Consumer Benefits of Unlocking Competition in App Distribution on Smartphones
July 2026
Smartphones are a linchpin of modern digital life. Apps on smartphones and ancillary devices like smartwatches are how we bank, communicate, find new interests and relationships, shop, monitor our health, and the list goes on. Artificial Intelligence and all that it promises users is also often delivered via an app on a smartphone.
Currently two companies, Apple and Google, control the services and innovations that can reach consumers on smartphones and charge users for accessing these services and developers for providing these services.
We estimate in this report for the Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) that this hidden charge on US smartphone users is of the order of $8.9B every year. This is equivalent to a household with four smartphone users paying for an additional iPhone17e every five years!
The monopoly harms extend beyond price. Apple and Google face less competitive pressure to innovate. Independent developers, especially smaller studios, startups, and AI-native entrants, face higher fees and rigid rules that make entry uneconomic. Service providers cannot freely innovate on payments, distribution, or device features. The result is fewer apps, fewer features, and a slower pace of innovation for consumers.
If app distribution were genuinely competitive, consumers could access and download services from multiple app stores. Consumers could also download (or download more easily) apps from the web like they do on laptops and desktop computers and use ‘super-apps’ – middleware that hosts apps and services across both operating systems. These additional distribution channels that bypass app stores would not only put downward pressure on any commissions collected by app stores but also ensure that consumers get back full control over, what for many, is their primary computing device.
Coverage in POLITICOPRO MorningTech, July 20, 2026.
