Apple’s App Store is now also under antitrust scrutiny in the UK

Apple is facing another antitrust investigation in Europe into how it operates the iOS App Store.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced today that it’s opened an investigation following a number of complaints from developers alleging unfair terms and as a result of its own work in the digital sector.

“The CMA’s investigation will consider whether Apple has a dominant position in connection with the distribution of apps on Apple devices in the UK — and, if so, whether Apple imposes unfair or anti-competitive terms on developers using the App Store, ultimately resulting in users having less choice or paying higher prices for apps and add-ons,” it wrote in a press release.

“This is only the beginning of the investigation and no decision has yet been made on whether Apple is breaking the law,” it added.

In a statement, Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the CMA, also said: “Millions of us use apps every day to check the weather, play a game or order a takeaway. So, complaints that Apple is using its market position to set terms which are unfair or may restrict competition and choice — potentially causing customers to lose out when buying and using apps – warrant careful scrutiny.”

An Apple spokesperson sent us this statement in response to the CMA action:

We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place for customers to download the apps they love and a great business opportunity for developers everywhere. In the UK alone, the iOS app economy supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, and any developer with a great idea is able to reach Apple customers around the world.

We believe in thriving and competitive markets where any great idea can flourish. The App Store has been an engine of success for app developers, in part because of the rigorous standards we have in place — applied fairly and equally to all developers — to protect customers from malware and to prevent rampant data collection without their consent. We look forward to working with the UK Competition and Markets Authority to explain how our guidelines for privacy, security and content have made the App Store a trusted marketplace for both consumers and developers.

The European Union already has an open antitrust investigation into a number of elements of Apple’s business — after announcing a probe of the App Store and the iPhone maker’s payment offering, Apple Pay, last summer.

US lawmakers have also been questioning Apple as part of a major antitrust probe into big tech. And a bill has just advanced in Arizona that aims to force both Apple and Google to allow third party payment options in their smartphone stores.

The EU’s Apple investigation, meanwhile, remains ongoing. The video games publisher Epic Games — which has been engaged in a vicious public battle with Apple over what it decries as Cupertino’s unfair ‘tax’ on developers — recently sought to join the EU’s case by filing a complaint with the European Commission last month.

Epic previously filed the same complaint in the UK — so it’s one of the unhappy developers the CMA cites.

Epic Games takes its Apple App Store fight to Europe

With the UK now outside the European Union, the CMA looks set to take on a more prominent role as a regional regulator. Post-Brexit, it’s free to investigate the same issues as the Commission (whereas under EU rules national regulators are supposed to avoid duplicating effort).

If it can move faster than the bloc’s competition commission it may have the opportunity to mould the standards that apply to tech giants. (Although the CMA said today that it “continues to coordinate closely” with the Commission and other agencies to tackle what it described as “global concerns”.)

Last fall the UK also announced a plan to establish a pro-competition regulation regime aimed at tackling the market power of big tech. That followed a major market study of online platforms and digital advertising carried out by the CMA — which published its advice to the government on shaping that regime in December.

“As the CMA works with the government on these proposals – which will complement its current enforcement powers – the CMA will continue to use its existing powers to their fullest extent in order to protect competition in these areas,” it said today.

“Our ongoing examination into digital markets has already uncovered some worrying trends,” Coscelli added. “We know that businesses, as well as consumers, may suffer real harm if anti-competitive practices by big tech go unchecked. That’s why we’re pressing on with setting up the new Digital Markets Unit and launching new investigations wherever we have grounds to do so.”

In other recent actions targeting tech giants, the CMA has opened an investigation into Google’s plan to phase out third party tracking cookies — and launched an inquiry into Uber’s planned acquisition of UK SaaS maker Autocab.

In its final report into the online ad market last year, it concluded that the market power of Google and Facebook had become so great a new regulatory approach and a dedicated oversight body is needed to address what it summarized as “wide ranging and self reinforcing” concerns.

The forthcoming Digital Markets Unit will form a key part of the UK’s regulatory response to big tech.

Apple Pay and iOS App Store under formal antitrust probe in Europe

Google’s plan to replace tracking cookies goes under UK antitrust probe

UK’s competition regulator asks for views on breaking up Google

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Cashify raises $15 million for its second-hand smartphone business in India

Tens of millions of people each year purchase a second-hand smartphone in India, the world’s second largest market. Phone makers and giant online sellers such as Amazon and Flipkart are aware of it, but it’s too much of a hassle for them to inspect, repair, and resell used phones. But these firms also know that customers are more likely to buy a smartphone if they are offered the ability to trade-in their existing handsets.

A startup that is helping these firms tackle this challenge said on Thursday it has raised $15 million in a new financing round. New York-based Olympus Capital Asia made the investment through Asia Environmental Partners, a fund dedicated to the environmental sector. The five-year-old startup, which counts Blume Ventures  among its early investors, has raised $42 million to date.

Cashify operates an eponymous platform — both online and physical stores and kiosks — for users to sell and buy used smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, desktops, and gaming consoles. 90% of its business today surrounds the smartphone category, explained Mandeep Manocha, founder and chief executive of Cashify, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“For consumers, our proposition is that we make it easy for you to sell your devices. You come to our site or app, answer questions to objectively evaluate the condition of your device, and we give you an estimate of how much your gadget is worth,” he said. “If you like the price, we pick it up from your doorstep and give you instant cash.”

A few years ago, I wrote about the struggle e-commerce firms face globally in handling returned items. There are many liability challenges — such as having to ensure that the innards in a returned smartphone haven’t been tempered with — as well as overhead costs in reversing an order.

Manocha said that phone makers and e-commerce firms have found better ways to handle returned items in recent years, but they still lose a significant amount of money on them. These challenges have created a big opportunity for startups such as Cashify.

In fact, Cashify says it’s the market leader in its category in India. The startup has partnerships with “nearly every OEM” including Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, and HP. “If you walk into an Apple store today, they use our platform.” For consumers in India, if they opted for the trade-in program, Apple.com also uses Cashify’s trading platform, he said.

The startup also works with top e-commerce firms in India — Amazon, Flipkart, and Paytm Mall. The firms use Cashify’s trading and exchange software, and also rely on the startup for liquidation of devices. The startup then repairs these gadgets and sells the refurbished units to customers.

“Essentially, whether you come directly to us, or go to popular e-commerce firms or phone OEMs, we are handling the majority of the trading,” he said. Even if a customer trades in the device to OEMs, or e-commerce firms, these companies sell the device to players like Cashify, which serves over 2 million customers in more than 1,500 cities.

The startup plans to deploy part of the fresh capital to expand its presence in the offline market. Manocha said Cashify currently has dozens of offline stores and kiosks at shopping malls across the country and it has already proven immensely effective in brand awareness among customers.

The startup also plans to expand outside of India, hire more talent, and invest more in getting the word out about its offerings. Manocha said the team is also working on expanding its expertise to more hardware categories such as cameras.

“The management team at Cashify has an excellent track record in building a strong consumer-facing franchise and building relationships with OEMs, e-commerce companies and electronic product retailers to be present across all touch points for the consumer,” said Pankaj Ghai, Managing Director of Asia Environmental Partners, in a statement.

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Version 2 of Google’s Flutter toolkit adds support for desktop and web apps

At an online event, Google today announced Flutter 2, the newest version of its open-source UI toolkit for building portable apps. While Flutter started out with a focus on mobile when it first launched two years ago, it spread its wings in recent years and with version 2, Flutter now supports web and desktop apps out of the box. With that, Flutter users can now use the same codebase to build apps for iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux and the web.

“The big thing that justifies the major version number shift is, of course, the availability of web and desktop support,” Flutter product lead Tim Sneath told me. “And that’s just a fairly profound pivot. It’s rare for products that you suddenly have all these additional endpoints.”

Image Credits: Google

He noted that because of Flutter’s open-source nature, web and desktop support had been “cooking in the open” for a while, so the addition of these endpoints isn’t a surprise. A lot of that work in getting these new platforms ready for the 2.0 release involved getting the performance up to par on these new platforms.

It’s worth noting, though, that Flutter desktop support is still behind an early-release flag in Flutter’s stable release channel and Google says developers should think of it as a “beta snapshot.” Web support, however, has transitioned from beta to stable and has become just another target for building apps with Flutter.

Image Credits: Google

On the web platform, specifically, Sneath noted that the team deliberately started out with a very standard, DOM-centric approach. But while that worked fine, it also meant performance was held back by that, especially for more advanced features. Over the course of the last year or so, the team started working on what it calls Canvas Kit. This WebAssembly-based project takes the same Skia graphics engine that powers Android and Chrome itself and makes it available to web apps.

“What that’s meant is that we can now essentially bypass the core HTML — sort of the document-centric parts of the web platform — and really use the app-centric parts of the web platform without leaving [behind] things like auto-complete of text or passwords and all the things that keep the web feeling very unique,” Sneath said.

Image Credits: Google

On the desktop, Google is announcing that Canonical is going all-in on Flutter and making it the default choice of all its future desktop and mobile apps.

Microsoft, too, is expanding its support for Flutter and working with Google on Windows support for Flutter. Given Microsoft’s interest in Android, that’s maybe no huge surprise, and indeed, Microsoft today is releasing contributions to the Flutter engine to help support foldable Android devices.

In total, Google notes, there are now over 15,000 packages for Flutter and Dart from companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Huawei, Alibaba, eBay and Square.

As always, there are dozen of other smaller updates to Flutter in this update, too.

Looking ahead, Sneath noted that the Flutter team plans to spend more time on Flutter as a framework for embedded devices and other somewhat nontraditional platforms. He also noted that the team is interested in how Flutter can help power ambient computing experiences.

“As we think about the ambient computing worlds where there are these core premises behind the ambient computing aspects — things like: Can it be searched easily? Can people make money off of the apps that they build and do it in a responsible way? We’re building support for those kinds of services. Better analytics, better ads frameworks, connectivity into things like Firebase and Google Cloud, so that people can not just take advantage of Flutter but the broader ecosystem services that Google provides,” Sneath explained.

Why your organization needs product principles

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Amazon’s GameOn app, a platform for sharing mobile gaming clips, launches on iOS

Mobile gaming hasn’t seen the same demand for streaming content in the past as desktop has, but Amazon sees a market there to extend Twitch’s dominance. After launching on Android back in November, the company’s mobile streaming centric app has just launched on Apple’s App Store.

The app lets users record short clips (anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes of content) of gameplay from a variety of titles that support screen recording capture. Users can screen record these clips directly into the GameOn library at which point they can add commentary or additional edits before publishing to the GameOn platform or sharing links to the platform on other sites.

The GameOn platform is interestingly fully disconnected from Twitch with separate branding and different channels. Amazon has been partnering with streamers to wholly focus on mobile gaming while promoting challenges unique to the app.The company says the service is compatible with over 1,000 mobile games.

Developers have been increasingly vigilant about brining more full-featured ports of desktop titles to mobile though the lack of sophisticated controls has made this a challenge. As gaming platforms aim to bring cloud streaming networks to iOS there could end up being more demand for shot-on-mobile content and titles that users control with a gamepad, but this will depend on whether the App Store grows more amenable to these platforms over time.

 

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Apple releases results from hearing health study

Was back in 2019, Apple launched Research. The app was the latest effort by a company looking to take a more serious approach to user health, built (naturally) around data collected from the iPhone and Apple Watch. The app debuted with four studies: heart health, women’s health, movement and hearing.

Today, the company is issuing results from the latter, conducted alongside the University of Michigan School of Public Health, a day prior World Hearing Day. Hearing loss is an issue the company has looked to tackle, due in no small part to its large — and growing — involvement in the headphone category.

Headphones have, of course, become a common source of long term hearing loss as the technology has proliferated. The company has also built noise level readings into its mobile operating systems, to offer notifications of loud environments. That info is also built into the health app, showing off both headphone levels and environmental sound levels – the latter of which can be a subtler source of hearing loss.

According to the study of “thousands” of participants in the U.S., a quarter of those involved encounter more than the WHO’s recommended daily limit of environmental sound exposure. 50% of those in the survey work or worked in in a loud environment. The numbers remain reasonably high, even as many or most have transitioned to a work-from-home setting during the pandemic.

“Even during this pandemic, when many people are staying home, we’re still seeing 25%of our participants experiencing high environmental sound exposures,” University of Michigan Associate Profession Rick Neitzel says in a release tied to the news. “The results of this study can improve our understanding of potentially harmful exposures, and help identify ways that people can proactively protect their hearing.”

Ten-percent of those surveyed, meanwhile, exceed the recommended limit for weekly headphone exposure, while a quarter reported ringing in their ears a few times a week or more.

Apple Research app arrives on iPhone and Apple Watch with three opt-in health studies

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Microsoft Azure expands its NoSQL portfolio with Managed Instances for Apache Cassandra

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, its latest NoSQL database offering and a competitor to Cassandra-centric companies like Datastax. Microsoft describes the new service as a ‘semi-managed offering that will help companies bring more of their Cassandra-based workloads into its cloud.

“Customers can easily take on-prem Cassandra workloads and add limitless cloud scale while maintaining full compatibility with the latest version of Apache Cassandra,” Microsoft explains in its press materials. “Their deployments gain improved performance and availability, while benefiting from Azure’s security and compliance capabilities.”

Like its counterpart, Azure SQL Manages Instance, the idea here is to give users access to a scalable, cloud-based database service. To use Cassandra in Azure before, businesses had to either move to Cosmos DB, its highly scalable database service which supports the Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL and Gremlin APIs, or manage their own fleet of virtual machines or on-premises infrastructure.

Cassandra was originally developed at Facebook and then open-sourced in 2008. A year later, it joined the Apache Foundation and today it’s used widely across the industry, with companies like Apple and Netflix betting on it for some of their core services, for example. AWS launched a managed Cassandra-compatible service at its re:Invent conference in 2019 (it’s called Amazon Keyspaces today), Microsoft only launched the Cassandra API for Cosmos DB last November. With today’s announcement, though, the company can now offer a full range of Cassandra-based servicer for enterprises that want to move these workloads to its cloud.

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Google restarts updates for some iOS apps after long pause triggered by lack of privacy labels

Google over the weekend began to update many of its flagship iOS apps after a lengthy delay caused by the company’s failure to add Apple’s newly required privacy labels in a timely fashion. Though Google earlier this year said it would “soon” begin to add the labels to its apps as they were updated, it has still yet to do so for a number of key properties — including Search, Photos, Assistant, Maps, Pay, Chrome and others.

Per Apple’s policy, developers cannot issue further updates until privacy labels are applied. That prevented Google from updating many of its top apps for a much longer period of time than usual — especially for a company of its size where minor updates containing bug fixes and performance improvements are issued on a regular basis.

Gmail, for example, hadn’t been updated for three months before the update that rolled out this weekend.

According their iOS App Store listings, Slides, Docs, Sheets and Calendar all received updates this weekend, as well. And over the past couple of weeks, updates for other newly labeled Google apps have also been restarted — including YouTube, YouTube TV, YouTube Music, Google Tasks and Google Podcasts, for example.

We’ve been tracking Google’s app updates here in Google Sheets. (Appfigures confirmed our spreadsheet’s accuracy by running it against its own data.)

This weekend’s set of newly updated apps aren’t the only ones from Google to have received their privacy labels in 2021. Labels can be applied without issuing an app update which makes them harder to spot, sometimes.

Across Google’s full suite of iOS apps, those apps with labels now include:

Google One, Google Podcasts, Google Stadia, Google Fit, Google Fi, Google Tasks, Google Chat, Onduo, Project Baseline, YouTube, YouTube TV, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, YouTube Studio, Google Meet, Google Smart Lock, Motion Stills, Google Fiber, Google Ads, Wear OS, Google Calendar, Google Classroom, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Play Movies, Google Home, Fiber TV, Google Translate and Google Authenticator.

Google has not said why it is taking so long to apply its labels. It initially attributed its delay to add the privacy labels to its annual holiday code freeze — a time of the year when the company pauses updates on its apps while many people take time off.

But as the weeks turned into months, it was clear that Google was taking a much more cautious and methodical approach to applying the labels than other large tech companies. As a result, it’s received increased attention and scrutiny of its app updates.

In fact, every time a new Google app was updated with a label, it made headlines.

Engadget today reported on Gmail and other apps being updated over the weekend, for example.

In mid-January, Google officially responded to the curiosity over its delays with a blog post explaining that its iOS apps would receive privacy labels as it received its next update. But the two have not necessarily gone hand-in-hand. Gmail received its privacy label back on February 22, according to reports, but hadn’t been updated until just now.

And the list of labeled apps is far longer than the list of updated ones.

Google has not responded to a request for comment at this time.

Google to add App Store privacy labels to its iOS apps as soon as this week

 

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