In legal documents released senior app storemcgee by Epic Games ahead of an antitrust trial, Apple engineer likened App Store security to ‘butter knife in gunfight’ there is a revelation. Please make use of the sharing options available through the share button located at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to distribute to others is against FT.com’s terms of service and copyright policy. To purchase more rights, send an email to licensing@ft.com. Using the gift article service, subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles each month. You may get more details at www.fabulaes.com. According to legal filings published on Thursday, a senior Apple engineer compared the protections of its App Store against hostile actors to “carrying a plastic butter knife to a combat.”
The narrative was based on internal Apple documents quoting Eric Friedman, chief of the organization’s Fraud Engineering Algorithms and Risk (Fear) team, and was used by Fortnite creator Epic Games ahead of a crucial antitrust trial in California next month.
Friedman compared the way Apple evaluates new apps for the App Store to “more like the attractive girl who greets you at the Hawaiian airport than the drug-sniffing dog” in the newspapers. Apple was unable to “deflect sophisticated assaults,” he continued.
The information might provide a serious blow to Apple’s defence, which is based on its argument that the contentious 30% “tax” it charges for in-app purchases is required to pay for store curation and safeguard users from viruses.
The two businesses have been at odds about the charge for months. Epic filed a lawsuit against Apple last August after Fortnite was banned from the App Store for introducing its own in-app payment system, a workaround that denied Apple its commission.
Apple bans any third-party in-app payment methods, claiming that doing so could jeoparadise the iPhone’s security.
Epic launched a savage attack on Apple’s assurance of App Store security in hundreds of pages of newly published arguments for which each business was given access to the other’s confidential materials. The Silicon Valley behemoth was argued to have “no evidence” that its app review procedure “screens for security issues better than other methods of app distribution.”
The developer of the games provided a long list of instances of fraudulent apps that had previously been listed on the App Store, including “obvious rip-offs” like a counterfeit Minecraft sequel that cost $6.99 and became one of the top five most downloaded paid apps, as well as con games that tricked users into purchasing fake goods.
Apple defended the App Store in its own lengthy legal filings, claiming that Epic was unfairly trying to avoid paying fees even though Fortnite made $700 million on the platform in the two years before to Epic’s expulsion.
Apple admitted the existence of various types of malware on the App Store, but it pointed to data from 2018 that revealed that the iPhone platform “accounted for just 0.85% of malware infections,” in contrast to Android (47.2%), Windows (35.8%), and PC (Windows and PC).
According to Apple, its app store is “much safer” than the Android one, and it can also assist developers in avoiding fraud of the kind that Epic “had experienced utilising third-party payment processors in Fortnite.”
Apple claimed that around 40% of all submitted apps are rejected. With roughly 500 Apple personnel devoted to user protection, it referred to its manual, human-centered review effort as “robust”. Please make use of the sharing options available through the share button located at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to distribute to others is against FT.com’s terms of service and copyright policy. To purchase more rights, send an email to licensing@ft.com. Using the gift article service, subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles each month. You can learn more at The Epic documents, however, include multiple instances of other developers who have complained about the App Store’s degree of quality control.
Headspace’s CEO allegedly complained about “egregious theft” on the App Store, where imitation apps keep appearing after allegedly taking its intellectual property, according to Epic.
According to Epic, he wrote to Apple, “Shockingly, Apple [is] allowing these programmes, and when the users buy the apps, they are left with nothing but some scammy chat rooms in the background.”
