Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on Android, but it wants one.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of creating and maintaining an illegal monopoly. Whether Apple actually has a monopoly on Android in the smartphone market is up to the courts to decide, but what’s clear is that Apple really wants a monopoly.

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The Justice Department’s lawsuit alleges that Apple has created a “smartphone monopoly” with the iPhone. The crux of the lawsuit is that Apple’s actions have forced users onto their iPhones through several means, including throttling app development on iOS, cloud gaming, messaging apps, and Apple’s own means of pushing messaging to other platforms such as Android. Locks in and interferes with third-party smartwatches, Apple Watch is not compatible with Android, and third-party digital wallets are restricted on iOS.

In a statement, Apple said, 9to5 macsaid it believes the lawsuit is “wrong on the facts and the law.”

And actually, I don’t disagree with that opinion either.

If the point of the Justice Department’s case is that Apple is a monopoly, that argument doesn’t seem to hold up. In the traditional sense, Apple does not have a monopoly. butif there’s one thing this case does well, it’s that it highlights how Apple has been pushing toward monopoly.

There are examples like messaging that are basically repeated thousands of times at this point. But the case also highlights some perhaps better examples. For example, third-party smartwatches are a hindrance on iOS. All the APIs and connections needed to run a smartwatch are present in iOS, but they’re essentially useless unless the Apple Watch uses them. It is artificially limited.

Google has been (and still is) making Wear OS compatible with iOS for years, but notifications are limited, voice responses are non-existent, and iOS doesn’t allow apps to run in the background. Connections are frequently dropped due to not maintaining connections. My father uses a Montblanc Summit on his iPhone, but it doesn’t work well with iOS so he has to reset it frequently. When he used the same watch on Android, he never had any problems. I don’t believe that giving Apple the same level of access to third-party watches would actually allow that. Better More than the Apple Watch, it just emphasizes that Apple has no reason to hold other companies back.

This is well emphasized in an interview with Beeper’s Eric Migicovsky. android police this week. In that interview, Migicovsky actually mentioned that he spent a lot of time over the years developing and overseeing products that run on his iOS, such as the Pebble Watch. He said many of the startups he worked with at Y Combinator “have always resisted the restrictions and limitations of Apple’s App Store.”

But I would argue that Apple’s intentions become clearer when we look beyond this ongoing lawsuit.

In the EU, recent digital market laws allow Apple to big The company says it’s “fully compliant,” but it’s clearly doing so in a malicious way. For example, there’s the company’s approach to sideloading. Apple requires that a developer have already accumulated more than 1 million downloads through an approved marketplace before allowing him to sideload from his website, and still requires developers to He charges 0.50 euros for per installation For sideloaded apps. This is incredibly hostile to developers, and it’s no surprise that the EU is objecting to the policy. There are absolutely security arguments for the previous two aspects of this policy, but the installation fee makes no sense beyond encouraging developers to continue using her App Store.

Such actions demonstrate that Apple is unwilling to compromise its experience and established standards to gain a competitive edge. The Department of Justice stated:

Apple has repeatedly chosen to reduce the quality of its products for consumers in order to prevent the emergence of competition.

The Department of Justice is exaggerating to some extent here. Apple’s choices don’t always make its products worse For consumers, but there’s no doubt that by making the product worse for developers and others, you’re also taking more away from consumers. Apple says this is in the interest of user experience, which is fair, but not possible at Apple’s scale.

What makes this whole story so different is the scale. You can’t lock things down so hard when you control half the market. Apple’s choices around things like APIs and the App Store are directly hostile to even the concept of competition, and have been for a long time. For comparison, let’s look at Tesla. EV manufacturers were pretty strict about how customers drove their cars, especially in the beginning. I had to charge it at a Tesla station. I had to have Tesla fix it. “Third party” was a foreign concept in a sense. And on a small scale, it was a benefit for consumers. But imagine a world where Tesla controls half the car market. None of that is good anymore. Suddenly, a single company has so much control that it ultimately hurts the end user by reducing their choice of products to purchase.

Similarly, Apple’s policies and choices undoubtedly benefited users in the early days, but as the company grew and the iPhone became truly dominant, especially in the US market, those policies became a hindrance. It’s starting.

Apple offers really great products and services and will definitely stand up to any effective competition. But the company has shown time and time again that it ultimately has no interest in doing so. Apple says this lawsuit “threatens our existence,” and that’s certainly true.

“Please buy your mom an iPhone”

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Those who have installed Android 15 DP1 should already have the OTA update for DP2.

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