Facebook and Apple aren’t exactly getting along right now, and as evident by recently-revealed emails between the two companies, these tensions have existed for over a decade. The emails shed some light on Facebook’s official iPad app — specifically, why it took the social network over a year to get it approved by Apple and on the App Store.

Facebook and Apple have been at each other’s throats lately for a myriad of reasons. In December of last year, Apple updated the App Store with its privacy labels feature — requiring developers to outline all of the data that they track and link to users. It’s largely seen as a win for user privacy, but with an app like Facebook, it makes it abundantly clear just how much personal information the company is keeping track of. It’s a move Facebook openly criticized, going as far as to create newspaper ads criticizing the feature. The tension continued into 2021 with the release of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5. The update requires apps to request user permission to have their activity tracked across other apps/websites, with this information being used for targetted advertising. Facebook again claimed it was a bad move, this time threatening to start charging people for Facebook if they didn’t allow the tracking.

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As hinted at above, disagreements like this between Apple and Facebook have been happening for quite some time. For part of its ongoing court case against Apple, Epic Games revealed emails between Apple and Facebook discussing the social network’s iPad app. Apple’s iPad was first released in April 2010, but it wasn’t until October 2011 that the Facebook iPad app was finally approved and put on the App Store. According to these emails, Apple didn’t want Facebook using “embedded apps” in its application — an eerily similar situation to one in August 2020 where Apple forced Facebook to removed embedded games from its Facebook Gaming iPhone app. This particular battle between Apple and Facebook appears to have gotten particularly heated, with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs referring to Facebook as “Fecebooks” in one of the shared emails.

 Why Apple Didn’t Want Embedded Apps In The Facebook App

In the early 2010s, one of Facebook’s biggest focuses was on apps/games integrated directly into its website — including things like FarmVille and Candy Crush. Facebook wanted to bring these same experiences to its iPad app, but since they’d be embedded in the Facebook app rather than standalone apps on the App Store, they technically bypassed some of Apple’s policies. In one email, Apple’s former head of marketing — Phil Schiller — said, “I don’t see why we want to do that. All these apps won’t be native, they won’t have a relationship or license with us, we won’t review them, they won’t use our APIs or tools, they won’t use our stores, etc.” In other words, anything that skirted past Apple’s proprietary systems wasn’t going to fly.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposed a few possible compromises in another email, including things like omitting a directory of its embedded apps, preventing these apps from running in an embedded browser in the Facebook app, and using Safari to take people to these apps/games if they wanted to access them. Zuckerberg also proposed that Apple allow Facebook users to share posts related to these embedded apps, but Jobs fought back on that. In an email responding to these proposals, he said, “I agree — if we eliminate Fecebooks third proposal [the one allowing news feed posts] it sounds reasonable.”

 

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Even though Facebook did eventually release its iPad app with most of the features intact, it is pretty eye-opening to see how little has changed from 2011 to 2021. Facebook has long been fighting against the App Store’s policies, Apple has always been set in its ways of forcing proprietary ruleson developers, and none of that has changed in the years since.

Source: CNBC

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Joe Maring
(1530 Articles Published)

Joe has been actively writing and talking about consumer tech since 2012. His biggest passion lies with smartphones, but he’s happy to talk your ear off about just about anything with a CPU. He lives in Kalamazoo, MI with his wife, two cats, and pit bull/boxer mix.

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