Apple Kept Spotlight On Buzzy New Improvements To Phones, Macs & Popular Software Like Facetime At Its Annual Developers’ Conference Yesterday
Apple Kept The Spotlight On Buzzy New Improvements To Phones, Macs And Popular Software Like Facetime At Its Annual Developers’ Conference Yesterday. But the glossy, commercial-style pretaped event came off as out of touch with the legal and regulatory problems embroiling one of the world’s most valuable companies. The event, WWDC, is typically one of the company’s key showcases for developers who build apps for iPhones and other Apple products. But this year, it came at a particularly tense moment for the company.
The world awaits a judge’s decision expected this summer in the company’s legal battle with the Fortnite maker Epic. And Epic’s accusations that Apple behaved anti-competitively have sparked greater scrutiny of the company’s relationships with developers, and prompted regulators in D.C. and around the world to take a closer look at the company’s App Store and other business practices.
Gene Munster, managing partner at the venture capital firm Loup Ventures, tweeted the company’s App Store commissions, which are at the center of the antitrust scrutiny, were “the elephant in the room” at yesterday’s event. Under pressure, Apple last year reduced commissions to 15 percent for smaller developers, and it still takes a cut of 30 percent for companies with over $1 million in App Store revenue.
Meanwhile, the company is also dealing with the fallout of New York Times reporting that it made extensive compromises, particularly on Chinese users’ privacy, to be able to operate in China. The Apple event underscores the challenge for tech giants in the era of techlash. After years of escalating political scrutiny, tech companies are trying to keep the focus on the buzzy ways their products are evolving, and especially changing people’s lives for the better during the pandemic.
Apple leaned into this heavily at yesterday’s event. It announced Zoom-style features that will make FaceTime a better experience for people working from home or video chatting more with loved ones. In the United States, many of these features will arrive as people are resuming in-person socializing and work, my colleagues Geoffrey A. Fowler and Heather Kelly report.
The company also announced new features that will make it possible to use government issued IDs (in some states) on iPhones. Apple also unveiled a series of new health-related features that will make it easier for people and their families to track health developments.
Apple also leaned heavily into privacy.
The company has extensively marketed its privacy protections in ad campaigns, and it’s often defended certain business practices to regulators by saying they’re motivated by protecting its customers’ privacy. Yesterday was no different, and the company announced a series of new protections – including for the first time, tools customers will have to pay for.
Apple’s default Mail app will now come with new privacy features to prevent marketing emails from tracking broad swaths of people’s online activity. The company will also launch a new section in Settings that will tell users how often apps use location, photos, camera and microphone, as well as all the third-party domains apps are contacting. Apple’s paid iCloud service will include a service called Private Relay, which will encrypt all traffic coming and going from an Apple device.
But as Geoffrey wrote yesterday, there’s are key questions to consider when trying any of these new tools from Apple: “Is it actually doing enough to put us in control of our data and is it just defining privacy in a way that hurts rivals while helping its own business?”
Some of these features are already attracting pushback.
Reuters reported the new Private Relay feature won’t be available in China. This has prompted criticism from Apple’s detractors, who have raised concerns about the concessions the company has made to operate in China. The company has also said it will not offer the feature in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines.
This news was originally published at Washington Post.