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 employees and executives continue to be shared by Epic as evidence for its case versus Apple.
In the most recent batch of e-mails, the vice president of the App Store, Matt Fischer, claims that Apple includes apps made by its rivals “all the time” on the shop and turns down the belief that it looks for to degrade the direct exposure of those apps.
According to internal Apple correspondence submitted as evidence by Epic, an Apple employee composed an email relating to a collection of apps on the App Store that were a part of the VoiceOver collection. In the e-mail, which was forwarded to Sarah Herrlinger, Apples senior director of international ease of access policy, the employee claims that Fisher feels “incredibly strong” about not including competing apps on the platform. The e-mail checks out:
Hey there Andrea,
Just spoke with 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 best and the brightest apps, Matt feels incredibly strong about not including our rivals on the App Store store, so Yanta asked us to apply the same filters for this collection. Im sorry I didnt check this earlier.
Reacting to the claim made by the worker, Fischer states that Apple functions and promotes completing apps on the App Store “all the time,” and mentions the particular example of Apple featuring Peacock, Hulu, and Hulu Plus on the platform, in spite of them taking on its own Apple TELEVISION+ streaming service.
Apple has actually long dealt with criticism that it decreases the direct exposure of completing third-party apps on the App Store when compared to its own apps. In 2019, the company adjusted its App Store algorithm after it understood that a number of its apps were ranking greater on App Store search results page rather than apps made by other developers. Despite the modification, research study from analytics firm Sensor Tower at the time revealed that first-party Apple apps ranked initially for over 700 search terms.
( Via iMore).