Featured documents by The Verge and disclosed as part of the Apple Vs. Epic Games, have revealed that Apple discussed sideload app plans, tried to block users in its ecosystem using gift cards, tried to deal with chaos in the App Store review process and more.
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Several of the internal documents related to internal discussions about the possibility of loading iPhone apps outside the “app store”. Some of these discussions may have gone beyond what was expected, as in 2008 software chief Scott Forstall asked Steve Jobs what text should appear to iOS users when they want to open an app. of lateral load. Jobs accepted the following alert: “Are you sure you want to open the” Monkey Ball “app from developer” Sega “?”
In October 2010, Jobs stated in a corporate strategy presentation that the company’s key goal would be to use the cloud to “link all of our products, so we would further lock customers into our ecosystem.”
In 2013, Apple’s senior vice president of software and services, Eddy Cue, praised the potential of bundling iTunes gift cards with new Apple devices instead of putting them up for sale to block more customers on the Internet. ecosystem of the company and deter them from switching to a different brand. He also became enraged with the Apple Retail team over his disinterest in selling gift cards from the iTunes Store.
Who will buy a Samsung phone if they have already bought apps, movies, etc.? Now they have to spend hundreds more to get to where they are today.
On the other hand, our apple stores (online and retail) are the only distributors in the world that declined year after year in iTunes card sales. We’re starting to move forward again with retail, but it’s always an uphill battle. Our teams don’t get the ecosystem. We (Val and the team) just learned from Jennifer that iTunes cards are not a priority for her. This is ridiculous. Whoever leaves Apple products after buying apps, music, movies, etc.
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… Meanwhile, Samsung is discounting and giving shit everywhere …
Samsung is now pushing Google Play cards located just below phones:
From the iPod we have not put our cards with the screens of our products (to third parties). They have to be in a different place. We should have gift cards on the tables like we do at Apple retail. We should also consider fixing them to the entire end cover of the hardware.
In 2012, Cue demanded that Matt Fischer, the head of the App Store, not Shazam appear in the “App Store”:
No promotion … we’re not going to promote anything that points to the goal of replacing our music player, unless it’s significantly better than our player and that’s not it.
Apple acquired Shazam in 2018. In 2016, Apple’s Elizabeth Lee said that “While they may be our best and brightest apps, Matt feels extremely strong when it comes to not introducing our competitors to the” App Store “when asked why the company does it. I don’t want to highlight Google and Amazon apps. The email thread suggested that this was a standard” App Store “practice, with some apps of the competition they saw “through a slightly different lens than most.”
In 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the issue of lack of traction in the Mac App Store, addressing the lack of gaming apps and productivity: “I think the lack of gaming (together with the lack of native productivity apps) are the main reason the “Mac App Store” is down. ”Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, responded:
We and the major game developers have tried high-end games on the Mac … but we haven’t been able to generate any major business in this genre.
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As for the native productivity app, it starts and ends with Microsoft and Adobe. It’s not in the store either because they don’t have to be. They can be on the Mac and distribute them to users without sharing revenue with us, following our rules on application engineering and business models, or they go through any application review process.
Many of the documents disclosed showed how Apple executives responded to repeated failures in the App Store review process. In February 2012, Schiller stated:
What the fuck is this ???
Remember we talked about finding bad apps with low scores?
Remember our talk about becoming the “Nordstroms” of stores in terms of quality of service?
How does an obvious boot of the super popular Temple Run, without screenshots, junk marketing text and almost all 1 star ratings, become the store’s number 1 free app?
Can anyone see how a best-selling game kicks off? Does anyone see an app that cheats the system?
Does anyone review these apps? Does anyone care about the store?
This is madness !!!
In 2015, Schiller asked the App Store team to “PLEASE develop a system to automatically find low-scoring apps and purge them !!”
In February 2019, a scam app that claimed to be able to measure blood pressure using the iPhone’s camera and fingertips reached the top rankings in the app store for medical apps. Later that year, applications that claimed to be able to measure a user’s heart rate using Touch ID were also subject to internal control after being accepted into the “app store” during the process. review.
Apparently, Apple’s Tom Reyburn admitted that “LinkedIn has been rejected for using the same language on the subscription call button that Apple uses in our own apps.” “It’s not good, but apparently it’s what it is,” replied Shaan Pruden, Apple’s chief development officer. Reyburn added: “Amazon is also complaining about this. We need to have a set of rules that all apps comply with, whether it’s from Apple or third-party developers.”
Apple also realized that it had mistakenly allowed two separate games featuring school features in the “App Store,” seven months after its approval. The debates reduced the error in the fact that “it took a total of 32 seconds to review the two applications.” In a similar case, Schiller questioned how a game about shooting protesters was accepted during the review process.
Separately, the documents show that in 2011, Schiller suggested that Apple could “go down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20 if we can maintain a $ 1 million execution rate on the year, ”in terms of App Store commissions, as the 30 percent commission rate“ wouldn’t last forever ”.
He also proposed a scheme called “Jump Start” in June 2018, which would have returned half of Apple’s 30% commission to developers during its first year to spend on iAd advertising. This idea seems to be a forerunner of the ppApp Store program for small businesses.
In February 2020, Eric Freidman, Apple’s head of fraud, said Apple was “the biggest platform for distributing child pornography.” He added that “we have chosen not to know enough places where we really can’t say.” It is unclear whether these discussions were related to the child safety features recently announced by Apple.
Other interesting findings and news from internal document disclosures showed that Apple appears to have offered Netflix an in-app purchase commission at a 15% discount, as did its deal with Amazon Prime Video, in instead of its usual 30% rate, Schiller said that in terms of “threat level,” Amazon’s Appstore posed a “very high” threat to Apple, and in the second quarter of 2016, the “App Store” was worth more than the Mac and iPad.
To read the full documents or for more prominent information, see the original article.