How Apple Secured Monopoly Power in Smartphone Markets

E. Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone markets

180. Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone markets because it has the power to control prices or exclude competition in each of them. Apple also enjoys substantial and durable market shares in these markets. Moreover, Apple’s market shares likely underestimate Apple’s power because they are protected by significant barriers to entry, network effects, and switching costs. Apple recognizes and exploits these barriers to entry, network effects, and switching costs to protect itself from competition from rival platforms and innovations, products, and services that may diminish consumer reliance on the iPhone. Apple’s power will likely increase over time.

181. In the U.S. market for performance smartphones, where Apple views itself as competing, Apple estimates its market share exceeds 70 percent. These estimates likely understate Apple’s market share today. For example, Apple’s share among key demographics, including younger audiences and higher-income households, is even larger. Even in the broadest market consisting of all smartphones—including many smartphones that Apple and industry participants do not view as competing with Apple’s iPhones and other higher-end phones— Apple’s share is more than 65 percent by revenue. Similarly, even if consumers choose one phone over another, the vast majority of developers consider iPhones and Android devices as complements because developers must build apps that run on both platforms due to the lack of user multi-homing. In effect, the lack of multi-homing among users necessitates multi-homing among developers. This market reality increases the power that Apple is able to exercise over developers that seek to reach users on smartphones—especially performance smartphones that run sophisticated apps.

182. Apple’s high market shares are durable. Over the last decade, Apple increased its share of smartphones sold in the United States most years. Through the same period, Apple collected more than half the revenue for all smartphones sold in the United States.

183. Apple’s monopoly power in the relevant markets is protected by substantial barriers to entry and expansion. For example, since fewer than ten percent of smartphone purchasers in the United States are buying their first smartphone, there are fewer new customers available for Apple’s rivals. Instead, rivals must encourage existing iPhone users to switch from using an iPhone to using another smartphone when they replace or upgrade their phone. As a result, switching costs—many created or exacerbated by Apple—impose substantial barriers to entry and expansion for rival smartphones. This barrier is increasingly impenetrable. Nearly 90 percent of iPhone owners in the United States replace their iPhone with another iPhone. At least one U.S. carrier estimates that as high as 98 percent of iPhone users on its network replace or upgrade their iPhone in a given quarter by buying another iPhone. The increased switching costs that consumers experience because of Apple’s conduct underpins these exceedingly high retention rates.

184. Apple’s monopoly power in the relevant markets is protected by other barriers to entry, expansion, or repositioning as well. For example, introducing a new smartphone requires considerable investments in acquiring expensive and scarce components such as mobile chips and specialized glass for screens. Other significant barriers to entry include product design, software development, regulatory approval, manufacturing, marketing, and customer service. Because most smartphones are bought through mobile carriers including Verizon, which has its operations headquarters in this district, new entrants or those seeking to expand or reposition must meet the carriers’ technical requirements to access the major carrier networks in the United States. New entrants and smaller rivals must also negotiate distribution agreements and persuade carriers and other retailers to promote their products to consumers. As explained above, rival smartphones must also overcome the substantial network effects generated by interactions between users, developers, and others who interact with the iPhone.

185. Apple’s iPhone platform is protected by several additional barriers to entry and expansion, including strong network and scale effects and high switching costs and frictions. For example, if an iPhone user wants to buy an Android smartphone, they are likely to face significant financial, technological, and behavioral obstacles to switching. The user may need to re-learn how to operate their smartphone using a new interface, transfer large amounts of data (e.g., contacts), purchase new apps, or transfer or buy new subscriptions and accessories. These switching costs and frictions are even higher when software applications, APIs, and other functionality do not help the different devices and operating systems communicate and interoperate. These switching costs and frictions increase the “stickiness” of the iPhone, making users more beholden to the smartphone manufacturer and platform operator.

186. Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers. Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017); HTC (which exited the market by selling its smartphone business to Google in September 2017); and LG (which exited the smartphone market in 2021). Today, only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors in the U.S. performance smartphone market. Barriers are so high that Google is a distant third to Apple and Samsung despite the fact that Google controls development of the Android operating system.

187. Apple’s monopoly power is separately demonstrated by direct indicia. For example, Apple can and does profitably forego innovation without fear of losing customers to competitors. For example, Apple’s vice president of iPhone marketing explained in February 2020: “In looking at it with hindsight, I think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are ‘good enough’ for the consumer. I would argue were [sic] already doing *more* than what would have been good enough.” After identifying old features that “would have been good enough today if we hadn’t introduced [updated features] already,” she explained, “anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it’s allowed into the consumer phone.”

188. Apple’s profits and profit margins, for nearly every aspect of the iPhone, are further evidence of Apple’s monopoly power. For example, Apple’s per-unit smartphone profit margins are far more than its next most profitable rival. Apple charges carriers considerably more than its rivals to buy and resell its smartphones to the public and employs contract clauses that may impede the ability of carriers to promote rival smartphones, a harmful exercise of monopoly power that is hidden to most consumers. Apple extracts fees from developers—as much as 30 percent when users purchase apps or make in-app payments. Apple also extracts a 0.15 percent commission from banks on credit card transactions through its digital wallet, while none of its smartphone competitors with digital wallets charge any fee. Apple predicts that it will collect nearly $1 billion in worldwide revenue on Apple Pay fees by 2025.A recent report by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau suggest these revenues will only increase, as “analysts expect the value of digital wallet tap-to-pay transactions will grow by over 150 percent by 2028.”

189. Apple increasingly charges developers additional fees to promote their apps in the App Store as well. In fact, this is one of the fastest-growing parts of Apple’s services business, with revenue “increasing by more than a third to $4.4B in FY 2022.”

190. These indicia of Apple’s monopoly power are direct evidence of its monopoly power in the relevant markets.