Apple admits it modified the App Store results in its favor

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appstore 1000x600.jpg
appstore 1000x600.jpg

If all surprises were like this, the world would be very boring: Apple has admitted that it lied and that contrary to what he claimed at the time, he manually modified the search results of the App Store to favor his applications over the rest.

This “confession” has been given in the framework of the trial that faces Apple and Epic Games and that is leaving us authentic jewels for posterity about the “good work” of the apple company. And it is that it is not necessary that Epic Games be the good guy in the movie, for Apple to be the bad guy, someone might say.

The accusation that Apple prioritized its applications ahead of the competition in the results of the Apple Store dates from 2019, when after an investigation by media such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the apple firm defended itself, claiming that searches in its application store were determined by “an algorithm secret with 42 different variables », but fair.

Well, a new email conversation unveiled at the trial proves otherwise. And not only that: Apple itself has admitted, in the words of Debankur Naskar, responsible for the search system of the App Store, that «we are removing manual push and search results should be more relevant now«, In specific reference to one of the arguments of the prosecution.

This argument supports what is admitted, that Apple interfered in the search results of the App Store for the benefit of its own applications, and as an example it gives one of the company’s applications, a file manager whose functionality would be equal to that of the popular Dropbox, but it appeared ahead of it, despite being newer and much less known.

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In its defense, Apple has shown another email conversation in which Matt Fischer, vice president of the App Store participates, in which he seems to berate his subordinates: «[¿Quién] gave the green light to put the Files app on top of Dropbox in organic search results? I didn’t know we did that, and I don’t think we should«, Says the manager. «In the future, I want similar requests for your review and approval.“, Add.

How do Fischer’s underlings, Naskar included, justify it? Noting that it was “a mistake.” An “error” that lasted for 11 months, which required manual intervention and which Fischer does not order to eradicate, but rather be warned before doing something like this again. But there is a darker issue if it fits in all this pantomime.

The meanest thing about this particular case, however, is not so much that Apple prioritized its application over Dropbox (Google has done the same). What is truly petty, as reflected in another message in which Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games and main promoter of the offensive against Apple, participates, is that “Dropbox was not even visible on the first page [de los resultados de búsqueda]».

That is to say, Apple not only illegitimately and with a high probability, illegally (there are details that have yet to be determined by justice, since the same criteria do not have to be applied to searches on the Internet or in a specific portal) its applications over the counter of the rest, but degraded the most competitive applications, which is much worse.

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The same journalist who covers the news in The Verge does not believe the explanations that Apple gives him and reasons are not lacking: if they lied before, why wouldn’t they continue to lie now? Not to mention a curious detail to say the least: the files app was still the first in the cloud storage category after supposedly fixing the bug.

Given this latest information, Apple published the following statement:

“We created the App Store to be a safe and reliable place for customers to discover and download applications, and a great business opportunity for all developers. App Store Search has only one goal: to get customers to get what they are looking for. We do this in a fair way to all developers and we do not benefit our applications over those of any developer or competitor. Today, developers have many options to distribute their applications and that is why we work hard to make it easy, fair and a great opportunity for them to develop applications for our customers around the world. “