Home > News

Apple Hit with Antitrust Investigation for “Sign in with Apple”

By Laura Tucker
Apple Antitrust Featured

Apple is facing increasing pressure over its App Store practices. It is facing lawsuits from developers over its insistence that apps only use its subscription model under heavy fire from Facebook for forcing apps to disclose their data privacy practices. It’s also deep into an antitrust investigation after more complaints from developers over its “Sign in with Apple” option.

“Sign in with Apple”

For a period of time, you would open new iOS apps and would be faced with options to sign in with Google and Facebook. Apple and other developers wanted in on that action too.

Starting with iOS 13, Apple started offering “Sign in with Apple” (or “Continue with Apple” as in the screenshot provided below) next to the options to sign in with Google, Facebook, and other apps. There are some great advantages of using the Apple option. One is the obvious ease of signup, as you don’t have to type in your email and password.

Apple Antitrust Continue With

The other advantage is that if desired, Apple will mask your email and provide the developer with a burner email, protecting the privacy of your email. For obvious reasons, developers aren’t happy with this.

Antitrust Investigation

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the complaints of developers about “Sign in with Apple.” Where the developers feel the antitrust comes in is Apple’s demand that apps that offer the option of signing in with Google, Twitter, and Facebook must also offer signing in with Apple.

Sources who spoke with The Information said that after developers complained last year, antitrust regulators are now investigating. They are considering the “Sign in with Apple” button and “other App Store rules that make it difficult for users to switch to a rival device maker.”

Apple Antitrust Sing In

The “other App Store rules” include the fees developers are charged and restrictions on location and other tracking that Apple’s default apps aren’t subjected to.

Fred Sainz, Apple spokesman, said the “Sign in with Apple” option provides its customers with a privacy-focused alternative to the other options.

Where It Stands Now

The Department of Justice is still investigating and has not yet decided whether it will fill an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. Facebook and Google have their own issues and antitrust probes. Those lawsuits have already been filed.

The antitrust regulators of the U.S. House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommitee opened their investigation into Apple last year. It joined other tech heavyweights – Google, Facebook, and Amazon – in being compared to oil barons and railroad tycoons.

Apple Antitrust App Store

The subcommittee released a 450-page report. It recommended new antitrust laws, arguing that Apple had a monopoly over the distribution of apps on its devices.

Apple has multiple antitrust probes in other countries as well. It’s working on putting out fires right now, as it also just made a change to the beta version of iOS 14.5 that will make zero-click attacks much less successful.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.