Tile sends letter to European Commission arguing that recent changes in iOS hinder its product as Apple prepares to launch a competing tracker
European Commission told that rival Tile's product was unfairly disadvantaged — Apple has been accused of abusing its power to unfairly favour …
Context & Ripple Effects
This letter is an escalation of a complaint Tile has been building since its House antitrust testimony in January, where it accused Apple of acting anti-competitively alongside Sonos against Google and PopSockets against Amazon. Now Tile is taking the same grievance to the European Commission just as Apple prepares to ship a competing tracker of its own.
The timing is the point: Tile's later congressional concerns about AirTag's tight integration with Apple's Find My network show the pattern that was forming here — Apple restricting third-party trackers' OS access while readying a first-party rival. For the Commission, the letter arrives as part of a broader docket that already includes the preliminary finding that Apple abused its dominance by limiting NFC access in mobile payments.
First-order effects
- Tile's tracker loses functionality on iPhones under the recent iOS changes at exactly the moment Apple launches a competing product with privileged Find My integration, directly shifting share in the tracking-hardware market toward Apple.
Second-order effects
- The Commission now has a concrete hardware-access case to weigh alongside its mobile-payments finding, raising pressure on Apple over how iOS privileges first-party products; other accessory makers watching this dispute gain a regulatory template for their own access complaints.
Third-order effects
- If regulators treat OS-level favoritism of first-party hardware as abuse of dominance — as they already have in payments — platform gatekeepers face structural constraints on bundling services and accessories, forcing separation between operating-system control and first-party product strategy.
The trend: Hardware-adjacent platform disputes are moving from US congressional hearings to EU competition enforcement, making access-to-OS-features the next battleground after app stores and payments.