How is this morally and ethically wrong? Do you know the details of the arrangement between apple and zoom?
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Apple Gave Zoom Access to Special API to Use iPad Camera During Split View Multitasking
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How is this morally and ethically wrong? Do you know the details of the arrangement between apple and zoom?
I can see a desire to want to limit this due to privacy reasons to prevent a less than ethical app continuing to use the camera after you put the app in the background and tried to hide this fact. Having it as a distinct entitlement to be requested can prompt a further review.
Weeks later after they went through another appeal process to a higher tier of review, the reviewer agreed with them that it was acceptable and approved the app? Not the instantaneous response that we've seen for other apps but weeks later which seems more likely that it's been slowly working through the process.
How is granting an entitlement to other companies like Zoom and reportedly Google Meet anticompetitive on Apple's behalf?
Courts have recently shown that you cannot copyright and API however you can of course copyright it's implementation. What Apple is gating is access to the implementation and nothing I've seen indicates that access to someones implementation of an API is something one can't restrict.
Near as I can tell Apple doesn't have a financial interest in Zoom and if the reports that Google Meet also has this entitlement one could consider that granting access to a competitor to Apple on multiple axis which seems the antithesis of what an anticompetitive company might want to do. If they granted this entitlement exclusively to their own apps (FaceTime, though it seems to always pause my videos when it goes into the background) then that would be anticompetitive because it would mean that Zoom couldn't build an app that competes with FaceTime, arguably a comparable product (Zoom could be used as a replacement for FaceTime, arguably during the pandemic it has been).
The charge is that a monopoly isn't allowed to use it's monopoly powers to unreasonably favour their own products to the detriment of the market. The existence of Apple granting access to this to a competitor is evidence that weighs in their favour that they aren't, at least in the case of Zoom, preventing access to equivalent APIs.
Since most people today believe in relative good and evil based on their feelings and not absolutes of good and evil then how can one say that Apple is 100% morally and ethically wrong.
yeah, this is what i don’t get. Apple allowing only its OWN apps to access the camera in the background may arguably be anti-competitive (Depending on other factors). Apple allowing a third party to do so, when apple has no financial or other interest in the third party, doesn’t seem anti-competitive, even if apple picks and chooses the third parties. Apple is not mommy and daddy, and it doesn’t have to treat all the developer children identically.
But this is different. That is on how the app operates, not how to app gets its money.
Ok. Watched it. Cook didn’t say anything about whether some apps have different entitlements than others. He just said the App Store rules apply equally to all apps. And this issue has nothing to do with App Store rules, so if apple told congress that all developers have equal access to all SDKs, this video isn’t it.
"Some developers are favoured over others though, isn't that correct?"
Cook: "That is not correct"
They didn't use the word privilege specifically, but I don't see how you can separate what apps are allowed to do and what developers are allowed to use. They're inextricably linked.
Well that interpretation doesn’t make any sense. It’s always been the case that some developers have different entitlements than others. Apple makes no secret of this. They publicize it in the developer webpages. These include things like MFi entitlements and CarPlay entitlements. I believe ClassKit is another one. There are a number of these. For each you need to apply, sign special contracts, pay additional royalties, etc. And obviously, we know from every WWDC that some developers get earlier access to things than others. Cook surely didn’t mean to suggest that these don’t exist, and the whole discussion is about the rules, which seems to frame his answer.
It is amusing that you use the example of making zoom the official video meeting app... because that is precisely what MS did to anger both US and EU regulators with IE. Creating private userland APIs and then unfairly granting access to them in order to meddle in a competitive market is arguably worse than anything MS did. As iOS devices are seen more as important tools and less as delightful toys, the more the pressure will grow for regulators to act.
You don't see the difference between the mere picking of commercial partners and what Apple is doing? Really?
What makes it different is that iOS is a general computing platform relied upon by millions and millions of people for most if not all of their computing, and anti-competitive actions like those undertaken by Apple not only damages developers not receiving preferential treatment, but also iOS users who are unfairly (likely illegally) coerced into making purchase, or use, decisions that benefit Apple and its partners.
General computing platforms are held to a higher set of standards than console devices. If Apple wants to call the iPad a computer, and market it as a replacement to traditional desktop and laptop machines, well, it is time for Apple to start treating it like one.
Your thinking is very simplistic. Once you allow Apple to do the things you suggest are perfectly legal they can use it to advance their own anti-competitive agenda. For example, Apple can use this to help Zoom (not Apple competitor) to win agains Microsoft (Apple competitor) thus weakening the latter's market position. More importantly, legality aside, you implying that what Apple is doing is normal is just ridiculous. Either Apple is selling a general purpose computing platform which all software developers can use for developing and marketing their wares or they own a close platform where they let chosen companies to make money.
I am very confused by everything you wrote. what MS did with IE is not at all “precisely” the same. MS had a monopoly, to start with. And IE was Microsoft’s OWN product; as far as I know, Apple has absolutely no interest, financial or otherwise, in Zoom.
I just don’t get your point. Leveraging a monopoly in one product to build a monopoly in another - what MS did with IE - is clearly an antitrust problem.
Picking commercial partners, when you don‘t have a monopoly in anything, is what nearly every company does every day. Restaurants have exclusive supply contracts. Some pick and choose only one authorized delivery partner. Makers of widgets partner with a single logistics and delivery company. Companies enter into exclusive data provider contracts. This is all completely normal, and nobody has ever said there is anything wrong with it until apple does it?
On the first page of this thread someone reported that Google Meet also has this entitlement as well, arguably Google's Android much more of a competitor to Apple iOS that Microsoft's Windows Phone OS is. Zoom also is a direct competitor to FaceTime, one could completely replace FaceTime with Zoom so it's weird to say Zoom isn't competing with Apple given it's product is a market substitute for FaceTime.
How so? If they are open about giving different entitlements to some apps then that's clearly a privilege that only some apps get. And yet that's exactly what Cook is saying they don't do. How is that not just a bald-faced lie? To be clear, I'm not a lawyer, this may be totally legal and Cook has worded whatever he's saying in such a way that somehow "we don't" means "we do", I'm just looking to understand how.
I never said that. What I said was that APIs themselves aren't protected -- a simple standalone statement, and one that you agree with.
Apple competes in the video calling market with FT, so they're in the marketplace, and they've put themselves in a position to pick and choose which features their competitors will have access to. Regulators in the EU and US are already investigating them. This is just another thing that will be held against them.
It seems like each major competitor in the videoconferencing market actually has access to it, once they enter into whatever contractual arrangements are necessary for apple to protect competitor’ s privacy - apple needs to make sure that when apps are not in the foreground and are accessing the camera, there’s a good reason and the user expects this behavior. Zoom and Google Meet currently seem to be supported. I’m sure others are working on it.
I don't know if you're being obtuse or if you are actually confused. It isn't hard to understand.
They aren't picking commercial partners. IBM picked a commercial partner in MS to supply DOS for the IBM PC. That isn't what is going on here. They're picking competitors in a marketplace they both control and participate in. You seem smart enough, so what is it you aren't understanding?
I would like to see the Judge "demand" the complete list of private APIs provided to "select" App Devs !
Don't need the list of App Devs that received such a Bennie from Apple, that can be dug up via those with an interest.
Don't need the list of App Devs that received such a Bennie from Apple, that can be dug up via those with an interest.
Perhaps I'm confusing your definition of "protected", I had assumed you meant copyrightable which in the recent Oracle and Google case was determined that the definition of an API, it's parameters and names, is not copyrightable. However we're not talking about Zoom re-implementing Apple's API, we're talking about Zoom being granted access to Apple's API implementation which near as I can tell is something that the creator of said API can protect under copyright law. Perhaps you can enlighten me on your definition of "protected" to ensure that we both understand the definition of the word you're using and the context you're using it in.
Probably the part where it's anticompetitive to grant a competitor access to a private API.
They don’t have any monopoly in video conferencing. They allowed arguably the two biggest videoconferencing competitors (zoom and google) access to the feature.
And even if they were picking and choosing their competitors, they are picking and choosing competitors only on one platform, which is not itself a monopoly. It’s like a mall owner that also owns the Jamba Juice franchise in the mall not allowing in an Orange Julius. So what? The mall isn’t a monopoly - there‘s another mall down the street.
(And, by the way, every mall nearly does this - the first competitor in a category gets to veto other competitors from leasing space in the same mall).
You hit the nail on the head. I've been on the other side of this: I worked for a company that provided its own set of APIs. Some APIs we made available through the general partner program, and some we reserved for internal co-product teams and trusted, very specific third parties. That simple fact is that public APIs are extremely expensive and complex to support, both lowering product quality and and slowing product release cycles down, because they greatly increase the number of test cases you have to validate for release, and increase the number of real world use cases that you miss in your testing. At some point you have to evaluate the cost-benefit of releasing a particular set of APIs to the general world.
It isn't the same as Jamba Juice or which mall you're in. The mere fact that they've put themselves in the position, not just this time but on other occasions also, to advance the interests of some competitors at the expense of others, in a market they control AND operate in, is clearly anti-competitive, and likely a violation of the law. The EU is investigating them for just that reason.
Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU prohibits "abuse of a dominant market position". Is creating private APIs that expose OS functionality required for what a reasonable person would consider integral functionality for certain apps, and then picking and choosing who accesses that functionality based on whatever arbitrary means Apple decides upon, the "abuse of a dominant market position"? The market is the market for iOS applications. I'd say yes. Hell yes, it is.
If you disagree, that's fine. But I think it is pretty clear cut.
I mean that the API function signatures are not copyrightable, and therefore are not protected. It bugs me when people say API and mean the implemented functionality and not the interface. Pedantic? Sure. But my comment should be understood in the context of the language I was replying to.