Apple’s long, bitter App Store antitrust war

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The year was 1998, and reigning personal computer giant Microsoft was on trial for violating antitrust laws, including by targeting its smaller competitor Apple. Apple occupied only a fraction of the PC market, while Microsoft held north of 80 percent. But its cross-platform QuickTime multimedia player threatened Microsoft’s own offerings, and a court determined that Microsoft had tried to crush it — pushing Apple to abandon a QuickTime version for Windows and implying it would limit the tool’s distribution options if Apple didn’t back off.

Anyone who’s used an electronic device lately probably knows Apple’s position has shifted. It may have never unseated Microsoft in the personal computer market, but it reigns in the far bigger category of mobile computing. It makes money at virtually every layer of its ubiquitous iPhone: the phone’s hardware, numerous accessories like earbuds and location trackers, first-party software services like Apple Music, and commissions from the developers whose apps populate the App Store. Even the iOS search bar is a moneymaker, thanks to a revenue-sharing deal that sets Google Search as the default.

All that power, combined with Apple’s tight control over its mobile ecosystem, has raised a lot of hackles. Some hardware and software developers say Apple copied and integrated tools they built (a practice known as Sherlocking), then disadvantaged them by locking them out of certain iOS features that its own tool could access — the former typically isn’t illegal, but the latter can be. Many app makers are critical of the App Store commission, pejoratively known as the “Apple Tax.” Developers and users alike are sometimes frustrated with Apple’s lack of support for third-party app stores or sideloading, which rival phone maker Google (albeit with its own anticompetitive restrictions) allows.

Over the past decade in particular, Apple has joined the growing number of major tech companies facing antitrust action. Chief among its critics is Fortnite maker Epic Games, which has filed legal complaints in several countries, seeking to use its own payment system and launch a third-party app store on iOS. Governments across the world — including in the US, the European Union, Brazil, Korea, and Japan — have also gotten in on the action, seeking to crack open the walls of Apple’s digital garden.

In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires, the basic antitrust argument against Apple is comparatively simple: it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through. The details are different, but in some ways, it hits the same emotional notes as the old case against Microsoft — they’re both stories about a company limiting what you can do with your personal device.

Navigating the legal implications of iOS’ design, though, has proven complicated. Actually changing it is proving even tougher.

Regulators and courts around the world have ordered changes at Apple, particularly around the App Store — but those changes have been slow to arrive, in part because for a half-decade or more, Apple has dragged its feet at every turn.

One of Apple’s highest-profile antitrust battles was the US lawsuit brought by Epic in 2020. Epic asked a judge to make Apple open up iOS to third-party app stores and alternate in-app payment methods. Apple mostly prevailed — in a 2021 ruling, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers largely accepted its argument that iOS’ walled-garden design provided real safety benefits and wasn’t unfairly anticompetitive.

But the company has spent years fighting over a comparatively small loss: an order to let developers add links or buttons to outside web-based payment systems. Courts have determined that Apple deliberately failed to comply with the order, including by adding a “prohibitive” fee to use it. (This wasn’t the first time it had tacked on this kind of fee, either — it failed to comply with Dutch regulators’ demands to allow third-party payments for dating apps in 2022, racking up tens of millions of dollars in fines.)

Apple also avoided becoming collateral damage in a different antitrust suit, US v. Google. That case found that Google had monopolized the search market through methods like its search deal with Apple. But a judge declined to ban such deals after Apple testified it could significantly damage its business.

In other countries, Apple has faced harsher demands — most prominently in the EU, whose Digital Markets Act (DMA) was designed specifically to create competition in the tech world. Under regulatory pressure in 2024, Apple started allowing third-party app stores on iOS in the EU. But it did so with a number of restrictions and additional fee structures that discouraged developers from switching over. A year later, it became one of the first companies (alongside Meta) to face fines for violating the DMA, with the EU citing “overly strict” requirements and the new fees. Beyond the App Store, Apple has also avoided bringing some device features to the EU, including Live Translation for AirPods and iPhone Mirroring; it’s blamed the difficulty of supporting these features on third-party devices per DMA rules.

Despite Apple’s steady opposition, there have been tangible changes. For over a decade, it was impossible to actually buy ebooks through Amazon’s Kindle iOS app, for instance — but in mid-2025, Amazon used the US court order to start including “Get Book” links. The alternative iOS app store AltStore has launched in the EU and Japan, with plans to expand to Brazil and other countries; Epic has launched its Epic Games Store on iOS in Europe too. While Epic hasn’t released numbers for iOS store popularity, AltStore said it had “hundreds of thousands of users” as of last October. And in China, Apple recently reduced developer fees in attempts to avoid a potential investigation.

But for many people, antitrust action hasn’t massively changed the iPhone experience. A different EU third-party store, Setapp, shut down earlier this year citing “still-evolving and complex business terms”; Apple and the EU are sparring about who’s at fault. iOS remains effectively one of two global smartphone platforms, and Apple retains tremendous power at every level of it.

Apple will likely keep tangling with governments. More countries, like Australia, have pushed pro-competitive regulatory overhauls. In 2024, the US Department of Justice filed an iOS-related antitrust suit against Apple, and it’s slowly moving toward trial — though judges can be leery of ordering drastic remedies even if companies are declared monopolies. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators seem poised to keep pushing for more changes — which could become a pressing issue for Apple in the coming year.

The EU and Apple will also continue hammering out what DMA compliance looks like for iOS. Apple initially planned to roll out a new fee structure at the start of 2026, but it’s claimed the EU “refused to let us implement the very changes that they requested,” failing to respond to a compliance plan and using “political delay tactics.”

For now, there’s a more immediate, non-regulatory potential threat to Apple: the rise of generative AI. Companies like OpenAI want to build a new computing pipeline that could bypass the existing system of phones and app stores, including by introducing their own devices. Apple has made comparatively few inroads into AI, and it remains dependent on other companies as it attempts to overhaul Siri with it. In theory, that could put it in the position of an incumbent tech giant about to be undercut by new technology — roughly the position that ’90s Microsoft found itself in with the web.

But Apple has survived other attempts to unseat it, like Mark Zuckerberg’s failed multibillion-dollar metaverse push. Losing the AI race hasn’t yet put a dent in phone sales. Early attempts at AI-first phone alternatives have been lackluster, and nobody’s figured out what an AI app economy looks like yet. So the battles over Apple’s power likely won’t stop any time soon.