Reincubate, which makes the Camo and Camo Studio apps for turning your iOS or Android phone into a webcam for your Mac or PC, is suing Apple, alleging anticompetitive conduct and patent infringement.
Camo first launched in 2020, but two years after, Apple launched a similar feature called Continuity Camera, which works just with Apple devices. Reincubate alleges that Apple “copied the technology” and “used its control over its operating systems and App Store to disadvantage that interoperable solution and redirect user demand to Apple’s own platform-tied offering,” according to the lawsuit.
“Camo was used by thousands of Apple employees, across all divisions of the company,” the lawsuit says. “At first, Apple encouraged Reincubate to increase its investment in Camo. But when Apple recognized that Camo was a threat—it took steps not only to copy it, thereby infringing Reincubate’s patents, but also to undermine Camo’s functionality such that Reincubate could not compete with Apple’s rip-off, called Continuity Camera, which was only operable between Apple devices and Mac computers.”
Reincubate CEO Aidan Fitzpatrick says in a blog post that Apple was an early supporter of Camo in beta, claiming that the company had “thousands of staff” running it internally and had made “all sorts of promises” about how they could help with the app. “Yet once we’d proven it could be done and users loved it, they took it and built our features into a billion iPhones, Macs, displays, iPads and TVs, while shutting us out and preventing additional interop we could provide to the ecosystem,” according to Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick says he was “puzzled” by the launch of Continuity Camera. “Connecting two devices and seeking out a mount didn’t seem like the sort of setup that Apple would lean into. A global pandemic had been underway, and I figured that if Apple was focused on user needs, recognised the problems with their cameras and the move to remote and hybrid work, they might seek to rapidly replicate innovation, perhaps even with a point release, while also putting in play some multi-year initiative to lead with the cameras in MacBooks.”
But Fitzpatrick argues that they did neither, and says that “as I write this the webcams in many Windows devices still outclass the one in my MacBook.” If Apple wasn’t going to “tackle video holistically, why bother cutting our legs off? The answer soon became clear: we’d not come between Apple and users, we’d come between Apple and their walled garden.”
According to Fitzpatrick, this suit raises questions about larger concerns than Camo, namely, “whether there’s room for developers to stimulate the building blocks of the digital experience, or whether we must limit ourselves to building platforms that stand alone in the cloud, or ideas that are too insignificant to duplicate and freeze out.”
Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.