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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

#251

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…

> Mac software and app industry has died. Even after notarising apps they show malicious popup to users. I maintain a handful of open source apps for macOS, and have for years. If I don't pay the $100 Apple tax, macOS will treat those apps as if they're radioactive, and it will trick users into believing the apps are either broken or malicious. In order to run them, users must know how to change arcane settings and d…

> If I don't pay the $100 Apple tax

Please. If you can’t make enough in an entire damn year to cover that $100, you need to look at what you’re doing.

Hell I’ve seen obscure open source projects get more than $100 in donations every single month.

If people see any value in your work, then that $100 is not a barrier at all.

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

#252
post #224

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?

Isn't it obvious? They say they don't give advantage to their own apps as a company policy but they made exception to this during an event. The follow up e-mails indicate that the upper management wasn't happy about this and demanded high level approval before this happens next time. So it's not really evil Apple caught doing something that they say they don't. Its more like corrupt Apple where someone did something…

> they made exception to this during an event.

It was for 11 months, and the event was for launching the competitor product.

I would understand the argument if they boosted for a reason which wasn’t to give themselves an advantage over the competition, but in this example that was their exact plan! Boost during launch to give their new competing product a kick start, and give themselves an advantage nobody else has launching a service.

And I might understand it if they boosted to the top for the keyword “files”, but the keyword was “Dropbox”.

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

#254
post #96

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?

Apple PR often says things that are not reality... It is almost like Apple PR does not really know what is happening inside of Apple....

But they still have to be cleared by legal. And for the past 6 years lots of Apple PR put out were lying by omission. Both Qualcomm and IMG's case has plenty of concrete evidence.

For example

>> we do not advantage our apps over those of any developer or competitor

They could redefine the word "advantage" or "competitor" in this scenario where the above sentence would be factually correct.

However in court, it becomes quite clear Tim Cook does't care about the PR speak. He does when he is in front of media, but not in front of court. So I am now convinced "someone" deciding on the tone of PR has been sending these memo and infecting Apple. And I would not be suspend if he/she came from Google because they sound exactly the same as google in the early 00s. And it changed after Katie Cotton retired mo 2014.

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

#255
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of anti-trust, surely Apple must be getting close to (or beyond) what Microsoft were? Total control over their users, hidden APIs, apparently biased store, rentseeking etc. My £0.02 is that if they aren't already over the line the line should be nudged against their favour.

They're nothing like Microsoft was; Windows was something like 97% of all PCs. I'm not aware of Apple having more than 50% of any market. You can't abuse a monopoly that you don't have. (Of course, collusion/duopoly and saying that they dominate some smaller market, say paid mobile apps, are valid arguments, but nothing like as cut-and-dry as peak MS).

>They're nothing like Microsoft was

Anti-Trust is about Power. Not market share.

I dont know how others that were there in the 90s thick about it. But I do think Apple today is way more powerful than Microsoft in the 90s. Your PC in the 90s were not the access point of anything in the society other than some games or spreadsheets. Not to mention most of the population dont even have a PC. PC in terms of reach to population is basically a niche.

These days it is hard to argue that. Excluding child and grannies US literally has 100% smartphone ownership. And smartphone ( or more like a pocket personal computer ) is our access point for a lot of thing in our society, and increasingly for almost everything. And it has to go through App Store where Apple is the judge, jury and executioner.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those resorts lease the land from Disney, https://www.wdwradio.com/2005/02/wdw-history-101-how-to-buy-... https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2019/12/30/disn...

As a person who has been involved in real estate around that area I'm fully cognizant that many of the resorts that appear to be outside the gates of Disneyworld are technically on Disney real estate. When looking at maps its pretty easy to see what is and is not Disney property, as soon after you leave Disney property there's tons of chain shops and other stuff right outside the gates. I've still never stayed on a r…

Thank You. It is tiring those analogy continues to be made when they are over simplify to the point of being wrong. Despite giving them an explanation how the world actually works.

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

#258
post #84

Does anyone else just…not care? Files is a system app like Windows Explorer. It’s not meant to “compete” with anything. Does anyone think Control Panel competes with Android’s Settings app? iCloud Drive is a cloud storage competitor that Files works well with, but Files also supports Dropbox and Google Drive and many other storage competitors (anyone who wants to implement the API gets to be in Files). Also, the argu…

If you dig down the email chain PDF you get to email from the head of Epic bitching about how a search for “Fortnite” comes up with ads for competitors first. He then goes on to use the ad for Files that showed up at the top of a search for “Dropbox” as another example. Half the time when I search for any app on the iOS store I get an ad for a knockoff at the top of the search, barely noted as an ad, this is a big pr…

> barely noted as an ad

I don’t know what version you use but in iOS 14 the ad is clearly mentioned and the ad element have a distinct light blue background and all the other elements have w white color !

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

#259
I'm sure nobody here will believe me, but somewhere around Oct-Dec of last year Apple literally replaced my Google translate app with their own translate app. Like it was literally in the same spot as my Google Translate app had been. I thought it was weird, but at first just chalked it up to Google changing the design. Only after I realized image translating was gone did I investigate more and realize it wasn't Google Translate after all.

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

#260
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet given all this, for a substantial cohort of customers, the Apple brand is still bought as a badge of "coolness".

I really don’t know how long I’m willing to buy this argument that Apple is a “luxury” brand or that Apple or its customers are disproportionately concerned about coolness or fashion. All the competing flagship smartphones have similar products at similar prices, including all the branded accessories, as well as extremely similar marketing and advertising. And at least in the United States, Apple has nearly a 50% mar…

> Apple has nearly a 50% market share

What market are you talking about? I haven't heard the 50% market share number in the US. - iOS is 59.71% of smartphones in the US - macOS is 27.16% of Desktop PCs in the US

https://www.mobileapps.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share#... https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

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