Apple and Meta may not be the best of friends right now, but at one point, Apple was in discussions with the social media company about how it could make more money from its presence on the App Store, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Apple reportedly argued that it deserved a cut of certain portions of Facebook’s ad revenue. The specific ads in question were boosted posts, which let users pay to have their posts reach more people, the WSJ reports. Apple apparently argued boosted posts are in-app purchases, which it famously takes a portion of; Meta argued that they were ads, from which Apple doesn’t get a share. It seems that Meta won out.
So Apple was perfectly fine with profiting off Facebook’s anti-privacy business model, and only when Facebook declined did Apple go on its holier-than-thou privacy crusade against Facebook’s ads business. Apple’s privacy position is pure marketing, and any time Apple needs to choose between money and privacy, money wins every time. Whether it’s Google paying Apple billions to be the default search provider on iOS, Apple handing over all Chinese users’ data to the Chinese government, or now, in dealing with Facebook, Apple will choose money over privacy every time.
Apple repeatedly calls privacy “a fundamental human right“, but human rights should not be for sale. It’s yet another illustration of corporations being above the law – Apple is allowed to just lie left, right, and centre without any legal repercussions.
To think that facebook integration was once touted as an IOS feature and now facebook is so hated they had to abandon the brand name, haha.
As for apple wanting to get in on ad revenue, that shouldn’t surprise anybody. Like it or not it’s par for the course for corporations these days to use ads for primary income or as a side hussle 🙁
I used to work at an AppleCentre 20 years and they have ALWAYS gotten away with anything, even 20 years ago. And the Apple websites are nuts.
For instance, during the MAC Vs PC ads, all new customers who came in for computers would state they came in because “they heard Mac’s can’t get viruses, and many Salespeople would agree (whilst a trojaned version of iWork was being distributed online). We’d have other customers telling others mac’s don’t crash (whilst iLife was crashing on a daily basis whilst demoing to customers). All this nonsense whilst Apple had a year old version of Java with their OS, which had known vulnerabilities, which were public for months.
Consumer affairs should have shut them down at the time for false advertising..
Jobs stood on stage and tried to claim credit for inventing multi-touch, despite there being a long history of multi-touch research. All Apple did was acquire a multi-touch company, and Apple’s patent was eventually invalidated for pinch to zoom. They didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for lying.
Then there was all the deception around antennagate, and Apple’s inability to manufacture a single working cable. Apple probably sold 5x more chargers and cables than actual devices (because the cables failed in exactly the same place every time).
STOP SUPPORTING THEM. They barely even support the open source community anymore (for instance, they use their own standard Metal instead of Vulkan). Back in the days, it was fair to say they did. But these days, everyone has overtaken them. They did things like use iMessage to help make migration from iPhone to Android also more difficult.
They are neither cheap, nor good quality either.
I agree with many things you said, however, As someone who uses both pixels and iphones on a daily basis, you can’t argue that the iphone isn’t quality. Its a damn good phone. Ipads as well. The M1/M2 processors are by far the most exciting and best performance per watt cpus we’ve ever seen. I remain cautious about the rest of the new mac computers, but that cpu might be worth all the other Apple headaches.
Just like Apple does lie about a lot, it does tell the truth about a lot too, much like other companies. You can’t take them for their word, but they also make some great products.
It should come as no surprise that Apple was willing to benefit from surveillance capitalism given it ran its own behavioural ad platform until 2016.
https://www.campaignindia.in/article/apple-takes-iad-programmatic/421794
But even if we suppose Apple’s conversion to privacy evangelism is driven by marketing and profit, it can still be a good thing: it shows that some consumers see privacy as a feature they’re willing to pay for, and it increases the need for other companies to up their privacy game to compete.
I wouldn’t necessarily trust Apple with my data any more than any other company, but I still think Apple is helping improve mobile phone privacy across the board, even if its motives are hypocritical and impure.
flypig,
Privacy is part of it, but incesant ads are a huge sellout as well. They’ll compromise our experience for their profits. I have a hard time believing that big tech is ever going to move beyond advertising business models to any significant degree. I don’t like it one bit, but the ad based services have won despite widespread consumer disdain for ads. Even companies that traditionally turned profits without ads like microsoft, apple, netflix, etc are keen on pushing more ads because it’s a proven revenue stream on top of what customers are paying. In short, they all see advertising in their future and I think the annoyance will rise to the level of pollution we see on cable tv. It’s just a matter of time 🙁
https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/03/apple-ads-expansion/
Alfman,
Regardless of personal views on the matter, ad based monetization seem to work “smoother” than other alternatives. And this pretty much dictated how the web would function.
My objection would be when you pay for a premium service, and still get ads on it. Yes, this happens with all companies, including Google, and feels like “double dipping”.
I should be able to use a service free* (with ads), or pay a fee and have no ads (one time, monthly, per visit, etc).
(Google used to have a service to “buy out” your ad space, and replace with whatever content you wanted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor . Not entirely sure why it was shut down, though).
sukru,
Like so many people, I despise paying higher prices on products just so that ads can be plastered everywhere. It’s akin to pollution. but it’s also the path of least resistance for business, which is why it is winning.
Microtransactions never panned out thanks to technological limitations, bureaucratic resistance to change, and simple greed. Also users don’t want to juggle hundreds of subscriptions for all the sites they use even if they are ideologically willing to support content producers. The result has always tended towards using advertising or going bust. That so many people hate ads is irrelevant when the alternatives don’t prove to be sustainable 🙁
Alfman,
The users don’t like friction. I think in the UX world this is called a “funnel”, where people would navigate away from your product after a gate, which includes “pay walls”.
As you said, subscribing to each individual content provider is not tenable, even though the traditional news media relied on subscriptions instead of point of sale for main source of income.
So only a handful of really high profile sites can get away with that. And that is with support from news apps with integrated auto pay systems (including, yes, Google News).
Microtransactions did not work either , since it would either cause even worse friction, or much more draconian closed ecosystems.
It would go something like this:
Browser: “Here is a blog post / OS News article of unknown quality, do you want to pay 10c to continue? Btw, this ‘clone’ offers the same content for free* (with ads), do you want to visit the pirate site instead?”
(Yet, that pirate site would be considered “savior”, and hailed for providing free access to somebody’s hard work).
People naturally chose this current system. Of course that was not an explicit choice, but rather an implicit one with their wallets.
(Yes, I know it is less than ideal, but it is what it is).
sukru,
We’re in agreement.
I wouldn’t quite go that far. Many did not and would not choose ads, but the financial incentives generally favor businesses taking advertiser money because why not. When acting individually, companies like netflix, disney, etc fear the addition of ads could loose customers to rivals. But when everyone in the oligopoly wants ad revenue they can act in unison to keep customers captive, each of them introducing ads on top of subscription fees. This is what’s playing out today even for services that didn’t have ads before. And just like cable tv and other traditional mediums I predict the ads are going to start “lite” and become more
aggressive with time to maximize corporate profits.
And of course we are all paying for this in the form of inflated prices. The amount varies significantly by industry, but apparently 19.8% of cosmetics and toiletries goes to advertising whereas 1.9% of household appliances goes to advertising.
https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/percentage-gross-sales-should-advertising-11818.html
Obviously this is why you have a job at google and I mean no offense but IMHO ideally the world wouldn’t have this intrusive advertising nor the inflated product costs. Instead we would get to choose where the money earmarked for advertising goes and we’d have even more money to pay for content sans the ads that nearly everyone hates.
I concede that it does not seem viable to get there, including for the reasons we’ve discussed, but I’d wager that the majority of us would prefer to be in that universe instead of this one.
Ho ho ho!
I would probably fail the interview if I did it today. But yes, I am humbled to be doing what I love.
sukru,
I don’t really know what exactly it is you do, but I’m sure you deserve to be doing it. You present yourself very well here, I must say.
As much as I am critical of big tech and advertising, I’m not really one to speak of having “a better way”. Working for small companies takes a huge financial toll. Instead of working up the ladder, many small companies offer a more flat and even downhill trajectory after inflation. The worst case is when they shut their doors as the giants continue to squeeze the market in their favor. Almost every one of my clients has been hurt by amazon’s dominance and growth. I can’t even convince my wife not to buy from amazon. The fact that nearly everyone buys from amazon has meant most businesses have had to significantly cut back on their own websites/platforms. So my market keeps getting harder and less profitable (same job less money). It’s a struggle and I don’t have job stability over the next decade. It’s a case of survival of the fittest I suppose, and betting against the giants is a poor bet to make with one’s career.
It’s hard to say where I’d be if google had accepted my applications. I also applied to NASA as well, science is what I really wanted to get into 🙂
I agree, but that’s just more of a reason to hold Apple accountable for this. Sadly, mainstream media isn’t as good at that as OSnews has been.
I have no sympathy for Facebook but am having a hard time interpreting this as anything other than a shakedown. Disgusting arrogance and immoral behaviour from Apple.
Yeah they’re too terrible companies being terrible to each other. The fight rather than co-operation is the best case scenario for everyone.
Reading this news item and the comments I was struck yet again by how facile and emotional much of it was. Bad things are the result of some sort of moral failing, bad things happening are a choice made by bad people who decide to act badly. Sigh.
Let’s insert some historical political economy into this analysis. Capitalist enterprises operate within hard budget constraints in competitive markets. The dynamic that drives modern capitalist enterprises and economies is capital accumulation. The imperatives of capitalist production mean that the people who operate the functions of a corporate entity barely matter, they are merely human functions of an inhuman process of value creation and accumulation. Capitalist enterprises would make sandwiches from asbestos waste if it was legal and profitable. Quite large scale capitalist enterprises operate quite successfully outside of the law selling fentanyl, the people working in those enterprises make some sort of moral choice about working in a business selling a deadly addictive drug but even if those businesses suddenly became staffed entirely by moral saints it wouldn’t alter the business model of the fentanyl business one jot.
What does this mean in relation to the issue to hand?
The various large tech giants all have particular business models that make each one different to the others in terms of what they do and how they do it. Those models have consequences. If the business model is all about accumulating personal data, or riding potentially socially dangerous viral social media activity in order to sell advertising then those businesses will operate in certain ways and do certain sorts of things. Some of those things will be bad but they are not the result of some sort of moral failing, they just flow from the business model.
Apple’s business model is about producing a limited range of highly integrated products – integrated both in terms of the vertical integration of their manufacture (from the silicon to the software, etc) as well as the integration of all the various different product types with one another (closely linking desktop PC to tablet to phone to watch to ear piece etc). There is also a deep corporate commitment to the design process both in terms of quality of manufacture, and aesthetic and functional design. That’s why I like Apple products and how they function in my life. I presume that why a billion people or so choose Apple products and their ecosystem. It has nothing to do with the moral qualities of the company or its executives who could be sociopaths for all I know or care.
The way to judge tech companies is not by using a frankly childish notion of good or evil but by regard to their respective business models, and what benefits, problems or impacts those business models automatically bring with them.
The business models of Apple, Google, Facebooks, etc all come with plusses and minuses and we all have decide which ones bring more benefit to us as individuals. So I use Apple kit, Google search but have nothing to do with Facebook (except for a sporadic engagement with Instagram). That’s just me, your choices will differ. But please let’s not pretend this has anything to do with good and evil, we are not children, and the world is not a morality tale.
“Capitalism forced poor, poor Apple to be evil.”
That had better be sarcasm…
No, companies can be beneficial to society or not beneficial. We have to evaluate not just their products but the overall effect of the company on society.
“Capitalist enterprises operate within hard budget constraints in competitive markets. ”
I fail to see how that diatribe relates to Apple at all… one of the wealthiest companies on the planet and they can do pretty much whatever they want and people will eat it up.
Also, apple is fairly vertically integrated these days… so that’s how they achieve competitiveness… they have absolutely no need to be evil.
cb88,
Yet it hasn’t stopped them from doing evil things… like updates that reduce performance of older devices without telling the owners. Or using their market power to unfairly block access to 3rd party apps & app stores. Or using their power to extend the censorship capabilities of autocratic regimes instead of granting owner freedom. Or intentionally making products harder to upgrade and repair. Or interfering with 3rd party repair shop supply streams and even going so far as to DRM to make sure those repair shops cannot use authentic used donor hardware.
Some of these things have improved after after lawsuits and industry wide criticism, but when Apple’s initial plan is to do what’s profitable rather than what’s right, I’m not impressed by their virtues.
As for the reason to be “evil”, well that’s simple, it’s wallstreet. For better or worse wallstreet always rewards profits over everything else. To be clear being “evil” isn’t the goal but a byproduct. It doesn’t really matter how big a company is, they’re still expected to maximize profits for shareholders irrespective of the social costs. It would be naive to think otherwise. It’s the reason wallstreet exists.
There’s plenty of room for altruism and judgements about societal consequences in the buying decisions we make as individuals too. On that basis it’s perfectly reasonable to judge a company on, say, whether it gives a truthful representation of itself.
Give me an f’ing break. When did Apple ever let people post fake news that tried to turn over democracy? Apple and Tom Cook are not Saints and I don’t claim that they are. The United States put Apple in a position where it is in today where it congresspeople and senators and even presidents actively pushed for moving as much production of items to China instead of being spread around the world.
When you can only buy from one place that place has you by the tender bits. Let me hold YOUR family hostage and let’s see what you do to keep them from being harmed.
Talk about holier than though. The only reason you can say this is because you have no skin in the game. You don’t create any physical products where your reliance is almost solely on a country that has horrible human rights.
PS: I’m an American so I’m saying this as an American. We have more prisons per percentage of population than ANY country in the world. You don’t live here but don’t try to say that China is worse than the United States. I have no family in prison or in abject poverty or held down due to racial profiling but that doesn’t mean I like it and that I don’t try to vote to change this. However, the way our politics work is that only corrupt people win. It’s only how corrupt the people are that win and not if they are corrupt.
I bet if all the republicans (lower case on purpose) were forced to pledge allegiance to America vs being a republican they would pick being a republican. We means they don’t put America first. If done in a MEANINGFUL way, president trump (lower case on purpose) would have been drawn and quartered for treason already as well as most of the republicans.
When people live in a country that is tiny and they can’t control any sector of anything it is EASY to look good to the rest of the world because you have no outside forces to force you to be bad.
I know that when Hitler was invading Europe, most people in your country were very good people or at least good. Only the few were evil and they were put in power. Thankfully my horrible country (I”m the one who said it could be a LOT better) helped to turn the tide. I just wish we could ALL be better people instead of corrupt and evil. Unfortunately I only have one vote.
“The gubrnment forced poor, poor Apple to be evil.”
Sabon,
You’re right about a lot of things in your post, especially the politics and the allegiance to a dictator over democracy. But to reign it back to the topic at hand, do you not find it problematic that our corporations are complicit in enabling and profiting from authoritarian regimes? Personally I’m very concerned about the rise of authoritarianism around the world (and domestically too). And although corporations aren’t directly responsible for overthrowing democracy like what happened in hong kong, they do play a very prominent role in normalizing it “business as usual”. They signal to the world that there are no consequences (short of all out war) and we’re willing to put money over freedom. Maybe that’s who we are, but are you ok with that?
Well, in this case it looks like the “revenue sharing” comes from Apple considering users’ purchases from Facebook (like boosting ads) to “in app purchases.” From a privacy standpoint, that’s not even the same thing as taking a share of, endorsing, or even knowing about Facebook’s data abuses.
On that last point: these conversations between Apple and Facebook happened from 2016-2018. Chris Wylie went whistleblower in mid-2018. I’d feel very differently about this had Apple continued these talks post- Cambridge Analytica, or were offering FB iPhone user data after that point. But this mainly looks like:
1) Apple looking to get a cut of in-app purchases, which isn’t a privacy or user data issue (even though it’s a significant issue of a different kind), and
2) Apple looking to offer its users ad- and tracker-free access to Facebook on a subscription model. Given what we now know how FB uses user data, it’s no surprise that this proposal was a non-starter (although that would not have been clear in 2016).