Over 74% of Apple Employees Believe that the App Store is not a monopoly.

While over 80% of the Qualcomm and Spotify employees believe Apple is a monopoly.

iPhone consumers upset with the closed app store system filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming that the tech giant is a monopoly. Because they can only purchase apps directly from Apple, this behavior was seen as unjust and monopolistic. Consumers also stated that the company’s restrictions on what apps get approved is too high and are also increasing the price of apps with their 30% commission. Apple on the other hand claims that the app store is safer than other platforms that distribute apps.

The Supreme Court sided with iphone consumers to proceed with a lawsuit against Apple on Monday, May 13, 2019. We wanted to ask verified employees working at Apple and others in the tech industry what they thought about this lawsuit.

Survey:

We asked our users to answer the question: Is Apple creating a monopoly by only allowing consumers to purchase apps from their App Store? They could answer with three options: “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t know”. The Survey ran from May 14 – May 20 and was answered by 10,040 users of the Blind app. Users could only answer once.

Overall Results:

  • For the overall tech employees, 44.12% answered ‘Yes’, Apple’s app store is a monopoly, 40.69% answered with ‘No’ and 15.19% answered with ‘I don’t know’.
  • When we broke down the results by device, 37.95% of Iphone users answered ‘yes’ and 52.22% of Android users answered “yes”.

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Company Breakdown:

  • Apple employees had the lowest number of people who believed Apple’s app store is a monopoly with 15.14% answering ‘yes’, 74.93% answering ‘no’ and 9.92% answering ‘I don’t know’.
  • Qualcomm had the highest number of employees who believe Apple is a monopoly, with 84.75% answering ‘yes’, 5.08% answering ‘no’ and 10.17% answering ‘I don’t know’.
  • Spotify and eBay made the top 3 companies with employees who believe that Apple is a monopoly.

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More conversation about Apple’s App Store on Blind:

  • Apple a Monopoly? – Uber employee
    • “It’s about security, privacy and user experience. We put a lot of effort in making sure all of those. Can’t guarantee privacy if you let any app running on the platform” – Apple employee
    • “Apple isn’t a monopoly in that they have the only store in to buy/install apps for a smartphone. However, they are a monopoly in that they operate the only store available for the smartphones they sell.” – Salesforce employee