Do App Store Rules Matter?

View fullsize View fullsize ...

4w

Antitrust posturing

"You give me the awful impression, I hate to have to say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever." - Christopher HitchensLate last year the US congress's antitrust committee held a series of hearings, and produced a 400 page report, on competition issues around big tech platforms. The report, co-authored by the...

Jun 2021

Boxes, trucks and bikes

The traditional way to think about ecommerce penetration is to look at share of total retail sales, and then deduct things like car repair, gasoline and restaurants - to get to ‘addressable retail’. On that basis, US ecommerce was at 16% penetration at the end of 2019 and increased to 20% or so in 2020, adding 12-18 months of growth in a year. ...

May 2021

Apple, Fedex and the cookie apocalypse

We’re now a couple of weeks into Apple’s latest iOS privacy move. If you want to track users between apps and the web, or from an ad through the app store to an install, then you need to ask permission and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes. On some reports, CPMs are already down by half. We could spend a...

May 2021

Can Apple change ads the way it changed music and games?

Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company. iPods were a much bigger business than the Mac, and they also made Apple a dominant force in the music industry. Then, as we all know, Apple jumped horse to the iPhone, which was a vastly bigger business again. But meanwhile, music switched from the download-to-own model pioneered by Apple to subscription...

May 2021

Does Amazon know what it sells?

Of Amazon’s top 50 best-sellers in “Children's Vaccination & Immunisation”, close to 20 are by anti-vaccine polemicists and 5 are novels about fictional pandemics. This poses two questions. First, how much content moderation should a universal bookshop do? Second, does Amazon really know what it sells? The content moderation questions here are closely...

May 2021

Resetting the App Store

Apple launched the App Store in 2008, and tightened up the payment rules in 2011, and we’ve been arguing about it ever since. In many ways the issues haven’t really changed - it’s just that the numbers got a lot bigger. Almost everyone understands that some kind of locked-down, sandboxed software model has been a huge step forward for both users and...

Apr 2021

Step changes in ecommerce

This might be quite an important chart. The lockdowns of the past 12 months led to a lot of forced adoption and forced experiment, and...

Apr 2021

Is content moderation a dead end?

‘Gin Lane’ - Hogarth In the late 1990s, Microsoft was the evil empire, and a big part of ‘evil’ was that it was too closed - it made things too hard for developers. But then came the great malware explosion, which at one point shut down half the Pentagon, and we realised that the...

Apr 2021

Amazon's private labels

Amazon is a big and very aggressive company, that’s radically changing how retailing works, and that attracts a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism. Some of this is entirely justified. However, there’s one strand of criticism that fascinates me because it attacks Amazon for something that’s been part of retail for 150 years - the private label business....

Mar 2021