Apple's Default Experiences
Apple's app store rankings, and Apple's broader stance
The Teardown
Tuesday :: September 10th, 2019
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Packing App Store Results
Several months ago, I wrote a novel-length newsletter draft about default user experiences, mostly on our phones. Apple’s revamped Apple News release piqued my curiosity because the purported content-discovery service was missing quite a bit of content. Significant publications with successful digital subscriber channels like the New York Times refrained from participating, betting instead on their content and acquisition. Others, like The Wall Street Journal, allowed some content but locked much behind their paywall. I wondered whether Apple’s service would elevate or stamp down specific content providers depending on their choice to open their catalogs to Apple. Reading between the lines, I wondered what opportunity some of those providers had at all.
The New York Times expose on Apple’s app store rankings helped me wipe dust off the old idea for another newsletter. The NYT piece summarized the recent state of App Store:
…But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia.
Apple’s apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.)
The article adds further context to the specific timing when Apple’s apps punted others off or to the farthest corners of the field:
Apple added its apps to the App Store in June 2016. Since then, it has been the top result for many popular search terms, according to the Sensor Tower data. Those Apple apps held on for years while top rivals remained stuck below, sometimes hundreds of spots down the list, the data shows.
The New York Times doesn’t expand on all the details, but some necessary background is worth the discussion. Before 2016, Apple sold iPhones preloaded with many Apple apps such as Mail and Messages, and others less critical but useful like Stocks. New iPhone owners didn’t need to download any other Apple apps to get started. However, the fully-loaded device arrived with one significant restriction: default apps couldn’t be uninstalled. Apple changed this policy beginning in 2016, allowing users to remove defaults and reinstall them when FOMO kicked into high gear.
Apple ensured users knew where to look for their castaway apps: the App Store. Coinciding with features designed to help other developers, Apple also made its apps available in the store, like Stocks, but also others like Clips and GarageBand.
Default Placement Wins
We’ll likely never know whether Apple deliberately boosted their apps in the App Store. But Apple’s targeted purpose or willful ignorance has done its damage:
On Aug. 21, Apple apps ranked first in 735 of roughly 60,000 search terms tracked by Sensor Tower. Most of the tracked searches were obscure, but Apple’s apps ranked first for many of the popular queries. For instance, for most of June and July, Apple apps were the top result for these search terms: books, music, news, magazines, podcasts, video, TV, movies, sports, card, gift, money, credit, debit, fitness, people, friends, time, notes, docs, files, cloud, storage, message, home, store, mail, maps, traffic, stocks and weather.
Two example paths of thought seem logical:
Some iPhone owners use Apple’s podcast app because they genuinely enjoy the way it works
Some iPhone owners find and user other podcast apps because those have superior discovery and playback features, and frankly, thoughtful design. Apple’s Podcasts app doesn’t deserve any awards.
It’s difficult for me to fathom using Apple’s default Podcasts app, but perhaps I’m an elitist. A substantial Apple presence gathered at the top of the search result set for “podcast” is bound to steer people toward Apple and away from products from other developers.
The NYT report leads back to an old question: what choices do app developers possess when they play on the app store court? Not many, it seems. Installation-focused ad placements boost costs, and may drive only marginal downloads and purchases. Some apps explode due to pure virality (e.g. TikTok). Luckily, Apple recently extended an olive branch after looking deeper into the publicly-reported issue:
Over the past several months, Apple engineers said, they began noticing how the algorithm was packing results with Apple apps. First, they stopped the algorithm from doing that for certain searches. In July, they turned it off for all Apple apps.
On July 12, many Apple apps dropped sharply in the rankings of popular searches. The top results for “TV” went from four Apple apps to two. “Video” and “maps” changed from three top Apple apps to one. And Apple Wallet dropped from the No. 1 spot for “money” and “credit.”
Mr. Schiller and Mr. Cue said the algorithm had been working properly. They simply decided to handicap themselves to help other developers.
“We make mistakes all the time,” Mr. Cue said.
“We’re happy to admit when we do,” Mr. Schiller said. “This wasn’t a mistake.”
Phew. Thanks, Apple, for already having keen eyes on the problem.
Increasing Defense In The Trenches
I hate to use the word need, so let’s start with another: benefit. Use in a sentence: Apple would benefit from distractions regarding scrutiny of the App Store, but perhaps this story dies on its own
The company’s corporate position is, generally, to extol the virtues of its developer ecosystem, and remind us all how much revenue it has generated for large and small app-makers alike. However, there is little choice involved: you deliver or sell your app in the App Store, or not at all. Jailbreaks allow end-users to install apps from other sources, but even technically-minded folks don’t bother en masse. Roughly thirty-percent of every dollar earned is carved away by Apple no matter what.
Senior management is almost evangelical in its broader market stance. The company cares about its users, its developers, and most importantly, promises to execute on the best privacy stance in the mobile market. Sometimes, it doesn’t:
Earlier this year Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) discovered a small collection of hacked websites. The hacked sites were being used in indiscriminate watering hole attacks against their visitors, using iPhone 0-day.
There was no target discrimination; simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, install a monitoring implant. We estimate that these sites receive thousands of visitors per week.
TAG was able to collect five separate, complete and unique iPhone exploit chains, covering almost every version from iOS 10 through to the latest version of iOS 12. This indicated a group making a sustained effort to hack the users of iPhones in certain communities over a period of at least two years.
Ben Thompson penned a detailed post about the back and forth between the two companies that I won’t recap here. Apple, aligned with its recent brusk response pattern, chaffed at the suggestion that iOS was exploited for nearly two years. Ben’s conclusions (emphasis mine) are astute:
…the last paragraph, which basically says that iOS security is better because Apple’s business model is better than Google’s, is tone deaf at best. The fact remains that Google did the heavy lifting here to discover and close a pretty significant iOS vulnerability; Apple should be thanking Google if anything. Yes, it must be annoying to have a competitor in mobile operating systems highlighting your shortcomings, but if Apple actually cared first and foremost about end use security, they would not only welcome this disclosure but also perhaps build their own team focused on rooting out security vulnerabilities, both in iOS and Android. At the end of the day this story is about iOS having a security vulnerability, and Apple should take responsibility for that.
Indeed, it is the defense played by Apple that seems so surprising, not the iOS exploit discovered by one of Apple’s most significant partners and competitors. Some of us, users of Apple’s default experiences on the iPhone, may have unknowingly shipped away sensitive information. Thus, it should’ve been Apple that informed us with clear information about our risks when using Apple devices. Similarly, perhaps it should’ve been Apple that admitted it carelessly packed its own apps at the top of the App Store rankings. It only stopped doing so when someone else pointed it out.