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Технологии

Facebook goes to war with Apple, despite not being traditional rivals

Nobody could ever forget the day that Apple pulled the plug on Facebook.

On a January morning in 2019, the social network’s then 35,000 employees woke up to discover that everything involving an iPhone was broken: their calendars, their maps of the company campus, their internal social networks and even their food-hall menus.

Meetings were cancelled because people couldn’t catch the campus shuttle buses, while work on any iPhone apps slammed to a halt as the test versions failed to boot up.

It could have been a cyberattack, but was in fact a show of force. Apple, incensed by the revelation that Facebook had exploited its workplace software scheme to spy on the habits of iPhone users as young as 13, had revoked the credentials that allowed Facebook’s internal iPhone apps to function the previous evening.

And so, in the midst of that chaos, perhaps sitting in the glass-walled office that employees call “the fishbowl”, what must Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg have been thinking? 

That jolt may help explain the caustic PR warfare that has erupted between the two companies. In the past six months, Facebook has become Apple’s chief antagonist, airing its gripes with investors, the media, its own employees and even the regulators writing the rules that will govern digital services for the next decade.

That is despite the companies not being traditional rivals: Apple sells hardware and runs subscription services; Facebook gets 98 per cent of its income through advertising.

“[Apple has] this unique stranglehold as a gatekeeper on what gets on phones,” Mr Zuckerberg told his workers in August, adding that it “blocks innovation, blocks competition” and charges “monopoly rents”.

His chief lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg and head of the Facebook app Fidji Simo likewise slammed the smartphone maker. The latter labelled its 30 per cent app fee as the “App Store tax”: confrontational language previously confined to Apple’s more bellicose critics, such as Fortnite maker Epic Games. 

Apple's app fees: at a glance

Behind the scenes, Mr Zuckerberg has reportedly lobbied US officials to scrutinise Apple more strictly. In July, he told a Congressional panel that Facebook’s competitors include “gatekeepers with the power to decide if we can even release our apps in their app stores”. And in Europe, responding in September to an EU consultation on the Digital Services Act, a major overhaul of internet laws currently being put together in Brussels, Facebook mentioned Apple 17 times, compared to eight Googles, two Twitters and just one TikTok.

It said Apple imposes “unfair contractual terms and unfair practices”, and accused the iPhone maker of “privilege[ing] its own services and revenue streams to the detriment of others”.

Apple has chosen to not directly respond to Facebook’s snipes, and it is easy to believe this is a mere PR tactic by Facebook – a distraction from its numerous political crises. Yet, a feud had been smouldering since 2017, when Mr Zuckerberg felt personally slighted by a graduation speech by Apple boss Tim Cook urging students not to measure their worth with likes.

By 2018, Mr Cook was using the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a cudgel and later, when Apple announced a Screen Time feature designed to combat smartphone addiction, it illustrated it with screenshots of Facebook and Twitter.

The root of the conflict runs deeper still. Facebook has often struggled with the depth of its dependence on smartphone operating systems run by Apple and Google.

Most recently, Apple has flexed those muscles by trying to extract its 30 per cent fee from sole traders using Facebook’s new paid events service, as well as rejecting important features of Facebook’s new gaming app.

However, the skirmishing began in 2009, when the team behind Facebook’s first mobile app butted up against Apple’s sentinels. 

“Steve’s being a little crazy,” Mr Zuckerberg told his head of mobile Joe Hewitt at the time, referring to Apple supremo Steve Jobs. “But if you antagonise Apple one more time, we’re going to have to fire you.”

Mr Hewitt gave up and quit the project, telling journalists he was “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review process.

“All of this has been brewing for more than a decade,” says David Barnard, an iPhone app maker and developer liaison at the mobile subscription services provider RevenueCat.

“Businesses big and small know much sway Apple has over their financial future … because of [Apple’s] incessant desire for absolute control of the platform.”

Mr Barnard is no anti-Apple partisan, having made his career in the App Store, but he is blunt about Apple’s capacity for “picking irrational fights”.

Who runs Facebook? | The management team

According to Phillip Shoemaker, Apple’s former head of app review, Facebook’s app would always go through rigorous scrutiny whenever a new version was submitted to the iPhone’s App Store. 

“We searched everything for those guys. They would try stuff all the time that they weren’t allowed to do,” says Mr Shoemaker.

In one case, when Facebook spun off Messenger into a new app, he recalls that the social network was told to remove a feature from its main app that allowed it to record sound in the background. While the Messenger service had a reason to activate the iPhone’s microphone in order to allow phone calls over it, the Facebook app no longer included that function and Apple decreed that it had no reason to record background audio.

Indeed, messaging is one place where the two companies do compete directly. The rivalry between Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp on the one hand, and Apple’s default iMessage texting app on the other has been dubbed the “messaging wars”. Zuckerberg has even called iMessage “our biggest competitor by far”. 

The rivalry between Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp, and Apple's default iMessage texting app has been dubbed the 'messaging wars'

Credit: Chesnot/Getty Images Europe 

Today the most pressing issue is Apple’s proposed advertising crackdown, which would force companies to get explicit permission, via a stark pop-up message, to track them between apps.

Such tracking is the backbone of Facebook’s mobile audience network, which lets apps host adverts, targeted using Facebook’s data. The company has warned that the effect on its revenue could be sharp and said it might shut down the audience network if they go forward.

Ironically, this latest imposition has provided Facebook’s best opportunity to push back. Many developers who depend on advertising have also been up in arms about the changes, letting Facebook position itself as a defender of the underdog.

Simultaneously, Apple is facing a general revolt by app makers from Epic to Spotify. While Facebook has conspicuously avoided backing Epic’s lawsuit against the App Store, it is far from averse from using the situation to extract concessions from Apple. 

“Facebook and everyone else feels more emboldened to speak out in public, in part because any retribution that Apple takes can now be used in lawsuits,” says Mr Barnard.

“In the past they felt more threatened because Apple could bring the hammer down in various ways.”

Ultimately, however, there is also a deeper reason for the two firms to be such enemies. According to journalist Steven Levy’s book, Facebook: The Inside Story, Mr Zuckerberg has been intrigued since Facebook’s early days by the idea of building a “social operating system”, hoping his company could repeat Microsoft’s trick of dominating the world through Windows.

In spite of multiple attempts to secure his independence, which included an abortive attempt to build a Facebook smartphone, he has never managed it.

Today there are signs Mr Zuckerberg sees a way out. He frequently refers to his multi-billion dollar bets on virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) as “building the next computing platform”.

His belief that headsets, wristbands and even mind-reading interfaces might one day replace the smartphone appears to be deadly sincere. If he’s right, Facebook might have a chance to finally be its own gatekeeper. 

Describing his plans in a recent interview, Mr Zuckerberg couldn’t resist another little swipe, making sure to mention that Facebook did not simply want to “put an Apple watch on your face”.

It just so happens that Apple, too, is reportedly building an AR headset.

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