FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY REED ALBERGOTTI
A new lawsuit brought by one
of Apple’s oldest foes seeks to
force the iPhone maker to allow
alternatives to the App Store, the
latest in a growing number of
cases that aim to curb the tech
giant’s power.
The lawsuit was filed on
Thursday by the maker of Cydia,
a once-popular app store for the
iPhone that launched in 2007,
before Apple created its own
version. The lawsuit alleges that
Apple used anti-competitive
means to nearly destroy Cydia,
clearing the way for the App
Store, which Cydia’s attorneys
say has a monopoly over soft-
ware distribution on iOS, Apple’s
mobile operating system.
“Were it not for Apple’s anti-
competitive acquisition and
maintenance of an illegal mo-
nopoly over iOS app distribu-
tion, users today would actually
be able to choose how and where
to locate and obtain iOS apps,
and developers would be able to
use the iOS app distributor of
their choice,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit was filed in federal
court in Northern California
and Cydia is represented by
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and
Sullivan.
Apple is facing an onslaught of
lawsuits and scrutiny from law-
makers and regulators around
the world for the way it allegedly
uses its power to maintain its
dominant position over its App
Store. Epic Games, the maker of
“Fortnite,” sued Apple in August
for allegedly monopolistic be-
havior, and a coalition of soft-
ware developers taking on Ap-
ple’s power has been growing in
membership. Apple is facing in-
vestigations in Europe, spurred
by music streaming service Spo-
tify and other competitors, over
allegedly anti-competitive be-
havior. And in the United States,
lawmakers scolded Apple an d its
peers in a report on the power of
large Sil icon Valley companies.
Apple spokesman Fred Sainz
said the company will review the
lawsuit and denied that the com-
pany is a monopoly. It says it
faces competition from Google’s
Android operating system,
which is used by competing
handset makers such as Sam-
sung and Google itself. And Ap-
ple says it must tightly control
the way software is in stalled on
the iPhone to protect its custom-
ers from inadvertently down-
loading viruses and other secu-
rity threats and from installing
apps that invade its customers’
privacy.
The Cydia lawsuit represents a
new kind of challenge to Apple’s
power. While Epic, Spotify and
other companies say they are
victims of Apple’s alleged App
Store monopoly, they aren’t di-
rect competitors to the App Store
itself. Cydia, which was popular
in the early days of the iPhone,
offers a r eal-world example of
what competition might look
like.
The App Store has been a h uge
success for Apple, generating
around $15 billion a year in
revenue, according to analysts’
estimates. While the sum repre-
sents only a s mall portion of the
company’s roughly $275 billion
in total revenue, it has become
an important springboard for
the company’s fast-growing ser-
vices business, which could help
the company through slowing
growth of iPhone sales. Apple
generally takes a 30 percent cut
of revenue earned by app devel-
opers on its platform.
The App Store’s success has
come least in part because of the
way it controls the software on
iPhones and iPads. Unlike the
company’s Mac computers,
which allow customers to install
software in a variety of ways,
including via the Mac App Store,
other competing app stores and
directly from websites, the
iPhone’s software prohibits all
methods of software distribution
except one: the Apple App Store.
Apple must approve every app
that is available for the iPhone,
and software developers must
abide by a l ong list of rules that
define exactly what an iPhone
app can and can’t do.
It wasn’t always th at way. Jay
Freeman was consulting as a
software developer in Santa Bar-
bara, Calif., when the iPhonelaunched in 2007.
When a colleague bought Free-
man an iPhone, he tested it out
and was at first disappointed, he
said in an interview. The phone
lacked features such as cutting
and pasting text, and the ability
to send text messages to more
than one person at a time. The
iPhone offered no way for its
owners to install new software,
such as games or alternative Web
browsers.
Still, the iPhone’s potential as
a truly mobile, Internet-connect-
ed computer had quickly cap-
tured the attention of sof tware
developers who began tinkering
with it. One of Freeman’s friends
convinced him that, instead of
complaining about the iPhone’s
lack of software, he should get to
work and create software of his
own.
Freeman quickly found him-
self at the center of a burgeoning
community of developers build-
ing new features atop the
iPhone. Those additions re-
quired unlocking the phone so
that new applications would run
on the operating system, much
like a traditional computer. The
act of unlocking the iPhone be-came known as “jailbreaking.”
Freeman wanted to make jail-
breaking and installing new soft-
ware easy, even for customers
with little technical knowledge.
The effort resulted in Cydia, an
app store where customers could
install games and features, in-
cluding the ability to cut and
paste text.
Freeman said that Cydia,
which he named after an agricul-
tural pest that affects fruit crops,
was an immediate hit. There
were so many people using it that
he estimates half of early iPhone
customers must have been “jail-
breaking” their phones to take
advantage of the additional fea-
tures it offered. In 2010, Freeman
told The Washington Post that
Cydia had 4.5 million people
searching for apps every week.
In 2008, Apple came out with
its own version, called simply
“The App Store.”
Apple also began adding addi-
tional protections to the phone’s
operating system and warning
its customers that jailbreaking
their phones could put them at
risk of security vulnerabilities.
Sainz reiter ated the warning in a
statement Thursday. Freemansaid he remembers seeing physi-
cal signs in Apple retail stores
with such warnings. Freeman
says the security risks are over-
blown. Such downloads are simi-
lar to those on a PC, which could
include software that invades a
user’s privacy or gathers their
data. And even Apple-approved
apps can expose customers to
privacy risks.
“Morally speaking, it’s your
phone and you should be able to
do whatever you want with it,”
Freeman said. “You should get to
decide which applications you
put on it, and you should be able
to decide where you get those
applications from.”
In 2009, the U.S. Copyright
Office established that jailbreak-
ing was not an illegal activity,
after Apple argued that it violat-
ed the law.
“The ability of people to jail-
break and put their own software
on devices is an important one
that has allowed people to do a
lot of cool and interesting
things,” said Kurt Opsahl, deputy
executive director and general
counsel of the Electronic Fron-
tier Foundation, a nonprofit
technology advocacy group thathelped gain the legal exception
for jailbreaking. Opsahl said
that, with only one app store to
install software on iPhones, he’s
concerned about whether the
process for installing apps is fai r.
“How are they going to use that
monopoly power?” he asked.
After losing its argument in
front of the Copyright Office,
Apple continued its attempts to
stop Cydia. It made jailbreaking
more difficult by adding more
barricades against outside soft-
ware being installed on the
phone. At the same time, Apple
added new features that had
previously been available on
Cydia. Apple’s Control Center, its
bubble notifications and the abil-
ity to immediately respond to
text messages on the home
screen all originated on Cydia.
According to the lawsuit, Ap-
ple used “coercive” terms to try
to prevent Apple customers from
using Cydia or any alternative
means to install software and
discourage d developers from us-
ing services like Cydia.
In 2013, as Apple’s own App
Store gained more power and
prominence, Cydia’s business be-
gan to dry up.
Apple also began hiring for-
mer “jailbreakers” to work on its
security team. Freeman said
some of those people were his
friends, and he said those discus-
sions were awkward. “When
Robin Hood is willing to go work
for the sheriff of Nottingham
because they have cool cross-
bows, it’s like, ‘What were you
doing?’ ” he said.
Jailbreaking an iPhone has
become so difficult that many in
the jailbreaking community have
essentially thrown in the towel
and moved on, and some have
declared the practice essentially
dead.
Freeman is still working in
software development but
spends less time on Cydia, which
still exists but is far less popular
than it once was. He is head of
technology for a privacy software
company called Orchid and he is
an elected official in California,
serving on the board of the Isla
Vista Community Services Dis-
trict in Santa Barbara County.
[email protected] More at washingtonpost.com/
technologyAnother ‘app store’ seeks to liberate the iPhone — again
MATTHIAS SCHRADER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Pedestrians pass an Apple Store in Munich on Sunday. A l awsuit filed by the maker of app distributor
Cydia represents a new type of legal challenge for Apple: one from a d irect competitor to its App Store.Maker of once-popular
distributor Cydia sues
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