Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, believes Apple’s App Store rules have hampered the company’s product roadmap, accusing the iPhone-maker of banning features from their app and generally not being friendly with the cryptocurrency industry.
“Apple so far has not really played nice with crypto, they’ve actually banned a bunch of features that we would like to have in the app, but they just won’t allow it — so there’s potential antitrust issues there,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong made the revelation on a podcast that he participated in during his trip to India earlier this month. In the episode of Superteam Podcast, which aired this week, the co-founder of the publicly listed firm discussed Apple’s influence and floated the idea that smartphones may soon need to build crypto-specific hardware features.
“There’s going to have to be crypto-compatible phones that I think could actually become quite popular in the future,” he said.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Armstrong made the disclosure when he was asked about whether Coinbase would ever launch its own hardware wallet. He said the company already has some co-branded hardware wallet with Ledger, but he believes that the two major mobile operating systems need to broaden their ecosystem of devices to crypto.
