The week of iOS 14-based leaks continues, with hints about new Apple hardware and a new home screen view. The rumored list for apps on the home screen view strikes me as particularly interesting and particularly likely. Cracks about it copying Windows Phone aside, it seems likely to me because it also mimics a lot of the minimalist/time-well-spent launchers I’ve seen for Android.
Maybe Apple will also let us put apps in arbitrary places on the home screen, too, instead of forcing them all to start at the upper left and flow down. Or maybe not! The interesting thing is that for the first time ever, Apple is reconsidering its grid-of-apps homescreen model.
I want to complete a thought I started in yesterday’s newsletter about Sherlocking. The pertinent issue these days isn’t so much that Apple, Google, or Microsoft would make a first-party app that duplicates an pre-existing third party app. To me the issue is that those first-party apps get access and integration into the core OS in a way that those third party apps never did and likely never will. Call it “self-preferencing.”
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In Apple World, examples include Apple Podcasts getting integrated into Siri, but Spotify being left out. The Apple Watch can reply to iMessages, but no other smartwatch can. And iPhones are only able to do their fast pairing tricks with Apple’s own headphones — with a hand-wavy excuse that a specialized hardware chip is necessary for that to happen. I could make a similar list for Windows 10 and Bing or OneDrive or Google search and Google Ads.
Anyway, I’m revisiting it a day later because it came up today in a congressional antitrust hearing! Adi Robertson covered it in a tweetstorm and in an article on our site. Senator Amy Klobuchar mixed up self-preferencing and Sherlocking while she spoke, which hit me because yesterday I was tempted to say we should resurrect the term Sherlocking but tweak it for the specific context of special first-party platform access.
I recognize that it’s easy to ride my high horse to a moral high ground and look down my and my horse’s nose at any app a platform creator may make and tut-tut. But the issue is actually more complex — these big tech companies shouldn’t be precluded from making their own apps at all, as Adi notes:
Grocery stores, for example, sell store-brand products that compete with other items on the shelves. Amazon does this too, but Open Markets Institute expert Sally Hubbard argued that its size and ubiquity make the situation different. Likewise, under a completely “neutral” ecosystem, Apple and Google wouldn’t preinstall any apps on your phone — but antitrust enforcers don’t want to go that far.
It’s worth drawing out the exchange that led to that first sentence. Adi has it in a tweet:
Okay, somewhat back on track: Lee is asking how something like AmazonBasics differs from Costco selling a store-brand product.
Hubbard: “The difference is that Costco is not nearly as dominant as Amazon is."
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) March 10, 2020
And that right there is the crux of it. At a certain point the sheer size and power of these companies make us feel in our guts that the rules ought to be different. But what those rules should be is unclear. And it’s even less clear how big and powerful a company has to be in order to be subject to them.
This is why The Verge covers tech policy the way it does, by the way. We got from a rumor about iOS 14 to congressional testimony about Kirkland — and I think those things are deeply connected.
You may rightfully find this congressional testimony abstruse and boring and I would be the last person to blame you. But it will eventually help determine whether pairing your next set of Bluetooth headphones is a pain in the ass or not. Or it will determine what hotel you stay at because the rules for how Google shows ads next to search results could change.
I came at this from the angle of Apple’s upcoming OS, but I could have just as easily talked about Google’s search page results redesign flip-flop earlier this year or even Microsoft’s back and forth on Bing integration in Windows.
The point is that in addition to worrying about data privacy, regulation is also going to touch your experience of these products. Hopefully for the better.
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