App store antitrust

App stores have been at the centre of attention in the antitrust community—and certainly at the centre of our attention. While the discontents of app developers have long remained under the surface, they are starting to become more public. The first significant development was driven by Spotify, as the European Commission (EC) started formally investigating its complaint against Apple mid-2020. Two months later, Epic Games filed complaints in the US against Apple and Google. Their app stores (the App Store and Google Play) had removed Epic’s Fortnite app when it introduced its own in-app payment mechanism—a breach of the app stores’ (allegedly anticompetitive) terms and conditions.

In December 2020, Epic brought its claim to Europe, registering it with the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. Shortly after, in February 2021, it also filed a complaint with the EC. As in the US, the complaint is twofold: firstly, the app stores reserve to themselves the distribution channels for apps and in-app payment processing; secondly, they use their resulting position of dominance to charge unfair prices for the distribution of apps. Given that many of the concerns of app developers relate to these two points, we take them as the starting point of our assessment. Before delving into each point, however, we take a closer look at mobile ecosystems and how to define markets and establish dominance within them.