that essentially all boil down to the amount of power big tech has. There have been warnings from governments and other players in the private sector for years. I happen to like my iPhone a lot, but it's about time Apple and the rest of them get their teeth kicked in.

skeaker24• 2 years ago

1. Super Apps are notorious for tracking the user across the "mini" apps within it, which is the argument made by Apple for making them hard to get approval for. I'm on Apple's side here

Never heard this argument, could you name an example of this? I figured the reason for the ban was that it would sidestep most of the Apple software that comes with an iPhone, which Apple obviously wouldn't want since they would prefer to lock users in.

danaris14• 2 years ago

From what I'm seeing in other places, there are also some pretty weak claims being made beyond this.

The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.

The second is their characterization of how Apple got to where they are. Like them or not, you have to be seriously down a conspiracy rabbit hole to believe that the iPhone became as popular as it is primarily through anticompetitive tactics, rather than because it's a very good product that lots and lots of people like. Regardless of whether you, personally, find that value proposition to be compelling.

They also point at some of Apple's offerings and make absolutely absurd claims about how they're anticompetitive—for instance, that they're going to somehow take over the auto market with CarPlay 2.0 and the fact that AppleTV+ exercises control over the content it serves.

There are some things Apple does that are genuinely concerning and deserve more antitrust scrutiny (for instance, their anti-steering provisions for the App Store are pretty egregious), but so far as I can tell, they're not even mentioned in this suit. I'm frankly disappointed in the DoJ for how they've put this together, and would have loved to see something that was narrower and much more robust.

Y_Y• 2 years ago

It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves

Of all the points in your low-effort manifesto I find this the most absurd. Even if you don't see any merit in the case, you must admit that it's likely that the DoJ does.

ben77994• 2 years ago

Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

I am curious what things the iPhone does that others aren't allowed to do.

Most of the differences between Garmin and Apple Watch seem like they were conscious decisions where they each decided to take a different direction.

It's one of those weird things where it seems like the case has a bunch of holes. You can use an iPhone with some but not all non-Apple Smart watches. You can use a non-Apple phone with non-Apple smartwatches. There are other non-Apple smart watches that those manufacturers have decided can't be used with an iPhone, no different than Apple. Lots of choices in the market, I certainly don't feel restricted.

I am not sure how requiring something like WeChat to break into multiple apps would be a big issue. Apple even breaks it's own apps up into different apps.

atourgates2• 2 years ago

My guess is around notifications and handoff to iPhone apps.

I tried Garmin watches, and they're certainly better as "exercise tracking devices" than anything Apple offers, but they weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to wear them all the time.

An Apple Watch Ultra - on the other hand - is a poorer exercise tracking device, but gives me enough "integrated with my iPhone" benefit to become the first watch I've worn consistently in 30+ years.

I assumed this was the result of design and development choices by Garmin, but it'll be interesting to see if their are meaningful ways that Apple restricts smartwatch developers from including similar levels of integration.

0xffff25• 2 years ago

Likewise, I'm a happy Garmin watch owner. Wondering what I'm missing because I don't feel like I'm missing anything.

dktp• 2 years ago

Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

Sending messages from watch for example. Apple only allows that for Apple watches

Wowfunhappy7• 2 years ago

The Pebble was very obviously hampered by iOS limitations. In order to offload any code to the phone, you either had to write the code in Javascript (so it was basically a web app) or direct the user to manually download a separate companion app from the App Store. If iOS killed the companion app because it hadn't been opened on the iPhone recently (because, y'know, you were using it on your watch and not your phone), you had to manually relaunch the app on your phone.

This is all before even getting into things like ecosystem integration.

abawany2• 2 years ago

replying to sms is one: garmins can do this on Android but only recently (venu 2+, venu 3) got limited ability to do so on ios.

hnburnsy2• 2 years ago

Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

The two main differences are notifications filtering (choosing which apps can send notifications to the watch) and actioning notifications from the watch.

eitally• 2 years ago

With non-Apple Watches, you can't 1) reply to texts, 2) answer phone calls (or place calls), 3) interact with other native iPhone applications (like Apple Health).

You'll pry my Garmin from my cold, dead hands but there's no mistaking it for an actual "smart"-watch. I value it entirely for health & fitness, and the very few "smart" things it can do are just nice-to-have icing on the cake.

gnicholas22• 2 years ago

You can't reply to text messages from other smartwatches, or at least not organically (only canned responses).

king-of-turtles• 2 years ago

Yeah, there are some inconsistencies with Apple products interop-ing with non-Apple stuff.

I've noticed this with wireless bluetooth headphone pairing. Sometimes it works, othertimes there are odd limitations and devices unpair randomly.

Also Samsung's Adaptive Fast Charging sends lower wattage through the cable if it detects a non-Samsung device. So Apple is not the only offender here.

bdavbdav7• 2 years ago

I’ve got an iPhone and an Apple Watch. Wife has an iPhone and a Garmin.

The Garmin sadly misses out on notification filtering, focus modes, replies, solid Bluetooth (it drops out from time to time and the app needs reopening).

Lio2• 2 years ago

Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

Apple block Garmin watches from replying to text messages as they do on Android for example.

Only Apple Watches are allowed to do that.

I also note that iOS regularly tries to nag me into blocking Garmin Connect from sending notifications to my watch.

Ostensibly that’s to preserve battery life but they don’t do that for their own watches either.

milkytron2• 2 years ago

I've had friends that have trouble syncing their Garmin devices with syncing to their iPhone. I've wondered if this is caused by their wireless communication protocol that is proprietary and only available on other apple devices.

Airpods and other bluetooth Apple devices seamlessly sync with iPhones because of a wireless protocol they use that is only available on Apple devices. I forget what it's called, but this definitely limits connectivity of devices that aren't made by Apple.

lordloki• 2 years ago

I used to be able to approve my duo notifications from my Garmin when I had an Android phone, but that functionality isn't available when using an iPhone. I found out recently that you can still do that from an apple watch on an iPhone, when my wife got one. So there is at least one area of functionality that Apple is likely restricting.

jacobr1• 2 years ago

Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

Not sure I buy this point. Competitors can also offer their own suite of apps. Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed. But they aren't really building super-apps, just a variety of default apps - nothing stops third parties from offering multiple apps on the platform, that is actually a common thing to do.

edanm2• 2 years ago

EDIT: My comment was wrong, please see helpful corrections below!

I think there are technical limitations when you have different apps vs. one app. Simples being you need to log in to multiple different apps, but things like data moving between them etc are also complications.

jabart• 2 years ago

Having an app that competes with an existing Apple app is considered a duplicate app and you can be rejected because of it.

KptMarchewa• 2 years ago

Either provide a platform or compete in one. Don't do both.

diggan• 2 years ago

Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed.

Not only that, apparently updates automatically push their apps on you as well, without even asking. Suddenly I had a "Journal" app added to my homescreen from nowhere, and I thought my device had been hacked before I realized what was going on.

Apple also have the advantage of not having to follow their own rules. Their apps can send notifications without asking for permission about it. "Journal" again is an example here where the app sent me a notification and after going to the app, then they asked me for permission to send notifications.

skeaker24• 2 years ago

I think it refers more to a hypothetical app that, when you're using it, would allow you to completely ignore the entire Apple software ecosystem. It would have its own home screen with launchers to things like a web browser, office tools, media, etc. I think this sort of thing never came to fruition because (aside from it being very hard to make) it would be way too bulky what with having to come in the form of a single app package. The ban on third party stores means it wouldn't be able to offer its own app store or come in segments so you can pick only the apps you want.

RowanH• 2 years ago

I bet the Apple apps have much, much, better background activity/services support. Doing "background" uploads is nothing short of painful compared to Android.

While we never want to compete with core Apple apps, we're constantly having to say 'sorry that's the restrictions running on Apple' with background support.

(our usecase is we have a B2B app that has visual progress reports - so we'll have the same people on a team - the Android ones get their progress reports uploaded instantly, the iOS ones 'sorry keep your phone open'.)

elawler24• 2 years ago

You also have to buy all apps through Apple's app store to natively download to a device. The Digital Markets Act addressed something similar, requesting that developers can sell through alternate marketplaces. Apple came back with a proposal to (1) stick with the status quo with 30 percent commission on sales, (2) reduce commission to 17 percent with a 50 cent charge on downloads over a million, (3) sell through a competing app store and pay the download fee every time. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/technology/app-store-euro....)

I've designed several apps (Fitstar, Fitbit, theSkimm) that were dependent on the Apple ecosystem. While it's a huge tax to comply with their rules, they also do a TON to help developers succeed, especially early on. They maintain components, provide developer tools, build entire languages, design new paradigms, and ensure quality. I've had a respect for the tax on a service they provide to both developers and end users. At this point though - they're acting as a monopoly, and it feels anti-competitive.

It's not just the developer tax that's a problem. Hiding behind a veil of privacy also doesn't forgive the introduction of "dark pattern" end user experiences - such as the inability to have a group chat with non Apple users. And no non-Apple share links on Apple Photo albums. These create digital "haves" vs "have-nots" - and not everyone in the world can afford to buy physical Apple devices. There must be protocols that allow information to be more interoperable so people have optionality and control over their digital identities.

madeofpalk7• 2 years ago

I believe Apple needs more regulatory action taken against it for abusing it's dominant position. But apart from cloud streaming apps (which they've resolved recently by allowing them), I find these claims to be pretty weak and not significantly market-affecting.

I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose. SMS is the interoperable standard between different platforms, and RCS is the new standard which they've comitted to supporting.

I would much rather action taken on Apple for the anti-steering provisions restricting competition for payments. I think this has had a much bigger market impact than limitations on game streaming or smart watches.

miloignis• 2 years ago

That's one of the things I like about this complaint - it points out that they don't allow any other apps to support SMS, so only iMessage has the ability to message anyone with just a phone number, seamlessly upgrading if the other party has iMessage and using SMS otherwise.

It's not solely about iMessage not being open, it's about reserving key features for only iMessage to give it a significant advantage. (Also mentioned are other key bits like running in the background, etc)

carlosjobim2• 2 years ago

Where does that "dominant position" idea come from, that you and others are claiming in this thread? Apple is nowhere near having a dominant position in any of the markest where they compete, such as cell phones or computers.

rezonant18• 2 years ago

As sibling points out and I have argued strongly for in past discussions here, at issue is Apple's control of texting: That is, the ability for a phone to message any other phone with a text message without requiring the other participant to use a custom app. Only iMessage can do this on the iPhone.

In the consumer's eye, all phones can text, so it is a universal way to reach someone who has a phone number. It removes the complexity of having to coordinate ahead of time with a contact about what messaging service they both have. It's why texting is so popular in the US (along with historical actions by US carriers to make texting extremely cheap and ultimately free)

Once they had this control, they then used it to make texting better only when the conversation participants each had iPhones, which produced a network effect where friends would be incentivized to pressure their contacts to also use iPhones. Apple leveraged convenience, features and security to make this happen.

I don't anticipate Apple's upcoming RCS support to materially change this. If we're lucky, we'll get higher quality pictures out of it, but it's possible to support RCS while not supporting a lot of the features that make RCS better than SMS, such as read receipts, replies, typing indicators, and yes, encryption. Encryption is not a standard part of RCS yet, but it could be made so by Apple forcing Google to standardize their encryption and then implementing it. But it's not in Apple's interest given the above to bother. More likely they will do as their initial complaint/announcement about RCS hinted at: Not even engage on encryption because it's "not part of the spec", leaving iPhone/Android messaging unencrypted.

Google is not blameless here, it's insane that they haven't worked themselves to standardize encryption.

amelius5• 2 years ago

I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

So if it were up to you all telecom operators would be on separate networks, because you can always use smoke signals to get your message across?

(I'm with you for niche applications where the number of users is small. But we're talking mainstream communication here.)

WheatMillington2• 2 years ago

It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

That argument only works until there is market dominance, which is the point of anti-trust regulations.

Cheer2171• 2 years ago

It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

So was the Bell telephone network.

ubermonkey6• 2 years ago

They aren't in a dominant position in the market by any normal measure, though.

nickpsecurity2• 2 years ago

My biggest problem is how hard it is to get my data out of apps in usable formats, move it between apps, or put in custom apps. My iPhone would be great if I could use my own data and apps as easily (and freely) as my old Samsung Galaxy.

EasyMark5• 2 years ago

I think they are hitting apple pretty broadly on all things you're mentioning. I don't think everyone will agree on all of them but many will agree on various ones and it's left up to courts after that.

diffeomorphism• 2 years ago

It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

What does that have to do with anything? They have a dominant market position and they abuse it. Different position, different rules.

Der_Einzige• 2 years ago

Holy mother of based.

I love the current US government. Cracking down on pretty much all of Apples bullshit in one fell-swoop. Now just stop them from offering 8gb of ram on the base model macbooks, and apple might be the perfect tech company.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

I just don’t understand the appeal of “Super Apps”. Do users really want to hire a taxi with the same application they use to message their friends, and have that be the same application they use to buy household goods, and have that be the same application they use to control their garage door? It doesn’t make sense to me. These are totally different tasks. Why would a user want to use the same app to do them?

Imagine the extreme end result of this: You buy a phone, and it’s OS comes with only one app installed: The Super App which you launch and do everything through it. How is that Super App not in fact the OS at that point?

deegles2• 2 years ago

Do users really want ...

The answer is clearly yes in a lot of markets, even if purpose-built apps might be better at a specific tasks, a single app that does dozens of things "well enough" is more convenient than having to juggle dozens of login infos and para-relationships with app developers (managing graymail etc).

skeaker24• 2 years ago

The extreme result is indeed what Apple wants to avoid because you would more or less have a custom operating system at that point and could ignore Apple's software, which they would hate. Obviously it is not as good as being able to flash an actual new OS onto the device but it would still impact Apple's bottom line.

skydhash10• 2 years ago

Google itself is a superapp at this point as you only have one account. But to answer your question, I think it’s because of interoperability issues. Why can’t my calendar services message me? Or why can’t I quickly create an event inside a chat? If you remember PDAs, they fell under the definition of one ecosystem to manage your communication and time, but now you have several services that refuses to talk to each other. One of the core strength of Apple is that kind of integration. It’s not that you want one company managing it all, you just want an integrated app ecosystem.

andy_ppp• 2 years ago

Interesting! So this doesn’t include the 30% Apple tax in this lawsuit?

mrkstu2• 2 years ago

Epic losing their suit pretty much torpedoed that plank. The findings there would basically tread the same ground and were already found in Apple's favor as a matter of law.

shadowgovt2• 2 years ago

It's a good list, but I'll be interested to see how it becomes anti-trust actionable and not just "a good list of reasons not to buy an iPhone."

Why is any of this a problem when consumers who find all that too constraining can just use Android?

jobs_throwaway6• 2 years ago

Because its bad for consumers to have to choose a different device solely because of Apple's anti-competitive practices. This is exactly the sort of scenario when regulation is good - Apple is acting in their best interest, but its on-the-whole bad for the American consumer. We can have the good of Apple without the anti-competitive bullshit like a lack of message interoperability. We just need the government to enforce it

harkinian37• 2 years ago

One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.

shuckles30• 2 years ago

“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

rootusrootus5• 2 years ago

It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets?

Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.

emodendroket5• 2 years ago

Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

Does Apple not let others offer a suite of apps?

alt22715• 2 years ago

Individually, yes. But each app has its own app store approoval process and fees. Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other. Only Apple Apps are the ones that can do that.

boringg2• 2 years ago

In terms of (4) Why would the apple watch want to have to build and maintain their apple watch on the google platform. Its funny that a company not wanting to work on another platform (probably due to business costs of doing that) is being considered anti-competitive.

Making it difficult for 3rd party .. sure but trying to force apple to have their hardware work on other platforms is a business decision .

ChuckMcM3• 2 years ago

This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market. The first one I heard about[1] was IBM versus Memorex which was making IBM 360 "compatible" disk drives. IBM lost and it generated some solid case law that has been relied on in this sort of prosecution.

In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money.

[1] I had a summer intern position in Field Engineering Services in 1978 and it was what all the FEs were talking about how it was going to "destroy" IBM's field service organization.

dmix2• 2 years ago

In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money

I’m curious what market opportunities the Apple suit could open up.

- Xbox cloud game streaming

- WeChat like super apps w e-commerce (X wanted to do this play but more likely Facebook Messenger and the like)

- iMessage on android

- a receipt tracking app or something directly tied into Apple Pay tapping

xpe4• 2 years ago

This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market.

Not simply that a company is dominant; it is more about how and why they are dominant.

Update 2:40 pm ET: After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:

* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation

* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing

* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability

* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling

* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another

Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.

scotty794• 2 years ago

This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market.

Maybe they should be. Our societies are ostensibly consumer-centric. It's about time our laws and organisations strongly sided with consumers against any opposition, especially against business.

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

Ironic that the worst business decisions (hardware or software lockdowns that pave the way for antitrust suits) come from the business heads.

rmbyrro• 2 years ago

Ironic that Jobs started by fighting the big, fat, corporate IBM, and now they turned the company he founded, Apple, into a big, fat, corporation with despicable practices...

When are people going to stop buying Apple?

supportengineer4• 2 years ago

This makes me so angry. You have a choice in the market! Everything on this list is a feature which I am choosing as the customer. If I didn't want these features and benefits then I would make a different choice as a consumer. As a consumer I am not a victim. I can choose between iOS, Android, or something else.

jobs_throwaway6• 2 years ago

You are specifically choosing to not have message interoperability? Why?

skyyler3• 2 years ago

I wonder if people made comments like these in support of Internet Explorer when Microsoft was dealing with antitrust law in court.

baq9• 2 years ago

It isn't about you, it's about me who can't install iMessage on an Andorid phone or a Linux desktop and participate in your group chats in reasonable capacity.

tick_tock_tick• 2 years ago

Many victim are adamant that they are not actually a victim no matter what evidence is provided. Luckily anti-trust law doesn't care about your opinion.

lijok• 2 years ago

You're not buying a literal apple. Purchasing context does not stop at point of sale.

bloppe• 2 years ago

I'm surprised no mention of Apple's forced 30% on all transactions, complete with hard requirement that you never mention the fee to your users.

nozzlegear• 2 years ago

Thanks for summarizing. As someone deeply entrenched in Apple's ecosystem, and who admittedly prefers the walled garden, I really have no problem if any of these five things were struck down.

Better competition for cloud streaming apps? Seems good for me as a user. Better messaging interoperability? I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go. Better smartwatch support? If it makes Apple want to build even better Apple Watches, I'm all for it. And all of my cards already work with Apple Wallet so this has no bearing on me either.

The only one that's really ambiguous is "Super Apps". I'd be greatly inconvenienced if Apple things stopped working so well together, but I wouldn't be inconvenienced at all if others get a chance to build their own "super apps".

rezonant18• 2 years ago

I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go.

I'm skeptical that adding RCS will actually fix the problems because of how Apple is likely to implement it. Their malicious compliance in the EU strongly hints that they are going to hobble their RCS implementation just enough to maintain the status quo just like they are with the DMA requirements. Hopefully legal efforts like this push Apple more towards actual interoperability.

fouc• 2 years ago

I suspect the "Super Apps" is the real reason for this lawsuit. The other giant tech companies are probably pushing for this.

This would let Google get rid of dedicated apps like Gmail or Google Maps, and then just force everyone to go through a central Google app itself.

Funes-• 2 years ago

What's stopping people from buying or using any other kind of phone, new or old? Or from producing one? None of what's listed here is relevant to that regard.

hyperbovine• 2 years ago

Absolutely nothing. The claim that Apple has a monopoly on the smartphone market is just laughable. Android has 40% market share in the US and 70% globally.

catlikesshrimp2• 2 years ago

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/iphone-teen-survey-2023...

90% of marketshare with monopolistic practices is relevant?

brocket2• 2 years ago

Do they mention CarPlay? It drives me crazy that it only integrates notifications with Apple first party apps. It will send me notifications for iMessage or Apple calendar, but completely silences and hides Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google calendar, Google voice, etc no matter what settings I try. It's frankly dangerous because it forces me to check my phone while driving in case of an urgent message or call. Meanwhile Android auto will show me all notifications and I can silence them while driving if I choose.

AlanYx2• 2 years ago

CarPlay supports notifications with non-first party apps like Microsoft Teams. I don't use everything on your list, but WhatsApp definitely supports CarPlay notifications. You may have them muted. You can mute/unmute on a per-app basis -- go to the app settings and adjust the "Show in CarPlay" toggle.

wiremine• 2 years ago

the case rests on specific claims

In this case, could a resolution involve resolving the individual claims, or are the plaintiffs looking for a more all encompassing solution?

s1k3s• 2 years ago

This is somewhat aligned with the recent trouble they had in EU as well, so now two different regulatory agencies call them out for the same topics. Are they going to claim "security reasons" again?

screye• 2 years ago

As someone who never uses Apple devices, iMessage is the only true form of monopoly based control that Apple imposes. Apple's 30% costs are harsh, but it is not like Google or MSFT charge anything less.

Such cases always seem to reach a pre-determined conclusion, that has more to do with the political winds of the era, than true legal determinism.

Looking at the accusations from that lens:

1. Super Apps - I don't see how 'Apple doesn't share enough data with Chinese super apps' is going to fly 2024 America. It also has huge security and privacy impliciations. This accusation seems DOA.

2. Streaming games is tricky, but it isn't a big revenue stream. The outcome for this point appears immaterail to Apple stock.

3. iMessage - This is the big one. I see the whole case hinging on this point.

4. Smartwatches. Meh, Apple might add inter-op for apple smartwatches on android. I don't think this will lead to any users switching over or an actually pleasing experience.

5. Digital Wallets. This seems tacked on. Apps are PhonePe and PayTm work just fine on Apple and Android. I have never heard of anyone using a Digital Wallet that is not Apple pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. Are digital wallets a big revenue stream for Apple ?

NekkoDroid• 2 years ago

Google or MSFT charge anything less.

Google: true, BUT you can install and publish other app stores

MSFT: false, they charge 15% for apps and 12% for games (talking about the Microsoft Store)

Panzer04• 2 years ago

You can't possibly equate the situation on windows or android with iOS. It's trivial to install an app from outside of the app stores on both, whereas it's entirely impossible on iOS.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform.

But WeChat is available on iOS isn't it? If not the iPhone would be pretty impossible to sell there, just like Huawei's android without Google play don't sell here in the west.

dathinab3• 2 years ago

They should have added claims for:

- NFC

apple does have full NFC support for their products but for other apps there are tons of road blocks for using anything close to full NFC functionality

- Bluetooth

same, similar more usable, but some functionality is still not available for 3rd party apps at all meaning certain things can only be provided 1st party by Apple

- Strange behaviour when releasing questionable competive Apps

There had been multiple cases where Apple released 1st party apps and it "happened" that the previous leader(s) of previous existing 3rd party apps "happened" to have issues with releasing updates around that time (or similar strange coincidental behavior). Additionally such new apps often had some new non-documented non public APIs which makes it harder for 3rd parties to compete.

- Questionable app store reviews

Stories of apps running in arbitrary you could say outright despotic harassment when wrt. the app store reviews are more then just few (to be clear legal non malicious apps which should be fully legal on the apple app store).

EDIT: To be clear for the first 2 points apple always have excuses which seem reasonable on the surface until you think it through a bit more (e.g. similar to there excuse for banning PWAs in the EU, I think they might have undid that by now). And for the other points it's always arbitrary enough so that in any specific case you could call it coincidence, but there is a pattern.

pksebben2• 2 years ago

Bluetooth remains my biggest gripe with my iphone. When I walk out of range of any connected device, my call switches from my headset to the phone, and I have to manually go in and reconnect to my headset every third or fourth time I want to connect to it.

It stands in stark contrast to literally everything else about the device, which is almost universally easy and thoughtless.

jajko• 2 years ago

Yet the most important issue for many is missing (unless something changed recently) - inability to access filtered cesspool of scam, malware and annoyance that modern ad-infested internet is.

Jihad against anything actually working well (ie firefox and ublock origin) due to to be polite dubious reasons. Apple gatekeeping is just a move to ads for themselves, it was already multibillion business for them last year. Thats monopolistic behavior in plain sight.

slibhb• 2 years ago

I'd be more sympathetic to the government's arguments if Android phones didn't exist. But they do, and people can use them if they don't like Apple's walled garden.

As things are, this lawsuit seems like the government striking an aggressive posture torwards tech companies for no good reason. It's almost like -- as the tech companies get bigger and more powerful -- the government wants to remind them who's really in charge.

kelnos12• 2 years ago

If phone OSes and ecosystems were fungible, then I'd agree. It's reasonable to prefer iOS for many reasons, but still be disappointed in the walled-garden, non-interoperable aspects.

Customers don't really have great choices right now when it comes to smartphones:

1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.

2. The other OS more open (interop & user-choice-wise, not really in the FOSS sense), but is run by a company that seems hell-bent on eroding user privacy.

These properties are dictated by Apple and Google. But due to the barrier for entry, there are no alternatives that come even close to duplicating Android's and iOS's feature sets. Even simply using a community-developed Android-based OS can cause you to lose access to many useful features Android provides.

I guess I went off on a little tangent here, but my position is that the existence of Android is only a defense if switching between the two doesn't incur high costs, both financial and non-. That's demonstrably not the case.

rsoto2• 2 years ago

You see this as about two major phone companies when in reality it is about all the small phone/os/app companies(competition is good in a free market) that get pushed out because the only two major companies (apple and google) share insane contracts between eachother essentially creating a horizontal monopoly that squashes competition.

empath-nirvana• 2 years ago

I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it. I sort of think apple shouldn't try to comply with these sorts of potential lawsuits by making their app store worse, they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.

If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

johnnyanmac14• 2 years ago

Doubtful, Google got dinged pretty hard in part because there were too many steps to allow other app stores to exist, and becsuse app stores couldn't auto-update apps like Google Play could.

And all that is way easier than rooting/jailbreaking. I doubt that will be enough of a deterrent considering the anti-trust angle being that you can't compete with apple's native software

pchristensen3• 2 years ago

I'm sure this comment will get downvoted and dunked on, but I agree and I would be that if Apple is forced to make changes like these, many peoples' only experience of it would be their iPhone/Apple Watch/etc getting worse.

Some examples:

  - A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it.

  - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.

  - Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market.

  - Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser). 

  - I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails

I think many computer savvy people don't realize how freeing and liberating it is for normal people to have an "appliance" computer.

bradgessler3• 2 years ago

I want iOS to be like macOS in that there's one "blessed" store, but I can sell, distribute, and install apps outside of it without giving Apple a cut.

macOS has proven for decades that a reasonably proprietary OS can be distributed and kept reasonably secure when apps are installed on it outside of an App Store. There's even third-party App Stores on macOS like Steam, Homebrew, and a few more that Indie developers use to distribute apps.

engeljohnb• 2 years ago

Do you prefer not being able to send or recieve good quality images and videos to anyone using Android?

idle_zealot11• 2 years ago

I am very pro-users-owning-their-computers, which makes me highly critical of Apple's behavior. However, these sorts of lawsuits or regulations that seek to force Apple to change App Store policies feel so wrong-headed and out of touch. The problem with Apple is not that they take a 30% cut of app sales in their store, or that they don't allow alternative browser engines or wallets apps or superapps or whatever in their store. It's their store and they ought to be able to curate it however they like. The problem is that users cannot reasonably install software through any means other than that single store. The problem is that Apple reserves special permissions and system integrations for their own apps and denies them to anyone else. That is not an acceptable way for a computer to work.

mirzap• 2 years ago

Is Macbook less secure because I can install whatever app I want, even my own app? No, it's not. I want to be able to do the same with my iPhone. It's as simple as that.

jedimind4• 2 years ago

if you like your prison, that's your thing, you have the right to stay in it, just don't force other people to live in misery under your preferences when they'd rather live in freedom. we also have rules and regulations which decide if something is lawful or not, so it's not just about what you personally like or not.

UniverseHacker• 2 years ago

I like the iPhone in general but there’s a ton of things I need to keep an old Android around for, because of functionality apple blocks for no good reason: connecting to many non approved bluetooth devices, vehicle gauges and other useful driving data in carplay, etc.

vlunkr2• 2 years ago

None of these require allowing alternative app stores. Just allowing more apps in. You don’t have to use these apps, and theres nothing inherently insecure about it.

epolanski6• 2 years ago

You know that nobody forces you to use features you don't want to, right?

drdaeman2• 2 years ago

they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it

That would be significantly more fair to the end users than the current status quo, if they won't intentionally make obstacles for those users.

Obviously, that's not happening.

crmd• 2 years ago

Same here. I use linux VMs and containers for all my "hacking" where I need total control and customizability of the OS. On my workstation and phone, where I do my banking and read emails, I'm willing to trade control and customizability for an extremely locked down high trust operating environment. I feel like Apple's closed ecosystem, despite all its flaws, gets this compromise right.

DANmode• 2 years ago

offer zero support for it.

If only they had it left it there.

mullingitover2• 2 years ago

they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.

Just let people wipe the phone completely - no drivers, no kernel, nothing, and bring their own. That's the proper solution to people wanting to own their hardware and do whatever they want with it. Want to install a different app store/browser/etc? Go for it, start by installing the new kernel and drivers.

paulddraper5• 2 years ago

That is the right way to think about it.

If your walled garden (App Store) is really better, people will stay in it voluntarily.

interactivecode• 2 years ago

If they would only verify quality and provide safe APIs and paths to safely integrate they can have their platform. The issue is that they are both managing the plantform and (unfairly) participating themselves.

If they had one set of APIs for smartwatches that can be used by them for the apple watch and everyone else for their smartwatches they wouldn’t get sued. But instead they give themselves deep integration into the OS and limit everyone elses access. When you are one of the only available platforms thats not okay.

Andrex12• 2 years ago

If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

The next generation isn't necessarily choosing, though.

Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).

Then, when they're locked into the Apple ecosystem from the start, it's almost impossible to break out -- even if you grow up into a mature adult that doesn't give a shit about bubble colors.

Interoperability (being able to exit an ecosystem without massive downsides, specifically) between the only two parties in a de facto duopoly is absolutely necessary and morally right, and it's a shame market failures force the judiciary to intervene. But we are where we are and there's no use putting lipstick on a pig -- the system as it stands is broken, and if left alone will feed on itself and become even more broken.

Salgat6• 2 years ago

That's the biggest thing, allowing sideloading is 100% optional and lets people stay in the walled garden if they want. Apple not allowing it is absolutely about suppressing competition, which given their >50% market share is a blatant abuse of their monopoly.

ken47• 2 years ago

I sort of think apple shouldn't try to comply

I know some of us like to think of Apple as some kind of corporate diety, but even Apple has to answer to the US government.

feyman_r• 2 years ago

Does this chain of thought apply to any company or just to Apple? At what market share does this become a problem in your opinion? Or are we assuming that the market is ‘free’ and people wouldn’t buy such a device/service because of these ‘restrictions’?

covercash• 2 years ago

I agree with this take. My one concern is it has the potential to diminish the entire brand. Even with giant warnings about losing warranty/support when installing 3rd party app stores or side loading apps, at the end of the day the back of the phone has a big Apple logo on it. So when the customer fucks it up and Apple refuses to fix it, they’ll still blame Apple.

gxs2• 2 years ago

Yeah exactly, for some of us this is a feature not a bug. And I say this as a customer that also supports open source software. Yes it's possible to support both.

Like damn, what if I intend to build this ecosystem from the outset, does that mean as soon as it reaches critical mass the government is going to come in and dismantle it? It's bullshit. This is essentially saying you're not allowed to build ecosystems.

Consumer products don't demand the same flexibility in this regard that enterprise products do. This is just other companies crying that they want a slice of the pie.

doctorpangloss2• 2 years ago

I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it.

This is basically saying you only use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Tinder, Gmail, Google Maps, and play zero to some handful of mega huge F2P games.

Why have an App Store at all then? You don't use it. It's an installation wizard for you, not a store.

Don't you see? This stuff doesn't interact with restrictions at all. The problem with the App Store is that it sucks, not that it's restricted.

making their app store worse

I've heard this take from so many people. It is already as bad as it gets. The App Store is an utter disaster. They have failed in every aspect to make a thriving ecosystem. It is just the absolute largest, hugest, best capitalized, least innovative apps and games.

This doesn't have to be the case at all. Look at Steam. Even Linux package managers have more diversity with more apps that thrive.

wiseowise17• 2 years ago

Stay within store, nobody forces you to sideload or download certain apps.

nox1015• 2 years ago

The suit is not about user choice between iPhone and Android. The suit is about control 60% of the digital market. Sure, a user can go buy a different phone. But, an App developer can not reasonable not support iPhone given it has 60% of the market and apple requires 30% of all digital transactions on that market.

I agree people should be able to choose different things. But I also agree with the suit, that once someone gets in the position to control the market of 1000s and 1000s of companies, it's not longer just about user choice in phones. It's about the digital goods (apps/subscribtions/IaP) market itself.

bredren2• 2 years ago

If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

Those choices also affect me, though. Any shared albums, messages or other data I transmit with these users has a higher risk of being leaked.

There's some security in knowing almost all phones are not jailbroken and thanks to regular os upgrades, have a pretty solid security floor.

One way to handle this would be to decorate the comms ID, email / phone name whatever to show they aren't running a standard iOS. But I would want to know as easily as I do that messages I exchange with someone are going to an android device.

clhodapp• 2 years ago

Mostly agree with this except for "... and offer zero support for it."

Nope, that's covered by basic consumer protections. Apple still has to offer support if the user has issues that weren't likely to have been caused by the modifications.

Your car maker doesn't get to refuse to honor your powertrain warranty just because you put in a custom stereo.

PenguinCoder• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter if you like it. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. What matters is their actions and behavior are against the law. It can be proven,/according to the US Gov.

namlem• 2 years ago

Yes exactly. If Apple allowed users to download alternative app stores or directly install apps, none of this would be a problem.

boplicity• 2 years ago

Here's my take on the App store:

Almost none of the "free" apps are actually free. However, the App store makes it impossible to find this out without first supplying credit card information and installing the app, and possibly setting up an account with an app.

It used to be great. Frankly, it's now abusive.

dfabulich• 2 years ago

We do have "Super Apps" in the Western world. They're called "web browsers."

Note that Apple doesn't allow alternative web browsers on iOS, so Safari/WebKit is the only Super App allowed on iOS.

https://open-web-advocacy.org/apple-browser-ban/

When you download Chrome, Firefox or any other browser that isn't Safari on an Apple device, that browser is forced to use Safari's rendering engine WebKit. Chrome normally uses Chromium, and Firefox Gecko. However, Apple will not allow those browsers to use their own engines. Without the ability to use their own engines, those browsers are unable to bring you their latest and greatest features, and can only go so far as whatever WebKit has added.

epolanski6• 2 years ago

This is no longer correct I believe at least in the European union.

lucasverra• 2 years ago

Not the case anymore in EU thx/because DMA (since ios 17.4)

jamesrr39• 2 years ago

Arguably, F-Droid is a (Android-only, not possible to make such an app on iOS) super app that very much exists in the western world.

Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

To be fair to Apple, both Google and Meta have loads of apps for iOS that compare to the Apple suite of apps. Although there is definitely a pre-installed advantage for the Apple apps.

panarky• 2 years ago

First, Chrome's rendering engine is Blink. Chromium is not a rendering engine, it's the open-source version of Chrome.

Second, third-party browsers use their own rendering engines (Gecko, Blink) on MacOS, while iOS only allows WebKit.

wslh• 2 years ago

Note that Apple doesn't allow alternative web browsers on iOS,

Nor [embedded] programming languages (e.g. Python).

sunnybeetroot2• 2 years ago

Your second paragraph is incorrect and is explained why in your quote. Apple does allow alternative browsers, it does however restrict the rendering engine. Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

eecc5• 2 years ago

That’s a specific strategic choice, wanted by Steve Jobs himself to maintain leverage on the browser ecosystem.

If Chrome was let loose indiscriminately on any platform, how long before it became a Macromedia Flash, hobbling battery life and performance on whatever platform didn’t align to Alphabet’s strategy?

Also, how long before Alphabet began prime-timing Android, leaving Apple versions trailing months of not years behind, and restoring the “Works best on IE” experience of the ‘00s?

warkdarrior2• 2 years ago

That is stretching the definition of a browser. Superapps enable all the miniapps in them to access the same user data, the history of app interactions (e.g., message history, shopping history), and to integrate closely. Webapps are nowhere close to that.

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

My 2 cents:

1 - Might have an argument there.

2 - OK, but only if the user is willing to accept the security risk to their apps, Apple and non-Apple. Apple has an interest in keeping the apps they create, or sell for others, secure but should bear no responsibility if a third-party fails to keep to the same standard.

3 - OK. I personally kind of like it because I am a bad person, but OK.

4 - Aren't most of them behind Apple's watches, anyway? I don't have an issue with Apple Watch not being compatible with Android - while Apple shouldn't prevent a third-party (see 2 above) from creating a bridge, they should, in no way, be forced to do it themselves.

5 - (see 2 above) And I don't have an issue with Apple torquing the nuts of banks - the banks do the same to us. And yes, it's my money they're taking from banks, but the banks don't like that, so ... I'm gonna call that one a tie.

stephc_int134• 2 years ago

The NYT article is making the case look weaker than it really is, especially for armchair lawyers.

You can read the full document but of course very few of us would do that.

Instead, I think this Youtube video of the US Attorney General is giving a good summary of the case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ6JycDyYj4

mikepurvis• 2 years ago

All of these look important to me, but I've been particularly frustrated recently by the smartwatch issue. I've been a Fitbit user for several years and briefly tried an Apple Watch before returning it and resume Fitbit use— I had a few issues with the Apple Watch, most notably around battery life. But that brief experience showed me really starkly how much Apple is able to lock out third parties from doing things that their own stuff can do trivially by hooking right into private operating system APIs:

- Apple Watch can directly use your credit cards without needing to separately add them to Fitbit/Google Pay.

- Apple Watch can "find my" your phone, whereas Fitbit's version of this is limited to just making it beep, and even that only works if the phone is running the Fitbit app in the background (which it often isn't).

- Apple Watch can stream data to the phone all the time, whereas Fitbit relies on the app being opened, meaning your morning sleep data isn't available immediately since opening the app (to look at it) just enables it to begin transferring.

- Apple Watch can unlock itself when your phone unlocks.

- Apple Watch gets much richer notification integration.

And yeah, you can argue that all of this is optional "extra" stuff that is just Apple's prerogative to take advantage of as the platform holder, and maybe that's so to some degree... but these little things do add up. Particularly when Apple doesn't even have a device that competes with Fitbit, it feels unfair that they shouldn't be made to open up all the APIs necessary for this kind of interoperability.

GnarfGnarf4• 2 years ago

My Apple Watch tracks Afib (atrial fibrillation) much more consistently and reliably than my Charge 5 did.

Aloisius4• 2 years ago

I don’t see Messaging interoperability of the iMessage protocol in the complaint.

I see:

* third-party apps not being able to send/receive carrier messages (SMS)

* only Messages getting background running

* blue/green colored bubbles.

The background running thing is a bit of a surprise. If you had asked me, I’d have said iMessages didn’t run in the background given it’s load delay for new messages.

lxgr3• 2 years ago

Yeah, iMessage completely craps out when sending messages without signal. A red dot and manual “retry now” button? What is this? ICQ in 1995?

WhatsApp on iOS does a much better job, ironically (it just sends all queued outgoing messages once connectivity is back in the background, like every email client did back in dialup days).

LastTrain• 2 years ago

They probably could have avoided all this if they’d caved on messaging interop.

kristjansson• 2 years ago

Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay

15 basis points (0.15%) from the issuing bank on something that _undoubtably_ increases tx volume and associated interchange revenue. Sure, the issuing banks would like tx volume for absolutely free. Sure, DOJ should argue the point on NFC access. But 15bp from the party that's making more money on a service that's free and beneficial for {consumer, merchant, card network} just seems like good business.

bhelkey7• 2 years ago

Sure, DOJ should argue the point on NFC access.

That's the point of the lawsuit. Chase can't currently make Chase Pay to compete with Apple Pay and offer a mobile payment service with less than 15 basis points.

fennecbutt9• 2 years ago

Lmao no. How will it increase tx volume.

And fine, let apple collect their fee, but also open up payments on iPhone to other providers. Why can't my native bank app use the nfc hardware itself, hmmmmmmmmm? Oh Apple lock in so they can collect their $$$ for literally no reason; the payment network already exists, Apple is just a middleman.

Fgyu09093• 2 years ago

Thanks this simplifies things a lot.

standardUser2• 2 years ago

3. Messaging interoperability

The richest company in the world is purposefully generating social and psychology stress for young people so they can edge up their market share just a little bit more. In a just world, people would be imprisoned over this.

tpmoney19• 2 years ago

Or alternatively in a just world we would teach our children not to be little shits to each other because of their tech choices. I just can't wrap my head around how the whole SMS vs iMessage color thing has become such a dominant "problem". It's been that way for as long as there was any distinction to be made between SMS and non SMS messaging. It's valuable information to the end user, and it's easily dealt with by using any other messaging system other than SMS to communicate, like apparently the entire rest of the world does. But somehow it's too difficult for american teenagers to figure out how to install Signal, or Whats App, or Telegram, or Facebook Messenger, or use email, or Discord, or IRC, or Matrix, or Skype, or Google Chat or literally any other of a few hundred messaging / chat systems that are out there.

ksec2• 2 years ago

Even though I am somewhat gainst Apple I dont think that is a fair assessment.

I do however find them extremely hypocrite of suggesting how they "care" about young people and yet not acting on it while causing this problem.

travisgriggs• 2 years ago

The one area I have concerns about is superapps. I’m of the opinion that user experience is better when an app does one thing and does it well. WeChat and Facebook as platforms or just a digital variant of platform lock-ins.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

This is like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. They missed the one actual example of Apple abusing its ownership in one industry (the OS) to then give itself a monopoly over another industry (app stores/app store fees).

kemayo10• 2 years ago

Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

...if that counts, is the suit claiming that they somehow don't let other developers have multiple related apps? Because it seems that something like Meta's suite of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) that all share login data and suchlike should qualify if "the Apple ecosystem of apps" does.

Menu_Overview• 2 years ago

Thats for the writeup. I tend to agree with most of those, although the "super app" things is weird to me...I don't like the idea of "super apps" because it is hard for the user to share only the minimal permissions.

ubermonkey6• 2 years ago

Most of this sounds like the DOJ doesn't understand the tech at all.

iMessage is an Apple service, created as a way to provide additional value to people on Apple platforms so that they aren't limited by SMS. The DOJ argument appears to be "oh, you made a better mousetrap, and now you have to let people outside your platform use it." Why? What's the rational argument there?

They then extend that argument to the watch, which is just bananas. It's designed to work with one set of platforms. The tightly coupled nature of Watch/Phone/Mac provides benefits, but Apple is never going to open the technical kimono up to Samsung (e.g.) watches to use the same hooks, and they shouldn't be required to do so.

KorematsuFredt3• 2 years ago

None of these arguments are very satisfactory to me as a consumer and this appears to be more Mafia like behaviour than a genuine concern for market based competition.

tristan9577• 2 years ago

Are you an Apple customer currently?

wiseowise17• 2 years ago

How so?

synergy202• 2 years ago

Apple is the old Microsoft but much worse. WinTel PC was so much more open comparing to Apple.

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

3. Messaging interoperability
4. Smartwatches [interoperability]

Where do you draw the line on forcing interoperability?

This is kind of like (in-person) movie theaters.

Movie theaters don't allow you to bring your own food, you have to buy their food/drink.

Why should a movie theater be forced to allow patrons bring their own food?

Why should Apple be forced to allow it's patrons to brining competitive things to their business?

Note: I ask these questions out of genuine curiosity. Not to troll/stir-the-pot.

jiggawatts4• 2 years ago

Even better analogies:

- Should the government force marketplaces to allow competing marketplaces to set up shop within their area, collect fees, but not pay any fees to the larger market?

- Should the government make laws to require restaurants to allow competing chefs to bring a hot plate and start cooking food at the tables and serve them to their customers?

- Should Google be forced by the government to include support for formats in Android that are used by Apple such a HEIF and HEIC? What about Microsoft and Linux?

These rules are not about individual choice or freedom. This is about giant corporations using the government to give them a way into the walled garden built by a competing mega corporation. This is completely self-serving and in no shape, way, or form serves the common good.

As an iPhone user I do not want government interference in a market place that has been kept mostly free of malware precisely because it keeps out the riff-raff. I want the hucksters and the scammers blocked. I really don't care if they scream "unfair!" at the top of their lungs from outside of the fence.

Similarly, general SMS messaging is a cesspit of unceasing spam precisely because it is so interoperable. Because Apple keeps out garbage devices with zero security, I've seen precisely zero iMessage spam in the last decade. I got a spam SMS in the last hour. I'll get several more today.

3D304974202• 2 years ago

I presume the question is about impact: At Apple's scale, restricting competition has a very broad impact on the economy. In contrast, a movie theater not allowing outside food is probably not reducing all that much food-related competition in aggregate.

I don't think there's a good real-world "venue/food" analogy. However, hypothetically: Imagine if half of all homes/apartments were controlled by the same company and they also happened to be the largest food producer. They then decided to limit what food could be brought into your home, saying "We have the safest food, so you can only buy our food." Now, they might even be right that their food is the safest, but the market impact would be significant enough to warrant anti-trust action.

thlamz• 2 years ago

In some countries with strong consumer laws, movie theaters are not legally allowed to forbid customers from bringing their own food and drinks.

yeeeloit• 2 years ago

I always wonder why safari doesn't get more attention in these sorts of claims against apple.

onethought• 2 years ago

1. Seems odd, given WeChat is on iOS… the example you used is literally a counterpoint for the allegation.

3. Messages do interop. But it’d be hilarious if the US created some kind of precedent where everything has to work on everything.

4. Samsung, and Google both fall into this trap, where more functionality is available between like devices.

5. So when my Amex isn’t accepted, that’s Visa or Mastercard restricting APIs - and causing lock in right?

These strange legal cases are odd to me. If we think these large tech conglomerates should be regulated, then write laws for them, don’t use the court system to muck things up for no reason.

siggen• 2 years ago

Did they mention copying photos from your phone to a PC via USB? This is intentionally crippled and such an unpleasant experience in comparison to the experience if you have a Mac, for me at least.

fsflover6• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781722

al_borland• 2 years ago

One of the big reasons I buy into the Apple ecosystem is for that next level of first-party interoperability. It works far better than any collection of more open systems I’ve even seen/used.

I don’t use Apple in spite of this, I use it because of this. Trying to support everything will likely lead to a worse experience for everyone in a multi-device world.

Apple is a hardware company making their own software to run that hardware, much like a game console. It seems like many of the criticisms here could be adapted and applied to Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. Why can’t my PS VR work with my Xbox… it’s a Sony monopoly /s

There are areas where I think Apple can improve, such as right to repair and reliability in general. But it seems like some of what these governments are trying to kill is the very reason some people went to Apple in the first place. That doesn’t lead to more choice, it leads to less choice… as the government tries to turn iOS into an Android clone. Kind of odd that Apple is being told to act more like the platform that has the lead in global market share.

TheGRS• 2 years ago

I remember how Apple Watch wouldn't let you download podcasts or songs on Spotify. Apparently they changed that to allow some recently, but that change did get me to switch to the Apple Podcast app for awhile, which I feel like is inferior.

tecoholic• 2 years ago

I am sure each of these items are a pain for a different sets of people. The most irritating one for someone who moved recently is: NFC lock down.

Like my Xiaomi phone was able to store any card I wanted and do a Tap to Pay, but I have to use Apple Pay and I can’t do that because my region is locked to somewhere Apple Pay isn’t a thing. Here in Melbourne even public transport is affected by this. The local myki transport cards can be digitally carried on an Android phone but not an iPhone.

Nevermark2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the summary. My "Open Apple" wishlist includes:

• Allowing alternate web browser implementations, including alternate Javascript and WebAssembly implementations.

• Which would include third party developer access to the memory allocation/permissions API used for JIT compilers. Make iOS a first class ARM development OS. Please.

Perhaps removing restrictions to general APIs for competitive apps and "Super apps" would implicitly include those changes?

Interesting that this doesn't address Apple's iOS "taxation" of tangential non-web transactions, or the lack of App Store alternatives. If Apple has monopoly power, those seem like suitable concerns.

Reason0772• 2 years ago

"Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps" ... In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments."

The WeChat super-app is available on iOS, complete with installable "mini apps", and most of the same functionality that is available on Android. So it's not clear exactly what the complaint is here. Unless Apple makes exceptions for WeChat and China that are not available to developers elsewhere?

zie2• 2 years ago

For a second, let's just assume that Apple is 100% guilty. What will the fine be? If it's anything less than many billions of dollars, there is zero incentive for Apple to do anything at all different in the future.

Suing Apple(or any other company over stuff like this) when the fines will be a tiny slap on the wrist at worst will not incentivize proper behaviour, so there is literally zero reason for doing this except for the govt to feel good about itself, see!! we got a few hundred million from that evil corp for doing bad things. LOL. Apple could plead guilty tomorrow, pay the fine and continue doing business and not even notice.

extraduder_ire• 2 years ago

Ongoing fines until they achieve compliance, or legally barring them from operating in the US. I think that's usually how rulings go in these kinds of cases.

Page 76 of the lawsuit PDF goes into some specifics under the section "Request for relief".

unclebucknasty2• 2 years ago

Does it indicate what the trigger was on the timing? As far as I can tell, most if not all of this has been Apple SOP for some time.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

I specifically prefer apple because they don't let others fuck around like android does.

whateveracct• 2 years ago

Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

Isn't this .. not "super apps" then? If it's multiple apps? Said 3rd party super apps could instead be multiple apps people install a la carte. But companies want to do uber apps for funnel purposes etc.

jll29• 2 years ago

Thanks for this excellent summary.

With regards to the "super apps", Apple can just as well argue that it aspires to retain access for multiple players ("avoiding monopoles", ironically), so naturally it does not want only a single app becoming the majority of all downloads, which leads the app store idea ad absurdum.

Makes you wonder about something else: Could Apple one day be broken apart like "Ma Bell"? It seems the Apple brand is inconsistent with notions of modularity and openness (which brings with itself a certain messiness), everything is supposed to look at feel alike up to the slightly silly (as a problem to solve, as long as there are still children starving on this planet at the same time) device unpacking experience.

It's good that the U.S. government are doing their job as expected, in this case that's relevant for all other countries, where a lot of the device owners/users are based.

My ultimate wish would be some someone to launch a third mobile platform - beside Apple IOS and Alphabet-Google Android - based on a new open W3C standard (not HTML). Such a standard would get a chance to grow with the support of the legal apparatus: judges should force the oligopolists to implement said standard, and then people might just say "hey, I can just implement ONE app, and catch all THREE platforms."

hunterrr• 2 years ago

Super Apps sounds like an app that takes away resources from other apps

dimask4• 2 years ago

It is interesting that in this case "pro-competitive" does not necessarily mean "pro-consumer". I am not sure how stuff like "super apps" are a good thing for consumers (sounds like a nightmare mass surveillance scenario to me). Similar cloud streaming apps where the whole fuss is really about microtransactions in games or less regulation. Message interoperability is not a bad thing, but not sure why we still talk about "MMS" in 2024 when so many different chat apps are around. I don't know about smartwatches, maybe that is a fair point. And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details, except if we were talking about some open source gold standard of trust and privacy. I do not care if it is apple or a third party that gets a commission from banks or who gets my transaction history to sell to brokers.

On the other hand, I would like to see interoperability in stuff like airdrop. But that would not be something that other FAANG would make money of, so that is probably not so interesting for these regulators.

bhelkey7• 2 years ago

And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details

Do you think no one else should be able to build a mobile payment service? Should banks be block from making, say, ChasePay?

It's fine to prefer Apple Pay and to choose Apple Pay even if there are other options. The question is, should everyone be locked into Apple Pay vs choosing Apple Pay because it is better than ChasePay?

kineto• 2 years ago

Another vote for Airdrop, but with no strings attached please (i.e. no silent failing on MP3 containing folders)

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 years ago

"For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just _the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big_. "

But that's not a claim. It might be a fact that supports a claim. One which Apple might contest. It seems that no matter how many times web publications in spades remind readers that monopolies are not per se illegal, i.e., something more is required, e.g., anti-competitive conduct, forum commenters remain convinced of some other reality.

w10-1• 2 years ago

Right. The legal theories are:

- Monopolization: actual, attempted, conspiracies, etc.

- Restraints of trade. Horizontal (rigging bids, fixing prices, allocating markets to avoid competition) and Vertical (resale price limits, exclusive deals)

- Tying: leveraging one monopoly to gain another

- Merger, where the resulting market would not be competitive

- other Unfair Competition (FTC)

While lawsuits are not uncommon, actual relief is rare, in part because the few judgments are overturned on appeal. Antitrust has been steadily eroded for decades.

Recent relief includes US v AT&T 2018 (imposed conditions on the Time Warner acquisition), but there are many more overturned.

So: 1. Super apps and 2 cloud streaming apps (restraint of trade): it's hard to compare all of apple to all of these multi-function apps. One question is whether all the apple functionality in fact complies with whatever constraints are imposed. I suppose the theory is restraint of trade. In NCAA v. Alston (2021) the NCAA lost their ability to restrict student compensation, but that was a blanket restriction.

3. Message interoperability: Apple also color-codes SMS messages, and will argue it helps to indicate the kind of data that can be transferred. That's a losing argument.

4. Smart watches (Restraint and tying): Unclear what limits are placed on other watches. Easy to fix with an updated API, but some risk the court will try to order Apple to license WatchOS. As with patent, watches may end up adding more legal exposure than the product is really worth in the portfolio.

5. Digital wallets (tying): Hard to see the courts requiring openness here when they have not done so for other financial networks, and the government doesn't really want this.

Most are based on tying, but tying has not been effective for some time. Virtually every successful tying case lacked a distinct business or technical rationale. (The right to repair and maintain (from Xerox on) is the furthest they go in rebutting technical rationale's, and they still permit technical standards.)

vorticalbox• 2 years ago

4. Smartwatches

This is true, my wife and I have Huawei smart watches.

After my wife's android phone broke she got an iPhone and the watch is basically useless.

It can't receive notifications, can't control music playback, it can't use "find my phone" which makes the phone shout "I'm here" really loud.

The only thing it can do is sync the step counter.

WhyNotHugo• 2 years ago

The "messaging interoperability" point strikes me as a weird one.

In the US, people tend to use iMessages, which is not interoperable with other ecosystems. But iPhone place no limitation on third party messaging apps. Indeed, the rest of the world simply ignores the existence of iMessages and uses other applications for messaging (these vary per country/region, but I don't think that iMessages has any significant market share in any other country).

There's not technical reason preventing people in the US from using another messaging platform, and there are no limitations imposed on third party messaging apps. It's really just a cultural issue of people _choosing_ iMessages. Probably just network effect.

bossyTeacher• 2 years ago

To be honest, I never got why the message interop was such a big deal. Do people still use text messages in 2024 as opposed to a third party app like Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc?

I just find it a bit questionable that Apple is being forced open this much. If you want a super app, why don't you just use the browser? Also, is cloud streaming apps such a big deal?

And re smartwatches, isn't it somehow expected that apps made by the same company will always have an edge? You can see this in the Windows+Microsoft Auth combo where Microsoft apps can do stuff that non-Microsoft apps can't just because it is a Microsoft app.

Maybe iPhones are much more popular in the US, but I feel Apple doesn't have such a strong hold of the mobile market in Europe.

My worry is that Apple is be forced open and will have to allow everyone to access the same APIs with all the security implications of it. Surely, if people don't like the way iPhones work they can move to Android or Tizen. I personally wish people moved away from iPhones AND Androids so we could have the thriving and healthy competition we had at the beginning of the smartphone revolution with Android, iOs, Symbian and similar. Support a market full of mobile OSes competitors and not a duopoly with open APIs.

burrish2• 2 years ago

Thank you for the summary

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

is a browser a super app? a cloud streaming app?

ApolloFortyNine3• 2 years ago

It's wild to me to see people defending Apple in the comments here.

60% of Americans own a phone they're not allowed to install third party apps on, and the ONLY way to get apps is to pay a 30% fee to Apple on every purchase.

Imagine if Windows allowed you to only install apps acquired through their store, and with the same 30% fee. Microsoft literally had a huge anti trust case against them for simply setting a default browser, one you could have switched away from at any time.

It's probably the clearest monopoly in America right now. The damage to consumers is immediately visible (30% fee leaves a lot of margin on the table for competitors). Just look at the number of apps that either don't allow you to purchase their subscription on Apple at all, or charge substantially more. It should be a slam dunk case.

darkwizard423• 2 years ago

60% of Americans CHOOSE to own a phone that has those features...

I think that is the issue. Android offers (nearly) all of the same functionality and yet people still choose iPhone.

Abusing your ecosystem is one thing (ex. defaulting to Apple Maps for location links, only allowing Safari as default browser), but not allowing 3P app stores seems perfectly within a company's rights.

Amazon isn't forced to list your product and Apple shouldn't be forced to give you access to it's hardware/software users.

ApolloFortyNine3• 2 years ago

Abusing your ecosystem is one thing (ex. defaulting to Apple Maps for location links, only allowing Safari as default browser), but not allowing 3P app stores seems perfectly within a company's rights.

Is taxing every purchase on your platform for 30% not abusing your ecosystem?

I think that is the issue. Android offers (nearly) all of the same functionality and yet people still choose iPhone.

iMessage is a non zero cause of this, and looking at the percentage of teens with iPhones, 85+%, likely a colossal cause. Which directly falls into Apple abusing their ecosystem.

vessenes2• 2 years ago

It's nothing like a slam dunk case. In fact, it's an attempt by DOJ to stretch and redefine the edges of their rights under anti-trust rules.

It's also nothing like Microsoft -- Microsoft was a monopoly, full stop, in the 1990s. They were well over 90% of desktop market share in business, and likely close in consumer. And as 1990s era Microsoft employees will remind you if you ask them -- "there's nothing wrong with being a monopoly, only abusing your monopoly power". Forcing IE on people was considered abuse by the courts of the time, and even then was widely considered to be a result of a Clinton-era DOJ, e.g. politics were involved. As they are now, both progressive anti-big-tech politics, and bipartisan anti-consumer encryption politics.

Today there are hundreds of functional choices you could make for any sane definition of the product categories Apple is in. Mobile phone? Sure - from totally open Pinephone type systems to vanilla Android to stripped-down Android to ... Laptop? yep. Servers/Desktop? Please. Watches? Check.

Are there any major pieces of software that consumers must have that are locked to Apple, and that Apple is charging egregious rent on? Nope. Most Macbook airs are really just browser engines. As of 2020, about 50% of those macbook airs ran Google's chrome as their primary browser.

You might, like me, feel Apple's App store walled garden is on balance a net positive, leaving me with almost no worries related to upgrade problems, my family's phones being compromised by malware, etc, or you might like many others hate the controls, want to root your Android phone and install your own apks directly, and thus choose Android or some other unix-a-like-on-mobile -- more power to you.

What we've seen you won't get the US courts to do is conclude that Apple's huge user base and developer base, controlled through their App store, is somehow a 'public good' that needs to be given away to others that didn't pay to develop, build and market it -- that's pretty much settled. It's valuable, super valuable. It's a competitive moat. But it's not abuse of a monopoly position to have such a thing.

ApolloFortyNine3• 2 years ago

You might, like me, feel Apple's App store walled garden is on balance a net positive, leaving me with almost no worries related to upgrade problems, my family's phones being compromised by malware, etc, or you might like many others hate the controls

You realize the app store can remain a walled garden, and users can be allowed to install their own applications right?

It's wild to me the number of people who argue for less freedom when the topic of Apple's walled garden comes up.

It's also nothing like Microsoft -- Microsoft was a monopoly, full stop, in the 1990s.

Plenty of anti trust cases have been brought against companies that don't have 90% of a market. 60+% is quite a lot.

Apocryphon2• 2 years ago

In fact, it's an attempt by DOJ to stretch and redefine the edges of their rights under anti-trust rules.

Given the incredibly attenuated state of antitrust enforcement in this country, maybe that's not such a bad thing. Going after the most profitable company in human history would make quite a statement, producing a chilling effect to the corporations.

AlexandrB9• 2 years ago

What no one seems to be able to explain to my satisfaction is why this logic doesn't also apply to game consoles. The "well they sell it at a loss" argument is not persuasive. That's Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft's choice as a business, it's not the government's role to make their loss-leader business model possible.

ProfessorLayton• 2 years ago

Regulations come into place when there's consumer harm, and consumers have TONS of choices in regards to games.

The vast majority of the library on Xbox/PS is cross platform. PC gamers are enjoying their vast Steam library and there's plenty of Switch clones that can handle everything from AAA gaming to indy titles.

Also the largest gaming market is on mobile phones by far. So here we are with this antitrust suit.

asadotzler12• 2 years ago

Consumers are not terribly harmed by this because gaming is a leisure activity while smartphones are critical components of everyday life. Also, no game company has billions of users and there are several players with little moat who actually have to compete to win users so prices come down even if there isn't much cross OS play.

dragonwriter16• 2 years ago

What no one seems to be able to explain to my satisfaction is why this logic doesn't also apply to game consoles.

Sony is currently facing antitrust litigation in multiple jurisdictions over it; more generally, the fact that a particular other actor has not yet been successfully sued under a law for actions similar to those for which some actor is currently being sued does not mean the law does not apply to their actions. It just means they haven't been successfully sued yet.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

It's wild to me to see people defending Apple in the comments here.
60% of Americans own a phone they're not allowed to install third party apps on

One could reasonably conclude that 60% of users have little or no interest in installing apps outside App Store. Nothing "wild" about that.

lowbloodsugar• 2 years ago

What a waste of everyone’s money.

visarga3• 2 years ago

I don't even want to open NYT after they sued for copyright infringement on their old news, after entrapping the models with the first phrase.

throwaway743• 2 years ago

Should this make it through, what would this mean for operating systems? Would it mean that Windows and Apple would have to be able to run Windows, Apple, and linux software?

Side thought, many Americans will purchase an Apple products as a means of projecting their identity/lifestyle. Apple, to many, is a luxury tech product company and is used to project their self image to the world.

Remove the exclusivity of their products only being able to integrate with one another, then the image of exclusivity ("part of the club") starts falling apart.

If any of this happens then Apple's in a pretty shit spot. That's a big if tho

shuckles30• 2 years ago

The super apps point is very interesting. The quotes in the complaint from Apple are exactly right: super apps are sucky and don’t follow native platform conventions. The DOJ then says this is a good thing and pro-consumer innovation. If only they knew the tactics WeChat and others use in China to keep users trapped. (For example: have you ever tried to send an Alipay link through WeChat? Good luck!)

Cornbilly• 2 years ago

The government has been pretty adamant about wanting a backdoor placed in peoples' phones.

A super-app probably seems a like pretty good option to them, as once they compromise it, they'll have access to a large amount of data or, more likely, pressure the super-app owner into placing a backdoor into their service.

shudza• 2 years ago

Looks like someone important didn't like that Apple placed a blatant backdoor in their CPUs.

crop_rotation6• 2 years ago

The comments here seem extremely emotional against Apple. If you want a free device then the android ecosystem has many great examples. The S23/S24 ultra are phones which are as good as the iPhone. I have always been an Android user because of the freedoms. But forcing iOS to become like android makes no sense. Android already exists and you can already use it. The onboarding app will even move all your data. iMessage is even going to support the useless RCS standard. I am not sure what people in this thread have against Apple. Doing the things they require will simply make all the advantages of iPhone evaporate and it will be simply left in the dust. If you want android, buy android.

throitallaway• 2 years ago

iMessage is even going to support the useless RCS standard

What's useless about it? As I understand it, it will provide a massive upgrade over SMS/MMS. Exchanging videos via MMS (currently the only native OS option for Android <-> iOS communication) is an exercise in futility.

crop_rotation6• 2 years ago

It is extremely useless compared to Whatsapp/Signal. It is not even natively supported in android like SMS. Even in android the only app that supports it is Google Messages (unlike several for SMS). Nobody supports the protocol and everyone uses Google's implementation. Google's client, Google's servers, optional encryption. What is good about it. The only reason for it's existence is to make Google get a leg in the messaging clients after failures with their previous attempts (Gtalk, hangouts, allo). That is why nobody outside the USA would ever bother using it.

It doesn't do anything that Whatsapp/Signal don't. And there is nothing native about it in Android, other than Google Messages is force installed on all devices, and the rich vibrant ecosystem of android SMS clients was killed off to make way for it.

shuckles30• 2 years ago

I like the part of the complaint where the government lawyers fantasize that their hard work is the reason why Microsoft allowed iTunes Store on Windows. Some real narcissism and lack of knowledge about technology on display.

doctoboggan• 2 years ago

US Attorney General Merrick Garland discussing the suit live here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqKbl0vWzaU

bedros• 2 years ago

can someone explain how different is the iphone ecosystem anti-competitive practices vs sony playstation ecosystem?

pvg2• 2 years ago

I can't explain it but one fairly straightforward argument is just scale - everyone has a smartphone, few people (comparatively) have Playstations. There is a more obvious case for legitimate government interest in the regulation of a market that affects a much bigger proportion of consumers and consumer activity.

daveoc64• 2 years ago

Nobody needs a games console, but a smartphone is increasingly an essential part of daily life - for things like accessing government services, transport, payments, identity, commerce etc.

If you are a company or other organisation that depends on making your service available through smartphones, then you may be affected by Apple's policies.

asadotzler12• 2 years ago

a few hundred million users vs about 7 billion users tells you a few things, among them which is that game consoles don't effing matter one bit and smartphones are a necessity for modern life. do you not even think before posting stuff like this?

davidham3• 2 years ago

Regarding the Apple Wallet: what about it is uncompetitive? I can add credit cards from many providers to it, and as far as I can tell Apple doesn't get anything if I add my Chase card and use it with Apple Pay. I don't think banks have to pay Apple anything for their cards to be used in the Apple wallet. Nor do non-financial cards like memberships.

padthai2• 2 years ago

They get 0.15% of the transaction from the card issuer. And they do not allow card issuers to use the hardware on their own.

davidham3• 2 years ago

That seems...fair to me? Apple makes a phone a lot of people want to buy, and adds NFC to it to enable mobile payment, and they provide security guarantees for the end user and the card issuer alike. I don't know why they should be obligated to provide this functionality to the card issuers for free.

davidham3• 2 years ago

(Thank you for the reply by the way, I didn't know that about the 0.15%!)

samatman17• 2 years ago

Visa and Mastercard both charge a fee for operating a payment network. Apple does as well.

mcfedr7• 2 years ago

You try and make an app that competes with Apple wallet.

You will very quickly find you can never have access to the NFC hardware. And you could not trigger your app when required.

alex_suzuki3• 2 years ago

I worked as a contractor for a company offering a mobile payment solution in central europe. They were able to negotiate, with some weighty backing, an app entitlement that prevents Apple Pay from popping up when the phone is held close to an NFC-enabled payment terminal while the app is open. Just saying that there are ways, but they‘re not open to everyone.

sf_rob• 2 years ago

I find it somewhat entertaining that the press conference, and to a lesser extent the brief, argues that giving 3rd party dev access to Wallet functionality would result in a more security for the user. I don't always trust monoliths (might be the wrong word?) but I trust Apple Wallet integrations more than anything my bank would try to roll out.

I'm fine with the claim of more competition and more privacy (although I'm not particularly worried about Apple here).

smashah• 2 years ago

Great next they should sue Meta and Whatsapp for anticompetitive and monopolistic practices

multimoon7• 2 years ago

I don’t understand why Apple is the target and everyone - govts included - walk right past MS repeating what they’re best at. MS is currently pushing popup ads into windows that installs unsolicited extensions into google chrome and switches the search engine to bing - and will fear monger the user with vague security claims about switching back.

dgellow2• 2 years ago

Microsoft can be targeted but that’s a pretty slow process, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they are sued in a few years if they continue their behavior

choxi2• 2 years ago

Or Google or Amazon, how are those not way more blatant antitrust targets?

jvolkman• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Amazon

codemonkeysh• 2 years ago

U.S. Government - "Hey Apple, can you stop selling so many phones because you're now becoming a monopoly; although there's Android."

hermannj3142• 2 years ago

The takeaway here is that when a multi-trillion dollar company breaks a 130-year old law in a way that impacts over one hundred million people, our justice system and government is so broken and incompetent that it takes five years of investigation before anything happens. Probably years more before any action is taken.

Cool, good job lawyers. The latency of your Leviathan ruins more lives than its power could ever hope to save.

bearjaws2• 2 years ago

I generally agree with your sentiment, maybe more when it comes to people like Donald Trump or SBF...

But what do you want them to do? Build a shitty case in 1 year and get destroyed in court?

Remember, Apple has thousands of lawyers too, they aren't going to settle this case.

hermannj3142• 2 years ago

I think that is a false dichotomy the lawyers have created: have a slow moving system or a system where justice isn't served.

Our current system is slow and unjust. There are other options.

My wife and I tried to be foster parents, we did it for about three months, but everything was so slow moving. We had to spend 30 days just to have a piece of paper signed that no one contested. That moment opened my eyes to the corruption the lawyers have willfully constructed and willfully participate in and I have hated the entire legal profession since that moment. The system from the simplest cast to the most complex is designed to pad billable hours without concern for latency, justice, or consistency.

It is a sham system.

modeless2• 2 years ago

The complaint doesn't talk much about alternative app stores or web browser engines. If Apple lost, would they even need to start allowing alternative stores or browsers? I guess it would be all up to a judge in that case, but the complaint isn't specifically stating that alternative app stores or browser engines should be allowed.

aabajian• 2 years ago

The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination. I feel a slight annoyance whenever a non-Apple user forms a group chat as I know that person will limit the messaging functionality.

In my opinion, the "monopolistic" aspect of it comes down to the fact that they tied it into an otherwise open messaging system - SMS. You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge). So, the only way to know a message was sent via SMS is the green background for incoming messages and the green background plus the "sent via SMS" for outgoing messages. This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.

On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger. I think it'll be a hard sell at this point to convince a jury that iMessage is an overt monopoly.

The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.

lvl1023• 2 years ago

That’s not Apple’s doing. They introduced iMessage as a direct result of telecom companies charging customers for text messages a la carte. If DoJ has issues with those blue bubbles then they should’ve sued telecom back then. This entire suit is a joke.

Workaccount211• 2 years ago

The problem isn't the messaging service, the problem is the artificial hardware requirement in order to use it. Second would be the inability to make another app the primary/default once you have said hardware.

shuckles30• 2 years ago

My guess is even if iMessage bubbles were green, the sheer horribleness of SMS would still make communicating with Android a second class experience in a way everyone found frustrating. Sure RCS might make that better (I’m skeptical — standards support in the Android ecosystem is very inconsistent and varying in quality), but it’s a decade late. The basic argument is: Apple can’t make anything better for iPhone users until they can make it a standard for every mobile computing platform and competing service provider. About as absurd as it sounds.

Dah00n6• 2 years ago

Sure RCS might make that better (I’m skeptical — standards support in the Android ecosystem is very inconsistent and varying in quality)

Maybe, but my old mom and her old Huawei phone works with zero problems with my brand new OnePlus and whatever mix of phones her friends have. All of them on RCS. The only one that has a problem is a friend with an iPhone that cannot receive images in the size everyone else shares them in. No-one here uses zuckerware - it is all SMS (IE. all RCS except for the few that likes old style Nokias so they get it as a SMS).

eYrKEC2• 2 years ago

The blue background isn't lock-in -- it's branding and fashion. It's labeling the in-group and the out-group. The cool kids with their Nike shoes and the kids who got their shoes from Payless Shoe Store. The Abercrombie & Fitch wearing kids vs Costco or Walmart wearing kids.

The sooner it can be learned that a symbol on a shoe is ... kind of a silly status symbol, the better. Same with blue background or blue check mark.

kelnos12• 2 years ago

I fear that's a losing battle. Forming cliques seems to be basic human behavior. It's not so much about the status symbol itself, as it's about being able to "other" people for whatever reason du jour.

This seems especially true for children, who lack the maturity to judge social interaction less superficially. Not saying adults are immune to this sort of thing, of course.

00deadbeef7• 2 years ago

When iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.

Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not as a status symbol.

tamirzb4• 2 years ago

On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger

I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.

With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

svachalek• 2 years ago

These are all available in the US but it sounds like you have the same problem we do. There are way too many of them and they aren't compatible.

Andrex12• 2 years ago

I hope WhatsApp is the past and RCS is the future.

Insane to me the amount of WhatsApp evangelism I read on this site. Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong?

SMS/RCS are flawed but can be improved. Advocating instead for Meta-produced software is irresponsible and reckless IMO.

oezi• 2 years ago

WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram

These are not good options to have secure and private communication.

Signal and Threema should be the choices given.

mettamage• 2 years ago

Except for all the US people that keep in touch with Europeans! Source: me (a European) that has a GF in the US. They all get converted to WhatsApp :')

rkagerer• 2 years ago

Could also say it was 'solved' 30 years ago with ICQ (OK, I know it was centralized and insecure, but from a strictly user-experience perspective I honestly liked it better than anything that came since) or maybe 35 years ago with IRC.

rootusrootus5• 2 years ago

I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step.

One person said that. Almost nobody I know has any interest in WhatsApp. The infatuation with putting all of your messaging into Facebook's hands is a European thing. What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple.

With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

I have a hard time believing that having multiple chat apps is any kind of solution to the problem. The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. Right out of the box, no asking what ecosystem someone else is using, it just works. And if I'm talking to someone who does not have iMessage ... it still just works, albeit with fewer features.

I heartily disagree that Europe or the rest of the world has a better system. Best would be if every phone from every manufacturer supported a modern protocol equivalent to iMessage or Google's proprietary RCS. Until then, iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.

jbm• 2 years ago

I can't speak for everything else, but LINE was not well known for privacy.

Everything people complain about WRT Meta was being done with impunity; their privacy policy basically said that they could read your messages and tailor ads based on them.

I really don't understand why people are crowing about using platforms like LINE and WhatsApp and sneering at Americans; they are not better.

spiderice• 2 years ago

I don’t think relying on Facebook for your entire countries messaging is considered “a solved problem”.

Relying on any one company is bad. But Facebook might be just about the worst.

vishnugupta2• 2 years ago

Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.

It's the same with payment system. I hear that bank to bank transfer is still a big pain in the US and that check payment is prevalent there.

jwr2• 2 years ago

What I find amusing is that all of those WhatsApp users don't know or don't care that they are uploading their entire list of contacts (with phone numbers) to Meta/Facebook and syncing it every day.

That "end-to-end encrypted" advertising has done its job, and most people don't want to be bothered with thinking too much anyway.

WhatsApp is a gold mine of real-world social graph data for Facebook/Meta. If you think for a moment how much you can infer by merging that data with other information you get from people using other FB apps and sites, it's incredible.

averageRoyalty7• 2 years ago

With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

I don't think this is accurate. In ANZ at least it's fairly uncommon, and I'd imagine there are a number of other similar countries. I would be surprised if the number isn't 100m+ first world users who don't fall into that bucket, not including the US.

aednichols4• 2 years ago

It seems like DOJ might force Apple to make separate "SMS" and "iMessage" apps, and perhaps forbid preinstalling iMessage so users have to download it from the App Store when they get a new phone (giving it equal footing with its competitors). This would diffuse the claim that iOS is downgrading Android users within the same app.

kelnos12• 2 years ago

I would prefer they just require Apple implement RCS (which they've already agreed to do), and -- crucially -- require feature parity with Android's RCS implementation. Which means standardizing Google's proprietary E2EE extension, and implementing that as well.

While I'd prefer being able to install a standalone Android iMessage app over the current situation, I really don't need or want another chat app.

SllX9• 2 years ago

The DOJ can’t really force Apple to do anything here without a consent decree, and with the case they just filed I’ll be surprised if they even get that much. Although, who knows, maybe a New Jersey district court will be a friendlier jurisdiction for this spaghetti case.

tiltowait• 2 years ago

So in order to protect users from a beneficial service they like, the DOJ would force Apple to gut the user experience?

pityJuke• 2 years ago

Man that would so awesome. The lack of control over what I'm actually sending the message on is annoying as hell on iPhone's. I want to explictly send and receive SMSes at points.

dfawcus• 2 years ago

Possibly split Messages and SMS in to distinct apps.

Have the latter handle SMS/MMS/RCS with options (in its settings area) to enable/disable each of the three, such that any or all of them may be individually allowed (or not).

Then also have an additional pair of options in the SMS app to indicate which other message app can operate as a proxy. Said proxy being able to send or receive SMS/MMS/RCS as appropriate. Possibly have the default set to Messages, but allow it to be set to any other app which has opted in.

Remove all of the SMS/MMS options from Messages, except the 'Send as SMS', which would then try to do the existing fall back when there is no data service.

The default behaviour would be as now. Disabling the 'Send as SMS' option would keep Messages and SMS as two distinct services, and one could then run the that way. Further flipping the config in SMS would allow any other app to be the preferred primary contact point.

I'm not sure how one would handle 'Group Chats' in such a situation.

With such a situation, I'd split the two and operate as distinct systems, iMessages in its own app, SMS/MMS/RCS in the SMS app, all other message facilities confined to their own playpen.

I know some relatives who would prefer to keep the proposed defaults such that everything appears in the Messages app.

AnonHP2• 2 years ago

The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.

There’s the Messages app and the iMessage protocol — two different things. How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS? That’s by adding RCS support, which is coming later this year. It still won’t have end to end encryption (like the iMessage protocol does) because Apple isn’t going to support (as of now) the proprietary and closed extensions Google has developed for RCS. Any Android message that comes over the data network will have to have some sort of encryption. Otherwise SMS is just fine, as it is today.

kelnos12• 2 years ago

How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS?

Quite easily: by releasing a standalone iMessage app on Android. The Beeper folks have shown this of course can be done (even if Apple doesn't like it and blocks them).

Doing this would certainly be orders of magnitude easier than implementing RCS. It's quite telling that Apple still wants to maintain iMessage as iOS-only. And if Apple doesn't work with Google to implement the E2EE extension (assuming Google is reasonable about it), that tells us all we need to know (and should have already known): Apple doesn't actually care about their users and user privacy. They just care about their market position and "prestige", and want to maintain these silly "class divisions".

Dah00n6• 2 years ago

It still won’t have end to end encryption (like the iMessage protocol does)

If Apple can access it in any way (which they can) then it is not real E2EE.

eyelidlessness3• 2 years ago

What I want to know is how there’s any legal basis to compel any business to implement and service specific, arbitrary software features. It would be one thing if there were a law that mandated a class of messaging apps interoperate on a certain standard if they use certain regulated communication networks. But “Apple messages must implement interoperability with Android messages” feels very hamfisted as an expression of that, and doesn’t strike me as legally defensible.

kelnos12• 2 years ago

Sure it is. Anti-trust law gives the government (assuming they prevail in court) broad authority to require that a specific company take specific, tailored actions that the government believes will make it so the company can't abuse its market position to harm consumers anymore.

There's a long history of this, with Microsoft being a fairly recent, famous example.

matheusmoreira4• 2 years ago

They don't even need to mandate anything. They need to neuter intellectual property, unambiguously legalize reverse engineering and circumvention, and make it illegal for corporations to retaliate against consumers who exercise those rights. Then all this stuff will happen on its own via adversarial interoperability.

Want to use a custom client to connect to some service? Want to bridge two rival networks? Such things should be our rights.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

johnnyanmac14• 2 years ago

There isn't, but the way anti-trust works it more or less says "You need to do X by Y date". That X usually nudges a path or least resistance towards iplementing and servicing a new feature (or undoing chokeholds on old features), but as we see with the DMA Apple can play with loopholes for months before getting with the program.

To your example (and excuse my lack of sound legalese), they wouldn't say "Apple must implement RCS", they would say "Apple must allow for an cross-compatible solution" or "Apple must document XYZ features keeping competitors from implementing a proper iMessage alternative".

kelnos12• 2 years ago

This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.

The thing is, I think it's perfectly fine, reasonable, and correct to have a disdain for SMS. The problem is that people transfer this disdain onto anyone they are "forced" to communicate with over SMS.

I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps...

Defaults matter. The friction to using iMessage on a brand-new iPhone is zero: it's right there, front and center, and doesn't require anyone to download anything new or confer with family and friends to figure out what the "right" other messaging platform is.

... like WhatsApp and FB Messenger

Oof, no thanks. I'd rather not be pushed toward using messaging apps owned by a company known to do shady things with user data. I've managed to get a few friends and group chats off those platforms and onto something else, but unfortunately there are still a few on them that I don't want to just cut ties with.

HumblyTossed4• 2 years ago

The annoying thing about any other messaging service except SMS is that if you're out in BFE, as long as you can ping a tower, you can get a message out ... or in.

danaris14• 2 years ago

The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination.

This is, always has been, and will always remain bullshit.

The problem isn't the blue vs green background. It would be the same if the backgrounds were purple and gold, red and gray, or just both blue.

The problem is the different capabilities between SMS and iMessage. And because those capabilities are different, it is useful and productive to communicate that in a clear, but unobtrusive way—like making their message bubbles different colors.

Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.

sevagh3• 2 years ago

Well, sure, "green and blue background" is a proxy for "SMS capabilites and iMessage capabilities".

People aren't protesting the actual primary colors of green or blue.

slavik81• 2 years ago

Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.

Interoperability doesn't have to be through SMS. Apple could allow other developers to implement the iMessage protocol.

brailsafe4• 2 years ago

Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.

If they control how SMS is received and displayed, they absolutely do control the featureset of SMS. On Android it's trivial to use different SMS apps, the receiver gets to decide how, if at all, they'll be separated.

harkinian37• 2 years ago

It's not artificial. SMS is terrible on its own, and that's none of Apple's fault. It's not like Android users are getting together and happily having SMS/RCS group chats.

dimator• 2 years ago

It's not artificial. SMS is terrible on its own, and that's none of Apple's fault. It's not like Android users are getting together and happily having SMS/RCS group chats.

What? RCS is a real thing that works between Android users. It is Apple's choice to not support (or contribute to it or improve the standard) it because it locks people in and creates a very cozy, very real in-group sentiment.

maest• 2 years ago

that person will limit the messaging functionality

Don't have an iPhone -- what functionality do they limit?

msdrigg• 2 years ago

- reacting to messages/replying to messages

- sending messages over data (obviously)

squeaky-clean4• 2 years ago

It falls back to plain ol SMS/MMS. So any features newer than 2008 or so.

RussianCow2• 2 years ago

The main thing I miss about having an iPhone is the ability to send full resolution pictures and videos over iMessage. In practice, SMS and MMS are seriously limited in the size of files they can send.

davidmurdoch3• 2 years ago

The person not using iMessage doesn't limit anything, in most cases, now that RCS is a thing on most Androids. Apple is the one that breaks the experience for everyone and then implies it was the non-iMessage user.

samstave2• 2 years ago

Agree, but its also more importantly the (...) bubbles that people have become addicted to. Green doesnt show that.

So when you see (...) and then it goes away and comes back a bunch of times - peoples fear and anxieties project into that (...) -- and its that fear dopamine that people are addicted to wrt to gree/blue...

where people are annoyed at green when they basically send a UDP txt - whereas blue is a TCP txt, so to speak...

00deadbeef7• 2 years ago

This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.

When iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.

Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not a way to shame Android users.

johnnyanmac14• 2 years ago

emphasis on "was". but we're much farther away from those times than we are to when sms more or less became unlimited on every major network.

odiroot• 2 years ago

This strategy doesn't work in all the other more sophisticated markets, where WhatsApp/Telegram/FB Messenger/etc are the most popular communication apps.

Time and again seems to be US-only curiosity.

taf22• 2 years ago

I’d also add that because the carriers SMS is so terrible it was easy for Apple…

dec0dedab0de• 2 years ago

You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge)

I have only had an iphone for a few months, and I haven’t tried it yet, but when I enabled imessage I had the option of using an email address instead of my phone number. and From an android users perspective texting an iphone user is terrible, because they are incapable of sending quality photos, i suspect they just default to over compression for mms

…on a side note, the overall iphone experience is not great, everything just feels like it is trying to stop me from doing what i want. Not that android was all that better, but I definitely felt a bit more free with even simple things like how copy/paste works.

142• 2 years ago

I’m actually thinking I will switch after my iPhone 8 packs it in. iPhone is now about extracting money not providing the best phone. Every app has an in app purchase. Let us have root to our iPhones so we can install open source projects.

142• 2 years ago

How about when you send a video or photos between iPhone and android the quality is abysmal. That is apples doing.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

SMS is inferior to imessage, and less secure, so color coding helps

metrognome• 2 years ago

Remember everyone, your bubbles are green because you have an iPhone, not because the person you are texting has an Android.

foogazi• 2 years ago

You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge)

You can message iCloud accounts without a phone number using only the email address

minroot3• 2 years ago

god damn, just use whatsapp

8fingerlouie3• 2 years ago

I find this whole debate over what is essentially the background color of chat messages to be rather silly.

iPhones implement SMS/MMS, which are both standards set forth by the GSM specification. That's the level of message exchange the underlying protocol offers. RCS is the "next gen" SMS, which is also being implemented. SMS/MMS/RCS does not support E2E encryption.

Apple then offers iMessage as a seperate service, on par with WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, etc. It is literally just a messaging service running over the internet, using some form of identifier to identify you, which might be your phone number, like signal, or your email.

iMessage also offers proper E2E encryption, which is hit or miss with competitors. The challenge with E2E encryption is peer discovery. iMessage has made encryption easy, to the point that nobody thinks about it, but that's really what the blue bubble indicates, that your message is E2E encrypted.

There is literally no monopoly there other than Apple offering the superior tool. There is open communication with other phones, using SMS/MMS, which is the lowest common denominator when you're talking phones. That is literally the level of capability you can guarantee when talking over GSM.

TheKarateKid• 2 years ago

I find this whole debate over what is essentially the background color of chat messages to be rather silly.

Are you aware that it's actually so serious that Apple officially uses it in their marketing? They quite literally say "iMessages are blue. So you're not." and most notably: "SMS texters will be green with envy."

https://beast-of-traal.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/2022/01/i...

consultSKI• 2 years ago

Maybe this will get Tim Cook's attention?

P.S. Tim, you have gone to far. Even if you win the case. #justSayin

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

Who knew the US would try to destroy their biggest export market

Foxhuls9• 2 years ago

I will never understand why people who don’t like the apple ecosystem just simply don’t buy apple products. It’s just really strange to me that it’s considered to be a monopoly when no one is forced to use the platform, there are other options out there.

pquki43• 2 years ago

Even if this eventually fails, I'll be very happy to read all the internal Apple documents that come out of this. It's going to be fun.

thiago_fm• 2 years ago

Meanwhile those monopolies can be good for the employees that work there, they are terrible for the rest of the Americans that don't, and they make up the majority of Americans.

I hope that, in the end, America sees that it is feeding those monopolies itself and even considers joining the European Union in believing that regulations are important.

When people come and say that regulations have an impact on innovation, I point out the fact that the object in question isn't that innovative. What is so innovative about the iPhone? They just made really good choices and got the rewards from consumers, on making it perhaps the biggest brand in the world.

But just by doing great products don't give you the right to go against the interests of your own customers or developers that helped you build that platform.

I'm sure by the end of this arc of those platforms that behave more monopolies, governments will realize that by regulating this space, it creates much more economic activity, jobs, and, of course, more space for innovation.

teitoklien• 2 years ago

I'm sure by the end of this arc of those platforms that behave more monopolies, governments will realize that by regulating this space, it creates much more economic activity, jobs, and, of course, more space for innovation.

Like there are in the EU, with amazing tech salaries that too, far superior than the USA ! :(

ChildOfChaos6• 2 years ago

Seems rather unfair on Apple to me. You don't have to buy an Apple product, when you do, you know what you are getting, there is choice.

These things always seem like some strange powerplay, if such bodies weren't happy, they should of been discussing this with Apple and changing the laws to match rather than making a big public spectacle out of it, this really hurts innovation.

Of course the HN comment crowd are going to be happy with this though.

Glant• 2 years ago

Talking things out and changing the laws went so well in the EU.

ben77994• 2 years ago

One thing I don't get about this is say DOJ wins and significantly weakens Apple.

They'll basically hand the market to foreign companies. Seems odd.

Google does not need an assist here, last I checked they are doing great, and could fix a lot of the things iPhone users don't like about Android if they wanted to.

robgibbons• 2 years ago

Not necessarily. If Apple allowed third-party app stores, alternative browser engines, had better cross-platform messaging support, et cetera, a lot of Android owners would buy iPhones.

A significant reason why Android appeals to many folks is that it represents a more open alternative to the iPhone. By opening up their walled garden, Apple still stands to benefit by magically becoming more appealing to a big chunk of Android owners.

ZekeSulastin• 2 years ago

I unfortunately think you're dramatically overstating how many people would actually switch after they're forced to open up rather than finding some other goalpost or simply not caring anyways.

amf124• 2 years ago

and could fix a lot of the things iPhone users don't like about Android if they wanted to.

What are those? And even if they were fixed, how would people move if Apple makes it so difficult to leave the ecosystem?

MR4D• 2 years ago

Some other sources about this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/us-justic...

https://www.investors.com/research/apple-stock-warren-buffet...

https://www.tipranks.com/news/tech-titans-unite-with-epic-ga...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/doj-sues-apple-for-iphone-...

https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-antitrust-lawsuit-16066694

coolliquidcode• 2 years ago

Cool. Now do google, amazon, fb, Verizon, att, chevron, exxon, gp, oracle, microsoft, etc.

stephc_int134• 2 years ago

Directly from the source, much better than the NYT paper.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1770844623562547394

amshukla• 2 years ago

The important question is who loses if apple loses. A whole host of very affluent and powerful politicians and others in influential positions own Apple stocks. Apple's monopoly helps their portfolios. I am not expecting much by way of any significant outcome from this exercise.

sneak5• 2 years ago

I wrote this essay about Apple’s anti-consumer practices in 2019:

https://sneak.berlin/20190330/apple-is-not-trying-to-screw-y...

It seems especially relevant given today’s news.

skeptrune2• 2 years ago

This is awesome. If this goes through then I expect Apple to enter a slump similar to MSFT in the coming years. Their primary selling point in the U.S. for mobile is imessage and their integrated suite. If that open market starts to eat into that then thier edge is much narrower and I don't expect it to hold well.

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

Their primary selling point in the U.S. for mobile is imessage and their integrated suite.

Their primary selling point is excellent performance from mobile low power custom silicon, I'd say.

hkpack• 2 years ago

And besides making you feeling good, how does it benefits anyone?

asow922• 2 years ago

Alternate coverage without a paywall https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/03/21/appl...

ChildOfChaos6• 2 years ago

I don't know why, but for some reason why I see something like this, I can't help but imagine what it must be like for Tim Cook receiving this news when he is randomly going about his day. It's got to be a huge punch to the face and I wonder how such people deal with such news.

Draiken6• 2 years ago

Realistically? They definitely expect it.

They've been consistently anti-competitive for years and it's the kind of move that you know will eventually generate legal issues. For them it's just the cost of business. They'll litigate for years, pay a small fine (if they even lose) and keep doing the same.

smoldesu16• 2 years ago

I hope he's using it as an opportunity to reflect on FOMO-based business strategies and the impacts of regressive software censorship. Tim made a lot of tough choices in his tenure, and now his chickens are coming home to roost.

Hopefully he's happy with the decisions he made.

jupp0r10• 2 years ago

"The tech giant prevented other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallet, which could diminish the value of the iPhone, the government said."

They literally offer APIs for any company to integrate with their wallet. As a consumer, I wish more apps would do so instead of half-heartedly implementing their own thing.

asadotzler12• 2 years ago

And if I want to be a wallet provider on iOS and compete with Apple Wallet, what then, big brain?

jupp0r10• 2 years ago

Antitrust law is there to protect consumers, not your business model.

As a consumer, I don't want to have to use 23 different wallet apps on my phone but am happy to have one secure implementation that's easy to use. You could argue that Apple Pay imposes lots of processing fees that will raise prices for consumers as vendors pass on processing fees to consumers and that prices would be lower if there was more competition, but I highly doubt this is the case in reality as Apple Pay processing fees are the same as regular payment processor fees for merchants.

asow922• 2 years ago

As an iOS developer, this excites me! It seems like it will open up the market for new app development opportunities, which is a great thing indeed!

luxuryballs3• 2 years ago

You have a monopoly on your product! I wonder what the real motive was here, did Apple not comply with something and now they’re getting slapped? I don’t believe for a second that this is purely good faith as I haven’t seen any actual harm being caused.

danielmarkbruce20• 2 years ago

antitrust regulators haven't been acting in good faith for years. It devolved into a political game a long time ago. Part of it is the complexity of modern businesses - they simply don't understand what they are regulating. At that point the goal posts move.

luxuryballs3• 2 years ago

Seems like a trend across the entire government, the first amendment appears to not be working even though it was intentionally put as step 1 before the 2nd…

danielmarkbruce20• 2 years ago

The doj doesn't have a basic understanding of how computers work, how networks work, how computer security works. They cannot effectively regulate a world they do not understand.

CharlieDigital9• 2 years ago

They are not regulating computers, they are regulating markets.

danielmarkbruce20• 2 years ago

In this case... the largest submarket of....computers.

If you think one can regulate the market for X without understanding how X works... you should work at the DOJ or FTC. Lina Khan has a job there waiting, I'm sure.

sircastor2• 2 years ago

Lots of comments here about the duopoly of Apple and Google (and I'm of the opinion that one cannot have a monopoly of its own product)

It's telling to me that not even Microsoft was able to make this work. There may have been some other internal interests at play, but their historical strength and background was in providing a platform, and then they dropped out when it didn't last. Likewise, Palm didn't last long in the space either.

It's not clear to me if there simply is not room for 3+ operating systems in a widely distributed mobile market.

bbarn• 2 years ago

Palm and Microsoft both made incredible (for the time) smart phones. The iPhone (and to a lesser extent android phones) were just on a totally different level. While Windows CE and PalmOS phones were trying to fight off blackberry, the iPhone was a different animal all together. The later Microsoft phones trying to compete on that level made a massive mistake of trying to tie in a bad UI design (the windows 8 square tiles for days UI) to it's desktop.

It was all timing, and by the time the war was over, MS would have had to become revolutionary in a field that pretty much every new thing had already been done, so it made sense for them to throw in the towel and get back to their money maker - business apps.

bogwog3• 2 years ago

It's not clear to me if there simply is not room for 3+ operating systems in a widely distributed mobile market.

I think there would be, if interoperability were a requirement. Microsoft and Blackberry both tried to make their own walled gardens, and maybe that's why it didn't work out. If consumers didn't feel locked in to one platform, they'd be more open to exploring other options.

Smartphones aren't the sexy new tech they once were. They're just boring old utilities now, and it makes sense IMO to start regulating them. Forcing companies to implement open standards seems like a good idea, and maybe this lawsuit is a first step in that direction if it ends with Apple being forced to fix iMessage interoperability.

cglong• 2 years ago

Microsoft employee, but no affiliation to Windows Phone other than a happy former user. How do you believe MS tried to create a walled garden?

jupp0r10• 2 years ago

"The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit."

Is this even factually true? Messages that are sent as texts appear green, whether it's to other iPhones or devices made by Apple's competitors. The green color warns me that messages are not end-to-end encrypted and can potentially be read by any man in the middle with access to telephony infrastructure.

cvdub• 2 years ago

The problem is Apple is corrupting SMS, which should be a public and interoperable standard. Google/Gmail is doing the same thing to email. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t have end-to-end encrypted text messages between iOS and Android.

I bet way more people would try Android if they could fully participate in group texts.

jupp0r10• 2 years ago

There are tons of apps that offer end-to-end encrypted messaging between iOS and Android (and Windows, MacOS, Linux fwiw). Apple offers APIs to allow you to associate your contacts with their ID in those apps so you can easily message them or share photos and files as part of iOS. The thing they are accused of is that they provide a great experience for users in their ecosystem on top of that.

gregorygoc• 2 years ago

Both Apple and Google are ruthless monopolies but when there was a post about an antitrust against Google you could’ve clearly seen a bias against them. Whereas Apple gets a free pass because their products are „cool”. This is a sad state of HN nowadays.

jupp0r10• 2 years ago

"The government also said Apple had tried to maintain its monopoly by not allowing other companies to build their own digital wallets. Apple Wallet is the only app on the iPhone that can use the chip, known as the NFC, that allows a phone to tap-to-pay at checkout."

NFC works fine with ChargePoint for example. There are APIs for app developers to take advantage of the chip if they want to use the functionality on their own hardware. This is merely about the level of abstraction that access is allowed to, and as a consumer, I appreciate Apple enforcing rigorous standards there vs dealing with 500 different buggy implementations.

ursuscamp• 2 years ago

I can't wait for this to take seven years to resolve, with the resolution being that the US government gets a big payday in bribes (er, sorry, fines) and nothing actually changes.

stolsvik• 2 years ago

As an iPhone user: Fantastic. I so hope Apple looses hard.

fnord77• 2 years ago

"apple is making too much money, so let's loot them"

mbgerring• 2 years ago

Another big, annoying one is password managers. I use an open source password manager with an iPhone app, but there’s no way to integrate it system wide, so the experience of using it on my phone is terrible.

And yet! No matter how much worse third party integration is on iPhone, I still don’t want to use an operating system made by an advertising company.

aednichols4• 2 years ago

Are you sure the password manager is using all the APIs available to it? I use 1Password and it feels extremely well integrated.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

I hope this lawsuit fails. As a user, I’m very happy with the tight Apple ecosystem, and I don’t want my experience to be compromised just because some other companies wants to make money in Message or Photos space.

The only place Apple needs to change, imho, is the app store tax.

SaintSeiya• 2 years ago

Of course it is a monopoly, I hope they sue them to the ground and force Apple to split like Microsoft was forced long ago.

hollerith• 2 years ago

Microsoft was forced to split? I thought they only had to ensure that competing browsers would run on Windows.

badgersnake• 2 years ago

I guess all that Google lobbying cash finally paid off.

andreygrehov2• 2 years ago

Can we stop feeding paywalled websites with free traffic? Does HN encourage me to create a paid account with NYTimes?

hgs32• 2 years ago

Why are antitrust laws so reactive? Why not have proactive laws that break up companies if they grow beyond a certain size criteria? Ideally, the criteria would be aggressive enough to kill large corporations leaving behind only small to medium-sized businesses. The result would be markets with increased competition, more innovation, lower prices, more options for employment and self-employment, and the elimination of Big Corp's big money political influence.

mrkeen4• 2 years ago

Why are antitrust laws so reactive? Why not have proactive laws that break up companies if they grow beyond a certain size criteria?

I've skimmed past a number of comments that say that Apple isn't a monopoly because it doesn't have a large enough share of the market. So is the DoJ too early or too late on this one?

Anyway, it shouldn't be about the size of the company, just how they act.

dragonwriter16• 2 years ago

Why not have proactive laws that break up companies if they grow beyond a certain size criteria

That's not proactive, that's just reactive to different indicators.

MetaWhirledPeas• 2 years ago

leaving behind only small to medium-sized businesses

I only partially agree. If you kill all big businesses your country will no longer be able to compete with outsiders in industries where economies of scale matter. A few examples: cars, computer chips, cloud computing. This in turn means a lot of jobs and talent will go elsewhere.

In the US during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis I had some pretty strong opinions about banks. Is there any justification for having a mammoth bank that is "too big to fail"? (Serious question.)

Approaching "too big to fail" status might be a good marker for when a corporate entity needs to be split. We should not be beholden to oversized companies.

itopaloglu837• 2 years ago

Some of today’s big corporations and mega hedge funds are almost bigger than the good old British Empire. Are we definitely sure that they will not just use that power for their own good only.

ants_everywhere3• 2 years ago

This quote is pretty consistent with my take on what Apple has been up to:

In the end , Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple's financial and business interests .

fundad3• 2 years ago

Do you think? Is it in their financial and business interest to differentiate their product and keep working at it? I wonder if that’s expensive

kelnos12• 2 years ago

The sarcasm isn't really necessary. I think most of us would prefer to live in a world where the capitalist mentality didn't trump all other considerations. It's actually possible for a company like Apple to be laser-focused on privacy and giving their users the best possible options, and still make a more-than-healthy profit margin.

Hell, with Apple's cash hoard, they could afford to give iPhones away for at least a couple years without much trouble. I'm not saying companies should be obligated to do crazy things like this once they have "enough" money, but I think it illustrates that there's no inherent reason why many companies need to take any particular action that increases revenue, regardless of the consequences.

Apple's long-standing culture of secrecy and exclusivity is the problem, really.

ants_everywhere3• 2 years ago

The point of the quote was not that it's in their interest to differentiate. The point was that, according to the complaint and for reasons they lay out, their marketing is dishonest and they frequently put their users at increased risk when it's to their financial to do so.

In other words, they're saying Apple's privacy and security stance is a bit like the trope of politicians saying "think of the children!" whenever they are selling a law that restricts liberty.

Hikikomori6• 2 years ago

Doesn't seem that expensive considering their profit margins.

twojobsoneboss2• 2 years ago

They are a company who’s out to make money and not a non profit, no?

zipping1549• 2 years ago

Truer words never been said

bredren2• 2 years ago

In the EU / app store ballyhoo, privacy / security has been used too often.

But in general, Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide. Far from perfect, (CN datacenters) but still seemingly far out ahead.

People don't normally pay for privacy or data security because they're not considered valuable until something bad happens.

So I can at least understand why the company might lean on this loss-leader to try and prop up its position in the face of unwanted regulation.

ants_everywhere3• 2 years ago

Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide

One of the big differences between Google and Apple is that users treat Google (IMO rightly) as a privacy threat, but treat Apple as a privacy ally. Apple's data privacy positions look a lot different if you treat them also as a privacy threat. For example, it becomes really odd that you can't set a non-Apple secure messaging app as your SMS app, or set a non-Apple browser as your default web browser. Apple insists that you share your browsing and messaging data with them.

What's the risk here? The risk is that, as has happened with nearly every darling tech company in history, Apple decides to end the honeymoon period at some point because that's what the market demands. Then you're in a position where you've handed over to Apple gobs of private data that they have unencrypted backups of.

gigel824• 2 years ago

The standards Apple set are for others, not for itself; Apple is all too happy to extract as much data as possible from its customers to build its own ad empire while limiting others'. I'd prefer a level playing field where I can control how much data Apple and others can extract from me ("none").

Also, the whole "security" bs is exactly the same thing as governments saying we're doing this to protect you citizens from pedophiles / terrorists / druglords.

choccy• 2 years ago

But in general, Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide.

I find this hard to believe nowerdays given what I read 3 months ago regarding law enforcement and push notification data. Google had set the standard higher in this situation.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-now-requires-judges...

tim3333• 2 years ago

The securtiy aspects are a big deal and I say this as someone who is not bothered at all by ad tracking and cookies and the like. But I and a lot of people have banking and crypto stuff on the phone and not having people able to hack in and steal your money is significant.

andreygrehov2• 2 years ago

Does U.S. make it simple to get into a mobile business so that I could compete with Apple? Can I easily manufacture a phone and get an approval from FCC? If not, then Apple should sue the hell out of DOJ in response.

pksebben2• 2 years ago

It's gonna hurt me to say this because I'm one of those rabid lefty bust-up-the-corporations types, but the universe is a nuanced place so here it is;

Whether Apple's practices are motivated by blocking competition or not (and I'm pretty sure that's part of their thinking if not the principal driver), there are other effects of a lot of these practices that I would hate to lose as a consumer.

Not having to work to maintain compatibility with a bunch of stuff that might or might not work, and being able to focus on ecosystem interoperability, all adds up to my tablet being a seamless second monitor, being able to shuttle data between my devices, and being able to manage messaging and all sorts of other stuff on whatever device I happen to be looking at at the time, whether it's my tablet, phone, watch, or laptop.

No one else does this even remotely well, and so much of what I do these days would fall under the effort watermark and never happen if it wasn't for this insane level of convenience and "it just works".

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Get the popcorn. This is gonna be good. It’s more or less tying or US v Microsoft no?

tagyro• 2 years ago

Maybe off-topic but it's really funny to read the mental gymnastics of John Gruber at Daringfireball.

A week ago, the European Commission had something with Apple, now the US DOJ ...one might think that Apple really is doing something.

To quote Francis Urquhart [the original https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Urquhart]: "You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment"

ein0p• 2 years ago

Makes me wonder what’s really going on. I don’t believe for a second this has anything to do with “antitrust” after watching Garland’s presser - they’re stretching the truth pretty bad and the language is along the lines of “they’re making too much money”. Like OK, what does the “GDP of countries” have to do with anything? I thought this is America and making a shit ton of money is legal here.

gigel824• 2 years ago

This is not enough. It's good, but definitely not enough.

zackmorris• 2 years ago

This makes me wonder who Apple ticked off at the DOJ, because it would be interesting to follow that money trail and see where their lobbying broke down. That's the chink in the armor of all these too-big-to-fail companies, and how we the people reclaim our power.

But the real point that HN commenters seem to be missing is that the Apple we grew up with hasn't existed for a long time. They abandoned their charter decades ago. Which was originally to bring the power of computing to everyone, especially children, to liberate us all from Big Brother and the limits on creativity handed down to us by megacorps like IBM, Microsoft and now Amazon.

I can't list everything that Apple has down wrong that caused me to stop endorsing them. But I can provide at least a start of a vision of what a real Apple would look like with today's technology and expertise. A real Apple would:

  * Strive to reduce the cost of technology through innovation and economies of scale.
  * Sell user-serviceable hardware with interchangeable parts and conveniences like no-tools battery replacement.
  * Use its vast access to capital and resources to innovate, rather than dump its R&D costs onto early adopters with stuff like VR headsets and "high end" computers costing 2-10 times the market rate.
  * Sell value-added services and leverage proven technologies like BitTorrent to provide users searchable access to every kind of media ever created, rather than bowing to the RIAA/MPAA and creating walled gardens like iTunes and yet another streaming service in Apple TV that locks users into a proprietary vendor providing limited usability.
  * Build handhelds with P2P wireless technology that "just works", the way early Kindle had free cellular access, to negate the monopoly power of 5G.
  * Empower users with real revolutionary technologies such as highly multicore processors, auto-scaling CPU clusters and parallelized functional programming languages, not just halfhearted evolutionary proprietary solutions like M1 and Metal which mostly just copy other monopolies like Nvidia.
  * Fund and maintain open source software ecosystems instead of endlessly deprecating previously working frameworks with no backwards compatibility or migration tools, to skim even more profit at tremendous expense to developers.
  * Encourage a developer-first mindset by providing up-to-date documentation instead of expired links and a drink-the-kool-aid mindset comprised of cookie cutter proprietary frameworks handed down from on high by middle managers and designers.
  * Stand up to authoritarianism by selling its products unmodified in foreign markets, rather than weakening encryption or bowing to censorship like Twitter/X did for China and India at the people's expense.
  * Pay the wealth forward into grants, trusts and UBI instead of hoarding an almost $3 trillion market cap that only benefits people of means who can afford to buy AAPL stock and sell it short for almost guaranteed profit at times like this.

I could go on.. forever. I'm just so tired of everything that I'm not sure I can even endorse tech as a whole anymore, since this seems to be what always happens. I wish we could erase everything that happened after the Dot Bomb around the year 2000 and start over on a new timeline. Built and funded by us directly as free agents the way we always dreamed of, instead of pulling the yoke for an owner class whose only contribution is access to capital it vacuumed up from the rest of us through everything from gentrification to regulatory capture.

amadeuspagel2• 2 years ago

In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Apple’s then-CEO about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.”

This attitude explains a lot. This logic applies to every app that's available on both iPhone and Android, and to every web app.

skeaker24• 2 years ago

This behavior is so overt that I am constantly baffled that otherwise rational people continue to make up excuses for Apple. See also this article where they overtly state that the green bubble thing is deliberately intended to cause lock-in: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

I have been called a "violent criminal" on this very site because I criticized Apple's decision to remotely brick swapped components to prevent DIY repairs. I do not understand what it is about Apple that causes this behavior in people when they make it so, so, so obvious that they are just trying to lock people in for cash.

munchler2• 2 years ago

“Locking people in for cash” is a common business practice in tech and other industries. Try mounting a Nikon lens on a Canon camera, for example. You might not like it, but I’m not sure why Apple deserves special condemnation in this regard.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

You can buy an android. It’s not hard. You can eliminate all your problems. The solution exists. I do find any further argument temping when not only can you buy an Android, you can buy a cheaper phone that does all the same things.

I do not angry when I use Netflix and the program I wanna watch is on Hulu. I do not complain to Hulu. They offer a app/website and I can buy it that very day. You can, this very day, buy an Android

I wish everything good was free too and I only had one app and one computer OS and didn’t have to choose between car brands too but that’s not Reality

AmericanChopper• 2 years ago

The green bubble complaining must have the lowest level of credibility among all the anti-apple complaints. The method of "monopolization" here is to make their product cooler than their competitors product. The idea that we need to government to step in and force apple to make android cool too is so silly.

gigel824• 2 years ago

Apple Fanboyism Is A Religion: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-a-religion-neurosci...

epolanski6• 2 years ago

The number of people opposing these changes in this thread because "it will make their walled garden experience worse" without being able to bring up a single valid reason why would that be is astonishing.

dogleash• 2 years ago

Apple is such boring stagnant soulless void, I don't know why people wouldn't want it chopped up just to see the component parts trying to innovate again.

What have they done in the last few years? Minor incremental updates to existing products, release another screen-strapped-to-face product years late to the party while also failing to figure out what to do in the software space to justify the device, and started issuing credit cards because they needed to branch out from just getting a cut of all sales that happen on-platform.

harkinian37• 2 years ago

Apple Silicon Macs. Aside from that, yes very boring, especially the silly stuff like watches, pencils, and credit cards. That said, I'd rather our country respect private property, also it's not like there's a ton more innovation left in these spaces anyway.

data-ottawa• 2 years ago

My one fear for this is the leverage it gives large tech companies.

What's to stop Microsoft, Meta, or Amazon from forcing you to download their own app store to use their apps? We kind of see this on PC already with every company having their own game or app store.

When Chrome is on iOS and is pushed on every Google search, what happens to health of the web? Does that create a new web monopoly?

It's not totally fair that Apple gives themselves special permissions and blocks competitors, or forces the prices they do from devs who would otherwise sell their apps through their website, but is that the lesser of two evils?

epolanski6• 2 years ago

I don't see how any of the things you describe is necessarily a bad thing for users.

And if other large tech companies (as if Apple wasn't one of the biggest monopolies itself) have to be broken down, so be it. I too consider companies like Google way too big.

But as a user, and a small developer, I have more pressing issues with the iOS ecosystem than "what ifs" about Google.

spywaregorilla3• 2 years ago

What's to stop Microsoft, Meta, or Amazon from forcing you to download their own app store to use their apps?

Like Apple does now, except for every app.

We kind of see this on PC already with every company having their own game or app store.

No we don't. Those are fringe and mostly unsuccessful. And even then, those companies should not have to pay 30% of their revenue to steam, so fuck that.

When Chrome is on iOS and is pushed on every Google search, what happens to health of the web? Does that create a new web monopoly?

Forcing everyone to use Safari is a web monopoly.

alickz2• 2 years ago

in my experience it often boils down to: "won't somebody think of my elderly relatives"

as if iOS prevents them from being scammed or giving away sensitive info in a meaningful way that macOS does not

itopaloglu837• 2 years ago

I think we should lead with the fact that cell phones became the new personal computing device and they should be turn into open platforms, like computers. But the same thing should apply to gaming consoles, TVs, and other software heavy platforms as well. Otherwise, it sounds like an arbitrary anti-Apple regulation, not pro-consumer or pro-free-market regulation.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

Ok here's one big one:

Today the development process inside Apple treats the full software stack, from underlying OS to the homescreen UI (SpringBoard) to the user-facing apps (built-in or not), as a virtual monolithic system. All these gets built and integrated every day, leading up to each iOS (and MacOS) release. This allows new features to be released which are integrated together across many apps. This is what the people come to know as "The Apple Experience." When your phone does its big iOS update overnight, you get all the new features together.

Critically, these iOS updates can introduce any number of breaking changes to their internal APIs, databases, protocols, configuration files, etc. The daily integration and daily testing is responsible for making sure the final product still Just Works.

If the government gets its way here, Apple would be forced to develop all the built-in apps using public APIs, and would need to make sure those APIs don't ever break -- or else risk another "uncompetitive behavior" lawsuit.

Could that be made to work? Sure. But then the overall Apple Experience would very likely be worsened, as Apple would not be able to make certain breaking changes any more, and would overall move slower due to having to carry all the external apps along with any internal plans. The experience of Apple customers becomes worse because some people want it to mimic Android's model.

epolanski6• 2 years ago

So the best argument you can come up with is that there will need to be less API breaking changes less often?

harkinian37• 2 years ago

1. Allowing other app stores would immediately mean each app wanting you to go to a separate store. I barely use apps in the first place but would imagine this being bothersome for those who use them a lot.

2. I don't want my phone to run arbitrary code, that's what my Mac is for. People install unknown third-party apps on their iPhones all the time, which is safe enough. Now imagine Apple was forced to make iPhones more like Macs in this respect. When was the last time you installed an unknown third-party Mac app?

3. If the govt does something along the lines of preventing Apple from pre-installing their own apps, or some other way of forcibly informing users that they have alternatives, that's annoying for anyone who uses those default apps anyway.

4. Forcibly opening the iMessage protocol could lead to more spam or hold up Apple adding new features that Android doesn't support. And Apple is going to adopt RCS anyway.

5. Govt regulations on software have historically not done much good for regular users. GDPR got us modal cookie notifications on every site, which some nerds really liked along with the takeout stuff, but most people saw as useless and annoying. Plenty of iPhone users are happy with the status quo.

hu36• 2 years ago

1. Allowing other app stores would immediately mean each app wanting you to go to a separate store. I barely use apps in the first place but would imagine this being bothersome for those who use them a lot.

Except Android allows other stores since forever and that didn't happen so this is proven to be an incorrect assumption.

I see this and other blatantly wrong, easily verifiable, takes so often that I wonder if those who write even know how things work in Android or they just live in an iOS bubble and assume things about Android.

nickm12• 2 years ago

2. I don't want my phone to run arbitrary code, that's what my Mac is for.

Then don't run it. Personally, I want all my devices that run third-party software to have strong sandboxing and defense-in-depth security. Even apps from developers I trust and admire can be compromised due to vulnerabilities and other types of attack.

jagged-chisel• 2 years ago

The government even has the right to ask for a breakup…

I really dislike statements like this. They could ask even without the “right to ask.”

Having the “right to ask” doesn’t guarantee the request will be honored.

How does this “right to ask for a breakup” actually affect the story?

asadotzler12• 2 years ago

But if they didn't have the right and asked there'd be almost no chance of success while if they do have the right to ask there's a positive chance of success. So of course it's meaningful. It's an available avenue and one worth mentioning.

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

I don’t know about the legal situation here but I welcome every effort to slow down these super mega corporations. They kill a lot of innovation with their market power. I think we would be way better off if we had many smaller companies. When was the last time something truly innovative came from Apple, Google or MS? They either buy a little innovation or suppress it.

standardUser2• 2 years ago

The way Apple purposefully aims to ostracize young people who don't own/can't afford an iPhone by defaulting to a proprietary, non-interoperable messaging system has been enough to turn me entirely against the company.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

How are they ostracized?

I hear people gripe about green versus blue and all I can think is: are we all suddenly grade schoolers who think the color of your clothes makes you cool?

pms• 2 years ago

Maybe you and me are not like that, but most iPhone users are like that and that's what Apple wanted from the start (to artificially discriminate for the good of their business)?

BlackFly6• 2 years ago

When did we as a society stop behaving like that? The scarlet letter was from 1800s, but at no time since then would I say that society suddenly realized that the designation of pariahs was problematic.

You talk about the color of your clothes as if people are someone enlightened about it, but the whole plot of American Psycho is essentially a lens on 1980s Yuppie culture where what you are wearing is more interesting and memorable to people than your name [and who you are]. Such attitudes persist in tech circles although flipped: wear an AC/DC t-shirt = one of us, show up in a 3 piece suit = outsider.

Absolutely, designating someone as different because of how they connect is enough to create a designation as an outsider. Almost by definition.

milkytron2• 2 years ago

I've been left out of family and friend group chats for not having an iPhone.

I nearly missed a birthday party for my friend that his girlfriend organized because she didn't want to lose iMessage features when sending out the group invite. I only found out the day before because my friend asked if I would be coming to his party the day before.

I only got added to my family group chat after I got a mac and installed AirMessage.

summerlight• 2 years ago

I wonder what would be Apple's reaction to this case. They've been publicly provoking EU since none of the available options can be an existential threat to Apple thanks to its jurisdiction. Even kicking them off the EU market would be very hard and politically infeasible actions.

But the US is different. They actually have the power to do whatever they want, from small fines to breaking up. It's much more of existential threat to Apple and they probably don't want to piss off those prosecutors and politicians too much?

m000• 2 years ago

The question for the case of US is "why now?". Could this be tightening the screw to make Apple more cooperative with 3-letter agencies, after other methods have failed?

djbelieny• 2 years ago

Ok, I understand this may be an unpopular stance and risk downvotes. However, I want to share my perspective on government intervention in business, particularly regarding anti-monopoly actions against companies with proprietary ecosystems.

Firstly, I'm no fan of monopolies. Yet, I'm conflicted about the idea of the government compelling anyone to divulge trade secrets or alter their services to simply foster competition, especially when the company in question has opted to create an ecosystem of products and services designed to be exclusive. For example, Apple's iMessage doesn't integrate with other platforms, and its smartphones are optimized for its ecosystem.

As consumers, we're aware of these limitations and have the "freedom" to choose products that better suit our needs instead. Labeling a company as a monopoly simply because its products don't play well with others overlooks the investment and innovation behind their development. After all, it's Apple's technology, infrastructure, and service on the line.

Why should these companies be forced to share or open their ecosystems? While there are valid arguments for promoting interoperability and open technology, the idea of mandating companies to share their proprietary advancements seems to contradict the essence of free enterprise. Should they then be compelled to 'open up' their infrastructure against their will?

waltbosz3• 2 years ago

Thought experiment: how would the world respond if Apple decided to go full Atlas Shrugged and just closed their business? Turned off all their servers, closed all the Apple stores, fired everyone, etc.

mutatio2• 2 years ago

What are you trying to convey, something along the lines that we should be grateful?

I suspect unless they destroyed everything the gov would force them open, after all their products and services have layers upon layers of service agreements, SLAs etc.

waltbosz3• 2 years ago

I was sincere in my thought experiment idea. I'm curious what would happen.

I expect they would be in beach of contract because of the underlying SLAs, but then what happens if they refuse to comply? Could the board go to jail or be sued? Could company assets be seized?

...

I'm not trying to convey anything. At least nothing along the lines of you should be grateful to Apple.

But it's their ecosystem and their vision for how it all fits together. And there are alternative smartphone vendors, consumers have choices.

Maybe I don't understand anti trust law well enough to see what Apple has done wrong and why they should have to compromise their vision.

ragazzina3• 2 years ago

How would you respond if Apple started requiring access to all your data to let you keep using your phone? Reading the thread, many people would probably still defend them.

waltbosz3• 2 years ago

Is Apple planning to do that? I guess my response would be to buy a non Apple phone and sell my old one to someone who doesn't care.

For the record, I have an $180 Android phone.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

I would imagine that this would upset Apple users.

burgessuk• 2 years ago

Is it Coincidence Apple just allowed EU to install 3rd party apps?

Personally I think Apple should never have allowed EU to infiltrate its devices /Apples software.

I always looked at an iPhone, like an Xbox, or PlayStation; locked down device; you have to use the brands own controllers, own App Store. There’s no way Microsoft/Sony would allow EU 3rd stores on their devices? I didn’t think Apple would either & that looks to have come back & bitten them!?

Andrex12• 2 years ago

Finally.

ubermonkey6• 2 years ago

Next up: suing Sony for having a Playstation monopoly, and suing Tesla for having a Tesla monopoly.

nvarsj2• 2 years ago

It has a lot to do with scale. There are 5 million Teslas. There are 2 billion iPhones. If Tesla had 60%+ of the car market and engaged in anti competitive/trust-like behaviour, it would also be ripe for action.

bsimpson• 2 years ago

Totally procedural, but…

I wonder how they select a venue for these cases. Looks like it's being heard in New Jersey, even though the California attorney general is on board.

Since Apple is based in California, it seems like the case ought to default to being heard there. Would suck if you were a smaller company and had to pay to fly your legal team to wherever whim the DOJ selected, for however long a case takes to hear.

jtotheh• 2 years ago

A big part of what makes a phone platform competitive is the apps for it. In the Netscape/ie days, Netscape ran on many platforms and made the underlying OS less important.this led to Microsoft going to great lengths to make windows/ie a walled garden. I saw this in working developing intranet apps. Things that “just worked “ on windows/ie didn’t work for Mac/linux/unix users. The “super app” part of this lawsuit seems to me to describe a sort of layer that allows smaller apps —- “mini programs”— to program to that layer instead of to android/ios, and makes the app the same on either OS. It seems apple is being anticompetitive in its actions to prevent this.its sort of like QT letting you have one code base for various os’s. I think apple can try and make the native apps for iOS be better through innovation, but anticompetitive behavior is not ok.

From page 29 of the lawsuit: “Apple did not respond to the risk that super apps might disrupt its monopoly by innovating. Instead, Apple exerted its control over app distribution to stifle others' innovation. Apple created, strategically broadened, and aggressively enforced its App Store Guidelines to effectively block apps from hosting mini programs. Apple's conduct disincentivized investments in mini program development and caused U.S. companies to abandon or limit support for the technology in the United States.”

If apple has capabilities on iPhones that androids don’t have, then native iOS apps that use them will be more desirable . That would be beneficial competition. If apple makes it hard to write cross platform lowest common denominator apps, that is anticompetitive.

devwastaken• 2 years ago

Apple has removed competitors apps and taken their markets in the past. They are not a neutral party, and the weights of public interest must be to sustain open markets. It is good for everyone, it's unfortunate Apple has to be forced to do it but they only did it to themselves.

pmarreck5• 2 years ago

People think iMessage has entrenched iOS but what's actually happened is that iMessage has entrenched the POTS phone number system, which is (frankly) unregulated shit.

You can actually iMessage people with just an email address, but in practice I don't think anyone actually does that since you can't also call them by that identifier (but now you can use any number of services to call digitally while skipping POTS phone numbers entirely)

browningstreet3• 2 years ago

Irony alert:

“YouTube TV rolling out Multiview on iPhone and iPad; Android ‘in the coming months’”

https://9to5google.com/2024/03/20/youtube-tv-multiview-iphon...

throwaway143562• 2 years ago

my mental analogy is this.

Say someone produces a reading chair. Now say the company desires to restrict, shape or dictate which books one is allowed to read while sitting in the chair.

One could argue they should have such rights but historically it is quite unusual.

Similarly, if you pay for the chair and put it in your home it is tempting to think you've purchased it and that you own and control it.

The tos could state that the company may at nay time introduce a monthly fee, render the chair unusable or force you to return it without providing a reason.

They may revoke the unisex version and force the user to choose a sex or limit the license to a single user.

It could introduce tools to measure the weight of the user and use that to determine a violation of the single user agreement.

A popular book vendor might require you own one of their competing reading chairs and disallow reading in other chairs.

The company building the house can also grant it self all kinds of privileges. You must buy compatible appliances. They can put some weird connectors on them with some drm logic. np

The only reason not to have such possibly wonderful eco systems imho is that we already have hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations.

If we are to use and make products it should be as simple as possible. Using your weight to check if you are the registered user is not the point to start fixing it. The law should simply state that chair and subscription are separate products.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

I don’t think this analogy works because you could have bought the competing chair - which proponents of loudly claim is better than the Apple chair - and gotten similar service. As a matter of fact I’m told the competing chair is much better, and not only that it’s cheaper! And I’m an idiot for buying the Apple chair

Buy the competing chair. This is not a monopoly.

_justinfunk• 2 years ago

Also, in the analogy your chair comes with regular visits to do maintenance, improvements and add new features to your chair.

Also whenever you sit in the chair, there are real monetary costs to the chair maker.

throwaway143562• 2 years ago

If you get the chance to dictate how the user of the chair uses it (without to much blowback) it would make good business sense.

If you can prevent manufacturers from gaining control over unrelated parts of the customers life it would make good sense as a law maker.

Can someone make a portable computer with networking a camera, mic and nothing else? It seems entirely possible.

Then there is no need for the chair maker to want a percentage of all food revenue eaten in the chair, no need to demand specific food vendors or demand they use a specific payment system they also happen to own. No need to control who you can talk to, which games you play.

There just isn't a need to allow it.

shmerl• 2 years ago

Good. It's hilarious how Apple complains that it "threatens our core practices". If their core practices are based on anti-competitive behavior (and they are), they should be totally threatened.

I want to see ban on competing browsers being mentioned in this case.

apatheticonion• 2 years ago

Wow I am surprised to see this coming from the US. Though this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actions the government could take to empower competition/innovation in the space. I wonder how far they will go?

Right to repair? Unlocked boot loaders? Driver schematics?

After seeing the EU crack down on monopolistic practices, I'm starting to feel hopeful that we might one day see competition, choice and innovation return to the modern computers.

kovacs_x5• 2 years ago

apple should simply allow to replace ios with Android or Linux on iphone (without any support obviously) for those who "feel restricted" and let them have it.. for all the remaining let us keep using Apples walled garden on apples terms (i like having good night sleep knowing that my family members wont fck up their phones, get hacked or their data be used for profit by google, fb and any other "competitor").

kovacs_x5• 2 years ago

Whats interesting that most of iphone users i know (eastern europe), doesnt use iMessage at all or only for sms type of messaging only and for rich messaging we use whatsapp, messenger, telegram, signal, slack, discord, viber (?) and my almost first / only question question over sms (imessage) always is- do you have whatsapp?

apparently its different in states.

Kerbonut• 2 years ago

Next do power tools manufacturers for purposefully making incompatible battery packs and printer manufacturers for incompatible ink cartridges.

hu36• 2 years ago

Funny, an Apple printer would probably only accept Apple certified paper sheets and require an ink subscription.

Of course it would not support USB, favouring a proprietary connector so your printing can start 0.1 seconds faster.

Parts would be glued together so to make it compact (and impossible to fix).

All for the bargain of $999.

And yes, some people would gladly buy them.

vmladenov8• 2 years ago

Of course it would not support USB, favouring a proprietary connector so your printing can start 0.1 seconds faster.

The company that shipped the first laptop to go all-in on USB-C in 2016?

kovacs_x5• 2 years ago

so.. based of these claims by US government, would it be good and required for Apple to give full access to users data, financials, health and everything-else-data to say Huaweii smartwatch?

nakedrobot2• 2 years ago

if you paid for the phone and the watch and they belong to you, then yes, of course.

kovacs_x5• 2 years ago

I'm not sure you get the reference here.. it's not about what you want or not, but how US government feels about certain (chinese) company.

ddxv• 2 years ago

I wish they took Apple to task for "privacy" SKAN which forces everyone to let Apple run a blackbox advertising.

mikhael28• 2 years ago

Man, it must be tough to work in Apple's legal department.

devaiops9001• 2 years ago

An iPhone should be like a Macbook.

A user should be able to load a cryptographic key to the bootloader and boot any OS of their choosing. I'm kind of more on the extreme "Free Market" way of thinking, but even I think that government should step in and force an iPhone to be like a Macbook in this way.

ch4s3• 2 years ago

This seems like such a waste of time for the Justice Department. Despite what we may think about Apple's walled garden, the case for consumer harm is very limited. There are only so many anti-trust cases they can pursue, and I don't know why they aren't digging into things that clearly damage consumers.

For example CVS Caremark, Optum Rx, and Express Scripts control 80% of the consumer drug market as PBMs. CVS Caremark controls 1/3 of the market and that control definitely drives up prices and bottlenecks drug availability. You can also easily identify how delays with PBM adversely effect patient outcomes.

Why did it take a person injury lawyer to finally take on the national association of realtors on fees?

One could go on at length.

lyu07282• 2 years ago

The Justice Department has the right under the law to ask for structural changes to Apple’s business — including a breakup, said an agency official

Sometimes neoliberalism feels like it's gaslighting us, like am I really supposed to believe this is going to lead to any substantial change? That this ideology isn't completely delusional?

gavmor• 2 years ago

I'd like to see them chastised/regulated for their anticompetitive browser policies which cripple PWAs and web technologies in general. I was truly thrilled to hear about this month's UK and European legislation on the matter.[0]

0. Interview with Alex & James Moore, founding members of the Open Web Advocacy (OWA) — https://pca.st/episode/62ae3300-16e1-47bb-af24-759c980ba671

kmbfjr• 2 years ago

There is a lot to complain about Apple’s business practices, but the fact that the green bubble rage has turned into an interoperability monopoly case is laughable.

How much did that one set back Google after their ADHD killed off how many messaging platforms?

Fine, open it up, open them all up. Give me sliders to deny messages from SMS, Whatsapp and anyone else looking for compatibility. Same in the other direction, allow users to choose from which originating platform they’ll accept messages.

As far as the rest, yeah, Apple needs an adjustment. I should not have to pay to run my own app on my own phone. But I do.

gwenwiener• 2 years ago

This comment is an experiment to test the website's error prevention methods

ArthurAardvark• 2 years ago

Of all the goliaths and titans of industry...Apple....really? Perhaps its a matter of applicable laws/cases...but why not Amazon, Google and Microsoft? They have their tentacles in every direction, I consider that sort of broad-spectrum corporation to be the worst kind. It is not even similar sectors in the case of Amazon (well there are plenty of Google subsidies without the "Google" brand on it) which I find more frightening but hey, I welcome our new corporate overlords!

jmholla3• 2 years ago

but why not Amazon, Google and Microsoft?

I'm pretty sure the DOJ is going after them as well. This suit is just about Apple.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

Yes, Apple and Google have what we call super app capability on their own phones. However unless or until mobile OS permissions structures can grant permissions at a sub app level, I think it's good that random Joe schmo, or worse, someone like meta, cannot make a combination banking-messaging - social credit - maps application that insists on total phone access all the time.

camdenlock2• 2 years ago

This is some EU-smelling shite.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

How so?

camdenlock2• 2 years ago

State overreach, wasting enormous productivity in the process.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

It seems like they do not like vertical integration

ActualHacker• 2 years ago

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon should be 500 companies, not 5

xyst• 2 years ago

Whoever is handling the legal for Apple is about to see a shit ton more billable hours for the next decade.

lukeplato• 2 years ago

When is a good time to buy AAPL on the dip?

jaimex2• 2 years ago

Good, tear them apart.

nektro• 2 years ago

while I love to see the government finally getting a sliver of an appetite to go after monopolies, why Apple when there's so many others that are so much more insidious?

dghughes2• 2 years ago

Stuff like Apple Vision Pro where you need an iPhone to scan your face is annoying. If you want a Apple Watch but have Android phone it's pretty much pointless. How does Apple get away with that?

Worse than that from hardware to browsers over the years it all seems to be less open or to work with other systems, apps, OS. Linux being the exception of course.

khazhoux17• 2 years ago

Stuff like Apple Vision Pro where you need an iPhone to scan your face is annoying. If you want a Apple Watch but have Android phone it's pretty much pointless. How does Apple get away with that?

You think of the Apple Watch or AVP as independent pieces of hardware, but the Apple model is that they're all one integrated system, of which you can choose what components to buy or not.

My biggest problem with this suit is that it attacks the core premise of interoperability that is one of the reasons people like the Apple ecosystem to begin with.

dghughes2• 2 years ago

My biggest problem with this suit is that it attacks the core premise of interoperability that is one of the reasons people like the Apple ecosystem to begin with.

I'm sure IBM would have loved to have made that claim in the early 1980s. Thankfully we now have a massive home computer market not just owned by IBM.

ggregoire• 2 years ago

Can Apple win?

cushpush• 2 years ago

Listening to Merrick Garland US AG all I can say is, let the man cook.

jmholla3• 2 years ago

For those asking why just Apple:

Google, Meta and Amazon are all facing similar suits, and companies from Kroger to JetBlue Airways have faced greater scrutiny of potential acquisitions and expansion.

aidog• 2 years ago

My biggest complaint is that they don't even let you send photos over bluetooth to a non-apple device! There is no way to share files wirelessly.

raminf• 2 years ago

"Super Apps" raise two technical issues:

1. Allowing such apps to handle their own payment processing across multiple applications. This means Apple doesn't get to force everyone through the in-app purchasing funnel and collect a transaction fee. There could be an exception made that the fee is waived for purchasing physical goods and services through the super-app. This shouldn't be a hard change. The big fight will be over selling digital content and what is a fair percentage.

2. Allow users to install binary plugins or extensions into a single app without going through an AppStore review. Apple does not currently allow this unless the plugins or extensions are web-based and can run inside the webkit sandbox.

They'll have a strong argument that forcing them to allow running arbitrary, unreviewed code will open up big security holes.

JaceLightning• 2 years ago

Thank.

God.

Fuck evil Apple.

sieborg• 2 years ago

If you don't want the app store, just buy an android. sick of this

matt3210• 2 years ago

If I didn't like the Apple ecosystem, lock-in and walled garden, I would use android.

Walden98• 2 years ago

thanks for sharing..

minroot3• 2 years ago

this feels so stupid.

minroot3• 2 years ago

will this prevent people from not buying apple phones?

Sparkyte• 2 years ago

It's not an iphone monopoly it is a platform monopoly. The lawsuit is over the ecosystem not allowing users to pick or choose and being forced into a dependency with Apple products.

dariosalvi78• 2 years ago

I don't understand what people don't understand about this. Comments like "you are free to buy another phone" or "regulating is only going to stifle innovation" show an utter ignorance about how tech industry works and a very naive view about capitalism.

Apple, as all other big tech companies, grow and thrive because of the ecosystem of companies, suppliers, consumers, researchers, and (importantly) those who offer products and services on top of them. They have built a very successful "platform": the iPhone. Because a mobile phone is not a "device" any longer, it's part of an infrastructure, used by companies, banks, healthcare and governments to offer consumers and citizens services, on which often life depends on. If you build a platform to keep it half-opened, at your convenience, with aggressive lock-in strategies, favouring your own products (apps) at the damage of others, you are playing dirty. No matter how much consumers love and trust you, you are playing dirty at the expenses of all those companies, banks, healthcare and governments that rely on you and at the expenses of consumers and society at large. Apple can still have its own wonderful walled garden for its iPhone, but give the possibility to others to create their own gardens too.

Regarding interventionism (ruling, punishing etc.), that's done for _protecting_ capitalism. I often read comments on HN that criticise the EU for creating pointless regulations that are anti-competitive or a burden and what not. What these people completely get wrong is that the EU institutions are as capitalistic as they can be. Capitalism is excellent at creating wealth, but it's also excellent at destroying itself as proven multiple times. Those regulations are meant to create a _healthy_ capitalism, one that fosters competition, creates jobs and favours consumers. Something that the US used to worry about in the past, but then got too lobbied (or maybe too nationalistic?) and stopped doing it. I am happy that someone is starting to wake up now.

Making iPhones more open comes with some risks, yes, but the current situation is unsustainable and something must be done about it.

minhdanh72• 2 years ago

I believe that the best solution would be for Apple to open up iMessage to other platforms. This would allow users to choose the messaging app that they prefer, regardless of what type of phone they have. It would also promote competition and innovation in the messaging market.

nojvek• 2 years ago

Suing is the easy part. Getting courts to rule that Apple is a monopoly is a much bigger deal. And Apple will surely appeal, and that appeal has to also result in same ruling.

Otherwise it’s a performance like Lina Khan does with FTC with little to to show.

spacecadet2• 2 years ago

Focus less on monopoly and they may not have built a flawed chip... The sun sets once again on Apple.

spacecadet2• 2 years ago

Downvotes but true. Hacker news hates truth.

amelius5• 2 years ago

Break them up into a software, hardware and services company.

twodave2• 2 years ago

Dr. Seuss wrote a book about the blue iMessage bubble. It’s called “The Sneetches”. There are lots of other chat app options that work just as well as iMessage and are cross-platform, but some people like to lord even very superficial superiority over others. And of course Apple fuels this by making it the default.

But what would it be like if we all had “stars upon ours”?

briandear2• 2 years ago

Why doesn’t the U.S. sue GM for their plan to eliminate CarPlay for most of their cars? GM is creating a monopoly on GM in-car infotainment systems.

Or why aren’t software makers being sued when they release Windows-only versions of their products?

This whole thing is absurd. Don’t like iPhone or Apple, people can choose alternatives.

Basically Apple’s being sued because it’s too good?

teddyh• 2 years ago

The case against Microsoft basically vanished after an election happened.

Blackstrat• 2 years ago

So I'm guessing Apple didn't agree to collude with the government as Google, Facebook, et al has. It's not a monopoly. No one has to buy Apple. Globally, Android phones have a larger share of the market. In the US, Apple is around 55%. As for it's business practices? About like the rest of the tech industry, or industry generally.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

For folks that have worked with Apple, since the 1980s, it’s sort of surreal, to see this happening.

We remember Apple as this scrappy, scruffy outfit, struggling to stay alive.

We never dreamed that they would ever get to the place, where they would be sued as a monopoly.

I remember the old WWDCs, when you could just walk up to anyone at Apple (including Steve), and just start chatting. If you did talk to Steve, he might not be so nice, responding, but you didn't have bodyguards or bouncers.

Those days, they are long gone.

I have a friend that worked for Apple for a while. He told me that his onboarding training had a special section on dealing with "The Principals."

Basically, if you passed Tim or Craig, or somesuch, in the hallway, you were to act as if they weren't there. Avoid eye contact, don't say hi, no nods, etc.

throwup238• 2 years ago

Basically, if you passed Tim or Craig, or somesuch, in the hallway, you were to act as if they weren't there. Avoid eye contact, don't say hi, no nods, etc.

It is believed within the upper echelons of the Cult of the Executive that employees' eyes are the windows to their souls, a dangerous place for any sociopath to gaze lest a tiny drop of empathy develop and ruin the quarterly numbers.

justin66• 2 years ago

We remember Apple as this scrappy, scruffy outfit, struggling to stay alive.

I don’t know. For those of us who were bitter when Apple killed the Apple II… we put the notion of “scrappy” Apple behind a long time ago.

perfectstorm• 2 years ago

i don't expect anything to come out of this (really a cash strapped government department trying to take on a trillion dollar company), but at the very least i expect Apple to settle for some things like better interoperability between iMessages and RCS. My SO uses an iPhone and i converted to Android and messages sent between our devices are always a hit or miss.

I really like my old Apple watch but i can't use it anymore because i switched to a Google Pixel.

My hope is that Apple settles this outside of court and agrees to more interoperability.

blondie9x• 2 years ago

The most dangerous monopoly Apple maintains is iMessage. Everyone hates to be the non-blue message recipient.

The reason customers are loyal to Apple iPhones is simple. iMessage and iCloud.

It is definitely anti-competitive the way iMessage and iCloud function to lock out other cloud backup alternatives and to make subordinate non-iPhone recipients.

Like the lightning cable to USB-C migration. There should be 1 message platform for phones that builds upon SMS.

sashank_15092• 2 years ago

I guess this is what it feels like to see the country and institutions you love decay in real time and go to the dogs. The number of HN comments here supporting the government and arguing against Apple boggle my mind, yet I can’t help but notice that I’ve seen this trendline for a while and should honestly be expecting it until something drastic happens.

For those with a more open mind, look at the wasteland of America and try to find the few institutions that houses the most productive, smart and creative people of the world and actively develops and nurtures them. You will find that one of those institutions is Apple, probably the biggest and arguably among the best in the computer industry. Any sane government would decide its first priority is to protect and nurture these institutions as they represent the cream of the crop of institutions in the country. If Apple started in China, you bet the Chinese government would pull all stops to try and subsidize Apple if its business starts to die, that will also kill Apple albeit in a different way. Yet in our government we have decided it’s time to ruin this institution. Quick, what’s the easiest way to take your most productive and motivated employees and make them quit in frustration. Easy, you keep chipping away at their autonomy, narrowing it in scope and replacing all the tasks where they used to think decide with a long complex labyrinthe of rules and processes. Any time they take initiative, make them go through a long and arduous approval by committee and anytime they make an infraction micromanage them in that area for an excessive amount of time. You will find that they will quit in due time.The government seems determined on putting Apple on that diet. In its ideal world, Apple should be another Boeing, a company that exists to embody its regulation. Alas we are fortunately a bit far away from that, Apple I reckon has a few good years of its life left, but I won’t be surprised if we see this happen to the tech industry in 20 years.

gigel824• 2 years ago

Apple should be another Boeing, a company that exists to embody its regulation

That is pretty funny because you're right, Apple is becoming another Boeing - a profit-above-all-else corporate asshole and just like Boeing what we need is a hell of a lot more regulation, not less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc

sashank_15092• 2 years ago

Your view is so opposite of mine that only one of us will be proven right and I like my odds

foobaw• 2 years ago

I just want Apple to release RCS already

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 years ago

The "non-paywall link" did not work me.

This worked instead:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240321143551if_/https://www.ny...

bfrog• 2 years ago

Plenty of monopolies, the iPhone at least to this armchair analyst doesn’t look even close to being one.

arctac• 2 years ago

Long overdue, markets should be free.

U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

Related Stories