Week in Review - Ahead of Apple's WWDC, an App Store controversy

Saturday, June 20, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about the Apple TV. This week, I’m taking a look at Apple’s App Store controversy.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The big story

For all of the antitrust attention that’s been paid to Facebook in recent years, what’s become clearer over the past week is that there’s already a good deal of anti-competitive sentiment surrounding Apple and its monopoly on gatekeeping software that can live on the iPhone.

The big news this week was that the EU had launched formal antitrust probes against Apple regarding the iOS App Store and Apple Pay.

Per our report:

The Commission confirmed today that it’s looking formally into whether Apple’s rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store violate EU competition rules. It said the probe focuses on Apple’s mandatory requirement that app developers use its own proprietary in-app purchase system, as well as restrictions applied on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.

Arriving alongside this news, the very same day, the very vocal development team behind Basecamp announced that their new product, an email service called Hey which had launched earlier this week, had drawn Apple’s ire. The app review team at Apple indicated that the app may be removed from the store if Hey’s team refused to include in-app purchases to sign up for the $99 per month email service.

On the Mac users can download apps outside the Mac App Store, but the iOS App Store is the only path for a developer to get their experience onto an iPhone. For developers that charge for digital services inside their apps, Apple takes a 30% cut that later shrinks to a 15% one. This is a very substantial revenue slice and one developers have long aimed to avoid. But Apple rules make it quite difficult for them to pull this off, even if they avoid selling anything inside their app.

The blowback was instantaneous from Hey’s team, while other developers also took the opportunity to criticize how Apple took substantial cuts of widely-defined “digital services” We covered the broader developer response here.

TechCrunch also interviewed Apple exec Phil Schiller this week, and while he advice to the team at Hey a path forward to being accepted on the store, rule changes were not part of the offer. “Sitting here today, there’s not any changes to the rules that we are considering,” Schiller said. “There are many things that they could do to make the app work within the rules that we have. We would love for them to do that.”

As Apple prepares for next week’s WWDC developer-centric event, expect the company to continue highlighting the value generated from the App Store for developers. But you can also expect regulators to continue scrutinizing the company’s maneuverings and continue listening for developer discontent surrounding anticompetitive practices.

Image Credits: SkinStyler, Zeeshan Ahmed, Rizki Kurniawan

Rip up your annoying paper processes

Facebook will let US users turn off political ads
Facebook is rolling our some new functionality on its site ahead of the 2020 US Presidential election, one feature allows Facebook users to turn off political advertising in their feeds. This functionality comes long after Twitter announced it would be discontinuing political ads on its site en masse, an action Facebook opted not to take. Read more here.

Twitter rolls out “Audio Tweets”
Scroll through your Twitter feed and you’ll see a lot of noise, but you won’t actually hear it. That’s all about to change with a new feature rolling out on iOS over the coming months that brings audio snippets into tweets so you can hear other users voices, whether that’s a feature request anyone really had I’m not so sure, but it’s coming! Read more about it here.

WhatsApp embraces in-app payments in new test
Facebook’s maneuverings to monetize WhatsApp have always a careful dance. Now, the app is finally embracing functionality that lets users pay for things with the app. Read more here.

COVID-19

FDA revokes emergency authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 treatment

Color’s COVID-19 testing shows most who test positive had either mild or no symptoms

MIT’s new way to remotely monitor vital signs over time could help with early COVID-19

Microsoft employs experimental undersea data center in search for COVID-19 vaccine

detection in care homes

Image Credits: Cesar Rodriguez / Getty Images

Extra Crunch

Investors and entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we’re taking note and hosting live Q&A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with some of tech’s most visible figures. We’ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.

Announcing the Extra Crunch Live event series

Later this month, we’ll be talking with Hans Tung and Jeff Richards of GGV Capital
Tuesday, June 30 at 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET

Hans Tung and Jeff Richards are managing partners at GGV Capital, a global VC firm that invests in startups from seed through growth-stage. The firm has invested in well-known companies like Slack, Square, Peloton, Zendesk, Hashicorp, ByteDance, and Airbnb. During our conversation we’ll examine how the duo’s investment appetite has changed in recent months, what it means to be a globally-focused investor amidst a pandemic, and how their mom-and-pop shop investment thesis is working out.