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Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

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Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#161

Post by simondotau »

intricatedetail wrote: post #71
codesternews wrote: post #28

Apple has made life of small developers hard. Mac software and app industry has died. Even after notarising apps they show malicious popup to users. Same practices has adapted by apple like search ad etc etc. They make competing services and steal ideas of developers and those app dies. For eg screen time for Moments app. They have unfair advantage and small developers could not complete. Only handful of indie develo…

They also don't pay the same taxes as small businesses. The market is completely rigged. Apple should be split and fined.

If the market is rigged, blame the market.

I don’t like many of the accounting tricks Apple pulls either, but as long as Apple’s competitors are pulling the same tricks, singling out Apple doesn’t solve the problem. Yes Apple are a huge company, but they are utterly minuscule relative to the overall economy.

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#162

Post by Spivak »

swiley wrote: post #126
codesternews wrote: post #28

Apple has made life of small developers hard. Mac software and app industry has died. Even after notarising apps they show malicious popup to users. Same practices has adapted by apple like search ad etc etc. They make competing services and steal ideas of developers and those app dies. For eg screen time for Moments app. They have unfair advantage and small developers could not complete. Only handful of indie develo…

Apple is to app developers what uber is to taxis and carpoolers.

Better in every conceivable way but make lots of people mad because of the way they deliver which is talking end-to-end control of the product?

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#163

Post by crazygringo »

canada2us wrote: post #122

Does Google do the same? From my experience, Google products almost rank top in the search results without Google in the keywords. Search "News", "Drive", "Calendar", et al. In Google chrome, all bookmarks are under auto-completed keywords in the address bar.

No.

If you Google "Dropbox" it doesn't return Google Drive as the top result.

And if you Google "Firefox" it doesn't return Chrome at the top.

Now it might sometimes show ads for competitors, but the actual organic search results show what you're actually looking for.

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#164

Post by [deleted] »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #139
stefan_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read the article. Apple boosted their generic Files app above Dropbox for the query Dropbox . That is the controversy.

While this is an abuse of their monopoly powers, to me this is less bad than locking out 3rd party app stores. I never heard much complaining about that before Epic did their thing.

[deleted]

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#165

Post by simondotau »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #117
xwolfi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In IT, there are edge cases, QA misses, design mistakes and ofc the almighty programming bug. Pick.

Possibly. Could be negligence if they're not already testing for such cases. Or could be they boosted their own app intentionally.

I’m curious, what hypothetical scenario do you imagine where Apple got any real world benefit from having files appear above Dropbox when searching for “dropbox”?

Setting aside whether Files is a competitor (which I’m honestly not sure it is) I would imagine that at least 99% of the time, a person searching for a specific product by name isn’t in a mind space to be conquered by a competitor.

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#166

Post by tyingq »

simondotau wrote: post #148
tyingq wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Below the fold" doesn't have meaning? Is that not what he was effectively saying?

“Below the fold“ implies that the result wasn’t on screen. The second search result is always on screen, even if you have a tiny iPhone from six years ago. When you search for “dropbox“ and the second result is the Dropbox app adorned with the Dropbox logo, is anyone ever going to even notice the first result?

The exact quote was "In fact, Dropbox wasn't even visible on the first page".

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#167

Post by swiley »

Spivak wrote: post #162
swiley wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is to app developers what uber is to taxis and carpoolers.

Better in every conceivable way but make lots of people mad because of the way they deliver which is talking end-to-end control of the product?

App developers are Apple contractors, not small business owners.

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#168

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

mercer wrote: post #86
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also "noun" verbs. One I hear in SV is "an ask". I find myself a bit peeved by it but I don't know why.

Much as I tend to be in favor of language evolving, I react almost viscerally to 'compute' as a noun. It is a major irk.

When people say they grok something it hurts me deep inside.

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#169

Post by vel0city »

astrange wrote: post #141
intricatedetail wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also don't pay the same taxes as small businesses. The market is completely rigged. Apple should be split and fined.

Apple is the largest taxpayer in the US. (and incorporated in California instead of Delaware, which presumably means higher fees)

Apple is incorporated in CA, they're incorporated in DE, they're incorporated in Ireland, they've got corporations all over the place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_v_Commission

Re: Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

#170

Post by smartbit »

nomoreplease wrote: post #153
musicale wrote: post #49

Apple PR: > we do not advantage our apps over those of any developer or competitor Apple employee Debankur Naskar: > I think the Files app was manually boosted ... during last WWDC. We are removing the manual boost So which of these is true? Or is PR technically correct because they do not currently "advantage" their apps?

For nearly a decade, they preferred to open addresses with Apple Maps instead of my preference of Google Maps. And they gave me no option to use Google Maps as the default. Apple defaulted to their own apps and I think they still do (I’m not sure if this changed)

At least you can now delete Apple Maps. That prevents it from starting inadvertently.
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