Eshu Marneedi

Don’t pretend this is about choice

Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters:

Apple on Wednesday hit out at Meta Platforms, saying its numerous requests to access the iPhone maker’s software tools for its devices could impact users’ privacy and security, underscoring the intense rivalry between the two tech giants.

Under the European Union’s landmark Digital Markets Act that took effect last year, Apple must allow rivals and app developers to inter-operate with its own services or risk a fine of as much as 10% of its global annual turnover.

Meta has made 15 interoperability requests thus far, more than any other company, for potentially far-reaching access to Apple’s technology stack, the latter said in a report.

“In many cases, Meta is seeking to alter functionality in a way that raises concerns about the privacy and security of users, and that appears to be completely unrelated to the actual use of Meta external devices, such as Meta smart glasses and Meta Quests,” Apple said.

Meta hasn’t released these interoperability requests itself, leaving the onus on Apple to truthfully represent Meta’s interests, but Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, alluded to what they might be about on Threads:

If you paid for an iPhone you should be annoyed that Apple won’t give you the power to decide what accessories you use with it! You paid a lot of money for that computer and it could be doing so much more for you but they handicap it to preference their own accessories (which are not always the best!). All we are asking for is the opportunity for consumers to choose how best to use their own devices.

It’s obvious that Meta wants its iOS apps to interact with Meta Quests and glasses (“accessories”) better and more intuitively. But let’s look at the list of features Meta asked for through interoperability requests, as written in Apple’s white paper titled “It’s getting personal”¹ as a response to the European Commission, the European Union’s executive agency:

• AirPlay
• App Intents
• Apple Notification Center Service, which is used to allow connected Bluetooth Low Energy devices to receive and display notifications from a user’s iPhone
• CarPlay
• “Connectivity to all of a user’s Apple devices”
• Continuity Camera
• “Devices connected with Bluetooth”
• iPhone Mirroring
• “Messaging”
• “Wi-Fi networks and properties”

Apple puts the list quite bluntly in the white paper:

If Apple were to have to grant all of these requests, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp could enable Meta to read on a user’s device all of their messages and emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use, scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their passwords, and more. This is data that Apple itself has chosen not to access in order to provide the strongest possible protection to users.

Third-party developers can accomplish most of what they want from these iOS features with the application programming interfaces Apple already provides. They can use AirPlay to cast content from their apps to nearby supported televisions, use App Intents to power widgets and shortcuts, use APCS to display notifications from a user’s iPhone on a connected device, make apps for CarPlay, use Continuity Camera in their own Mac apps, view devices connected via Bluetooth, send messages with embedding logging using the UIActivityViewController API, and view details of nearby Wi-Fi networks. All of this is already available within iOS with ample developer and design documentation.

For instance, if Meta wanted to create an easy way to set up a new pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses, it could use the new-in-iOS-18 API called AccessorySetupKit, demonstrated at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference to display a native sheet with quick access to Bluetooth, near-field communication, and Wi-Fi. There’s no need to get access to a user’s connected Bluetooth devices or Wi-Fi networks — it’s all done with one privacy-preserving API. As Apple puts it in its developer documentation:

Use the AccessorySetupKit framework to simplify discovery and configuration of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi accessories. This allows the person using your app to use these devices without granting overly-broad Bluetooth or Wi-Fi access.

From this Apple-presented feature interoperability list, I can’t think of much Meta would want that isn’t already available. The only features I can reasonably understand are iPhone Mirroring and Continuity Camera, but those are Apple features made for Apple products. Meta could absolutely build a Continuity Camera-like app that beamed a low-latency video feed from a connected iPhone to a Meta Quest headset, as Camo did for Apple Vision Pro. That’s a third-party app made with the APIs Apple provides today, and it works flawlessly. Similarly, a third-party iPhone Mirroring app called Bezel on visionOS and macOS works like a charm and has for years before Apple natively supported controlling an iPhone via a Mac. These apps aren’t new and work using Apple’s existing APIs.

Meta’s interoperability requests are designed as power grabs, much like the DMA is for the European Commission. At first, it’s confusing to laypeople why Meta and Apple feud so often, but the answer isn’t so complicated: Meta (née Facebook) missed the mobile revolution when it happened in 2009, was caught flat-footed when social media blew up on the smartphone, and suddenly found itself making most of its money on another company’s platform. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, isn’t one to play anything but a home game, so instead of working with Apple, he actively worked against it for the last decade. Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 to emphasize its “metaverse” project — now an artifact of the past replaced by artificial intelligence — because it didn’t want to play on another company’s turf anymore.

Now, Meta as an organization has a gargantuan task: to transition from a decade-long away game to a home game. This transition perfectly coincided with the launch of App Tracking Transparency and Apple Vision Pro, two thorns in Meta’s side that further complicate what’s already a daunting feat. If Meta wants to play its own game, to have its own cake and eat it too, it needs to make its own hardware and software — and to transition from Apple hardware and software to its own, it needs Apple’s cooperation and favor, which it hasn’t ever curried in its existence. Meta knows there’s no chance these interoperability requests will ever be approved, and it knows the DMA isn’t on its side, but it’s filing them anyway to elicit this response from Apple. I’m honestly surprised Meta decided to slyly provide a cheap-shot statement to Reuters instead of cooking up its own blog post written by Zuckerberg himself to turn this into an all-out war.

The default response from any company ready to pick a fight with Apple is always that Cupertino cites privacy as a means to justify anticompetitive behavior. Apple has had enough of this, as evidenced by this passage in its white paper:

But the end result could be that companies like Meta — which has been fined by regulators time and again for privacy violations — gains unfettered access to users’ devices and their most personal data.

Scathingly bitter. Grammatically incorrect (“companies like Meta… gains”) — the team writing this really could’ve used Apple Intelligence’s Proofread feature — but scathing.

Anyone who has talked to a layperson about Meta’s products in the last few years knows that they’re all concerned about Meta snooping on their lives. “Why are my ads so strangely specific? I just searched that up.” “I hear Meta doesn’t care about my privacy.” “Instagram is listening to my conversations through my microphone.” Generally, however, most people think of Apple as privacy-conscious, so much so that they store their secrets in Apple Notes, knowing that nobody will ever be able to read them. No amount of marketing or conditioning can achieve this — Meta is indisputably known as a sleazy company whereas Apple is trusted and coveted. (This is also why it’s an even bigger deal when Apple Intelligence summarizes and prioritizes scam text messages and emails.)

Meta, Spotify, and Epic Games — Apple’s three largest antitrust antagonists — love to talk big game about how people are dissatisfied by how much control Apple exerts over their phones, but I’ve only ever heard the opposite from real people. When I explain that Apple blocks camera and microphone access to all apps when the device is asleep, they breathe a sigh of relief. Apple’s got my back. Nobody but the nerdiest of nerds on the internet ever complains that their iPhone is too locked down — most people are more wary of spam, scams, and snooping. For the vast majority of iPhone users, the primary concern isn’t that their phone is too locked down, but not locked down enough.

Meta has never built a reputation for caring about people’s privacy, so it never understood how important that is to end users. Most people aren’t hackers living in “The Matrix” — they just don’t want to feel like they’re passing through a war zone of privacy-invading bombs whenever they check Instagram. There is and always will be a good argument for reducing Apple’s control over iOS, but whatever Meta’s advocating for here isn’t that argument. Where I’m willing to cede some ground is when it comes to apps Apple purposefully disallows due to their payment structure or content. I think Xbox Game Pass should be on the iPhone, and so should clipboard managers and terminals. If Apple doesn’t want to host these apps, let registered developers sign them without downloading third-party app signing tools. This is uncontroversial — what isn’t is giving a corporation known for disregarding privacy as even a concept unfettered access to people’s personal information.

The issue isn’t choice as Meta apologists proclaim it to be, evidenced by Meta’s very anticompetitive, anti-choice smear campaign in 2021 against App Tracking Transparency. “Let us show permission prompts” is a nonsense request from a company that took out full-page newspaper ads just a few years ago against the very idea of permission prompts. Meta isn’t serious about protecting privacy or letting people choose to share their information with Zuckerberg’s data coffers, but it is serious about turning iOS into an “open” web that benefits the interests of multi-billion dollar corporations. No person with a functioning brain would believe Meta — whose founder said it needed to “inflict pain on Apple” — is now interested in developing features with Apple via interoperability requests. The fact that the European Union even entertains this circus is baffling to me.