You are framing this as if there is a magical "growth curve" that must take you from an inovative startup to a 800 pound gorilla that has a complete chokehold over the market.
No, if regulators do their job, nobody gets to ask that question because there is continuous competition. Getting to that monopoly or oligopoly requires sustained effort from would be monopolists, it's a strategy they have been executing for more than a decade. And if you do that, you must expect there is a moment where society says: ok, it's time to regulate it and not let company X extract economic rent solely based on market dominance.
Not at all, there was nothing inevitable about Apple's success, many analysts, pundits and their competitors have been adamant Apple would fail for the first decade or so of the iPhone. After that these claims started looking a bit thin.
You're presuming that market abuse has occurred and that market abuse is the only way to get popular, but I don't see that's a given. Maybe people simply genuinely like iPhones just the way they are, and maybe network effects just legitimately lead to the most popular platforms dominating.
Apple don't have a monopoly on the phone market anyway, they only have 27% of the South Korean phone market. In the US it's 65%, high but not a monopoly, but it only went over 50% in 2020.
What changed to make them a market abuser and when did it happen, as you allege? That's the question OP is asking.
"What changed to make them a market abuser and when did it happen, as you allege? That's the question OP is asking. "
There is no clear line or answer, as the topic is incredibly complex.
Electronic devices are not just gadgets anymore, but tools to participate in modern life. We never had that situation before.
So by traditional meassures like absolute market share, apple might not be a monopolist, but because of the massive lock in and market dominance (of the luxory segment), with all its implications, I surely would say they abuse their power since a long time.
But I also do not believe in regulations as the magic bullet to really solve it, exactly because the lines are too blurry.
They've expressed anti-competitive behavior from the beginning, but it's advanced over time. It's the confluence of factors that makes it particularly bad in Apple's case. You can't chance the software (OS) on the device. You can't run iOS on a different set of hardware. You can't run any store but the App Store on iOS. You can't deliver software to customers without using the App Store (or jumping through hoops for very limited methods of getting it on there otherwise). It's not that 30% was ever good or bad, but that initially there was no competition, and at every step Apple has taken steps to make sure competing is extremely hard to do, by tying you to an entire ecosystem.
Android is better in some respects, but is mostly happy to not actually compete on a lot of levels because that would possibly endanger the 30% industry standard. What we have is two extremely large players, so large and so establishes and in a market that takes so much money to enter that new competitors are at an extreme disadvantage agreeing, even if tacitly, that the fees for their stores are not something they will compete on.
That's not better than when they agreed they wouldn't hire each other's employees (which they were punished for). It benefits only themselves at the detriment of everyone else, and through market manipulation. If they actually cared to compete, we would see competition in store fees.
>You can't chance the software (OS) on the device. You can't run iOS on a different set of hardware.
There is no reason why Apple should have to support any of that. They design and build the product, and they decide what features it has. The vendors don't provide support for running an alternate OS on Symbian phons, or the Gameboy, or an XBOX, or your car's infotainment system. You either like the features the product has and buy it, or you don't.
>at every step Apple has taken steps to make sure competing is extremely hard to do.
How exactly? There was and is nothing to stop a competitor bringing out an alternate platform, in fact that's exactly what Google did. MS and did as well, and at that time smartphones were a small minority of phones overall.
The thing is what Apple, and Google did is very, very hard. It takes massive investment and very sophisticated technology. Once you have a platform and services and apps, network effects kick in and it becomes beneficial for people to converge on platforms used by their friends and family, but there's nothing manipulative or illegal about network effects, there's no coercion. It's just rational customers acting in their own interests to prefer one product over another. How do you regulate that away, or make it illegal? Why would you even want to?
> There is no reason why Apple should have to support any of that.
No one's asking them to support it, but there's a large difference between not supporting and actively thwarting.
> How exactly? There was and is nothing to stop a competitor bringing out an alternate platform
The answer is in your own phrasing. You talk about platforms. Apple has so restricted their products that the only way to compete is to build a whole platform. You can't build an app store, there's nothing to run it on. You can't build hardware to compete with Apple, iOS won't run on it, you can't replace the OS because the hardware requires signed code. The only place to compete without bringing a whole platform is Android. If Android didn't exist, there would be zero question as to whether Apple is a monopoly based on their actions, and I don't think that the fact that there's one other provider necessarily absolves them of the responsibilities for their actions. The anticompetitive behavior underneath is the same regardless.
> The thing is what Apple, and Google did is very, very hard. It takes massive investment and very sophisticated technology.
Not nearly as hard as you make out. The market is so lucrative that it makes sense for investors to throw some billions at a capable competitor and eke out some percentage of the market, but they don't. They don't because everyone is so locked into their ecosystems that any competition is at a real disadvantage. That's why the behavior is anticompetitive. It prevents competitors from entering the market to provide choice. A duopoly is obviously not enough if there's no competition at all in some areas.
> It's just rational customers acting in their own interests to prefer one product over another.
Is it? What if a separate app store existed that guaranteed that if the app existed on multiple platforms, your purchase was good for all platforms? How many more people might feel free to switch platforms and try new things if they knew they could get most or even all their purchases moved with them?
I generally buy Samsung phones, ranging from top of the line to budget models over time. There's a Samsung app store. I've never once been inclined to use it when the Google play store exists and means if I get a non Samsung phone that my purchases are still good. If there was an app store that worked on iOS and Android, I'd likely us that instead. That would be one more barrier preventing me from getting an iPhone at some point if I thought it was worth the switch. The same goes the other direction.
> If so, why is it only being investigated now, 10+ years later?
By it's nature and the nature of our system it's often hard to prove or hard to actually prosecute, as those that engage in it are often large and powerful.
We have laws regarding monopolies not because they're "monopolies", but because it's a specific subset of anticompetitive behavior that was seen that the legislative body wanted to make it easier to prosecute, and easier to prevent before it actually happens (which is why the government rejects some mergers as bad for consumers).
That we didn't prosecute this before likely has many causes. From the token appearance of competition between iOS and Android to an unwillingness of politicians to go after companies that are seen favorably in the public eye and/or that have lots of money and contribute a lot of funds to reelection campaigns. Until a sizable chunk of the public is behind them, few politicians have the desire to be the first to call for reform that would be a major impact to some of the largest companies in the world, for multiple obvious reasons ranging from funded competitors to worried stockholders to how many people that company employs and if it will affect that.
Edit: Also, there's not usually a rush to investigate small or medium size businesses, or markets that are so new that it's plausible that competitors haven't shown up yet. That's the other half of the "Android and iOS aren't really competing" point. Initially it looked like competitors were around, but it wasn't always obvious that certain things just weren't on the take as competition until it became impossible to ignore. That everyone charged 30% and then all of a sudden there was massive change just as legislation was being considered is a dead giveaway, but also not something those companies could afford to not try in appeasement.
Companies that build their own hardware are not and should not be required to somehow care about a <0.01% minority that want to run a different OS on their hardware.
It’s been done for decades with consoles, cars, TVs, etc space and now suddenly they’re all anti-competitive from the get go?
No, if regulators do their job, nobody gets to ask that question because there is continuous competition. Getting to that monopoly or oligopoly requires sustained effort from would be monopolists, it's a strategy they have been executing for more than a decade. And if you do that, you must expect there is a moment where society says: ok, it's time to regulate it and not let company X extract economic rent solely based on market dominance.