For a long time, the discussion about Big Tech has focused on whether a private good can be transformed into a public good, and whether social media platforms constitute an online public square. It’s an important principle and a discussion we need to have as these social media giants become increasingly powerful and impactful on our lives—but it’s not the solution to all of our Big Tech problems.
The discussion has, so far, prompted a series of antitrust lawsuits against the tech giants, with more on their way from the United States Justice Department. But beyond social media, there is a platform access issue that seems to have been forgotten – and it was one previously championed by Canadian former smartphone giant BlackBerry.
Apps run our lives. The average person has dozens of apps on their phone that let them do everything from manage their bank accounts and pensions to communicate with colleagues and friends. Devices that support these apps, therefore, are an absolute necessity in the modern world, and particularly in the COVID era.
As it stands, there are just two mobile platforms suitable for daily use; Google and Apple. In 2008, Nokia’s Symbian smartphone operating system dominated the market with 52.4 percent global share, with RIM’s BlackBerry OS at 16.6 percent. That was followed by 8.2 percent for iPhone, 1.8 percent for Windows Mobile, and just 0.5 percent for Android. Only a year later a dramatic shift occurred with Symbian dropping by over five points, RIM gaining over three points, Apple’s iPhone hitting 14.4 percent and Android rising to 3.9.
Palm’s WebOS even began to make waves, resulting in a massively diverse offering for smartphone users, and no monopoly for a single tech giant.
Fast forward to 2020, and Google’s Android has consumed 71.18 percent of the global market share, and Apple’s iOS 28.19 percent. No other platform can even boast one percent global share.
Is it a victory of the free market, or is it an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen?
In 2015, BlackBerry CEO John Chen proposed “App Neutrality” in a last-ditch effort to save the company’s flagging smartphone business. Android and iOS had huge and growing app stores with hundreds of thousands of apps, while BlackBerry’s core business and government clients were not enough to maintain its smartphone business. App developers paid no interest in porting their software over to the secure BlackBerry platform for the simple reason that fewer people used it. With no financial incentive, it cemented BlackBerry’s destiny and sent the company’s phone platform into a death spiral, handing great power over to two co-existing platforms who now feared no new competitor.
Even Microsoft’s Windows, the most popular computer operating system in the world, could not compete with the two giants, and after several failed attempts to reboot its Windows Mobile platform, recently announced a “Surface Duo” smartphone built on Google’s Android instead.
Chen was mocked and derided for his plea for legislation that would ensure apps were made available equally across platforms. PC World called it a “profoundly stupid” idea, and Canadian Business said it “makes no sense at all.”
And, when BlackBerry installed an Android runtime into its own operating system, making Android apps available through the Amazon App Store, Google ensured that the Canadian smartphone maker’s operating system still couldn’t compete by refusing access to “Google Play Services”—an additional background service that supported full app functionality. It meant that the most popular social media apps like Snapchat simply could be legitimately installed on BlackBerry, but wouldn’t properly run, sabotaging the platform’s last hope of keeping even a small slice of the global smartphone pie.
This matters, and now in 2020, an idea that was mocked as “crazy” might be exactly what is needed to break up Big Tech and stop blatant anti-competitive practices among tech giants that just keep getting bigger. Google and Apple don’t just run our phones but our entire lives, with both companies entering new marketplaces and trapping their existing users in their own ecosystems.
Google and Apple both have smart home appliances, smartwatches and fitness trackers, computers and tablets, and multimedia services including gaming platforms and streaming services.
What were once two very different companies—one that produced optimised hardware and another that pioneered online search—are now two very similar companies vying for the same audience. That audience is every single living person.
Apps were a turning point in this race, giving Google and Apple confidence in the knowledge that nobody else could compete. Along the way, they learned that buying up competitors not only gave them the edge in developing new technologies but also defeated potential competitors.
Antitrust lawsuits could go a long way in changing these practices, but as it stands, their dominance in the mobile software space will not change for as long as apps run our lives. No new competitors, particularly ones that focus on the protection of customer information, can ever compete with the two big companies. It means that even security-focused individuals and companies are forced to make huge compromises on their own data protection in exchange for access to apps.
For these reasons, we now need more than antitrust lawsuits to settle this problem; we need app neutrality.
Jack Buckby is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Photo by Rami Al-zayat on Unsplash.
