Apple’s Fellow Phil Schiller Presented Epic iPhone Testimony

We’ve got the news of the Epic vs. Apple battle through genuine witnesses, and as a reflection, Phil Schiller, the current “Apple Fellow,” and the former senior vice president of worldwide marketing, has taken the stand for App Store. According to Schiller, Apple is a great partner to developers, selflessly upgrading developer tools and taking care of their needs. At a time, the testimony feels like a drawn-out advertisement for iOS.

 

The aim of the testimony is to showcase the App Store as a part of the iOS that can’t be replaced or removed through a competitor. To this end, we heard a thorough detail about the upgrades introduced to the iPhone that avail the developers in the App Store. The chips, the accelerometer, the Retina display, and the wireless upgrades. It’s obviously an Apple stand event.

 

Among the thorough detail, Schiller mentioned Metal, one of the dev tools comes from Apple. Apple’s counsel talked the lawyer mode of “roll tape!” and we’re gotten a 20 seconds video of Tim Sweeney on stage at WWDC, admiring Metal as the greatest tool that will enable developers like Epic Games to make the next generation of upgrades.

 

The overall impact we find from the list of upgrades is, importantly, that Fortnite completely could not have released on the first generation of iPhones, the chips and hardware couldn’t have managed the game, which is true. Also, Fortnite didn’t exist yet, so that’s a clearly good reason it couldn’t have been on those old iPhones. But there is another fact that Fortnite couldn’t have released on the first iPhones in 2007. However, the App Store also didn’t exist yet. This specific reason is somewhat not suitable for Apple’s argument that the iOS and the App Store are inseparable.

 

Schiller’s testimony takes us back in 2007 to describe the origin of the App Store. When the iPhone was released, all the apps on it were Apple’s own. All other apps were web apps. In response, there was an explosion of “jailbreaking,” essentially hacking the iPhone so you could place your own apps on it. This was the origin of the App Store: Apple triggered that people were going to keep their apps on the iPhone no matter what it did. If it wanted command of the process, it was needed to create an official method.

 

From this jump, privacy security was going to be the main concern, Schiller said. After all, the motive of the phone was that you could keep it around, which involved storing location information. So, iPhone was developed from the ground up with this in mind, Schiller says. This part of the testimony is a refutal to Epic’s argument that MacOS enables side-loading, and it is hence, anticompetitive that iPhone does not. To stop the jailbreaking, Apple implemented something unusual. Rather than introducing the world to a finished product, it announced it was working on something and that something was the App Store. The line of Steve Jobs that Epic has touted, “We don’t aim to make money off the App Store,” comes from these early days. When this announcement was made, Apple was not sure if it would make money, Schiller testified. He also clarifies that the line was not a promise that Apple surely would not make money. The App Store was a “biggest” risk, Schiller said. “We’re launching our brand-new products and doing something we’ve never done before on it, and we have no apps yet! So, we didn’t know how this is going to do.” This is credible. What is less convincing in this testimony is Schiller’s effort to redefine what it exactly means to “lock customers into our ecosystem,” a phrase that comes from a Jobs email included into evidence previously in the trial.

 

Schiller said that “see, ‘locked in’ has an accepted meaning, and it’s not a very friendly one: prisoners, for example, are locked in. Schiller presented this the old college attempt anyhow, explaining to the court that the thought behind “locked-in” was merely to make services more reliable and attractive so that users wouldn’t be willing to leave. Later in the email, Jobs discusses making the ecosystem even more “sticky,” which is less dangerous. But the glue traps are sticky, right? And when was the last time that got stuck to something was fine for you?

 

But wait, Schiller is a marketer. He has been Apple’s marketing fellow for years. He is supposed to always be closing. And so, if it sometimes looked like he presented Apple as like it was a selfless, do-gooder, responsive to developer’s requests for in-app payments, which was a then-growing business, by developing capability for that into the App Store, well, that’s his work. Still, presenting one of the most merciless capable cash machines in technology as a supportive friend of small developers is like coloring a whale shark orange and telling it a goldfish who feeds other goldfish.

 

Despite Schiller’s friendly behavior, a few of his testimony is an exertion. For example, he says he doesn’t look at mobile as a duopoly. He enlists Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon as competitors. The Amazon Fire mobile phone was disappeared in 2015, as was the Windows Phone.

 

But Schiller generally does what he requires to do for Apple. He’s cheerful, pleasant listening to, and sometimes, very convincing. The question in this case, though, is if convincing to a judge is as easy as convincing to Apple customers

 

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