EU accuses Apple of giving Apple Pay a huge competitive advantage in electronic payments on the IOS platform

The European Union earlier accused Apple of abusing its monopoly on the iOS platform by restricting developers’ access to the NFC function on the iPhone, giving Apple Pay a greater competitive advantage in iPhone products and limiting the competitiveness of third-party e-wallets such as PayPal.

“Apple Pay está más cerca de España y sigue creciendo” by iphonedigital is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.

According to the EU discussion, Apple forms a closed ecosystem through its own software and hardware design and has a high degree of control over its experience. Moreover, because of its high market share and the fact that it has not opened the use of NFC functions to other third-party e-wallet services, Apple Pay has gained a very high dominance in the market.

Since NFC itself is a standardized technology, and many electronic wallets use this technology to create convenient mobile payment functions, for example, Google Pay on Android phones, or Samsung Pay, which is implemented by Samsung, is also highly used in Europe. However, Apple only opens its own Apple Pay service to use the NFC function on the iPhone, which is like restricting the competitiveness of other third-party e-wallet services on iPhone products and clearly violates the EU market monopoly ban.

However, Apple said in a follow-up response that Apple Pay is only one of the many options for EU consumers. There is no monopoly in the electronic payment market, and Apple also indicates that it will cooperate with the European Union, emphasizing more on providing a highly secure experience in Apple Pay.

At present, the EU only makes a statement of objection to Apple, which means that Apple can still make objections or explanations, but if the EU further finds that Apple has violated the fact of monopoly, it will make relevant penalties.