The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.

The department joined 16 states and the District of Columbia to file a significant challenge to the reach and influence of Apple, arguing in an 88-page lawsuit that the company had violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones and less likely to switch to a competing device. The tech giant prevented other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallet, which could diminish the value of the iPhone, and hurts consumers and smaller companies that compete with it, the government said.

  • Spaghetti_Hitchens
    58•9 months ago

    God. All I really want is to be able to sideload and app I developed without Apple’s approval.

    And not bullying kids because of their chat bubble color would be cool, too

    • @squeakycat@lemmy.ml
      39•9 months ago

      The iphone/non-iphone situation is utterly insane to me. I am constantly being punished for not having an iphone, be it texting or airdrop. These things should be standardized and interoperable, not owned commodities by companies. Grrr.

      • Darkrai
        16•9 months ago

        Stop talking to the type of people that care about what phone you have.

        • frog 🐸English
          8•9 months ago

          So I’m actually going to agree with this, with a caveat, having learned from personal experience - because sometimes we do have to keep talking to these people for work/education/family purposes. When they start arguing about their choice of phone being better, ignore them. But do continue to respond to them about things you need to talk to them about. Or, in short, grey rock the hell out of them.

          Method successfully deployed against a guy at university who picked fights about everything, including what phones people had.

        • @charles@lemmy.ca
          5•9 months ago

          Some of us don’t really have that luxury. For example, I don’t choose who I need to communicate with for work purposes.

        • @squeakycat@lemmy.ml
          5•9 months ago

          It’s not that they necessarily care, it’s that it’s the assumed default. So then I have to respond with “I can’t do that, can you upload it here?” it makes me the odd one out making people jump through hoops.

    • @emptyfish@beehaw.org
      2•9 months ago

      I think side loading is an important point. You can even side load apps on a Mac so Apple is going to have a difficult time arguing this one. It’s fine to not allow it by default and adding the extra steps to enable it.

      I’ll admit I am torn on this. Before the iPhone really took off in the US the mobile carriers were in control. Does anyone remember having to pay for GPS and navigation and similar things through Verizon or whoever as add-ons? I do not miss those days, Apple (and Google) have done a lot to improve mobile experience since then.