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 in between Apple staff members and executives continue to be shared by Epic as proof for its case against Apple.
In the current batch of emails, 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 belief that it looks for to degrade the exposure of those apps.
According to internal Apple correspondence sent as evidence by Epic, an Apple worker wrote an e-mail regarding a collection of apps on the App Store that belonged of the VoiceOver collection. In the e-mail, which was forwarded to Sarah Herrlinger, Apples senior director of global accessibility policy, the employee declares that Fisher feels “very strong” about not including completing apps on the platform. The email reads:
Hey there Andrea,
Simply talked to Tanya about featuring Google and Amazon apps in the VoiceOver collection and she asked us to exclude them from the lineup. Although they may be our finest and the brightest apps, Matt feels extremely strong about not including our rivals on the App Store store, so Yanta asked us to use the exact same filters for this collection. Im sorry I didnt examine 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 specific example of Apple including Peacock, Hulu, and Hulu Plus on the platform, regardless of them taking on its own Apple TV+ streaming service.
When compared to its own apps, Apple has long faced criticism that it decreases the exposure of contending third-party apps on the App Store. In 2019, the business changed its App Store algorithm after it recognized that numerous of its apps were ranking greater on App Store search results instead of apps made by other designers. Regardless of the change, research from analytics firm Sensor Tower at the time showed that first-party Apple apps ranked first for over 700 search terms.
( Via iMore).