Apple antitrust suit could help mitigate iPhone user headaches

A lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice on Thursday takes aim at conduct that it alleges has allowed Apple to disadvantage competitors in the market for mobile phones and services.

If successful, regulators and state watchdogs could force Apple to work with applications it has a history of hindering and enable in-app purchases it’s blocked, ultimately improving the consumer product experience. And yes, that could include making green-bubble text messages obsolete, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin told Tech Brew.

“Every time you get on a text chain with somebody who doesn't have an iPhone, you see the dreaded green bubble, which degrades the experience. We all have lived through it,” said Platkin, whose state is one of 15, plus Washington, DC, that joined the DOJ as plaintiffs. “That’s not a result of the capabilities of the other person’s phone, it’s Apple’s decision to make that experience worse for iPhone users so that they don't want to leave the platform.”

The lawsuit claims that these decisions add up to a pile of cash for the company. They’re also part of a broader strategy that “undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers,” according to a DOJ press release.

Déjà vu?

Today’s DOJ suit has the potential to be one of the department’s more significant moves to rein in Big Tech since it sued Microsoft in the ’90s, alleging it enjoyed an illegal monopoly over the PC web-browser market, Platkin said. In that case, an Apple exec testified as a government witness, and the company later used the resulting elbowroom to bring some of its most innovative products to market.

“Once that lawsuit was successful, Apple was able to develop the iTunes Store [and] get it on Microsoft platforms. Ultimately, that led to the iPod and then the iPhone,” Platkin said. “Apple took Microsoft's playbook after benefiting from the lawsuit, and is now doing the exact same thing that Microsoft was doing in the ’90s that ultimately led to the DOJ and many states, just like today, filing a lawsuit.”

If the lawsuit is successful and Apple is forced to open up the iPhone ecosystem, it could mean iPhone users enjoy a plethora of features that aren’t currently iPhone-compatible, John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, told Tech Brew.

Take, for instance, as Bergmayer pointed out, the fact that Kindle app users can’t buy books in the app and must switch to a browser if they want to do so. Or that users can’t sign up for new paid Spotify accounts—or even access pricing information—through the streaming service’s app. Or that until recently, Apple didn’t allow Xbox Game Pass users to access the entire library of games from a single app.

“It’s opening up a little bit in Europe due to regulatory pressure, but not in the United States,” Bergmayer said.

“As the DOJ alleges, a lot of these behaviors, once you have market power, they might become unlawful,” he said.