How Two Companies Came To Control Every App On Your Phone

On the afternoon of August 13, 2020, Fortnite vanished from every iPhone on Earth. Epic Games had added a way to buy in-game currency directly, skipping the cut Apple takes on each sale, and within hours Apple pulled the game from the App Store. Google removed it from the Play Store the same day. One of the most popular games in the world, gone from new phones in an afternoon, because the two companies that stand between every app and every phone decided it should be. No court was asked first. The two doors onto a modern phone had simply been shut at once.

The Gate

Almost every phone on Earth runs one of two operating systems. Android holds around seventy percent of the global market and iOS around twenty-nine, and together they account for more than ninety-nine percent of the phones in use. Two companies, Google and Apple, write those systems, and each controls the only sanctioned way to put software on the devices that run it. On an iPhone the App Store is, by design, the single road onto the phone. Nothing reaches the billions of devices in people's pockets without passing one company's review, following one company's rules, and paying one company's toll.

That toll runs as high as thirty percent on what an app sells through the official payment system. Global spending inside mobile apps passed a hundred and fifty billion dollars in 2025, and a slice of that flows to two firms for the service of letting software exist on a phone at all. The toll is the smaller problem. The larger one is the switch beside it. The same review that lets an app in can take it out, for everyone, at once. Fortnite was the loud example. The quieter fact is that every app on your phone is there because two companies allow it to be, and remains only as long as they choose.

Five Years At The Gate

What happens when someone with real resources pushes back on the gate is now a matter of public record, because Epic Games has spent nearly six years and a fortune doing exactly that against both owners, and both gates still stand.

Epic sued Apple and Google on the same day in 2020. Against Apple, a 2021 ruling went Apple's way on nine of ten counts but ordered it to stop blocking developers from pointing users toward cheaper payment options elsewhere. Apple complied in the narrowest way it could, charging twenty-seven percent on those outside links instead of thirty, which left developers no reason to use them. In April 2025 the judge found Apple had willfully violated her order, barred it from collecting any fee on external links in the United States, and referred the matter to federal prosecutors for a possible criminal contempt investigation. Apple appealed, and by 2026 the fight had climbed to the Supreme Court.

Against Google the verdict was even sharper. In December 2023 a jury unanimously found the Play Store an illegal monopoly, and a court ordered Google to open Android to rival app stores and outside payment systems. Google appealed and lost, and in 2025 the Supreme Court declined to pause the order. Even then, the deepest changes were phased in over years under a court-appointed committee. Europe took a third route, through law rather than lawsuit. The Digital Markets Act named both firms gatekeepers and ordered them open, and the Commission fined Apple five hundred million euros over its steering rules. Apple answered with a new charge of fifty euro-cents for every yearly install of an app distributed outside its store. Years of litigation on one continent and the heaviest technology law on another, and the result so far is a slightly cheaper toll collected through slightly different doors. Policing a single chokepoint turns out to be slow, partial, and easily outlasted by the party that owns it.

The Door No One Guards

There is one way onto a phone that no company guards, and it has been there the entire time. It is the web.

A web app installs from a link. Open a site, add it to the home screen, and it launches in its own window, works offline through a service worker, and since 2023 can send push notifications even on an iPhone. No review board approves it. No company takes a cut of what it sells. And no one can reach across the network and delete it from every phone at once, because there is no central listing to remove. A website is not stocked in a store. It is an address, and an address answers only to whoever runs it.

The gatekeepers understand the threat exactly. When the Digital Markets Act forced Apple to open iOS in early 2024, one of its first moves was to quietly break home-screen web apps for users in the European Union, turning installed web apps back into plain browser tabs. The backlash from developers and the Commission was immediate, and within three weeks Apple reversed itself. The one distribution channel a gatekeeper cannot tax or delete is the one it tried hardest to disable the moment it was forced to compete.

The web is freer than the store, but it is not yet equal to it. Apple still requires every iPhone browser to run its engine, still allows no automatic prompt to install a web app, and still holds those apps to tighter limits than native ones on storage and background work. The open road is real, and it is narrower than the private one, which is the case for widening it rather than abandoning it. A distribution layer that asks no one's permission is the only kind that cannot be closed on a Friday afternoon, and it is the reason we publish our own tools as web apps you reach from a link instead of a store you have to be admitted to. This is the same brittleness that runs through every centralized system, and the same lesson as a model one letter can switch off. The gate will always have an owner, and an owner can always close it. The open web has no owner and no gate to close.