Tim Cook is on a crusade.
With the release of iOS 15, Apple has opened up a battle with Facebook and other apps that want to track your data, and has run endless ads about how great Apple’s privacy features are. After all, screw Facebook - they broke democracy, right?
But let’s dig a little deeper.
We spend half our waking hours staring at this black rectangle. It is our first and sometimes only access point to the web, which at this point is our main way to interact with the world - ordering food, calling friends, watching videos.
Amazon is seen as the enfant terrible of Big Tech, from the videos of Bezos laughing evilly to memes of volcanoes exploding behind him. But somehow Tim Cook’s equally expansive ambitions - from Music to Movies to Podcasts to Health to your finances to your credit to your heart rate to your email to your career - are somehow treated as some benign paternalism.
Apple has full control. And they’re giving themselves more power by the day.
This should bother you.
Walled Garden or Prison Warden?
Apple has always pursued a “walled garden” strategy. That means they try to make Apple apps and devices only work with each other.
To state some obvious ones, you can’t install iOS on devices other than an iPhone. So if you like Apple’s software, but want a different device, you’re out of luck. Another example: by default, your backups go to iCloud, unless you install Google Drive. They make it as hard to escape as possible.
By doing that, they get a cut of every dollar. A feature like Twitter Spaces is essentially charging a ticket price for a webinar. Twitter takes a cut, then Apple takes another cut - and only half goes to the actual creator. The app creators have no choice but to provide apps through the Store - and then to use Apple’s payment system.
Apple was somehow able to apply this vertical integration to the App Store for the last fourteen years without much furor. To make your app downloadable, you have to get Apple’s approval - and they can be stingy about saying yes.
Can you imagine if Microsoft controlled what software you could install on your laptop? They would be broken up on the spot. But that’s exactly the level of control Apple has over the app store.
So when you buy an iPhone, you don’t just buy a phone. You buy iOS, which you are chained to. You have no choice. Good luck getting rid of it!
A Bad Netizen
Apple also does not contribute to tech innovation the way its rivals do. Tech companies today “give back” to the industry via open source. That means they make code that isn’t key to their business freely available, which makes it possible for startups to use that code.
Google, for example, has contributed Angular, which is the code used for probably half of all the websites you visit. Facebook has many open source projects, including PyTorch, one of the most popular codebases for machine learning. These projects help move innovation forward faster.
Apple contributes much less on the open source front. Instead, it takes work from others and then makes its own closed source software that it can monetize.
Android is actually the strongest example of why commitment to open source matters. Google made its OS available for free - mostly to make sure Google was dominant in mobile search - but free Android software installed on cheap, made in China phones is why people in India and Africa have been able to leapfrog the installation of cable broadband and get on to the Internet long before they could afford iPhones.
Do you think Apple really cares about expanding Internet access to these countries? Of course not! Their strategy is about premium products at premium prices.
Another Internet principle is to provide open APIs so software engineers can build apps on your platform. Instead, Apple stonewalls, blocking access to iPhone features like iMessage and screen time data.
Apple congratulates itself for releasing privacy and screen time features as being helpful for “kids,” but only releases these when they feel like it. So parental controls to keep kids from getting device addiction only came around in 2018, when it could have been available long before. You could get all this privacy on your own if you could install apps and have actual control of your device.
Compare that to say “platform neutral” Whatsapp, which runs on any kind of phone and can be run through a browser. All you need is an Internet connection. Conversely, Apple makes non-iMessage users the ugliest, most vomit colored shade of green possible.
Apple’s approach to software is more akin to the PC wars culture of the 1980s, rather than the Internet culture of startups today.
Helping you, helping them
Microsoft’s original antitrust suit came because they use their control over the OS (Windows) to crush the competition for their apps (Internet Explorer vs Netscape). Meanwhile, Apple packages an ever expanding list of apps into the iPhone: Pay, Music, Podcasts, Mail, News, Numbers, Books, FaceTime, Maps, and now a VPN if you subscribe to their iCloud+ service.
Just in finance alone, how many potential fintech startups are losing out on a market because Apple is including Pay for free and haranguing you to set it up with constant notifications?
We don’t notice this pre-packaging because many of the competing apps, like Gmail or Spotify for podcasts, are free. What’s being lost, thinks the user? But what Apple is actually trying to do is to kill ad based competitors’ business and supplant them with unwitting iOS “subscribers” (that means you) who subsidize this long list of pre-installed apps through their need to buy a new $1000 iPhone every two years.
Apple claims they keep control over their ecosystem to help “customers” - just like when Amazon lowers prices to the floor to drive competitors out of business. But we should have no doubt Apple is using its monopoly power over iOS to establish what is amounting to full control of the Internet.
Congress might finally be waking up to the risks. My personal belief is that the only reason Apple has escaped heavy scrutiny for more than a decade is because rich people like Apple products, and rich people write the headlines. In a Tim Cook world, privacy and security are luxury goods that only the rich should be able to buy.