Founder ProtonMail criticized Apple for abusing its monopoly to manipulate people, “holding developers hostage”

Confidential email service developer ProtonMail today spoke out against how Apple uses its App Store to control other developers’ accessibility to iOS users, while taking down competitors. painting. Therefore, ProtonMail urges regulators to come up with stronger measures.

” Apple has become a monopoly, crushing potential competitors for fees such as exploiting and conducting censorship at the request of dictators, ” ProtonMail founder and CEO Andy Yen wrote on the blog. of such company. ” We know that because we have been secretly enduring this abuse for many years .”

Yen insists Apple is using its market power ” to take all of us [developers] hostage “. Calling the 30% commission that Apple collects on any order through its App Store a ” tax “, he added that every traditional rule in the retail industry is broken in the software sector. .

” Apple seeks to justify those fees by saying the App Store is no different from a supermarket, where companies who want to sell products pay rent to the owner of the supermarket (in this case, Apple). This argument ignores the fact that there is only one supermarket in the iOS world and there are not any competing supermarkets for other companies to lease space. It’s not illegal, and so is the fact that they own the only supermarket.What is illegal here is the act of taking advantage of their owning the only supermarket to charge sky-high fees, influencing consumption. extreme to the competition “.

” This form is not different from that of a gang ” – Yen said. ” It’s a fee that developers have to pay if they want to do well. And it’s a fee that will ultimately harm consumers because they will be passed on to them indirectly, or through price increases, or through reduced in-store competing products . ”

ProtonMail isn’t the first developer to say Apple’s 30% commission is like an unfair tax on other companies’ revenue and makes it harder for them to compete with apps. Apple first party. Yen writes that this behavior is not only illegal, but ” abusing power to suppress digital freedom is simply unethical, and someone should have exposed Apple for a long time ago ” .

Amazon, Facebook, and Google are the ones that frequently have to “sit hot” when it comes to antitrust, anti-competition, and abuse of market power. But Apple is also facing a lot of investigations – not just in the US, but especially in Europe.

Spotify filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with regulators in Europe in March 2019. ” Apple has put in place a lot of rules on the App Store with the aim of limiting options and hindering innovation for reasons of ensuring user experience, ” said Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. Digital reading service Kobo did the same thing in June this year.

The European Commission’s preliminary investigation revealed ” concerns that Apple’s restrictive policy could distort competition in the market for music streaming services on Apple devices “, and last month, The EU has officially opened a further investigation into Apple’s App Store and its Apple Pay payment system.

David Heinemeier Hansson, founder of the email management service Hey, publicly criticized Apple last month for favoring its services over third-party apps, like his Hey service. ” You listen to some of the developers, they say it is like being held hostage, ” – Hansson said. ” They are like reading a prepared paper, because if the opposite, then Apple can destabilize their business. Which is true! “.

Messaging app Telegram also joined last week by filing an EU petition accusing Apple of using ” monopoly power ” to thwart innovation.

Reference: ArsTechnica