Apple’s developer relations are a major point of controversy at the moment following the court ruling related to Epic Games. Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg discussed Meta’s relationship with Apple in an interview that was just published at Stratechery. Here’s what he said.
Zuckerberg outlines history of troublesome Apple relationship
Ben Thompson of Stratechery was able to interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week on a wide range of issues. They met in person Monday at Meta’s first ever LlaamaCon developer conference.
The full interview was just publishedand contains some interesting tidbits on Zuckerberg and Meta’s history working with Apple.
Thompson begins by mentioning that many of Facebook’s developer platform announcements over the years are now either “dead” or “massively constrained” per the original vision.
Naturally, this steered the conversation to Apple.
Here’s Zuckerberg:
As the usage transitioned from desktop web to mobile, Apple basically just said, “You can’t have a platform within a platform and you can’t have apps that use your stuff”. So that whole thing, which had grown to be a meaningful part of our business — I think by the time that we had our IPO in 2012, I think games and apps were about 20% of our business — but that basically just didn’t have much of a future. (…)
I think it’s really just an artifact of Apple’s policies that I think has led to this deep bitterness around not just this, but a number of things where they’ve just said, “Okay, you can’t do these things that we think would be valuable”, which I think to some degree contributes to some of that dynamic between our company and theirs. I think that’s unfortunate.
Apple and Meta don’t have the most friendly relationship, despite being somewhat dependent on each other for a portion of their respective success.
Looking back at the history of the two companies’ relationships, Apple’s restrictions around certain app policies undoubtedly did play a factor.
Those practices, to this point at least, have never been ruled anticompetitive though. As a result, developers have needed to simply adapt to work around them.
For Meta, as the full interview gets into, that has led to a shift of company strategy on more than one occasion and even greater success over time.
What do you think of Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on working with Apple? Let us know in the comments.
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