Apple CEO Tim Cook hits back at criticism of the company’s App Store business practices.
Apple CEO Tim Cook says the commissions it charges for developers to sell apps through the App Store are no different to those imposed by competitors and that the company doesn’t dominate any market it operates in.
That’s what he plans to tell the US House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee today at the ‘Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple’ hearing.
The highly anticipated event will hear testimonies from the CEOs of the US’s biggest tech platforms. Besides Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will need to address questions over concerns their business practices are harming the tech market.
In a prepared statement, Cook says Apple “does not have a dominant market share in any market where we do business”, including the iPhone and the App Store as a digital platform.
“The smartphone market is fiercely competitive, and companies like Samsung, LG, Huawei and Google have built very successful smartphone businesses offering different approaches,” he says.
Cook argues that the App store began with 500 apps but now hosts more than 1.7 million products, of which only 60 are Apple software.
“Clearly, if Apple is a gatekeeper, what we have done is open the gate wider. We want to get every app we can on the Store, not keep them off,” he says.
But it’s the App Store that’s been in the spotlight of late. Apple has 1.5 billion active iOS devices that can only install apps from the App Store unless they’re jailbroken.
