The social network’s “pivot to privacy” places iOS in its crosshairs. Welcome to tech’s subsequent huge competition.
The large question after CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook’s “pivot to privacy” is whether or not the organization becomes, without a doubt, sincere about guarding users’ private facts. (The consensus amongst critics: possibly now not as serious as you would possibly wish.)
What does appear sincere, however, is Zuckerberg’s newfound commitment to messaging. He needs Facebook to dominate non-public online communication to the same degree that it dominates what we call social networking these days.
When human beings pull out their cellphone to text their mother or plan a celebration with a set of pals, Zuckerberg needs them to try this on WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct—all of to work with each other, and finally with general SMS systems, too. And ultimately, he desires them to apply the one’s structures for tons extra than texting and chatting. The final vision is something akin to WeChat, the Chinese extraordinary app that humans use for everything from messaging to sharing videos to creating appointments, reviewing restaurants, and hailing rides.
However, to do so, Facebook will need to accomplish something no one else has yet been capable of doing: pull iPhone customers off of iMessage, Apple’s highly famous and person-friendly messaging platform. Ultimately, Facebook desires to construct an entire suite of messaging-based offerings that would compete with popular iOS apps. For the first time, that aim places Facebook in direct opposition now, not only with Snapchat, Google, and Twitter but with Apple.
It ought to get unpleasant.
For years, Facebook and Apple offered largely complementary merchandise. People bought iPhones, downloaded Facebook and Instagram, and spent huge chunks of time on those social networks, even with Apple’s native apps for calling and texting. Facebook made money from the centered ads in human beings’ feeds. Apple made money on the hardware, even as its software program kept users unswerving (or locked in, relying on your attitude).
iMessage particularly—with its user-friendly interface and stop-to-give up encryption—has been a bulwark for Apple to keep human beings from switching to Android devices. It isn’t a twist of fate that Apple has in no way constructed an iMessage app for Android phones, even though demand for it is high. For its part, Google has struggled to construct a hit messaging product, which is why many Android users have turned to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
The current slowdown in iPhone sales has Apple trying to make extra cash on software, subscriptions, and bills. Simultaneously, the plateauing recognition of the principal Facebook app has Facebook keen to invade new areas. And so the giants had been circling each other warily, with Apple CEO Tim Cook jabbing Facebook over privacy failures, at the same time as Zuckerberg has hit back over Apple’s presence in China. The tensions boiled over in January, while Apple cut off Facebook’s unique developer access after TechCrunch said that a Facebook VPN app had been violating Apple’s guidelines.
The clearest signal of the approaching conflict, in retrospect, came in October, on a Facebook profits call. In a remark that surpassed with incredible little awareness, Zuckerberg called Apple’s iMessage “our largest competitor by way of far.” He went on: “In essential international locations like the U.S. In which the iPhone is powerful, Apple bundles iMessage as a default texting app, and it’s nevertheless in advance.”
At the time, it seemed like hyperbole: Surely, Facebook’s largest competitors have been Snapchat and YouTube, no longer iMessage. But it wasn’t hyperbole: It became a touch that Zuckerberg had already begun considering non-public messaging as his organization’s future and identified iMessage as its best impediment.
Near-international dominance of messaging is not as far-fetched a dream for Facebook as it’d seem to the average American. WhatsApp is already the maximum famous messaging app in many nations outside the U.S. And China, including Brazil, India, Mexico, Germany, and Turkey. Messenger is close at the back of and has ended up the default messaging app for lots of Android users in North America.
One market where Facebook is regarded as facing little threat is China, where WeChat already does all the things Zuckerberg dreams of doing, and more. That sincerely made it easier for Zuckerberg to announce in his privacy manifesto this week that Facebook will no longer construct facts centers in oppressive countries—a robust signal that it’s giving up on the Chinese market.
That move makes it all the more apparent that Facebook sees its direction to increase blocked by using Apple and iMessage, specifically inside the United States. And it offers Zuckerberg fresh ammunition to fire again at Apple anytime Cook criticizes him on privacy. If Apple virtually cared approximately its users’ privateness, he’ll say, it might comply with Facebook’s lead in refusing to keep statistics in China, whose authorities have a record of traumatic get right of entry to customers’ records.
Nonetheless, Cook is sure to put up a fight. The analyst Ben Thompson makes a persuasive case that Apple’s struggles in China—the principal offender in its iPhone slowdown—are due in part to WeChat’s dominance there. With WeChat taking over a few of the key features of iOS for Chinese customers, including messaging, Apple lacks the software program lock-in that it enjoys in a good deal of the rest of the world. As a result, Chinese users feel little loyalty to Apple products and don’t have trouble trading in an iPhone for an Android phone.
Messaging might be the initial front in this contest, but it is the simplest one. The New York Times suggested last month that Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency to allow immediate payments inside WhatsApp. That will put it in opposition with Apple Pay, in addition to Venmo and others. Zuckerberg didn’t clarify how Facebook could monetize its push into non-public messaging, but bills, marketplaces, and e-commerce could be a logical method.
If Facebook were to become the WeChat of the sector’s relaxation, then Apple’s business outside China would begin to look plenty more like its business interior China, which is to say, vulnerable. So Apple needs to find ways to block Facebook from accomplishing that. Its crackdown on Facebook over the VPN app seemed like a warning shot. However, it could have also been a display of pressure that foreshadowed the drawn-out conflict to come.
