Apple Faces a Well-Armed Enemy in Fortnite Battle Royale
The Silicon Valley giant still runs its App Store as if it’s a challenger in mobile devices. It might be about to face a serious antitrust reckoning.
App attack.
Photo: Bloomberg
When Apple Inc. opened the App Store in July 2008, it was a $155 billion company selling 12 million iPhones a year. It’s now a nearly $2 trillion company that sells more than 200 million iPhones annually. In the time it took you to read those two sentences, Apple sold 60 handsets.
While the world’s most valuable company has changed, the rules by which it governs the App Store have not. It’s like a 120-pound Great Dane that still thinks it’s a puppy. It has failed to adapt to the outsized role it plays in the smartphone market. A dispute with the makers of the popular Fortnite game app — alongside new Apple antitrust probes by the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice — brings that failure into the spotlight.