> Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Do you have examples, I’m aware of a few examples where Apple built features in that used to be 3rd party apps. But kick them off?
Google’s actions here systematically undermine auctions to their direct financial benefit, while delivering sub-optimal results for advertisers. In a way that is not an accident, but deliberately engineered and even given snappy project names that allude to the exact purpose of the deception. A better comparison is how certain banks were found to be reordering transactions to maximise the number of overdraft fees owed.
Apple only have a handful of apps and of those fewer are paid apps (they’re the pro-level tools). To claim that apple uses its knowledge of the store to make app duplications, then boot the original concepts off the store is plainly false.
An example given below by another reader is talking (I believe) about a company called Luna which produces a dongle that allows the mac to share their screen onto an iPad. Apple has always had this feature through the screen sharing service (I did the same, without a dongle, using VLC on a gen 1 iPad, long before Luna had a product - thus the feature is arguably obvious.) Over the years Apple have increased the functionality and ease of use of the screensharing features as their hardware has become more capable of running them - including the latest macos update which expanded these features further. Luna however feels they should have a monopoly on any screensharing functions with their dongle hardware. I’m yet to hear a convincing argument from this developer.
I think the core issue is that the app store is large and invariably any changes Apple make to their own software can be tenuously attributed as copying of some random title on the app store. Common-sense arguments such as: apple don’t charge for the feature, the feature is obvious, or the feature is merely an enhancement of an existing feature, are readily discounted in favour of depictions of an evil mastermind preying on utterly tiny revenue sources.