Hubris, Thy Name is Apple (Premium)

Apple has been quietly waging war against its own developers for years in an effort to grab as many revenues as possible from its ecosystem. But thanks to a growing chorus of fed-up app developer complainers, antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are finally paying attention to this illegal behavior. And that war has gotten a lot louder.

What’s astonishing about Apple, of course, is that its marketing is so effective that so much of the population actually believes its lies. This is a firm that’s been bulldozing its most popular and effective developers for years and then promoting its efforts as being user-centric. Even Apple’s privacy jihad can be viewed in this light. After all, the only way to truly ensure its users’ privacy is to make sure their data is controlled by only a single entity. Apple.

I’ve described Apple’s behavior towards its users as parentalism. This is a firm that thinks it knows better than its users what’s good for them. Its app store is guided by the puritanical worldview of the deceased tech demi-god Steve Jobs, who decided that no adults would be able to see nudity or violence on his devices. This worldview has permeated throughout the Apple ecosystem, and has infected everything from privacy controls—only Apple can be trusted to ensure that its customers’ children are safe from online attack—to its new games, news, and video services.

Apple’s approach to developers is a bit more complicated. Apple hasn’t created the biggest digital ecosystem, but it has created the most lucrative digital ecosystem. The problem is, it did so using strategies that can fairly be compared to any other exclusive and isolationist movement, be it religious, political, or whatever special interest you care to back. Apple thrives because its users want to be part of something that they perceive to be better than what’s offered to the masses. But Apple’s developers walk a razor’s edge in which they hope to benefit from the scraps that Apple lets fall of the table while not drawing the attention of Cupertino.

As Apple’s hardware sales soared and then stalled, the firm has by necessity started looking at those scraps. And increasingly, it likes what it sees. The firm’s services businesses are aimed at collecting the type of ongoing revenues that Apple used to get every year or two when its gullible wanna-be-elite customers purchased new iPhones, iPads, and/or iPods with such regularity. But instead of delivering big bang payments every so often, services provide a steady drip of revenues that could collective, over time, surpass even Apple’s vaunted hardware businesses.

Put another way, Apple is discovering what companies like Microsoft and Google have known for years: Services are lucrative, are easy to amplify or detune as needed, and come with relatively low overhead after you get past the startup-up costs.

The problem, of course, is that Apple isn’t starting services in a vacuum. It’s directly attacking its own partners, those firms that already offer services in the markets in which Apple now wants to compete. When Apple created iCloud, for example, and thoroughly integrated it into its entire software ecosystem, it didn’t just create an offering that worked better with the iPhones and Macs its customers own than did Dropbox or OneDrive. It took the extra step of charging a fee to the makers of Dropbox, OneDrive, and other cloud storage services whenever their apps collected money from their own customers. So Apple takes a fee, a vig, even when customers choose competing services, further hobbling them on Apple’s platforms by putting up  artificial roadblocks its own services don’t need to worry about.

This behavior was considered unsavory before Apple was so dominant. But with over one billion customers and a thriving ecosystem, Apple has expanded its services businesses and infringed on more and more otherwise successful businesses in the process. And it is alienating the very companies that used to champion Apple and its “think different” (sic) mantra.

Today, Apple has essentially put a tarp under the table to collect all the revenue scraps. And it is treating its developers like ants, or mice, or other unwanted visitors while it gorges. It created Apple Music to kill Spotify. Apple Books to kill Kindle. Apple Arcade to kill Xbox, Steam, and any other erstwhile game services. It created Apple TV+ to kill Netflix and Hulu. Apple News+ to kill The New York Times.

Of course, it doesn’t promote these services that way. Oh, no. As the halo of light expands behind Tim Cook pontificating on stage, Apple markets each as a shining star of quality and excellence, just another perk of that growing monthly bill that Apple collects from its customers each month. Stick with us folks, it says. We’ll keep you safe. Safe from the predations of the other firms that want your money. Sorry, we meant our money.

How far does this hubris, this parentalism, take Apple into the Twilight Zone? This week, Microsoft killed off its xCloud efforts on Apple’s platforms specifically because Apple’s store policies prevent it from even operating the service. Why xCloud/Game Pass is any different from OneDrive, or Microsoft 365, or anything else is unclear.

Don’t worry. Apple explains it.

“The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for customers to discover and download apps, and a great business opportunity for all developers,” an Apple statement explains. Before they go on our store, all apps are reviewed against the same set of guidelines that are intended to protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field to developers. Our customers enjoy great apps and games from millions of developers, and gaming services can absolutely launch on the App Store as long as they follow the same set of guidelines applicable to all developers, including submitting games individually for review, and appearing in charts and search. In addition to the App Store, developers can choose to reach all iPhone and iPad users over the web through Safari and other browsers on the App Store.”

In other words, what Apple wants to do is literally review every single game that could possibly be played through Microsoft’s game streaming app. This includes, today, over 100 titles that are part of xCloud. But it also includes every single game that can be played on an Xbox One because the other thing this app can do, at least on Android, is stream games from the console.

Apple’s policy is insane and anticompetitive. As Microsoft points out, the gaming industry already has ratings standards, created by the ESRB in the United States and by other organizations around the world. We don’t need Apple to review games.

But this policy is also inconsistent with literally everything else Apple does. The firm doesn’t require that Netflix allow it to review every single TV show and movie that it streams via its video service. It doesn’t require that The New York Times or Google News allow it to review news stories before they publish them Spotify doesn’t have to submit songs for review, and Amazon doesn’t have to submit books for review.

Put more simply, this is simply a roadblock that makes it impossible for competing game services to fully offer their solutions on Apple’s platforms. Meanwhile, Apple Arcade runs unfettered, and with lower costs because this otherwise pointless service is subsidized by Apple’s hardware sales while it burns through billions of dollars in startup costs.

This company is the worst.

And until its customers open their eyes and see what’s really happening—an explicit strategy to curtail innovation while its steals the ideas of others—we’re going to have to rely on antitrust regulators to protect us from this ravaging beast. And let’s face it, that’s a bad bet. The European Union is certainly interested in slowing down Big Tech, but everything in Europe happens at a snail’s pace, and the European Commission’s actions against firms like Apple and Google thus far have done nothing to slow down their world-eating. And the U.S.? Pffftt. Please. We’re so hamstrung by partisan divide that we’ll never agree on anything, let alone punishing this darling of American business. (Please ignore that it builds all its products in China, folks.)

Look, Apple makes mostly excellent hardware, and I understand why some might fall for the siren cry of the latest iPhone or Apple Watch or whatever. Hell, I fall for it with some regularity. But if you must own Apple hardware, the smartest thing you can do is limit your use of Apple software and services to the bare minimum.

And maybe press your local congressperson to regulate the hell out of this company before it destroys half of the personal computing ecosystem.