Facebook’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call features CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling Apple’s iOS 14 moves and saying the iPhone maker is ‘one of our biggest competitors’ and questioning motives.
Yes folks, Zuckerberg of Facebook has wrestled a bit pro (at least for tech executives not named Larry Ellison) with his Apple confrontation.
Zuckerberg has a reason to be a little out of shape. Facebook said it could harm future results through privacy changes in Apple’s iOS 14. Zuckerberg argued that Apple’s changes are aimed at benefiting iMessage and harming small businesses.
Here is a full comment from Zuckerberg:
WhatsApp, and the direction we are heading with Messenger, are the best private social apps available. Now we have many competitors claiming privacy which is often misleading. Now, Apple has released so-called nutrition labels, which have focused primarily on metadata that apps collect rather than the privacy and security of people’s real messages. But iMessage saves unintended encrypted backup of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud. Apple and governments therefore have access to most people’s messages. So as for the most important thing, protecting people’s messages, I think WhatsApp is clearly better. As I try to use these earnings calls to discuss aspects of the business strategy that I believe are important to investors, I want to emphasize that we increasingly view Apple as one of our biggest competitors. iMessage is an important link in their ecosystem. It’s pre-installed on every iPhone, and they prefer it with private APIs and permissions, which’s why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the US. services against us and other developers. Apple therefore has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to give their own preference. And that’s affecting the growth of millions of businesses around the world, even with the upcoming changes in iOS 14, many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted advertising. Now Apple can say they are doing it to help people, but the movements clearly track their competitive interests. And I think these dynamics are important for people to understand, because we and others are going to resist them soon. Now our messaging services are still growing, but it’s an uphill battle, and our services need to be just as much better than private social platforms to succeed.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, noted that Facebook will find ways to magnify stories about small businesses that are concerned about Apple’s iOS changes.
Related:
Apple CEO Tim Cook did not address Facebook by name, but by the company’s position on privacy. Cook said:
Tomorrow is International Privacy Day, and we continue to set new standards to protect users’ right to privacy, not only for our own products, but also as the ripple in the pond that moves the entire industry forward. Recently, we are implementing new requirements in the App Store ecosystem that give users more knowledge and new tools to control the ways apps collect and share their personal data.