With the sleek design and ubiquity of its devices and its highly profitable ecosystem, few companies wield the influence of Apple in the modern digital marketplace. Beneath the surface, however, lies a strategy that consumers and lawmakers alike should take seriously: Apple is systematically undermining third-party applications through technical design choices that degrade the user experience – ultimately steering users towards Apple’s own services. The technical term for this sort of degraded experience is “interoperability issues,” and Apple’s practice of intentionally creating them raises serious legal issues about market manipulation and consumer harm.
The Myth of a Level Playing Field
Apple has long insisted that its App Store is a vibrant marketplace where the best apps rise to the top. The company’s narrative, however, does not hold up under scrutiny. Consider, for example, the consistent performance and feature discrepancies between Apple’s native apps and their third-party equivalents. Whether it’s Maps versus Google Maps, Spotify versus Apple Music, Safari versus Chrome, or iMessage versus any non-Apple messaging app, the disparities stem from calculated restrictions on the part of Apple.
For instance, third-party browsers on iOS are required to use the same WebKit rendering engine that powers Apple’s Safari. So, Google Chrome on iOS is not actually Google Chrome; it is Apple’s engine dressed up to look like Google’s interface. Apple prohibits the use of competing browser engines to limit performance enhancements that third-party developers might otherwise find ways to offer. The result is a user experience gap that benefits Safari –conveniently the default browser on iPhones.
The interoperability issues also extend beyond apps to actual hardware. Pairing a Garmin watch or Bose headphones to an iPhone is a far more complex task than pairing an Apple Watch or AirPods to an iPhone. That’s not an accident – that’s an example of Apple intentionally creating a worse user experience for their customers who choose to use third party hardware.
Degrading the Competition
Apple’s approach to messaging apps is perhaps the clearest example of intentional degradation. iMessage offers a seamless experience with high-resolution media, typing indicators, reactions, and encrypted group chats. When an iPhone user texts an Android user, however, the experience devolves into green bubbles, broken group chats, and missing features. This degradation is not a technical inevitability – it is a deliberate choice. By withholding interoperability, Apple amplifies social pressure and user frustration, nudging consumers towards the iOS ecosystem. For example, while Apple Music enjoys privileged integration with Siri, other services such as Spotify face hurdles, even down to issues like whether the volume buttons work or not.
Control Without Accountability
What makes Apple’s anti-competitive behavior so troubling is its veneer of legitimacy. The company conceals its restrictions behind vague language about privacy, security, and user experience. At the end of the day, however, it comes down to a simple issue of monopolistic control. Since Apple controls the hardware, the operating system, and the distribution platform (the App Store), the company is both a player on the field and the only referee. The rules are opaque, inconsistently enforced, and often retroactively justified – and every player selling digital goods and services on the field has to pay a 30% fee just to participate.
In other regulated markets such as finance, telecom or energy, such gatekeeping would trigger immediate antitrust scrutiny. In the app economy, however, Apple enjoyed years of largely unchecked dominance. That era is over, as recent actions in both Europe and the United States, plus Brazil, South Korea, the UK and Japan, suggest that competition enforcers are more than alert to this pernicious issue that only results in consumer harm, inflated prices and a degraded experience for everyone.
The Path Forward
Apple just found out it won’t be able to delay the App Store changes mandated by the ruling in the Epic Games case, which is a step in the right direction. To further preserve innovation and competition in the mobile ecosystem, Apple must be compelled to adopt principles of functional neutrality – treating third-party apps as equal citizens, not second-class competitors. In other words, Apple must be compelled to follow the law, and if competition law means anything, it certainly means that consumers, not monopolists, are the decision makers. Ultimately, the market should be driven by the quality of user experience, not by artificially induced friction. Apple’s design choices are not just technical decisions but economic levers, and if left unchecked, they will continue to warp the app economy in favor of Apple’s bottom line.
