There has been a long-running tussle between Facebook and Apple. These companies are at loggerheads for multiple reasons but dominance is certainly one of them. Simply put, both companies are dominant in separate ways. Apple has the monetary dominance to muscle out the competition. The company also has some markets like the U.S. market where it is “King Kong”. On Facebook’s part, it is dominating the social internet space. Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, almost everyone has a connection with Facebook in some way.
However, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, recently spoke on a podcast hosted by Kara Swisher in The New York Times. He believes that the market needs more social media networks. His remarks are targeting the competition between Apple and social giant, Facebook. The focus of the contradiction is that the upcoming privacy update of the iPhone could severely weaken Facebook’s future profitability.
On Monday, Cook said in a podcast: “I think the more social networking platforms are the better. It is better for people to have more social networks than fewer”.
How sincere is Tim Cook?
No doubt, Cook is correct, it is always better to have multiple in everything. However, Cook will not call for multiple participators in Apple’s core business, will he? Certainly not. Apple does not have a social business so it’s easy for him to call for more social networks. Thus, while Facebook’s dominance in the social network space irritates Cook, Apple’s dominance in some smartphone markets does not.
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Although Tim Cook did not directly mention Facebook’s name, the two companies have been involved in six months of repeated discussions about the iPhone update scheduled to be launched this spring. This update will require application developers to obtain user permission to collect data for targeted advertising and allow users to opt-out of such tracking.
For Facebook, this policy change may mean that its advertising revenue will be significantly reduced. After all, a large part of Facebook’s advertising revenue is obtained by using these user data. In this regard, Facebook has widely and bluntly expressed its critical views, and they believe that Apple is using this to seek its own industry dominance.
In response to opinions, Apple said that Facebook does not respect user privacy.
After Facebook hit back, Apple delayed the launch of privacy updates. This update was originally planned to be carried out in September last year, and then it was not implemented until early April this year.
In January of this year, some media reported that Facebook was also preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple over this policy change. The reason given by Facebook is that Apple requires app developers to comply with the rules that appear on the App Store (for example, you can choose not to place targeted ads), but Apple’s own apps do not need to comply with the same rules.
In this regard, Tim Cook said that he does not pay attention to Facebook’s business, so it is difficult to evaluate the impact of Apple’s privacy policy on Facebook.
