“Cook chose poorly” is one of those phrases you’ll someday read in a history book about the tech industry. That’s just one of the memorable lines from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ stinging rebuke of Apple this week, in which she ruled that Apple needed to change the way it handled external payments, buttons, and links in apps. And it needed to do so now. Apple says it will appeal, but it has already changed the rules. The app economy might never be the same.
How Apple lost control of the App Store
On The Vergecast: Monopoly Madness! Here’s what’s coming for Apple, Google, and Meta in court.
On The Vergecast: Monopoly Madness! Here’s what’s coming for Apple, Google, and Meta in court.
is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about what just happened and why it matters. After some very important party speaker updates, Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes walk through Apple’s years of closed-door meetings about app commissions, and the ways in which Gonzalez Rogers found she’d been misled throughout the process. (Nilay also takes a victory lap on the whole “buttons and links” thing.) We talk about how developers are responding to the news, as well as what new things you might be able to buy in the App Store, which new apps might suddenly be possible, and whether Apple has any moves left in this case.
After that, it’s time for… more monopoly talk! Meta and Google are both still in court fighting to keep their companies intact. We’re learning a lot about how important TikTok has become, how Meta sees the world in general, and why it feared what might happen if Google bought WhatsApp. Meanwhile, just down the hall in the DC District courthouse, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made an impassioned case that this trial could be the end of Google Search.
Finally, in the lightning round, it’s time for another (relatively brief) edition of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, followed by the latest from Worldcoin, Meta’s AI app, and more. We need more orbs, y’all.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Apple:
- A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store
- Apple changes App Store rules to allow external purchases
- ‘Cook chose poorly’: how Apple blew up its control over the App Store
- The future of the App Store depends on the difference between a ‘button’ and an ‘external link’
- Apple exec ‘outright lied’ during Epic trial
- Apple confirms it will appeal the App Store order.
- Epic says Fortnite is coming back to iOS in the US
- Apple approves Spotify app update with external payments
And in the Google and Meta trials:
- Sundar Pichai says the DOJ’s antitrust plan could kill Google Search
- Google confirms it’s close to getting Gemini support on iPhones
- The TikTok ban is back in court — in Meta’s antitrust trial
- Facebook execs worried Google would buy WhatsApp and make it ‘a cross-platform iMessage.’
- Apple hasn’t considered putting ads in its messaging app.
- WhatsApp showed ‘absolutely no signs of morphing’ into a social app.
And in the lightning round:
Update! I forgot the party speaker pictures. Here are some party speaker pictures. Thanks to everyone who sent them, keep ‘em coming.
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