What they knew, when, and the decisions they made behind closed doors
been sitting around. We’ve also been digging through these companies’ dirty laundry, reading scores of internal emails and confidential presentations unearthed during the legal discovery process. It’s fascinating stuff.
The email chain reveals Netflix had this arrangement before Apple created an “Apple Video Partner Program,” which offers the same reduced cut in exchange for supporting Apple features like in-app purchase, AirPlay, Universal Search, and the Apple TV app,says “over 130 premium subscription video entertainment providers” are signed up, including Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Starz. No mention of Hulu or Netflix.
Early on, Apple wondered aloud whether it should ever allow sideloading — and whether Apple should publish App Store Guidelines publicly.Steve Jobs personally approved the text users would see when they sideload an app, all the way back in May 2008.“the App Store is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications,” iOS chief Scott Forstall asked which of these two templates Jobs preferred: “The application ‘Monkey Ball’ from the developer ‘Sega’ did not come from the App Store.
Microsoft is bringing Office to iPhone for the very first time, and it floats the idea of cutting a special deal with Apple to share a percent of its revenue instead of using in-app purchases. Schiller tells his team: “I don’t think there is any chance we would agree with that business model. We run the store, we collect the revenue.”“No promotion...
When Epic CEO Tim Sweeney confronts the company about why Apple’s Files showed up first when searching for Dropbox, Apple’s app store search lead suggests it was because Apple manually messed with the results. Apple now tells“LinkedIn has been rejected for using the same language on their subscription call to action button that Apple uses in our own apps,” writes Apple’s Tom Reyburn.
In a revealing presentation from May 2020, Microsoft revealed who it believed its true competitors are in the video game industry.Microsoft didn’t seem particularly concerned about the Epic Games Store or Google Stadia yet. “We believe the store makes a minimal financial contribution to Epic’s overall business,” wrote Microsoft, and estimated that the nascent Stadia only made $11 million in 2019.
Twenty-four hours later, the team already had a working prototype. “Here is our official plan for communicating with Google about bypassing the Google Play Store: SAY NOTHING TILL IT SHIPS,” writes Sweeney.“We’ll need a plan for secretly negotiating bundle deals with Android OEMs with a major presence outside of China, including Samsung and LG,” he adds, “Will need to be a coordinated international effort and needs to stay below the radar.
The Coalition for App Fairness , an advocacy group nominally founded by Epic, Spotify, Tinder’s Match Group, and 10 other developers, appears to have actually been created and funded by Epic explicitly to help win its case. Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer is still trying to bring the company’s cloud gaming service xCloud to other consoles.player from being able to play with friends across platforms — but behind the scenes, Epic and Sony were in active discussions to make cross-platform a reality, according to the companies’ emails., things got heated.
The top reason was redacted, but the other two were “Fortnite’s all time high user base plus the Marvel Season and concerts add pressure to Apple and Google” and “Growth is predicated on user generated content; stronger creator revenue share from lower mobile platform fees.”The App Store might largely be “a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps,” like Apple advertises on its homepage.
Eric Friedman, now head of Apple’s Fraud Engineering Algorithms and Risk team, says the company’s App Review team is “bringing a plastic butter knife to a gun fight,” a spicy quote you may remember from the trial. It seems that quote was in response to a rather simple scam: Chinese apps requesting that their users give them 5-star reviews, which the App Review team apparently wasn’t catching.that allows gambling, porn, pirated games, and more onto the iPhone, using enterprise certificates.
The CEO of popular meditation app Headspace complains directly to a contact about scam apps stealing its branding, screenshots, and description: “Shockingly, Apple are approving these apps, and when the users buy the apps they are left with nothing but some scammy chat rooms in the background.” Within an hour, he’s speaking to the head of the App Store via email, and is on the phone with the head of App Review within two weeks, according to the email thread.
Halfway through an iMessage conversation about whether Apple might be putting too much emphasis on privacy and not enough on trust and safety, Friedman comments that “we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn,” adding that “we have chosen to not know in enough places where we really cannot say” and referencingHe also shares a slide from his upcoming trust and safety presentation where “child predator grooming” is listed as a known issue for the App Store and iMessage.
Apple explains internally that it’s yanking the Tribe video chat app for being a store-within-the-store now that it has added. “They are a live multiplayer games platform which we do not allow,” Apple’s Bill Havlicek adds. , iOS numbers had been declining since April, months before Apple pulled the game.’s $10.6 billion in revenue between March 2018 and July 2020 — nearly half. And 27.5 percent was Xbox One, 9.6 percent was PC, and 8.
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