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The yr was 1998, and reigning private laptop big Microsoft was on trial for violating antitrust legal guidelines, together with by concentrating on its smaller competitor Apple. Apple occupied solely a fraction of the PC market, whereas Microsoft held north of 80 p.c. However its cross-platform QuickTime multimedia participant threatened Microsoft’s personal choices, and a courtroom decided that Microsoft had tried to crush it — pushing Apple to desert a QuickTime model for Home windows and implying it might restrict the instrument’s distribution choices if Apple didn’t again off.
Anybody who’s used an digital machine recently in all probability is aware of Apple’s place has shifted. It might have by no means unseated Microsoft within the private laptop market, nevertheless it reigns within the far greater class of cellular computing. It makes cash at just about each layer of its ubiquitous iPhone: the cellphone’s {hardware}, quite a few equipment like earbuds and site trackers, first-party software program providers like Apple Music, and commissions from the builders whose apps populate the App Retailer. Even the iOS search bar is a moneymaker, due to a revenue-sharing deal that units Google Search because the default.
All that energy, mixed with Apple’s tight management over its cellular ecosystem, has raised a number of hackles. Some {hardware} and software program builders say Apple copied and built-in instruments they constructed (a observe referred to as Sherlocking), then deprived them by locking them out of sure iOS options that its personal instrument might entry — the previous usually isn’t unlawful, however the latter will be. Many app makers are vital of the App Retailer fee, pejoratively referred to as the “Apple Tax.” Builders and customers alike are generally pissed off with Apple’s lack of assist for third-party app shops or sideloading, which rival cellphone maker Google (albeit with its personal anticompetitive restrictions) permits.
Over the previous decade particularly, Apple has joined the rising variety of main tech corporations going through antitrust motion. Chief amongst its critics is Fortnite maker Epic Video games, which has filed authorized complaints in a number of nations, searching for to make use of its personal fee system and launch a third-party app retailer on iOS. Governments the world over — together with within the US, the European Union, Brazil, Korea, and Japan — have additionally gotten in on the motion, searching for to crack open the partitions of Apple’s digital backyard.
In an business filled with sprawling multipronged tech empires, the fundamental antitrust argument towards Apple is relatively easy: it’s turn out to be the last word gatekeeper to billions of individuals’s main computing {hardware}, and it retains opponents locked out whereas levying a heavy toll on the builders it lets via. The main points are completely different, however in some methods, it hits the identical emotional notes because the previous case towards Microsoft — they’re each tales about an organization limiting what you are able to do together with your private machine.
Navigating the authorized implications of iOS’ design, although, has confirmed difficult. Truly altering it’s proving even harder.
Regulators and courts all over the world have ordered adjustments at Apple, notably across the App Retailer — however these adjustments have been sluggish to reach, partly as a result of for a half-decade or extra, Apple has dragged its ft at each flip.
Certainly one of Apple’s highest-profile antitrust battles was the US lawsuit introduced by Epic in 2020. Epic requested a choose to make Apple open up iOS to third-party app shops and alternate in-app fee strategies. Apple principally prevailed — in a 2021 ruling, Decide Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers largely accepted its argument that iOS’ walled-garden design offered actual security advantages and wasn’t unfairly anticompetitive.
However the firm has spent years combating over a relatively small loss: an order to let builders add hyperlinks or buttons to exterior web-based fee techniques. Courts have decided that Apple intentionally didn’t adjust to the order, together with by including a “prohibitive” charge to make use of it. (This wasn’t the primary time it had tacked on this type of charge, both — it didn’t adjust to Dutch regulators’ calls for to permit third-party funds for courting apps in 2022, racking up tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in fines.)
Apple additionally averted turning into collateral injury in a unique antitrust swimsuit, US v. Google. That case discovered that Google had monopolized the search market via strategies like its search cope with Apple. However a choose declined to ban such offers after Apple testified it might considerably injury its enterprise.
In different nations, Apple has confronted harsher calls for — most prominently within the EU, whose Digital Markets Act (DMA) was designed particularly to create competitors within the tech world. Underneath regulatory stress in 2024, Apple began permitting third-party app shops on iOS within the EU. But it surely did so with numerous restrictions and extra charge buildings that discouraged builders from switching over. A yr later, it grew to become one of many first corporations (alongside Meta) to face fines for violating the DMA, with the EU citing “overly strict” necessities and the brand new charges. Past the App Retailer, Apple has additionally averted bringing some machine options to the EU, together with Reside Translation for AirPods and iPhone Mirroring; it’s blamed the issue of supporting these options on third-party units per DMA guidelines.
Regardless of Apple’s regular opposition, there have been tangible adjustments. For over a decade, it was not possible to truly purchase ebooks via Amazon’s Kindle iOS app, as an illustration — however in mid-2025, Amazon used the US courtroom order to start out together with “Get Ebook” hyperlinks. The choice iOS app retailer AltStore has launched within the EU and Japan, with plans to develop to Brazil and different nations; Epic has launched its Epic Video games Retailer on iOS in Europe too. Whereas Epic hasn’t launched numbers for iOS retailer recognition, AltStore stated it had “tons of of 1000’s of customers” as of final October. And in China, Apple not too long ago decreased developer charges in makes an attempt to keep away from a possible investigation.
However for many individuals, antitrust motion hasn’t massively modified the iPhone expertise. A unique EU third-party retailer, Setapp, shut down earlier this yr citing “still-evolving and sophisticated enterprise phrases”; Apple and the EU are sparring about who’s at fault. iOS stays successfully one among two world smartphone platforms, and Apple retains super energy at each stage of it.
Apple will doubtless hold tangling with governments. Extra nations, like Australia, have pushed pro-competitive regulatory overhauls. In 2024, the US Division of Justice filed an iOS-related antitrust swimsuit towards Apple, and it’s slowly transferring towards trial — although judges will be leery of ordering drastic cures even when corporations are declared monopolies. In the meantime, Chinese language regulators appear poised to maintain pushing for extra adjustments — which might turn out to be a urgent challenge for Apple within the coming yr.
The EU and Apple will even proceed hammering out what DMA compliance seems like for iOS. Apple initially deliberate to roll out a brand new charge construction in the beginning of 2026, nevertheless it’s claimed the EU “refused to allow us to implement the very adjustments that they requested,” failing to reply to a compliance plan and utilizing “political delay ways.”
For now, there’s a extra quick, non-regulatory potential menace to Apple: the rise of generative AI. Firms like OpenAI wish to construct a brand new computing pipeline that might bypass the present system of telephones and app shops, together with by introducing their very own units. Apple has made comparatively few inroads into AI, and it stays depending on different corporations because it makes an attempt to overtake Siri with it. In concept, that might put it within the place of an incumbent tech big about to be undercut by new expertise — roughly the place that ’90s Microsoft discovered itself in with the net.
However Apple has survived different makes an attempt to unseat it, like Mark Zuckerberg’s failed multibillion-dollar metaverse push. Shedding the AI race hasn’t but put a dent in cellphone gross sales. Early makes an attempt at AI-first cellphone alternate options have been lackluster, and no person’s found out what an AI app economic system seems like but. So the battles over Apple’s energy doubtless gained’t cease any time quickly.
- Apple’s competitor Google manages a extra open cellphone ecosystem with Android, however notably within the US, it’s bought a worse antitrust observe file — it misplaced a authorized battle with Epic that now appears more likely to finish in a settlement, and it’s been declared a monopolist within the search and ad-tech markets as properly.
- Lengthy earlier than App Retailer competitors grew to become a serious concern, Apple fought a complete completely different, arguably weirder, antitrust battle over e book publishing — after a 2012 DOJ swimsuit accused it of conspiring with main publishing homes to shake Amazon’s dominance out there. The case ended with a $450 million settlement.
- Apple was one of many main targets of a 2021 US congressional push for antitrust reform, with witnesses from corporations like Tile and Spotify relating tales about its allegedly anticompetitive conduct. Predictably for Congress, stated push failed.
- The Ringer has a traditional oral historical past of the unique Large Tech antitrust battle, US v. Microsoft.
- Sean Hollister wrote concerning the difficult explanation why Apple principally gained its authorized battle with Epic, whereas Google misplaced on The Verge.
- Antitrust circumstances are an important likelihood to get an inside have a look at how corporations perform, and Epic v. Apple didn’t disappoint.
- Cory Doctorow argues Apple’s “curated computing” mannequin undercuts the corporate’s pro-privacy selections and different constructive strikes.
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