From a legal standpoint Apple don't have a monopoly in the phone market comparable to what Ms had on the desktop.
There is one thing that Apple does that Microsoft did not do: it prevents the user from designating a non-Safari default browser. Every link you open will open in Safari, unless you copy it and open paste it into another browser. Microsoft let users install other browsers and designate them as the default (I don't know if this was always the case, but it has been for a very long time.) I'm not sure if Apple has a technical argument for why this is necessary, but it probably won't ever need it because of the market share threshold.
FWIW, I am a recovering lawyer, and I spent a summer in antitrust law. So I'm not an expert, but I do know how to calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for the purpose of determining market concentration...
How does a strong alternative help solving the following problem. Let's say you are a video service provider, and want to offer MPEG-DASH[1] based service which relies on browsers supporting Media Source Extensions[2].
Soon enough, you discover, that iOS users can't use your service, not only because iOS default browser doesn't support MSE, but because they can't even install any alternative that does (Apple doesn't let them).
You are literally forced to implement something[3] in addition to MPEG-DASH to address a substantial amount of Apple users and in the process potentially pay Apple and Co. for implementing it because they own related patents, or you need to agree to ignore them (which means a loss of money for you).
TL;DR: Apple stifled adoption of MPEG-DASH, and forced you to do double work and in theory can force you to pay them money too. This is just one example, there can be many like that, another big one is video codecs and etc., but you get the idea. All that bottlenecks on the same restriction - ban on competing browsers.
Shouldn't this be a subject of anti-trust regulation? If they managed to do it, they have enough control over the market. But again, may be anti-trust law simply isn't equipped to address this? I see it as a major problem.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...
This doesn't hold true always, and certainly not in the short-run, but it's better than having every company with moderate market share being sued by any other company that wishes they had different features in their products.
I don't mean for this to sound harsh, and I wish iOS were more open in various ways that would make things easier for my startup, but I recognize that companies need to have autonomy to build products as they wish — except in rare cases.
Which is why I'm glad FirefoxOS failed.
Apple has a complete iOS / iTunes monopoly in the iPhone/iPad market, which is pretty big. And Microsoft wasn't preventing the existence of alternative browser engines or banning apps competing with them, whereas Apple does.
Microsoft didn't restrict what software you could install on Windows. That creates a different market.
Someone who is buying a phone can reasonably choose between iOS and Android. Someone who already has a phone and is buying an app can't reasonably choose between the iOS App Store and Google Play. And someone selling an app can't reach iOS customers via Google's or Amazon's store. They're different markets.
That's not the legal distinction. What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer. This was troublesome because, at the time, Windows had a 99% marketshare of PC operating systems, which was judged by the courts to be a monopoly.
Apple has nowhere near the same marketshare in phones. Therefore, Apple is free to do whatever it wants with regards to its OS, as consumers are free to switch to Android.
Market definition in antitrust?
> What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer.
What got Microsoft in trouble is that they had a monopoly in PC operating systems and tried to leverage it into a monopoly in browsers.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly in PC operating systems. They have a monopoly in iOS app stores. It's like having a retail monopoly for washing machines in the state of California. It doesn't matter how many retailers there are in Florida when nobody in California is going to drive to Florida to buy a washing machine.
It doesn't matter how many Android app stores there are when you can't buy an iOS app from them and you can't use Android apps on iOS.
Because it's illegal to use a dominant position in one market (desktop operating system in Microsft's case) to gain an unfair advantage in another market (browsers). Since Apple does not have a dominant position in any market so they're free to do as they please.
Note that the question what constitutes a market is not always easily defined. Apple obviously has a monopoly on iPhones or smartphones running iOS but I doubt you'll find a judge that sees that as a market distinct of the wider smartphone market.