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 executives and staff members continue to be shared by Epic as evidence for its case against Apple.
In the current batch of emails, the vice president of the App Store, Matt Fischer, claims that Apple features apps made by its competitors “all the time” on the shop and turns down the sentiment that it looks for to deteriorate the direct exposure of those apps.
According to internal Apple correspondence submitted as proof by Epic, an Apple employee wrote an e-mail concerning 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 worldwide ease of access policy, the staff member declares that Fisher feels “exceptionally strong” about not including contending apps on the platform. The e-mail reads:
Hi Andrea,
Simply spoken to Tanya about including 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 featuring our rivals on the App Store store, so Yanta asked us to apply the very same filters for this collection. Im sorry I didnt inspect this earlier.
Responding to the claim made by the worker, Fischer says that Apple features and promotes completing apps on the App Store “all the time,” and mentions the specific example of Apple including Peacock, Hulu, and Hulu Plus on the platform, in spite of them taking on its own Apple TELEVISION+ streaming service.
When compared to its own apps, Apple has long dealt with criticism that it decreases the direct exposure of contending third-party apps on the App Store. In 2019, the company changed its App Store algorithm after it recognized that much of its apps were ranking greater on App Store search results page instead of apps made by other designers. Despite the change, research from analytics firm Sensor Tower at the time showed that first-party Apple apps ranked initially for over 700 search terms.
( Via iMore).