Apple has been hit with a new lawsuit by Reincubate, the company behind the Camo and Camo Studio apps that let you use your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac.
Reincubate accuses Apple of copying its technology when it launched Continuity Camera in 2022. Continuity Camera is Apple’s own similar first-party solution for using your iPhone as a webcam with your Mac.
Update: Apple provided the following statement to 9to5Mac:
“We strongly disagree with the allegations and believe the lawsuit is baseless. Apple competes fairly while respecting the intellectual property rights of others, and these camera features were developed internally by Apple engineers.”
Camo first launched in 2020 and has received consistent updates since then. Reincubate has also expanded its portfolio with the launch of Camo Studio and Streamlight. When Apple launched Continuity Camera in 2022, many people were quick to point out the similarities between it and Camo that year, including us.
In a blog post today, Reincubate founder Aidan Fitzpatrick has a good explanation of the situation without all the legalese of the actual lawsuit filing:
The tl;dr is we’re suing Apple on patent infringement and antitrust grounds. Apple hopped on Camo when it was still in beta, encouraged us to go all in, had thousands of staff run it internally, nominated it for an innovation award, and made all sorts of promises about how they’d help.
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. I found myself at WWDC ’22 seeing our technology demoed, now as Apple’s “Continuity Camera,” by members of a team who’d previously been in my dms telling me they used Camo every day at work.
“Apple’s goal wasn’t to make Continuity Camera great, it was to hinder innovation that leveled the experience between platforms,” Fitzpatrick continues.
Fitzpatrick also questions 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.”
In the lawsuit, Reincubate also says that Apple “actively undermines competing apps like Camo,” beyond just benefitting from being a built-in feature:
Apple’s Continuity framework itself is what prevents Camo from offering low-latency wireless functionality. Beyond that, several aspects of Continuity Camera interfere with or obscure the Camo user experience. For example, when a user positioned their iPhone for use with Camo, Continuity Camera automatically launched on the device, and would suspend the Camo app and block its connection in a way that Reincubate cannot work around.
The lawsuit was filed in the District of New Jersey and asserts Sherman Act Section 2 monopolization claims and willful patent infringement claims.
You can read the full lawsuit below.
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