I respect and appreciate the time you've taken to outline your thoughts. I completely understand what your saying, that, essentially, apple are now in the spotlight for this type of thing due to the amazon business last year. You might say that they dare not put a foot wrong on this type of thing or they might well be crucified in the court of public opinion.
Well, in this case it's not so much the public opinion, but the matter of avoiding any needless antitrust scrutiny.
Like any large business, Apple makes decisions that benefit the bottom line. The fact that so many of Apple's decisions are relatively consumer-friendly (making accessible products, focusing on privacy, etc), is just a side-effect of that. However, Apple isn't so completely arrogant as to think it can do anything it pleases, and it's pragmatic enough to not whack the hornet's nests of government regulators and lawmakers unless there's a really good financial benefit from doing so.
For instance, Apple fights tooth and nail to defend its multi-billion dollar App Store business, however when it came to AirTags, there's little doubt that it deliberately
delayed the release of them until third-party Find My products were on board in order to avoid more allegations of anticompetitive behaviour. There's just no need to fight a battle over a $29 product that's ultimately designed to sell more iPhones — something that third-party products will also help do.
In the case of Amazon, there was clearly a benefit to Apple from crafting a special deal — getting the two companies to play nice in everything from Amazon Prime on the Apple TV to selling the Apple TV in the App Store. However, Apple also figured out how to do this in a reasonably fair and equitable manner that would allow an even bigger win — Apple could avoid looking like it was making special deals while getting even more premium on-demand video providers to support all of its tvOS and iOS features.
Siri works amazingly well on the Apple TV when it comes to searching for content, even across multiple apps, but it's likely Apple had to give up 15 percent of its App Store commission to encourage developers to do that. In that sense, it wasn't much different than if Apple had simply paid these companies outright to implement these features. It was never a special deal just because these were big companies, but rather a matter of Apple
wanting something very specific from them that it basically had to pay for.
I'd encourage you to read a book called "Dying for an iPhone" describing a new generation of workers struggling to meet corporate requirements for speed and precision in producing iphones and other high tech products precisely at a time when consumers around the globe are queueing up to buy the latest models. Apples success is intimately bound up with the production of quality products at high speed. Given its control of the commanding heights of hardware, software and design, Apple has remained in the driver's seating setting the terms and conditions for Foxconn and, in turn, for its workers.
You are absolutely correct and I agree completely when it comes to Apple's supply-chain issues, but I also think that's in an entirely different category than what we're talking about when it comes to potential App Store deals, whether those are with Amazon, Sony, or anybody else.
Apple is only going to sign a special deal with Sony if there's some really lucrative benefit for
Apple in doing so, and I honestly don't see what that benefit would possibly be. Is Sony's IP going to be so insanely popular on mobile that it will drive hordes of customers to buy an Android just to play
God of War or
The Last of Us? Maybe, but I don't see Apple kowtowing to Sony merely because of that possibility.
Further, it's not in Apple's best interests to craft a special deal with only
one company. Why should Apple give one company an edge over its other competitors when it comes to the App Store, especially when Apple is the one that holds all of the cards. I'm sure at least part of the reason why the "Amazon deal" was actually the "Video Partner Program" was because Apple wasn't at all interested in specifically empowering Amazon to succeed. Instead, it's far better to give everyone a level playing field so they can fight for market share while Apple simply sits back and reaps the rewards equally from all.
I do not believe Apple, Sony and other big tech will not bow to public opinion, but instead attempt to become more opaque in their operating models through use of NDAs etc.
If the Epic games lawsuit has proven anything, it's the fact that these things eventually do come out, and companies
do have to be careful how they operate. Nothing remains hidden for long, so it's ultimately a matter of how they can spin it and weather the storm when the negative stuff does come out.
Still, I think you're ultimately right that they don't care
that much about public opinion. As any politician or marketing executive will tell you, the public is fickle and has a short attention span. Those of us who hang out on sites like
MacRumors too easily forget that the other 99% of the public has only the vaguest idea that Epic and Apple are engaged in a lawsuit at all, much less all of the more specific revelations that are coming out of it.
