Apple is facing a new lawsuit from Reincubate, the company behind the Camo and Camo Studio apps that allow you to use your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac.
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Reincubate accuses Apple of copying its technology when it launched Continuity Camera in 2022. Continuity Camera is its own first-party solution for using the iPhone as a webcam with the Mac.
Camo was first released in 2020 and has been continuously updated since then. Reincubate has also expanded its portfolio with the release of Camo Studio and Streamlight. When Apple launched Continuity Camera in 2022, many pointed out the similarities between it and Camo that year.
In a blog post, Reincubate founder Aidan Fitzpatrickexplained the situation:
“The gist of it is that we are suing Apple for patent infringement and antitrust reasons. Apple got excited about Camo when it was still in beta, encouraged us to fully invest, had thousands of employees using it internally, nominated it for an innovation award, and made all sorts of promises about how it would help us.
But once we proved it could be done and users loved it, they took it and built our features into billions of iPhones, Macs, displays, iPads, and TVs, while shutting us out and blocking the additional interoperability we could bring to the ecosystem. I was at WWDC '22 watching our technology being demonstrated, now called Apple's 'Continuity Camera,' by members of a team who had previously told me they used Camo every day at work.
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“Apple’s goal wasn’t to make Continuity Camera great, but to hinder innovation that equalizes the experience across platforms,” Fitzpatrick continues.
Fitzpatrick also wonders if there is “room for developers to stimulate the building blocks of the digital experience, or if we should be limited to creating stand-alone platforms in the cloud, or ideas that are too trivial to copy and block.”
In the lawsuit, Reincubate also alleges that Apple is “actively undermining competing apps like Camo,” in addition to taking advantage of the fact that it is a built-in feature:
“Apple’s Continuity framework is what prevents Camo from offering low-latency functionality over a wireless connection. Many aspects of Continuity Camera interfere with or obscure the Camo user experience. For example, when a user placed their iPhone to use with Camo, Continuity Camera would automatically launch on the device, suspending the Camo app and blocking its connection in a way that Reincubate could not circumvent.“
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The lawsuit was filed in the District of New Jersey and includes allegations of antitrust under Section 2 of the Sherman Act and allegations of willful patent infringement.
