Can we trust Apple with the App Store?

On the App Store, Apple is legislator, judge, jury and hangman. Apple sets the rules. It has the last word on which apps you can buy, download and use officially on your iPhone or iPad. And most importantly, Apple can change its mind at any time and remove an application, even to promote its own applications at the expense of a competitor and even if this competitor is a small business that depends on the App Store for its very existence .

As the world takes a closer look at the power of Silicon Valley, this status quo is now being re-examined. The presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) believes in fact that Apple should be dismantled: "Either they run the platform or they play in the store," she said. The edge in March. The Supreme Court recently launched antitrust litigation against Apple. And a recent scandal, in particular, has again raised the question: Apple is moderating the App Store fairly?

Apple is fully aware of the fact that it is at the center of its concerns: last week, the company published a new web page called "App Store – Principles and Practices", in which it defends the stewardship of the company on the shop. The App Store offers "equal opportunities for developers," says Apple, even listing all applications competing with its own services (including Google Maps, Facebook Messenger and Amazon Music) and available for free on the App Store. . .

But Apple's defense is full of holes. Yes, Apple has its guidelines for the App Store and a review process, but after a decade, it is clear that the company does not apply them systematically or often chooses to claim them for the benefit of Apple. Even for authorized apps on the store, developers still have to fight against Apple's services. Spotify – as the EU antitrust complaint makes clear – can never be the default music app on an iPhone. In addition, Apple's 30% discount means that if Spotify sells subscriptions through the App Store, it must charge more for its customers to break even. Apple's rules also prevent it from directing even the application's customers to its website so they can subscribe without paying those fees to Apple.

The most recent example of these problems is Apple's apparent ban on apps that allow parents to control and monitor what their kids can do over the phone. April 27 The New York Times announced that Apple had, by coincidence, started banning or restricting "at least 11 of the 17 most-screened parental control and screen control applications" at about the same time that Apple was publishing its own version of this idea on iOS 12. "Apple has approved our software 37 times," said a representative of OurPact to The edge. "For the moment, they are retroactively applying these restrictions that have not yet been put in place."

According to Apple, the removal of these applications had simply gone as usual: the company reacted to Time article explaining that these apps just broke the rules. In 2017, Apple updated its policies on the App Store to prohibit consumer applications from using an extremely powerful feature, called Mobile Device Management (MDM), to enable these controls parental. MDM is typically used by IT departments of companies and schools to manage the devices of their employees. Apple argued that it would be "extremely risky … for a private and consumer-centric business to install MDM control on the device of its customers" due to problems confidentiality. if a bad actor ended up in the iPhone of a child.

Apple is not completely out of order here. In 2010, a company called EchoMetrix, which offered parents parental control software to monitor their children's Internet traffic, was surprised to pass this data on to the other branch of its business: Pulse, the division of market research of the company.

But if Apple is so concerned about the privacy risks of MDM software, why did it come up with this feature in the first place, approve these banned parental control apps for years before changing the strategy in 2017, without always delete them after this change has been adopted? As OurPact – one of the now banned applications – documented, Apple has approved its applications using MDM many times over the years, including 10 updates in 2018. "From day one, the very first version OutPact we submitted to the App Store for review at MDM in it. We clarified the questions we asked the application review team about our use of MDM, "said Dustin Dailey, Senior Product Manager at OurPact. Other apps, such as Kidslox and Qustodio, also saw their updates rejected from the summer of 2018, the year of the first announcement of Apple's Screen Time feature. (The two companies have since filed an antitrust complaint against Apple.)

Meanwhile, the developers of these apps have come together to demand an Apple API that would allow them to re-offer these services in an Apple-approved format, even going as far as to offer accurate specifications for that. that would imply. After all, they argue, if Apple is truly committed to "creating an ecosystem of innovative and competitive applications," the company should invest its money where it is and let those services compete. This seems unlikely though: according to Dailey, Apple would have informed the company that even though they found another approved method for running the application, the application blocking feature itself was fundamentally problematic for Apple .

According to Apple, a spokesman for Apple, the timing of Apple's enforcement is not a good idea, even though the company insists it is a coincidence. The New York Times. (When The edge tended to clarify some of these inconsistent policies, Apple declined to comment further.)

Meanwhile, Apple still allows many MDM applications on the App Store, such as Jamf Now, aimed at businesses, or many MDM solutions available at the university level for managing iOS devices for students. Why does Apple allow employers to leave their customers 'data vulnerable or schools to put their students' data at risk, but not parents to make similar decisions with devices purchased by their kids?

The most charitable explanation is that Apple really believes that the use of these APIs is an unacceptable risk to consumers and allows businesses and schools to use them simply because there is no other recourse or that these large institutions are better equipped to manage this risk.

But this is a strangely restrictive view of this type of application, and it ignores the fact that almost all the applications and services we use carry the risk of becoming bad actors. After all, Facebook is allowed to stay on the App Store, despite its many security flaws that have compromised user data, and Amazon may ask you for your credit card number without fearing that Jeff Bezos will steal it. So, for Apple, saying that these parental control apps are too risky, it's an arbitrary line, and it's hard to say why we should trust big business not to steal customer data more than those which are now prohibited.

At best, Apple's management here is inconsistent; at worst, he favors his own services. None of these reasons is positive about Apple's ability to properly manage or moderate the App Store in a fair manner. (The former Apple App Approval Manager said he was "really worried" about his behavior.) All of this highlights the biggest problems with Apple's walled garden, whether you live or die as Apple wishes. Even if you are a developer who has been building an app for years, all of this can be immediately removed simply because Apple has changed the rules of the game.

Apple is well aware that its leadership on the App Store is under fire from critics, and it already seems to want to be less anti-competitive. Take the Steam Link app from Valve, which finally made its surprise debut nearly a year after Apple's mysterious blocking of Apple due to "commercial conflicts with application rules" (although it works the same way as other remote desktop applications based on a local network of the store). The approval came just days after the Supreme Court's decision to apply an antitrust case against Apple for monopoly practices on the App Store.

Next week, the company will have the greatest opportunity to convince the developers that it will treat them fairly. Monday marks the start of the company's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), where Apple presents developers every year why they need to build apps for the Apple platform and where Apple should come up with new ones software and hardware.

For many, the most important feature in iOS 13 might not be a new dark mode or a cancellation gesture. Instead, it will be a promise that Apple will let you start a business without fearing that a new rule will bring it back to destruction.