Apple CEO Tim Cook on Friday will take the witness stand to defend the App Store in a trial being held in California. “Fortnite” maker Epic Games claims the App Store is a monopoly that Apple abuses.
When Epic Games tried to evade the commissions with an alternative payment system in Fortnite last August, Apple ousted it from their App Store. Epic Games then sued Apple resulting in this trial.
Cook is expected to spend more than two hours making what are likely to be his most extensive public remarks on the App Store business, which anchors Apple’s $53.8 billion services business.
Cook fielded a handful of questions about the company’s App Store when he testified before U.S. lawmakers last year, but he otherwise stayed mostly silent as lawmakers grilled the chiefs of Alphabet Inc’s Google and Facebook Inc.
Apple attorneys said they plan to ask him to testify about Apple’s corporate values, how the App Store came about and Apple’s competitive landscape. Throughout the trial, Apple has sought to persuade Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that whatever rules it imposes on developers are aimed at keeping its customers’ information private and safe from malware.
MacDailyNews Take: This case is a farce. Expect Tim Cook to use his opportunity in this trial to drive home the point that Apple does not have a monopoly in smartphones (or any other market, in fact), so there can be no “monopoly abuse.”
Worldwide smartphone OS market share, April 2021:
• Android: 72.19%
• iOS: 27.00%
I don’t think anybody reasonable is going to come to the conclusion that Apple is a monopoly. Our share is much more modest. We don’t have a dominant position in any market… We are not a monopoly. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, June 2019