Facebook’s Zuckerberg: Apple’s App Store ‘blocks innovation, blocks competition’

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blasted Apple during a companywide meeting to more than 50,000 employees via webcast on Thursday, saying that Apple’s App Store “blocks innovation, blocks competition,” and ““allows Apple to charge monopoly rents.”

Buzzfeed News:

Zuckerberg’s comments were another signal that there’s no love lost in the long-contentious relationship between the leader of the social network and the $2 trillion electronic device maker.

On Thursday, Apple refused to allow Facebook to notify people that the iPhone maker would collect 30% of in-app purchases made through a new feature on the Facebook app that lets businesses sell tickets to online events on the platform. After Apple told Facebook that a notification was “irrelevant information,” the social network was forced to scrub the message out of its app before Apple let the feature through.

Earlier this month, Apple also made Facebook strip a feature called Instant Games from Facebook Gaming, an app that primarily lets people watch other people playing video games.

Zuckerberg also criticized a change in Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 operating system for iPhones and iPads that would make it much harder for companies like Facebook to target people using those devices with ads.

Facebook has posted a video of the meeting here: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10112235089045271

MacDailyNews Take: Since Apple does not have a monopoly in any market in which they participate, there is no legal basis for antitrust action against Apple, as Zuckerberg ought to know.

So, there is no monopoly (which is legal by the way), much less monopoly abuse (which is explicitly impossible given the nonexistence of a monopoly). You cannot abuse a monopoly and therefore face antitrust action when you do not have a monopoly to begin with.

Worldwide smartphone OS market share, May 2020 (via StatCounter:

• Android: 74.60%
• iOS: 24.82%

If the customers didn’t like Apple’s iOS Software License Agreement, they should have opted for a pretend iPhone from any one of a dime-a-dozen handset assemblers. Then they could have blissfully infested their fake iPhones with malware from a variety of sources.

Apple built the Mac. Apple built the iPhone. Apple built the iPad. Apple built the App Store. Apple created the most verdant ecosystem ever created for developers by far. Only the losers and those developers who can’t read and follow simple rules are whining incessantly.

If anything, Apple takes too little of a cut for all that the App Store provides developers. — MacDailyNews, June 21, 2020