The iPhone kept itself so slick and functional by operating as a “walled garden.” Although it was a full-featured computer, capable of running any software, Apple made it so that you could run only the programs it authorized. At first, these were the apps that shipped with the phone, but a year later, Apple opened its App Store, a “curated marketplace” of apps that the company had vetted for safety and quality.

  Apple touted this as a service to its end users. The company expended considerable resources ensuring that every app you downloaded, paid or free, “just worked.”

  That was stage one. The company had a surplus—the sums it chose to spend on product quality and maintenance, rather than on, say, share buybacks or dividends—and it allocated that surplus to users.

  Then, some of that surplus was shifted to its business customers—the app vendors.

  Apple has always stressed the superiority of its closed, curated, managed service over Google’s Android, whose app store is said to have looser rules for inclusion and to be more dangerous than Apple’s peaceful Eden. To make things worse, owners of Android devices can choose to directly install apps, without ever touching an app store—that means that, on their intimate pocket computers, they can run code that has never been vetted by a multibillion-dollar tech company’s security experts.

  Apple has also touted the superiority of an economy grounded in good, old-fashioned money, contrasting this with Google’s ad-centric Android. Both Google and Apple charge you for the service you get, but (Apple claims) Apple puts the price tag on the front of its product, while Google charges you by siphoning off a constant stream of personal data used to feed a vast surveillance advertising empire. Apple said it was a hardware company, swapping material objects for cash, not a surveillance company that made its profits by selling its customers.

  Apple’s defenders claim that this makes Apple a better bargain—for its users, and for society. Because Apple gets paid in dollars, rather than eyeballs, it has an incentive to satisfy you. If you’re paying Apple, Apple wants to keep you happy, by showing you the things that you want to see as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  Not so the “surveillance capitalists” like Google: the longer you linger with their products, the more chances they have to show you an ad, and every time they show you an ad, they make more money. So these “bad” capitalists try to hook you by “hacking your dopamine loops” to keep you angry and clicking and fighting, leading to a host of evils, from anorexia in teens to right-wing extremist militias.

  Thus, in the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis, the “good” capitalism of Apple—the kind where money is exchanged for goods—has no need for surveillance.

  This is obviously a self-serving narrative, but this much was true: the iPhone was substantially less surveillant than Android, and the locked-down nature of the iPhone platform meant that there were fewer hacks and fewer scandals about data-stealing apps.

  In other words, Apple had a surplus, and it allocated that surplus to its end users. The company devoted substantial engineering to producing a smoothly operating platform, and it devoted even more work to vetting apps.

  But the flip side of that was lock-in. Unlike Android phones—which are typically designed to allow users to make use of alternative app stores and even install different operating systems—iPhones use software and hardware locks to prevent users from modifying Apple’s rules.

  This is a system that works well, but fails badly. So long as Apple remains a benevolent dictator, your iPhone is a walled garden that protects you from the bad guys who want to attack you. But if Apple turns on you, that walled garden becomes a prison, one that pens you in and makes you easy pickings.

  Apple’s total control over the iPhone meant that the more you used your phone, the more hooks Apple could sink into you, raising the switching costs of leaving the platform. The things you created—message histories, notes, calendar entries—were shackled to the platform, as was the media you bought: books, videos, and music.

  Apple—not you—gets to decide whether you can install an app to make it easier to slurp all that data out of your iPhone and transmit it to an Android or Windows device.

  Stage Two: Good to Business Customers

  Apple completed its lock-in by bringing in the business customers. For these business customers, Apple offered a sweet deal indeed: “Develop iPhone apps and sell them through our store. We’ll collect a one-time fee when you sell the app, and you’ll pocket the rest, plus the lifetime revenues from your customers’ in-app spending.” That was the time of “There’s an app for that,” when independent software vendors and iPhone customers met one another’s needs.

  App makers showed up, and the network effect wrought its magic: every new app was a potential new reason to buy an iPhone; every iPhone sold was another potential customer for a new app. Every one of these apps increased Apple’s lock on its users, and the network effect only multiplied—users checked in, but they couldn’t easily check out.

  For all that Apple presented itself as the surveillance-free alternative to Android (just as Facebook had once presented itself as the surveillance-free successor to MySpace), some aspects of the iPhone’s design made it an even more potent commercial surveillance tool than any Android device.

  The same lock-in that prevented users from modifying their iPhones in ways that potentially exposed them to danger also prevented users from modifying their iPhones to defend themselves against danger.

  That meant that once an app made it through the App Store vetting process, users were defenseless against it. Apps from major companies like Facebook (as well as innumerable bottom-feeding fly-by-night outfits) gathered data on iPhone users and funneled it into the commercial surveillance vortex, where it was sold, given away, stolen, published, and weaponized.

  Users could not install privacy blockers, spoofing tools, or any other utility that would let them push back against this abuse. Only Apple could do that—and it didn’t. As far as Apple was concerned, only the company could decide which privacy protections you deserved. By allowing for some surveillance on iOS, Apple could lure in more business customers. So iOS users had to tolerate whatever surveillance Apple judged to be tolerable.

  At first, anyway.

  But in 2021, Apple took action on surveillance in the App Store: the company announced a one-click opt-out from app-based surveillance. Once users checked the “don’t spy on me” box, all the third-party apps on their phones were prevented from gathering information on them. This was a massive blow to the commercial surveillance industry. Facebook warned investors that the move would cost the company at least $10 billion in the first year.

  There’s a reason Apple’s crackdown on commercial surveillance was so hard on Facebook (and other surveillance-oriented app companies): everyone hates commercial surveillance, sure, but Apple customers bought a product that was specifically marketed as a way to avoid it.

  Once Apple offered iPhone owners a single button that they could click to block surveillance, 96 percent of iPhone owners clicked it. Presumably, the other 4 percent were drunk, or Facebook employees, or drunk Facebook employees.

  Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit

  But enshittification never sleeps: right around the time that Apple was running a global ad campaign touting its commitment to privacy, it was also rolling out a secret surveillance system for iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices. Apple now gathers the very same data that Facebook once gathered on its customers, and for the same purpose: to fuel Apple’s own surveillance advertising business.

  The argument that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is herein revealed as bunk. Companies don’t treat you well because they’re “good” capitalists, and they don’t abuse you because they’re “bad” capitalists. Respect for your privacy isn’t a rebate you get for every $1,000 you spend on an iPhone. Companies abuse you if they can get away with it.

  That’s the crux of enshittification. Apple didn’t treat its customers well because it loved them. It treated them well to lure them into its walled garden, which was then revealed to be a prison.

  Likewise, Apple didn’t offer the companies that filled its App Store that onetime charge for initial sales because it was a “good” company. Getting app vendors into the App Store kicked off the network effect: more apps, more users; more users, more apps. And that gave Apple the power to change the deal later.

  And boy, did Apple change the deal. The processing fee for money exchanged in an app or on the App Store doubled, to 30 percent, and Apple switched to charging that fee on every dollar the app made, forever.

  At the same time, Apple rolled out draconian policies that punished any app vendor that encouraged its customers to make payments via a website, where the payment processing fee could be reduced by more than 90 percent, to the industry standard of 2 to 5 percent. Even mentioning that there was a way to save money by paying on the web was grounds for removal from the App Store.

  This is the Amazon playbook: pile the junk fees onto your business customers, then use your lock-in to punish them for doing anything to avoid those fees. Naturally, merchants had to raise their prices—few products, even digital ones, have 30 percent margins. But these prices went up on every mobile platform, because Apple’s “competitor,” Google’s Android, had exactly the same fees and policies, though Android used subtler tactics to lock app vendors in to its store, like contracts that banned phone manufacturers (like Samsung) and carriers (like Verizon) from preinstalling third-party app stores. Antitrust investigations in the United States and the European Union have concluded that Google uses these strong-arm tactics to keep customers locked in to the Google Play app store, every bit as much as Apple does with its App Store.

  Stage three of enshittification heaves into sight at this point. Apple can pick winners and losers, for example, by exempting Uber from its 30 percent app tax, while charging smaller competitors the full amount. Like Amazon, Apple can clone its best customers’ businesses and directly compete with them.

  When Apple sells you an audiobook via its Apple Books app (which comes preinstalled on your iPhone), it doesn’t charge itself a 30 percent fee for every book sold. But other companies do pay the fee, which is onerous indeed, since the wholesale discount for audiobooks is only 20 percent.

  That means that when Apple sells you a Penguin Random House audiobook for $25, it sends $20 to Penguin Random House and keeps $5 for itself. But if an indie audiobook store like (the excellent) Libro.fm sells you that audiobook through Apple’s platform, it pays Penguin Random House $20 and owes Apple a further $7.50. In other words, if Libro.fm tries to sell audiobooks through an iPhone app, it loses money on every sale.

  Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone: Uber and Lyft are exempt from these fees. Enshittifiers stick together.

  Case Study: Twitter

  When Twitter started, its most obvious characteristic was its brevity. Users were limited to sending messages no longer than 140 characters, brief enough to fit into the short message service (SMS) system, the standard text-messaging system used by mobile phones around the world. (See page 293 for more on SMS.)

  But for business customers—developers looking to integrate with Twitter—the length constraint for messages was secondary. The most interesting thing about Twitter was its API (or rather, that Twitter was an API).

  That’s one of those computer-industry acronyms that doesn’t really stand for anything. It originally stood for “application programming interface,” and later “advanced programming interface,” but really, API just stands for “API”—a subtle, sui generis way of talking about a feature of a digital system that has no adequate equivalent in the nondigital world.

  An API, broadly speaking, is any way that one program can exchange data with another program and/or receive data and/or instructions from another program.

  For example, you might get emails with calendar invitations in them. Clicking on these invitations automatically adds them to your personal calendar. This is possible because there’s a formal standard for calendar invites, decided by a committee at the Internet Engineering Task Force. Anyone who consults this standard can use it to make a compatible calendar, or to generate invitations that work with such a calendar.

  Stage One: Good to Users

  But an API can also be informal and improvisational. Hashtags are a kind of API: a developer who scrapes Twitter can use hashtags to figure out what each post is about. APIs can also be added by third parties: a developer who scrapes Twitter and categorizes posts by hashtag can then set up a more formal way for others to pull those out of their own database, without doing all that messy scraping.

  At its outset, Twitter was, in fact, an API. The core of Twitter was a database of users’ posts that users themselves had no way to access. In order to post or read tweets, users had to make use of a program that used the Twitter API to access the database, pulling out the relevant entries and presenting them in a human-readable form.

  Twitter made one of those API-accessing programs, but it also allowed anyone else to make such programs, and they all accessed the same API.

  It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this was: normally, companies give themselves privileged access to their own infrastructure. The API they expose to third parties is a weak, thin version of the private tool.

  But not Twitter: it gave first-class access to all comers, and developers threw their resources into the project of building all kinds of ways of accessing Twitter. Some of these may be familiar to you, like TweetDeck, which Twitter eventually acquired and brought in-house. Others were strictly “programmatic”—tools that made it easier for other developers to do cool things with Twitter, like operate bots that answered queries, told jokes, or automated public safety announcements.

  Twitter also paid close attention to its users. Users invented “retweeting” by typing RT and copying and pasting someone else’s tweet into the composition box. Twitter noticed this and automated the process, creating a one-click system for retweeting anything on the system.

  Many of Twitter’s core features were developed in this way, including “quote tweeting,” typing some commentary on a tweet, then pasting in its link and the #QT tag. (Twitter now automates this process as well.)

  Developers call this “paving the desire paths.” That’s a reference to a design principle from physical spaces like parks and campuses. Landscape architects look for places where people have worn the grass thin by cutting across lawns and fields (desire paths) and formalize them by leveling them and paving them or putting down gravel, wood chips, or some other material.

  Taken together, these two policies—first-class access to the Twitter API and integration of users’ own innovations—constitute a system of generous value sharing with both business customers (who could create a variety of tools for themselves and for users) and users (whose workarounds were observed and turned into official features).

  People loved using Twitter. It was playful. It was fun. It was a party that the whole world was invited to.

  Stage Two: Good to Business Customers

  But from the start, Twitter also made compromises. When Twitter added advertisements to its service in 2008, it made the decision to open local sales offices in countries around the world, including nations like Türkiye, where governments could be relied upon to make censorship and surveillance demands.

  This was a way of shifting surplus from users to business customers. Turkish advertisers didn’t need to do business with a Turkish Twitter office, but opening offices in-country made that more convenient for Twitter’s business customers. However, it also put Twitter employees and bank accounts within reach of Türkiye’s authoritarian government, which used that reach to compel Twitter to do things that were harmful to its users, like revealing information about the identities of dissidents and removing their speech. (Despite this, Twitter continued to operate at a loss.)

  Twitter also engaged in other forms of stage-two enshittification, notably in the staffing of its content moderation division. Content moderation on giant platforms like Twitter is always going to be a difficult proposition, but the more a company spends on moderators, the more moderation it can do. As Twitter’s user base and volume of posts grew, the company did enlarge its moderation team, but not at a rate to match its overall growth. That meant that the ratio of moderators to activity worsened over time.

  Of course, all of this was characteristic of Twitter 1.0, the private company that was later taken public through an IPO and governed by a shareholder-voted board of directors. This arrangement was far from ideal, but compared to what happened next, it was practically Eden.

  In 2022, Elon Musk assumed ownership of Twitter. Musk had to borrow $22.4 billion to fund the acquisition. That vast debt exerts enormous pressure on Musk to extract money from Twitter. Remember, shareholders prefer to get paid by the companies they invest in, but their ability to compel the companies they invest in to pay them is limited to voting for company directors who’ll appoint CEOs who’ll agree to give the company’s money to its investors, rather than spending it on product maintenance and development, wages for staff, improved infrastructure, or executive bonuses. But creditors who hold a company’s debt are entitled to regular payments on that debt, and if the company stiffs them, they can ask a court to force the company to cough up, and if the company doesn’t have enough money and can’t borrow or raise it, they can force the company into bankruptcy.

  By taking on tens of billions of dollars in debt, Musk was setting the company up for a world of hurt. Twitter (or, for some reason, X) will need to come up with large sums of money every year to service its debts, or its creditors can kill the company.

  (Of course, if they do that, they will wipe out any chance of getting paid back. Forcing the company into bankruptcy would likely mean a fire sale of Twitter to someone else, with a share of the proceeds going to the creditors. By contrast, if they let Musk stiff them, they at least have the hope of getting paid in the future if he turns the company around—or if he makes it structurally important to a future federal government, as Musk was actively trying to do with the second Trump administration as of early 2025.)