Apple is to be dragged through the courts once again on antitrust charges, this time by the US Justice Department.
A wide-ranging lawsuit filed by the US government and backed by 16 US states dropped this morning. The complaint is lengthy, and also accuses Apple of stifling of ‘super apps’ that contain in-app stores and game streaming services. It also alleges that Apple locks customers into its ecosystem and uses App Review to kneecap developer innovation.
This section sums up the most relevant part for mobile game developers:
“Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives.”
Later, the lawsuit suggests that Apple’s conduct “stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple’s smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone—or make users device-agnostic altogether.”
“Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy.”
There’s also a section of the lawsuit dedicated to App Review’s role in the shenanigans, and Apple’s alleged stifling of game streaming services, such as Xbox Game Pass and Netflix. The latter has to submit each game on its service individually through the App Store.
On App Review, the lawsuit says Apple uses its policies to ‘suppress innovation’ and “selectively enforces” them to the detriment of the consumer. Apple also denies developers access to important APIs and is only able to enforce these restrictions “due to its position as an intermediary between product creators such as developers on the one hand and users on the other.”
The section on game streaming seems particularly geared around Netflix and Xbox’s game offerings. “Having to submit individual cloud streaming games for review by Apple increased the cost of releasing games on the iPhone and limited the number of games a developer could make available to iPhone users. For example, the highest quality games, referred to as AAA games, typically require daily or even hourly updates across different platforms.”
“If these updates need to be individually approved by Apple, developers must either delay their software updates across all platforms or only update their games on non-iOS platforms, potentially making the iOS version of the game incompatible with other versions on other platforms until Apple approves the update. Neither option is tenable for players or developers.”
