The Creator Economy is Being Held Back by Apple
Apple has always thought of itself as the kind of company that empowers creative people to do their best work. From the fonts on the original Macintosh, to the camera on the first iPhone, it has built world-class tools for people who make things. But now, through its App Store policies, Apple is now one of the main barriers to independent creators thriving on the internet. It’s not because they changed their minds about who they want to serve. This is just what happens when a company manages a platform as if it were a product.
Apple is a product company. They famously obsess over details, and want every element of the user experience to be perfect. They require total control, because it allows them to use their taste to make choices that are frustrating at first for users (like removing the headphone jack) but then turn out later to be prescient and perhaps even courageous. There’s no question, they make the best products, and they extract a steep price for them.
But iOS is a platform. And the habits you acquire by being a good product company do not always help to run a platform effectively. Too much control, taste, and value extraction can break a platform. These three principles served iOS well in the early days when the platform was nascent and needed to be hand-nurtured. But now that the iPhone is ubiquitous, the App Store has become part of the basic infrastructure of the internet. And many of its policies around in-app purchases and tightly controlled App Store curation are not well-suited—and in fact harm—the broader ecosystem.
