Last week, I received an unexpected email from the U.S. Department of Justice.
It wasn’t a press update or a policy statement. It was procedural — a reminder that, as part of the Department’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Apple for monopolising smartphone markets, it must produce materials received from third parties during the discovery process.
The significance lies in the timing. In early 2026, with the litigation deep in the discovery phase following Judge Julien Neals’ 2025 ruling that the case could proceed, the legal machinery is finally examining real-world impact. Nearly two years after the DOJ first announced its landmark antitrust case against Apple, the litigation remains active. Discovery is ongoing. Questions about how Apple’s platform practices affect disabled people have now entered the legal record.
The case may have faded from headlines. It has not gone away. It has simply become more human.
Accessibility entered the case — and is there now
In March 2024, the DOJ, joined by 16 state and district attorneys general, accused Apple of monopolisation or attempted monopolisation of smartphone markets, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
Public discussion at the time focused on familiar themes: app stores, defaults, ecosystem lock-in, and competition. Accessibility barely featured. Antitrust is often treated as a dry corporate dispute over margins and market definitions; for those of us living with the consequences of platform decisions, it is also a question of independence.
Shortly after the lawsuit was announced, I wrote to the DOJ to raise a specific concern: that Apple’s “walled garden” practices may, in some cases, hinder accessibility, not intentionally but structurally. I linked to my article exploring that question and offered concrete examples.
I did not receive a response then. But last week’s email confirms that my correspondence, and the issues it raised, are now part of the formal discovery process. That matters. Not symbolically, but practically. It suggests that my voice is one of many third-party contributions being treated not as side commentary, but as evidence.
The problem with “good enough” accessibility
Apple’s reputation for accessibility is deserved in many areas. Features such as VoiceOver, AssistiveTouch, and Switch Control have opened doors that were once firmly closed. Apple deserves recognition for that work.
I use Siri every day, and I’m open about how helpful it is to me in many situations. I’ve even spoken publicly about the difference it has made to my daily life.
That is precisely why the limits matter. When Apple’s tools work well, they are genuinely empowering. When they don’t, the lack of viable alternatives becomes far more visible.
But a strong accessibility reputation can also blunt scrutiny. It creates what might be described as a “good enough” fallacy: the assumption that because Apple provides built-in tools, they should be the only tools.
When built-in solutions are positioned as the answer, it becomes harder to ask whether alternative approaches are being prevented from existing at all. Apple’s achievements should not be used as a shield against more specialised, or more capable, third-party innovation.
That tension sat at the heart of my original question in 2024: whether Apple’s tightly controlled ecosystem can, at times, limit accessibility rather than expand it. When third-party developers cannot build deeply integrated assistive tools; when system-level access is restricted in ways that break established workflows; when innovation is constrained not by technical possibility but by platform permission, these are not neutral design choices.
They are market choices.
Accessibility is a competition issue
Antitrust law tends to focus on prices, output, and market structure. Accessibility rarely fits neatly into those categories. But for disabled people, accessibility is consumer welfare.
If a dominant platform restricts assistive technologies from competing on equal terms — not because they are unsafe or ineffective, but because they fall outside the platform owner’s preferred model — that represents a real form of harm. It affects choice, independence, and the ability to participate fully in digital life.
Apple’s defence is familiar. The company argues that tight platform control is necessary to protect user privacy and security, particularly on devices as personal as the iPhone. Those concerns are not trivial, and they matter to disabled people as much as anyone else.
The question, though, is one of proportionality. Does protecting privacy and security require excluding trusted third-party assistive technologies from meaningful system access? Or can those goals coexist with greater choice, especially where people rely on specialised tools that Apple’s own solutions do not fully meet?
When one company controls both the platform and the rules that determine which accessibility solutions are allowed to function properly, the boundary between product design and market exclusion becomes increasingly thin. That is precisely the territory antitrust law is meant to examine.
What this looks like in daily life
It is easy to discuss platform power in abstract terms. It looks different when you live with its consequences.
I rely heavily on voice input. When Apple’s Voice Control works well, it can be enabling. When it falls short, meaningful alternatives are limited — not because better tools do not exist, but because system-level access is tightly controlled.
This has already played out in a way that feels uncomfortably instructive, even beyond the iPhone. On macOS, Nuance was forced to discontinue its Dragon Dictation product because it was unable to obtain the access required to function properly within Apple’s walled garden. Apple’s answer for users was Voice Control — a solution that, for many disabled people, remains far less accurate, flexible, and efficient than Dragon ever was.
The same limitations persist on the iPhone, where dictation with Voice Control continues to disappoint.
In a genuinely competitive market, users would not be forced to settle for a platform-native tool that is objectively less capable than the one it replaced.
The same pattern appears in messaging. I cannot reliably message through my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, despite the hardware being capable. I am not the only one frustrated by this. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly complained about Apple’s approach to messaging, specifically noting how restrictive platform rules prevent devices like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses from accessing iMessage. Zuckerberg frames this as a battle for the next computing platform, but for a disabled user, it is a battle for a basic interface. Whether it is a CEO trying to integrate a new UI or a disabled user trying to use a third-party dictation tool, the result is the same: Apple’s gatekeeping dictates what is possible.
The same restrictions surface in more everyday tasks. Siri Shortcuts and HomeKit smart home controls are effectively closed to third-party wearables like my smart glasses. If I want to do something as fundamental as unlock my front door hands-free by voice, I am limited to Apple’s own hardware, such as AirPods.
I already wear glasses, Apple don’t currently offer smart glasses, so third-party smart glasses like Ray-Ban Meta smart specs are a natural fit. But there is only so much wearable technology most people want on their head at once. The requirement to add AirPods on top is not a design choice; it is a platform constraint.
Apple does have a point. The company invests heavily in custom hardware, software, and integration, and it is reasonable for new capabilities to debut exclusively on Apple devices. That model has long been part of how Apple differentiates its products.
But when features become genuinely transformative for accessibility, the question shifts. It is reasonable to ask whether some capabilities should move beyond permanent exclusivity. A time-limited period — two or three years, for example — would allow Apple to benefit from its investment while recognising that certain functions, such as hands-free messaging and good quality dictation, are too important to remain locked to a single ecosystem indefinitely.
Signs of movement under pressure
It would be unfair to suggest Apple is entirely static. In recent months, there have been signs that political and regulatory pressure can prompt change, with features such as notification forwarding to third-party wearables emerging in response to European regulation.
That matters, because it shows these limits are not always technical. They are often policy decisions.
Why discovery matters — and why silence is a problem
Discovery is a quiet phase of litigation. It produces documents, not headlines. Confidentiality orders are standard, necessary, and legally sound. But they also mean that disabled people’s contributions can slip from public view, even as they inform the legal understanding of harm.
Accessibility is present in the case file, but largely absent from coverage. That gap matters. If accessibility is treated as peripheral — something to be addressed after competition issues are resolved — then the people most affected by platform control are once again positioned as an afterthought.
Conclusion
The email I received last week does not signal a turning point in the Apple antitrust case. It does not suggest a new direction or outcome. What it does confirm is simpler, and more important: persistence.
Two years after the DOJ announced its lawsuit, the case remains active. The questions it raised have not been resolved. And accessibility, including concerns raised directly by disabled people, is now part of the evidentiary record. There is no public visibility into how many disabled people or organisations have raised similar concerns, but this correspondence is unlikely to be unique.
Antitrust law exists to protect competition. Technology should exist to empower people. Accessibility sits at the intersection of both. Whether it is allowed to shape the outcome of this case remains an open question — but it is no longer one that can be quietly ignored.
