How much control should Apple have over your iPhone?
Our mobile apps are fantastic. It's difficult to think of anything that one of the almost 12 million apps available can't do. Ordering a taxi, shopping for clothes, getting directions, playing games, messaging friends, storing immunisation cards, controlling hearing aids, eating, praying, loving... the list goes on and on. You might be reading this article through an app. If you're reading this on an iPhone, you probably downloaded the app from the App Store, Apple's own and maintained app store. However, many people want this to change.
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Efforts in the US and overseas have the potential to break Apple's grip on one of its most vital lines of commerce and fundamentally alter how iPhone and iPad users obtain and pay for apps. It has the potential to make many more apps available. It may jeopardise their safety.
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The iPhone maker isn't the only one facing antitrust scrutiny. Apple is one of numerous Big Tech companies accused of acquiring too much power over areas of the economy that have become as important as steel, oil, and the telephone were centuries ago.
These corporations have extensive control over what we can do with our phones, the products we buy online and how they are delivered to our homes, our personal data, the internet ecosystem, and even our online identities. Some argue that the best approach to deal with Big Tech now is to use antitrust laws to impose limits or even split them up, as we did with steel, oil, and telephone monopolies decades ago. Legislators seek to establish new legislation that target the digital economy if existing laws are unable to do so.
However, iPhones account for more than half of all smartphones in the United States, and as these devices become more linked into our daily lives, Apple's sole control over what we can do with them and which apps we can use becomes increasingly troublesome. It's also an oddity; Android, for example, permits almost any programme, though app shops may impose their own restrictions.
The phones are made by Apple. Should Apple, on the other hand, set the rules for everything we may do with them? What do iPhone consumers lose out on when one corporation controls so much of their experience on the device?
Many of Apple's current troubles stem from a business model principle: maintain as much control as possible over as many parts of its products as possible. For a computer manufacturer, this is unusual. Apple's operating systems, however, such as macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS, are only available on Apple devices. Apple claims it does this to make its devices more user-friendly, private, and secure. It's a selling point for Apple, and it's one of the reasons why some buyers are prepared to spend more for Apple products.
When it comes to mobile apps, Apple doubled down on its vertical integration plan, limiting customers to only get them through the App Store, which it owns and operates. To get into the App Store, outside developers must follow Apple's approval process and fulfil its regulations. "If you're attempting to shock and insult people, the Product Store isn't the correct location for your app," Apple writes in its developer guidelines. But that doesn't imply Apple's mobile devices, which number more than 1 billion worldwide, are the best place for your software.
The icon for the Apple App Store. Getty Images/AFP/Chris Delmas
Developers whose apps are accepted into the App Store may have to pay Apple a significant portion of their earnings. The App Store tax has been coined to describe the up to 30% charge. There is no option for apps to avoid the in-app payment system's fee, and customers must pay for goods and services outside of the app to avoid the in-app payment system's commission.
When it comes to specific types of apps, some of those developers are also competing with Apple. Apple has been accused of "Sherlocking" third-party apps, which occurs when Apple creates an app that is very identical to a popular third-party app and advertises it in the App Store or integrates it into device software in ways that independent developers cannot. After several flashlight apps utilising the iPhone's camera flash became popular in the App Store, Apple developed its own flashlight tool and included it into iOS in 2013. Those third-party programmes were no longer required.
Apple has also been accused of exploiting its position of power in order to get an advantage over streaming providers. Apple, after all, doesn't have to pay an App Store tax on its own Music app, which comes pre-installed on iPhones and iPads, or the streaming service, which it may and does promote on its devices. (Apple points out that it only has 60 of its own apps, indicating that it isn't competing with every single third-party software in its store, let alone the vast majority.)
"What Apple learned is that if they could dominate the App Store, they could control the rest of the game," Daniel Hanley, a senior legal analyst at the anti-monopoly advocacy group Open Markets Institute, told Recode. "They no longer merely control the hardware; they now control the software as well." They have unilateral control over which apps get on."
This has all been quite profitable for Apple. Apple's mandated commissions from those apps, according to that profit margin estimate, greatly exceed the company's costs for administering the App Store.
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