Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Apps That Benefit and Threaten Apple

For Mr. Cook’s monthly services meetings, the company has intensified monitoring of apps that benefit and threaten Apple. The team has created a release radar for the CEO to track apps that are expected to sell well and other metrics for the apps that have challenged Apple’s business, including iTunes sales decreases compared with Apple Music subscription growth, said the person involved with the meetings.

Nilay Patel:

This is exactly the sort of data tracking that Amazon does and which @ewarren wants to break tech companies up over

Apple the services company that tracks what apps are successful in the App Store so it can build competing products does not look so different than Facebook selling a VPN to track competing social networks or Amazon doing AmazonBasics

Michael Love:

Re this... the bit about “monitoring of apps that benefit and threaten Apple” is just really, really bad; I expect Cook will be confronted about it at an extremely hostile Congressional hearing within the year.

I don’t know what idiot at Apple thought they could exploit their ownership of the App Store in this way and not get in trouble for it, but it’s absolutely planing into the hands of all of those of us who would benefit from their iOS app monopoly getting dismantled.

Hwee-Boon Yar: