It’s not a law of nature that Apple can make it difficult for its users to switch to Android devices or even be compatible.
Once Apple, always Apple? Photo: image
For a long time it was a kind of law of nature: Apple’s golden cage. The unspoken deal: The IT giant’s devices have advantages: They receive updates longer and offer slightly more privacy protection than many things running on Google’s Android. The price for this is higher purchase prices, both for devices and for some apps – and digital life in a cage.
Because Apple locks up its users. Apple devices work best or only when they communicate with each other. From a business perspective, this is an ingenious trick: for example, if it is made difficult for users to switch from an iOS to an Android device, the chance that the next smartphone will be one from Apple increases. But the golden cage goes even further and doesn’t stop at something as simple as installing software. At Apple there was no escape from its own sales channel, the App Store.
But now it turns out that the golden cage is not a law of nature, at least when it comes to the app store. The EU’s latest platform regulations aim to at least somewhat break the IT giants’ monopolies. And the European Commission’s current investigation into Apple shows that it is taking implementation seriously. The Commission’s steps to offer users and developers alternatives to the App Store are not enough.
The cage bars have only been slightly sawn so far. And there is still much to do. Since Apple isn’t the only company that doesn’t want to share its users, others are following similar strategies. Amazon, for example, does a lot to keep buyers in its own universe. Microsoft has cashed in More than a decade ago, it was fined in the three figures of a million for only offering its users its own browser. And Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is now so big that it’s almost impossible to travel in the digital space without being with them to leave data. But that is not a law of nature either.