You have a fair point in that a native experience will more than likely keep privacy in mind and have more resources to produce a potentially better experience. The concern is that these are unethical practices. Now, they don’t own a monopoly over the smartphone market, but they do have a monopoly on the actual app purchase market, so the monopoly question is debatable. Apple has both created the game (marketplace), owns the game and has private information on how the game is being played. They are then using that information to increase the value of their offering. They have a statistically unfair advantage against any offering on their marketplace and can use that to build up their own product. I’m not a lawyer and I can’t speak to the legality, although this is something that would be classified as at least suspicious, although it’d be hard to build a case on, if at all possible.

Ethically, their practice of appearing to target successful offerings and undermining them is debatable. There’s no right answer here, it’s a matter of opinion. But this repeated behavior would signal to anyone looking to build a commercial success on their marketplace: don’t be too successful. You have to remember that you have a multi-trillion dollar international corporation suppressing the success of small (internationally <$1B business is considered small) businesses, who have employees that believe in their mission. And you can see I keep referring to “their marketplace” that they legitimately own, and I understand they may not be doing anything “illegal” as defined by current law, but when you look at a multi-decade view of this practice, I think we’re going to start to see new laws being drafted and regulations put on place. I’m not sure how you even begin to fight a “virtual monopoly” which has little physical monopoly dominance.

I will caveat that I do thoroughly enjoy Apple products and the seamless Apple native applications and integrations with each other. I do appreciate their craftsmanship and attention to detail. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when we see a similar headline every year each of the last few years, where a closed environment controlled by one entity is swallowing more and more of the world’s resources and preventing others from growing.