I don’t see the monopoly
First, the monopoly comparative of Apple to Microsoft in its heyday is disingenuous. Back then your only practical options to do anything were Windows and Internet Explorer, and Microsoft went well out of their way to crush the competition by playing dirty, not by designing amazing products that people love - both Windows and Internet Explorer were junk forced upon you and you could do very little about it because the alternatives had dramatic limitations, limitations that were perpetuated by Microsoft, for example by implementing web standards in IE wrong or hustling OEMs to release Microsoft products or else face the consequences.
You can read all about it here, it’s the stuff of horrors.
Today, anyone who doesn't like Apple has other options, and iOS is not even the number one phone OS. Even now, Apple isn't nearly as pushy forcing me to use Safari or any of their products in MacOS as Microsoft is with Edge on Windows, or automatically putting Microsoft Teams in the startup applications, and don’t even get me started with how sneaky they are with violating your privacy.
Other point the US government is making is that Apple’s anti-competitive practices are hurting innovation by both Apple and its competitors. And yet somehow, Apple continues to excel at innovation and their competitors are constantly being inspired by this. One just needs to look at how phones were before and after the iPhone to see that, or how Apple Vision and the Apple Architecture are at the cutting edge of technology and innovation, and how other companies are scrambling to come up with something similar. So where exactly is Apple hurting innovation? I just don’t see it.
Apple users stick with Apple not because they have to, they do it because their products are great, and if the competition was objectively better in most regards like Chrome was when it dethroned IE, then Apple would cease to exist. And it’s not like there aren’t other huge companies with the same amount of resources that could do this. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, all of them have enough might to come up with at least a few products that rival Apple’s, like Android. Apple is not the only big player in this game.
I also don’t entirely buy the argument that you are completely locked into the Apple ecosystem. For most things you can use Google Drive to backup your stuff, and the vast majority of iPhone apps have Android equivalents. And if you wanted to move from MacOS to Windows, almost every single app is also available for Windows or has an equivalent.
So now that’s out of the way, let's review other points covered by the lawsuit:
Blocking Innovative Super Apps
Everyone is saying this is referring to WeChat having limited functionality in the iPhone. It blows my mind that the Justice Department in the US is indirectly protecting this app while hunting down TikTok. Anyone who thinks this is bad should read this article, I will paste here an excerpt from it:
So perhaps thwarting WeChat isn’t such a bad thing after all, even if done for other reasons unrelated to this.
And if WeChat is being used as a prime example of “innovative”, that’s just hilarious. It is an overbloated app that does many things, not sure I qualify that as innovative, or super - but that’s just my opinion. I just don’t see why this in particular is part of this lawsuit, unless it is Elon sticking it in so he can create his own version of WeChat with X.
Suppressing Mobile Cloud Streaming Services
I can’t think of any reason why Apple doing this would be good for anyone other than their pocket, so this is definitely worth addressing, agree with the lawsuit.
Excluding Cross-Platform Messaging Apps
This feels stupid to me. No one is preventing you from using Signal Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram or others to talk to people who own iPhones from Android (I use Android and I do it all the time!), there is no point in sticking to iMessenger and it only seems to be popular in the US anyway. Also, no other messaging app except for maybe Signal is doing anything to play ball with the others. You can’t message someone in WhatsApp from Signal Messenger, so why is this only directed at Apple? Shouldn’t this be more of a general law targeting all messaging apps?
Diminishing the Functionality of Non-Apple Smartwatches
They may have a point here, but then on the other hand for Apple to go out of their way to provide the same functionality for Android would probably cost them millions in investment and may divest their focus from areas where they could provide more value for their users. I am guessing here that creating a compatibility layer for watches is not as easy as creating a bluetooth driver for headphones, so I can see why they wouldn’t want to do it beyond just being greedy.
There are a myriad of other watches that an user can buy and if you know that an Apple Watch is not that compatible with android and if that’s important to you, Apple can’t stop you from buying something else.
Rather than make this a thing, why not make Apple more compliant with ports and cables?
That being said, I do agree that Apple should make it easy for others to make their tools compatible if they don’t want to do it themselves.
Limiting Third Party Digital Wallets
I also don’t see a problem with Apple allowing third party wallets as long as it can be done securely, Apple should help facilitating this, so I agree with the lawsuit here.
The line between greed and user focus is blurry
I don’t know how to feel here. On the one hand I know that the reason why Apple can create such phenomenal products that are so reliable, have such great user experience and work so well is because of their extreme focus on their walled garden. On the other hand, some of their decisions feel like pure greed, such as not implementing usb-c for years.
This lawsuit needs to find a good balance between maintaining Apple’s autonomy, vision and values, while also levelling the playing field for other competitors that use their platform or want to create compatibility with their products.
Many people don’t seem to understand that even if many of the things that Apple do may be driven by greed, are also what makes their products so robust and well-designed, forcing Apple to become more open is a good thing, forcing them to be too open may undo some of the quality we love about their products.
Take for example the push for them to allow third party app stores. This has the potential to be a great change, I also don’t like how Apple holds a monopoly within their ecosystem here, but I am also convinced this is also a big part of the reason what makes iPhone more secure than Android.