The Justice Department has announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors and stifles innovation
    • restingboredfaceEnglish
      814·
      8 months ago
      1. Force them to allow the use of hardware without an account.

      This should be a rule for all products.

    • 100@fedia.io
      18·
      8 months ago

      problem is that they are ready to do anything to keep their locked ecosystem (see how they sabotaging alt stores in EU)

      you have to stomp apples anticompetive strategies HARD

      • Dojan@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 months ago

        Yeah and then keep stomping.

        I’m loving how governments are finally starting to stomp on corporations. I only wish they’d stomp *harder. *

        • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          If you’re in the US, vote for Biden or Trump is going to direct all of that to stop.

          • Dojan@lemmy.world
            1·
            8 months ago

            I’m not. But yeah, I’d easily vote for Biden. Not because he strikes me as a good and capable president, quite far from it, but because he’s obviously leaps and bounds better than the other train wreck of a human being.

            Honestly American politics would be funny in their ridiculousness if they didn’t set the tone for politics here in the years to come.

            • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
              12·
              8 months ago

              You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store, but the Mac’s App Store is very much the second banana on MacOS. You can open up Chrome or Firefox and download an installer for any ‘ol app, or another app marketplace entirely.

              That said, if a developer hasn’t registered as a “Trusted developer” with Apple, installing an app will ask the user if they’re sure that they want to install the program. All of the settings around trusting known developers are at the OS account level. They require a local admin login, not an Apple ID. Its somewhat similar to what Google does with Android.

                • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  8 months ago

                  Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.

                  As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.

      • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        8 months ago

        Was thinking that too, although there are some caveats, you need to at least log into the store to download apps as it stands right now. I think you can log out after installing them, but still. Also using FaceTime or iMessage require accounts, when Apple otherwise could have it set up to just register with the phone number only, have no account, and just be ephemeral to that specific device. (But then at that point, they might as well just follow the IMS video call standard that is cross-platform and do away with FaceTime altogether, and the mobile industry should figure out the SMS replacement to then eliminate iMessage.)

    • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
      7·
      8 months ago

      Forced bundling of their preferred apps like a browser was what triggered the Microsoft anti trust, this is well overdue and Apple should have known it was coming

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
    379·
    8 months ago

    About damn time. They should have never been allowed to grow so big in so many markets to become the only player. They’re literally mentally crippling a generation of youngs that now don’t know how technology works. I remember a young coworker at a technology company a while back remarking, upon finding another coworker’s Android phone, “Oh wait, this is Android? Well, we’re going to need a hacker to figure out how to use that thing,” and he sat it back down, defeated. Wat.

    https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

    • BlitzoTheOisSilent@lemmy.world
      61·
      8 months ago

      My boss was kinda giving me and another guy some shit for having Android phones (he has an iPhone). Not in a mean way, just kind of razzing us about it.

      Other dude looked at him and goes, “Sorry for being poor, I guess,” and then started laughing, haha. But yeah, I’ve had several people over the years be perplexed by anything that wasn’t an iPhone.

  • stoly@lemmy.world
    24·
    8 months ago

    Europe doesn’t surprise me but I am actually surprised to see this happen in the US.

  • nkat2112
    234·
    8 months ago

    I wonder what took so long, but anyway. I’m glad they’re working on it now.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      8 months ago

      My guess is that it took a while because they’ve been able to argue that they’re not a monopoly in the market. It’s a duopoly in the US because Android controls 40% of the market and Apple has 60%.

      It’s a stupid argument and it’s still anticompetitive. That said, the last time the US government cracked down on an operating system manufacturer like this, it was Microsoft, and they had over 90% of the market.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    192·
    8 months ago

    So the stupidest thing happened with my iPhone. My mom and I are going on an 8-hour drive and I loaded a bunch of radio dramas on my phone and wanted to print out the track listing for her to choose from what to listen to on the drive. We have multiple machines with multiple OSes, but my desktop was a Mac, so I plugged the phone in and started the Music app… and there was no way to do it. No way at all. I did some searching and that’s just not something that is on the Music app. And there are no other Mac options either.

    But… Windows doesn’t run Music. It runs iTunes. And the way to do it is to print it from iTunes as a PDF. Something that is not an option on a Mac.

    They removed a feature for their phone from their own OS.

    • ji17br@lemmy.ml
      6·
      8 months ago

      Highlight the tracks, command+c, paste into numbers, and then print it.

      Was my first idea and it works, took about 5 seconds.

        • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          iTunes still exists on Windows, but it’s only covering Podcasts, Audiobooks, and back ups on Windows. Only music and video have been broken out in to the Music and TV apps.

          It’s pretty stupid and half ass. Windows needs parity with MacOS. MacOS has a Music, TV, Podcast, and Books app. Also there is a back up experience that integrates into the OS’s file management system. Bloated iTunes is totally dead.

          I feel like Apple and Microsoft are slipping back into the late 90’s. Each company’s software is pretty janky on their competitor’s machines.

  • fidodo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    8 months ago

    I read the whole article and it didn’t fucking mention the specifics of the case at all. Which part are they suing over specifically?

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
      41·
      8 months ago

      At least one thing is supposedly rejecting payments apps and things that competed with built-in Apple apps and services.

      • fidodo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        The article said that was already disallowed by a prior court ruling. I want to know what’s in the new case.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 months ago

      This means that the reporters haven’t read through all the hundreds of pages yet.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
    139·
    8 months ago

    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.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
        35·
        8 months ago

        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? 🤔

        • nymwit@lemm.ee
          5·
          8 months ago

          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.

        • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io
          3·
          8 months ago

          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”

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      74·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
        76·
        8 months ago

        This isn’t about an Appstore monopoly though, it’s about a monopoly in the smart phone market, which clearly Apple does not have.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          81·
          8 months ago

          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:

          “Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others,” the DOJ wrote in a press release.

          Those are people who are gonna be selling in Apple’s app store.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    1917·
    8 months ago

    Bullshit. The App Store is anti-competitive. The hardware is not. Wrong thing to attack. It will likely fail as a result.

    I’m beginning to agree with a take I saw online. Someone said Lina Khan’s tenure has been a failure because despite gesturing at all the right players, her FTC has failed to make progress because they’re calling the wrong plays.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
      27·
      8 months ago

      You’d be right, if the hardware AND software weren’t made by the same company and locked to each other and that same company didn’t simultaneously have a massive market share

    • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io
      6·
      8 months ago

      It seems that the App Store and other walled garden restrictions are what the suit is about. The posted article is vague and confusing: first talking about an “illegal monopoly in smartphones” but then referring to the “walled garden”, etc.

      This article notes that

      The heart of the lawsuit centers around claims that Apple stopped smaller companies from accessing the hardware and software in its iPhones, which led to fewer options for customers.

      referring to hardware monopoly power may be some legalese needed to meet the requirements to file an antitrust suit, or to head off defense arguments by making a distinction between Apple and other instances of walled gardens, like game consoles.

    • mommykink@lemmy.world
      96·
      8 months ago

      Someone said Lina Khan’s tenure has been a failure because despite gesturing at all the right players, her FTC has failed to make progress because they’re calling the wrong plays

      All by design, it’s only a failure to us stupid prolies. They’re intentionally giving their corporate donors softballs that they know will never hurt their bottom line so that they can turn around come election season and say “Well, at least we tried!” and hope we don’t look any further.

      FWIW, I don’t think this is failure is Khan’s fault. She seems to have spent her professional career developing anti-trust philosophy. The only issue is that the FTC is the state mechanism to protect the wealth funnel and there’s very little a individual can do within the Commission to protect consumers.

  • csm10495English
    511·
    8 months ago

    This is a nonsense suit. We have Android. I mean great hopefully alternate app stores and payment methods… eh.

    I’d rather them go after the only internet provider for like half the country instead: Comcast.

    • Maven (famous)@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      8 months ago

      Comcast also sucks but I’d highly recommend you look at the lawsuit. It’s got a lot of stuff in there and 1 or 2 that I didn’t even know about.