Apple Won a Battle to Lose the War
By: M.G. Siegler
Tags: Tech, Apple, 4til40, Legal, Epic

Apple Won a Battle to Lose the War

Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

It depends on what your definition of a link is. Or really, in some ways, what your definition of the internet is. If it’s all really just a series of tubes, it’s not entirely clear that a link you click to take you somewhere else actually takes you somewhere else versus a link that allows you to pay for something on a page as that’s also essentially taking you somewhere else. It’s confusing, yes. But this is probably what it’s all going to boil down to in the next battle of Apple v. Epic.

Apple says they won. Epic says they lost. That should be cut and dried, no? But maybe, just maybe, both sides are saying what they think they need to say for appearances sake. Perhaps there’s actually quite a bit of nuance and gamesmanship here — surprise!

My read is that Apple did win — exactly what everyone always knew they would win. But in winning that battle, they actually lost something far more important. There is no way around it: the judge’s order to stop App Store anti-steering is a big one. And seemingly one Apple did see coming given the Japanese settlement a few weeks back. But this is still a major blow because it both continues and accelerates the boulder rolling down the hill of real reforms to the App Store.

Apple may think that they’re doing enough in a piecemeal fashion to stave off major change, but they’re not. If anything, they need to make a major change to stanch the bleeding. But they won’t do that. They’re both too proud and too arrogant. They’re so sure that they’re in the right here that they don’t see that it actually doesn’t matter.

Epic, I think, sees that. They’re coy about it, but my suspicion is that they’re a lot smarter about all of this than they’re letting on. And that we’ll only find that out well after the fact. After the App Store has been majorly reformed by Epic’s “losses” here.

As I’ve said before, this is some Sun Tzu shit.

And I’m really not sure Apple sees this. They’re failing to read the room and more importantly, the courtroom. They’re going to interpret this court order in the way that best serves Apple, obviously. But others are going to challenge that, obviously. Regardless of who wins, it just continues the bad vibes yielding bad blood within Apple’s own developer community. And it’s going to keep the pressure on them, politically.

I mean, someone inside Apple must see all of this. It’s obvious. But hubris is blinding those in the position to do something about it, clearly. Apple should just take a look around, see which way the wind is blowing, and make some major changes to appease the courts and to please their developers. End this.

They should open things up to win these arguments on the product side of the equation — something which they’re uniquely situated to do thanks to about two dozen aspects of the iPhone. They should compete on the playing field in which they already have home field advantage.

And that’s the craziest part of all of this. They would undoubtedly still win far more often than not. Both because of those inherent iPhone advantages, but also because their product offerings on the in-app and Apple Pay side are very good! Let them stand on their merits! That, in turn would also likely help Apple in a number of ways!

But they don’t see it that way. And the bigger fear is that they don’t see it at all. Instead, we’re about to battle about what the definition of a link is. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll get into the weeds of MFNs. Appeal after appeal. Delay after delay. Buy time for other revenue to fill in the inevitable gaps. Meanwhile, all of this will just continue the appearance that a $2.5T company is nickle and diming their developers to death. Not a great look.