Apple Made A Deal With The Devil (No, Worse: A Patent Troll)
Over the last two years, Apple has been engaged in vicious legal battles over smartphone patents, many of which are aimed at squelching (or squeezing money out of) manufacturers of devices running Android.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple has spent roughly two years litigating smartphone patents against Android device makers, a campaign that by May 2011 had widened beyond handset manufacturers to suits against individual app developers. The same week this deal surfaced, an Australian court re-applied an injunction against Galaxy Tab sales in the parallel Apple-Samsung design dispute, underscoring how many fronts the fight now runs on.
What makes this move notable is the counterparty: rather than asserting its own product patents, Apple is striking a deal with a non-practicing entity — the kind of firm it has historically cast as a parasite on innovation. Turning a troll's portfolio into an instrument of the Android squeeze marks an escalation in how the platform war is being fought.
First-order effects
- Android device manufacturers now face assertions routed through a troll's portfolio on top of Apple's own patent claims, adding another licensing cost to every shipped handset.
- The troll gains a deep-pocketed patron whose litigation budget and settlement leverage far exceed what an independent assertion campaign could command.
Second-order effects
- Google and the Android OEMs come under pressure to respond in kind — acquiring or aligning with patent aggregators defensively rather than relying on cross-licenses with actual product makers.
- Rival platforms watching the tactic learn that NPE portfolios function as off-balance-sheet weapons, making portfolio acquisition a standard line item in mobile strategy alongside R&D.
Third-order effects
- If operating companies keep co-opting assertion entities, the line between 'troll' and 'strategic IP arm' collapses, and smartphone competition settles into a permanent tax paid in royalties and injunction risk regardless of who innovates.
- A market where incumbents weaponize third-party patents invites regulatory and legislative scrutiny of the assertion business itself, since the practice now visibly serves platform exclusion rather than inventor compensation.
The trend: Smartphone platform competition is migrating from product markets to patent portfolios, with non-practicing entities increasingly serving as hired arms in the Android-iOS war.