Competing on merit means no dirty monopolistic tricks, like saying "you can only use our browser here. Tough luck if you want to use something better than that". So they clearly don't compete on merit when they make all those weird restrictions.

> You completely misunderstand the article.

I understand it well. The article says, that in China the situation ironically managed to undermine Apple's lock-in (though replacing it with Wechat lock-in). This way Apple only serves as another hardware option. So Apple has to compete on merit with other hardware makers.