Zuckerberg takes on Cook, says Apple ‘biggest competitor’

Stressing that Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, Zuckerberg said that the company "increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors".

San Francisco: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has opened another front against Apple, saying that the iPhone maker and governments have the ability to access most peoples messages and its future results could be hurt by privacy changes in Apple’s iOS 14.

Stressing that Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, Zuckerberg said that the company “increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors”.

“iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem. It comes pre-installed on every iPhone and they’ve preferenced it with private APIs and permissions which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the US.

“And now, we are also seeing Apple’s business depend more and more on gaining share in apps and services against us and other developers,” the Facebook CEO emphasised.

Facebook chief operating officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg also said that the company will find ways to amplify stories about small businesses worried about Apple’s iOS changes.

Apple’s new privacy feature requiring developers ask for permission to track iOS users for ad targeting is set to go live in the next iOS 14 beta.

Zuckerberg said that Apple recently released so-called nutrition labels, which focused largely on metadata that apps collect rather than the privacy and security of people’s actual messages.

“iMessage stores non-end-to-end encrypted backups of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud. So when it comes to what matters most, protecting people’s messages, I think that WhatsApp is clearly superior,” he noted.

The iOS 14 privacy changes will impact the growth of millions of businesses around the world, Zuckerberg argued.

“Many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted ads. Now Apple may say that they are doing this to help people, but the moves clearly track their competitive interests and I think that this dynamic is important for people to understand because we and others are going to be up against this for the foreseeable future,” he noted.