Apple Faces Fresh EU Antitrust Complaint Filed By Messaging App Telegram

Apple Inc. AAPL is facing a new antitrust complaint filed against it in the European Union — this time by messaging platform Telegram, the Financial Times reported Thursday.

What Happened

Telegram said that the Cupertino, California-based smartphone maker raised obstacles in the way of it launching a gaming platform in 2016. It also accused Apple of curbing innovation and decried the 30% commission charged to app developers publishing on the App Store, the Financial Times noted.

The Pavel Durov co-founded app, with more than 400 million users, complained to the EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager that the tech giant must “allow users to have the opportunity of downloading software outside of the App Store.”

Durov aired his grievances with Apple publicly this week, claiming in an online post that it costs the Tim Cook-led companies millions, not billions, of dollars to host and review apps on its App Store. 

“We at Telegram host and review more public content than the App Store ever will,” Durov wrote.

Why It Matters

Spotify Technology SA SPOT and Viber’s owner Rakuten, Inc RKUNF have also complained to the EU about App Store’s monopoly, Financial Times reported.

An email correspondence made public by the House Antitrust Subcommittee Wednesday shows that Apple gave a preferential cut of 50% to Amazon.com, Inc AMZN for its video streaming app on its app store.

Slack Technologies Inc. WORK filed a similar antitrust complaint against Microsoft Corporation MSFT last week, alleging the latter was attempting to stifle competition by bunding its Teams app with Office 365 tools, the Financial Times reported at the time.

Apple is scheduled to release its Q3 FY 20 earnings results later in the day. 

Price Action 

Apple shares traded 0.19% higher at $380.80 in the pre-market session Thursday.

Photo by Medhat Dawoud on Unsplash