by Jacob Kalphat-Losego | Jan 11, 2023 | Commentary |
Spotify’s recent media barrage against Apple for the phone maker’s app store policies reveals a glaring breach in American antitrust enforcement. Spotify, a subscription-based media streaming service, has taken to hurling complaints against Apple for its allegedly anti-competitive practices, arguing that how it handles application review and fees disadvantages competitors. Developers offering applications and services that compete with Apple’s own, such as Spotify, often find that Apple’s policies and practices in the App Store place them at a disadvantage. However, Apple’s stranglehold on the smartphone market leaves little room to negotiate. As of November 2022, Apple’s handheld holds a fifty-five percent share of the US market for smartphones. Its closest competitor in the domestic market, Samsung, commands a little over half of that position at twenty-nine percent, while other names like Motorola, LG, and Google fight over what little is left. Apple for its part hasn’t been shy about leveraging its dominance in the market for hardware against software developers. This effort is partially enabled by the iPhone’s integrated ecosystem. Unlike some other hardware manufacturers, which give a user the freedom to design or install alternative operating systems (OS) and features, Apple designs its phones, tablets, and computers to work with a proprietary OS and raise significant barriers to modification of that software or installation of alternative operating systems. As a result, developers who want to reach consumers are shoved into a binary: design a web-based application reachable through an installed browser (think accessing Facebook through Safari or Google Chrome) or design a native application for the Apple OS (think tapping on the Facebook app). The latter presents significant...
