Google's 21-year deal with Apple is the "heart" of monopoly case, judge says
To be honest, the entire state of mobile browsers could (and probably should) be an antitrust case in and of itself. It&#x27;s just that the technical specifics are too complex for your average customer, let alone an aging judge, to understand.<p>On iOS customers are always locked in on the Safari ecosystem (well, for now, the DMA will probably change that) - all browsers on the app store are just skins of Safari, not meaningfully unique browsers. I hope I really don&#x27;t need to explain why Apple gatekeeping non-WebKit browser implementations is bad.<p>Android is slightly better in that on the surface you can switch out the browser for say, Firefox (although Firefox on Android is a disaster), but... then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem. And in recent updates to AOSP, the vendor gets to <i>force</i> the System WebView to be set to the Chromium System WebView (or the Chromium Canary WebView, but that&#x27;s... just the beta version).<p>Not that that one matters a whole lot directly considering there are no competing implementations for the System Webview besides Vanadium (which is just a Chrome fork - you also had Bromite in the past but a spat between Vanadium and Bromite means that Bromite System WebView is dead) and a single &quot;just pass through to your regular browser&quot; implementation; Mozilla has a Firefox WebView implementation for Android but largely leaves the choice up to app developers to switch out Chromium WebView instead of making it compatible with the system WebView (so nobody uses it afaict).