The Impact of Apple’s Monopoly on Consumers & Small (& Big) Businesses

If you’re a small business who’s been hurt by Apple’s policies, we’d love to hear your story: alison@knitrino.com

Innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit have long been a part of the fabric of America. As long as companies can fairly compete, customers benefit and clever innovations emerge. Many of us remember how inventions like the Walkman changed our lives, only to be outdone by the iPod and then the iPhone. However, when any one company gains too much power over a market, customers pay higher prices and small businesses have an impossible path.

Knitrino is a company built on the idea that creativity, community, and collaboration can not only make for better products and better customer experience, but can actually make the world better. We are two sisters, the daughters of a teacher and a stay at home mom who grew up with little, who put ourselves through school and established careers. We left those careers and invested years of our lives and our life saving to build an app that would lower the barriers to knitting, help knitters grow their knitting skills, and at the same time, uplift all the small business that make our hobby great, from pattern designers, to editors, to independent yarn dyers.

No part of Knitrino was an accident - we’ve been very intentional about both the business and product we’re building. When we started, we carefully weighed the risks and the threats to our business. Never did we consider that Apple would be the largest threat we faced.

We had a solid business model, an app built with user input that our customers love, and we were finally launching! Knitrino planned to offer our customers precisely what they want: knitting patterns and yarn to knit with.  We submitted for approval to both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.  Google approved Knitrino within a few hours. Because Apple requires physical goods be sold outside their In-App Payment system (IAP - the system that takes an exorbitant 30% cut of all sales), Knitrino implemented an alternative payment system. When Apple finally did review Knitrino (days after Play Store approval), they rejected it. Apple insisted that digital goods could only be sold through IAP, and physical goods could only be sold outside it. Apple stated that Knitrino’s business model of offering both products together in its app—the established model used by brick and mortar yarn shops—was not allowed. In a competitive market, Knitrino would have offered its iOS app to customers directly, or through another app store with less restrictive policies. But of course, Apple will not allow customers to install an app outside its App Store, nor will it allow alternatives to its App Store.

This story has a happy-ish ending. After weeks of rejections that finally culminated in a phone conversation with an actual human on the cloak-and-dagger Review Board at Apple, Apple approved Knitrino, and for that we are thankful. But the incredible power that one company wields is outrageous.

Less resilient people would give up. People with wealth or access to capital would move on. But this small company, founded by a couple of knitting sisters, knew we had to fight not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because our livelihood depends on it. We don’t want other developers to face these obstacles, that are so clearly illegal. We have joined the Coalition for App Fairness, we’ve written letters to the Federal Trade Commission, our State and Federal Attorneys General, members of the House Judiciary Committee, and our representatives. We’ve joined the Amicus (“Friend of the Court”) Briefs written in support of Epic Games in their legal wranglings with Apple (both the first Amicus, which in a shocking move, was denied by the court, and a second Amicus, filed in support of Epic’s Appeal on January 27, 2022). Our vision is an open marketplace for apps where developers are treated fairly and customers have more choices.

Apple alone has the power to destroy our business - and any of the businesses on its platform.  They can reject an app for any reason (and there's often no transparency on why), they can ban any app that takes a stand, they can just wait until our small startups run out of money. And that's a terrifying place to be.

If you’re a knitter reading this and you’d like to show your support, the best thing you can do is buy our patterns. You can also pre-order our Unravel Apple stickers (shown below), which we’ll ship by mid-March.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at alison@knitrino.com.

Alison Yates, CEO

& Andrea Cull, Chief Knitting Officer

Knitting Sisters and Co-founders of Knitrino