Apple Exec: We Feature Competitors’ Apps ‘All The Time’ on the App Store

On May 3, the Epic Games vs. Apple trial got underway, and every day, new emails between Apple executives and workers continue to be shared by Epic as proof for its case against Apple.
In the most recent batch of e-mails, the vice president of the App Store, Matt Fischer, declares that Apple includes apps made by its competitors “all the time” on the store and declines the sentiment that it looks for to deteriorate the exposure of those apps.
According to internal Apple correspondence sent as proof by Epic, an Apple employee wrote an email relating to a collection of apps on the App Store that belonged of the VoiceOver collection. In the email, which was forwarded to Sarah Herrlinger, Apples senior director of international availability policy, the employee claims that Fisher feels “extremely strong” about not including contending apps on the platform. The email checks out:
Hey Andrea,
Just talked to Tanya about featuring Google and Amazon apps in the VoiceOver collection and she asked us to omit them from the lineup. Although they might be our best and the brightest apps, Matt feels very strong about not featuring our competitors on the App Store store, so Yanta asked us to use the exact same filters for this collection. Im sorry I didnt inspect this earlier.
Reacting to the claim made by the staff member, Fischer states that Apple features and promotes competing apps on the App Store “all the time,” and points out the particular example of Apple featuring Peacock, Hulu, and Hulu Plus on the platform, in spite of them completing with its own Apple TV+ streaming service.
When compared to its own apps, Apple has long faced criticism that it reduces the direct exposure of competing third-party apps on the App Store. In 2019, the company adjusted its App Store algorithm after it recognized that a number of its apps were ranking higher on App Store search results page instead of apps made by other developers. Regardless of the change, research study from analytics firm Sensor Tower at the time showed that first-party Apple apps ranked first for over 700 search terms.
( Via iMore).