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Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Don't think that's going to go far:
https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
As of early 2024, Android has a 70.69% market share worldwide.
In the US, iPhones hold a market share of 60.77%.
More than 1 billion iPhones and over 3 billion Android devices are currently active.
Android smartphones accounted for 56% of all smartphone sales worldwide in Q4 2023.
It's 100% not about how much market share they have, it's about the restrictions on hardware and software:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/business/live-news/doj-apple-antitrust-lawsuit-03-21-24/index.html
Not sure how a different color constitutes "degrading". Regardless, they don't have a monopoly outside the US. If their policies were effective, why do they only have a majority share in the US? 🤔
Probably means using SMS instead of RCS which forces photos into a lower quality and all the reactions get sent as:
so-and-so liked “message text”Do you think the color difference is just to mess with android users or something and is otherwise meaningless? It represents differences in abilities. The abilities are the "degraded" part.
I don't know what the criteria the FTC uses is, or what exactly Apple is accused of, but economically, I'd say that Apple and Google largely have different markets. There are Android users and iOS users. Because apps are not portable across these, a user's software library largely locks them into and constrains them to use the same platform, as shifting away from the platform would require throwing out their software library.
So if you're an iOS user, for example, there's really one app store out there that you can use. Android isn't really an option.
And I'd say that there's probably fertile ground for a company to have a monopoly position there.
This isn't about an Appstore monopoly though, it's about a monopoly in the smart phone market, which clearly Apple does not have.
I'm not sure that that's true, and that's why I pointed out that it's not clear what exactly Apple is accused of. That's what the title says -- and it's also wrong, I might add, in that having a monopoly is not illegal. Just places limits on some behavior that is then considered anticompetitive.
But the article text, for example, talks about the walled garden crossing multiple devices. If that's part of the complaint, then yeah, it can be an issue.
Here's some text from another article that quotes the DoJ:
Those are people who are gonna be selling in Apple's app store.