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Dutch Regulators Want To Know Whether Apple is Favoring Its Own Apps (cnn.com)
Apple has another antitrust problem in Europe. Dutch regulators said Thursday that they have opened an investigation into whether Apple has abused its market position by giving preferential treatment to its own apps. From a report: The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets said in a statement that app providers have submitted evidence "which seem to indicate that Apple abuses its position in the App Store." The regulator said it had been studying the issue for 10 months. It said the probe would initially focus on Apple, but it also called on app providers to report any issues with Google's Play Store. "Apps have increasingly become important parts of our daily lives," said the regulator, which added that it "expects Apple and Google to exhibit fair and transparent behavior."
Apple said in a statement that it is "confident" the review "will confirm all developers have an equal opportunity to succeed in the App Store." The move comes after Spotify launched a similar complaint against Apple last month with the European Commission.
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets said in a statement that oceanographers have submitted evidence "which seem to indicate that Ocean is wet." The regulator said it had been studying the issue for 10 months. It said the probe would initially focus on bottled water, but it also called on oceanographers to report any issues with wetness to the authorities.
I was going to write an answer assuming you were honestly asking, and then I recognized the user name as a known Apple shill. So I now know not to expect an answer in good faith.
The bottom line is that Apple absolutely abuses their control of the App Store to punish third parties trying to compete with them. Maps is a simple example - anywhere iOS detects an address, that address will always open in Apple Maps. There is no way to tell it to use a third party mapping program instead.
Something similar happens with Apple Music. Various things that are supposed to start audio playing will always trigger Apple Music. For example, if you plug your phone into a car equipped with CarPlay and turn the car's audio on, this will always launch Apple Music, regardless of what was playing prior.
There are various ways that Apple hooks their apps into iOS that third parties simply cannot do. As an example, they recently released a "Shortcuts" app that allows you to automate various tasks in iOS. However, this only works on Apple apps and a very limited selection of third party "partners." You can use it to start playing music in Apple Music, but not in Spotify.
SiriKit is also heavily limited. You can't use SiriKit to replace Apple's default services. Want to let people ask Siri for directions using a third party mapping app? Tough. You can't. Want to provide a way to use voice commands to play music? Also not allowed.
Then there's the whole Apple Tax, where Apple takes a 30% cut of all revenue "generated" by apps. If you have an app on iOS, regardless of how you handle payments, you're "supposed" to pay Apple 30% of all revenue "generated by" the app. This is why the method to side step that is to prevent purchases on iOS entirely - even if you don't use Apple as the payment processor, you're required to send them 30% of all revenue. Even if you have the app launch a web page, that's also considered revenue "generated by" the app. The only solution is to entirely block purchases from iOS devices.
Apple, of course, doesn't have to pay the Apple Tax, because they would only be paying themselves. It's a simple way they can make third party apps more expensive while undercutting them when offering the same services.
It would be great to see the EU slap Apple down on this and force them to provide third party apps a level playing field. Sadly anything Apple does would likely be EU-only, but I'd love to see Spotify be given a level playing field on iOS given that Apple Music is such an abysmally bad and buggy service.
This is simply algorithmic bias. The stores prioritize apps which have the largest install base and vendors with the overall largest install base. Many of these apps come bundled with the phones and tablets already. These numbers count in their respective stores, increasing not only the individual app's rating, but their vendor's rating as well. Therefor any other app released by the vendor will have a head start over any other apps from another vendor in the respective stores.