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, brand-new e-mails between Apple executives and employees continue to be shared by Epic as evidence for its case versus Apple.
In the current batch of e-mails, the vice president of the App Store, Matt Fischer, claims that Apple includes apps made by its competitors “all the time” on the store and turns down the belief that it seeks to degrade the direct exposure of those apps.
According to internal Apple correspondence sent as evidence by Epic, an Apple staff member composed an email concerning 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 worldwide ease of access policy, the employee declares that Fisher feels “incredibly strong” about not including contending apps on the platform. The email reads:
Hello Andrea,
Simply talked with Tanya about featuring Google and Amazon apps in the VoiceOver collection and she asked us to exclude them from the lineup. They may be our best and the brightest apps, Matt feels incredibly strong about not featuring our competitors on the App Store shop, 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 worker, Fischer says that Apple functions and promotes completing 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, regardless of them taking on its own Apple TELEVISION+ streaming service.
When compared to its own apps, Apple has long dealt with criticism that it reduces the exposure of completing third-party apps on the App Store. In 2019, the business adjusted its App Store algorithm after it understood that much of its apps were ranking higher on App Store search engine result instead of apps made by other designers. Despite the modification, research from analytics firm Sensor Tower at the time revealed that first-party Apple apps ranked initially for over 700 search terms.
( Via iMore).