Mark Zuckerberg has openly criticized Apple’s approach to the iPhone 20 years after its launch, addressing the implications for developers.
The Meta Platforms Inc. CEO made his remarks during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he expressed mixed feelings about Apple. He acknowledged the significance of the iPhone as “one of the most important inventions of all time” but questioned the company’s current revenue strategies.
On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that aired on January 10, Joe Rogan himself confessed to having reservations about Apple, prompting Zuckerberg to share his perspective. He pointed out the timeline of the iPhone’s inception in 2007, alongside his own journey with Facebook, which began in 2004.
Zuckerberg noted that while smartphones have become the “dominant platform” and it is “great” to “build these tools that everyone can have in their pocket,” Meta did not contribute to the creation of these devices as they were developed while he was focused on launching Facebook.
He argued, “Apple has ‘used that platform [of the iPhone] to put in place a lot of rules that I think, feel arbitrary and feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while – Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later and they actually, I think year-over-year I’m not even sure they’re selling more iPhones at this point. I think the sales might actually be declining.
“I think part of it is each generation doesn’t actually get that much better so people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before, the number of sales has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company?
“Well, they do it by basically like squeezing people and, like you’re saying, having this 30 percent tax on developers by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it.”
As an example, Zuckerberg discussed AirPods, which he acknowledged as “cool,” but criticized Apple for limiting connectivity options for competitors.
Zuckerberg continued: “Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods basically to connect to it and it’s much more seamless and they’ve enabled that but they’ve not let anyone else use the protocol.
“If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there. And whenever you push on this they get super touchy and they basically wrap their defence of it as, ‘Well, if we let other companies plug into our thing then that would violate people’s privacy and security’.
“It’s like no, just do a better job at designing the protocol.”
Zuckerberg views this situation as “wild” but remains hopeful that Apple’s lack of recent innovation will eventually allow competitors to surpass them.