Tile, Apple AirTags and antitrust allegations, explained briefly

On Tuesday, Apple announced the launch of AirTag, a small electronic tracking tool that people can attach to keys, luggage or anything else, indeed, and then use Apple’s Find My system to find that item. For Apple fans, it’s another handy product. But for Tile, the maker of a similar tracker, the long-awaited announcement is another sign of Apple’s anti-competitive behavior.

Tile again urges Congress to take a closer look at Apple ahead of an antitrust hearing in the Senate, where Tile’s general counsel Kirsten Daru will testify alongside executives from Spotify, Match, Google and Apple. The hearing takes place because Apple has been repeatedly accused of anti-competitive behavior due to its requirement that all iOS apps be distributed through the Apple App Store, where Apple receives a sales commission.

But in the case of the new AirTags, the criticism goes further. Tile says that Apple not only creates hardware similar to its own, but also designs Apple software in a way that favors its own products and disadvantages Tile products.

“We welcome the competition as long as it is fair competition,” CJ Prober, Tile’s chief executive, said in a statement shortly after the Apple AirTag announcement. “Unfortunately, given Apple’s well-documented history of using its platform’s advantage to unfairly limit competition for its products, we’re skeptical.”

Apple AirTags, which will go on sale at the end of April, do what Tile products have been doing for some time: keep track of things. The new trackers use Bluetooth technology to locate these lost objects. AirTags also have the U1 chip, which uses ultra-wideband technology to more accurately locate objects. This approach – and even the physical design of the trackers – is very similar to what Tile has been doing for years. Tile also uses Bluetooth to locate objects, and the company is launching ultra-wideband capabilities (along with an augmented reality feature) on trackers.

A big difference between the new AirTags and Tile trackers: Tile relies on Apple to keep its location tracking tools running smoothly in the Apple App Store and iOS, but not the other way around. Tile has long claimed that Apple has unfairly designed its mobile operating system, iOS and Find My app to favor its own location tracking tools. Tile did not respond to Recode’s request for comment before Wednesday’s hearing.

Apple, in turn, pushed back against this criticism.

“Apple created Find My over a decade ago to help users locate and manage lost devices in a private and secure way,” Recode said in a statement. “We’ve always embraced competition as the best way to generate great experiences for our customers, and we’ve worked hard to build an iOS platform that allows third-party developers to thrive.”

The distance between Apple and Tile has been many years. In 2019, there were rumors that Apple was working on a tracking system that would compete with Tile products. Daru, Tile’s general counsel, told Congress in January last year that Apple is making it difficult for users to connect their iPhone to Tile devices, asking for permissions in iOS 13.5 that were buried in settings, and urging users to disable those permissions after what devices were set up. Daru also claimed that the Apple Find My app competes with Tile’s own app. Tile sent a letter to European authorities accusing Apple of anti-competitive behavior, saying that iOS 13.5 was built to favor the Find My Apple app compared to the Tile app, among other complaints. Apple “rejected” the allegations.

Following the volley of lawyer’s letters, Apple announced last summer that it will launch a new program that will allow third-party trackers to work with the Find My application. But it wasn’t until early April this year – two weeks before the launch of AirTags – that Apple finally updated the Find My app to allow it to work with third-party devices.

It is unclear how lawmakers or regulators will react to this update. However, the argument that Apple unfairly pushes users to the Find My system over the Tile system has become stronger in Congress in the past. An extensive House antitrust report in October last year argued that “Apple’s service would require companies like Tile to abandon their applications and ability to differentiate their services from Apple and other competitors” and put companies like Tile “at a disadvantage.” competitive”.

Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Amy Klobuchar called Apple’s announcement of the AirTags “opportune”, telling Reuters that “this is the kind of conduct we will talk about at the meeting.”

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