Apple Accentuates the Positive
…and tries to eliminate the negative
In another life, perhaps Bing Crosby was an Apple PR lead. Sing it with me:
🎶 You’ve got to accentuate the positive… Eliminate the negative…🎶
That was clearly — clearly — the marching orders from Apple’s actual PR team in announcing the settlement with app developers in which Apple gave up some major… er, wait, no — in which Apple gave up basically nothing. But that wasn’t how the initial group of stories around the matter read. And even I too was thrown at first. And now it’s clear why.
To be clear, it’s obviously the goal of every PR person around every single announcement to accentuate the positive as much as possible. No one can fault Apple for that, of course. But if this bit of reporting by Jack Nicas of The New York Times is to be believed — and I believe it is to be believed given my own experiences in such matters — Apple’s positioning and tactics were decidedly more slippery than just your standard PR spin.
The core bit is a ways down the story:
There was a lot of confusion after the settlement was announced in part because of how Apple announced it. The company told reporters about an evening press briefing two hours before it was set to start and then posted a muddied news release just as the briefing was beginning.
That meant that as an Apple executive described the settlement as a win for developers, reporters were already rushing to tweet and file first drafts of articles. The incentives of digital news today reward those who are first, not those who are more nuanced or accurate. (An Apple public-relations official required reporters to not name or quote the executive in order to hear the briefing.)
As a result, news headlines initially framed the change as a major avenue for companies to avoid Apple’s commission. This was good for Apple, as any perception that it was making substantive changes to its App Store rules could help appease developers, the courts, regulators and lawmakers.
In reality, it appears that Apple has paid a small price to get rid of a potentially big legal headache.
Some people find the sausage-making details of how a story is put out there into the world boring. And most of the time, it is. But here, it actually is intriguing because Apple nearly successfully turned a lump of coal into a diamond. By giving reporters a two-hour heads up that something was coming and posting their decidedly disingenuous press release just as that call was starting; while at the same time, not allowing anyone to actually quote the executive giving the details, let alone name them, Apple was essentially trying to tie reporters’ hands behind their backs and weights around their ankles while asking them to swim laps in their Olympic-sized pool.
You can almost hear the press conference:
Unnamed Apple Fellow: Today, we’re announcing a substantial set of changes to our App Store policies designed to ensure our developer community can take even further advantage of the unprecedented capabilities which Apple has bestowed upon them with the App Store.*Insert a fifteen minute filibuster of bluster about the App Store.*Reporter: Thanks for that. Can I just ask, are these actually substantial changes, it would seem that…Apple PR Person On The Line: [cuts in] …well, thanks for your time, we have to run now. The release is live on the site. If you have any further questions, we’ll find some time for you and he-who-shall-not-be-named later. Reporter: Just one…Apple PR: Have a nice night!
Remember, this was at 6pm PT/9pm ET on a Thursday night. Not exactly standard press release time. In fact, Apple had already put out a tangential release earlier in the day around the in-app cut for publishers who agree to put their content on Apple News.
That leads to the question of why this was all so hastily put together. Was it an attempt to bury the news? To more fully guide the narrative? Was there some legal reason for the timing? That’s not entirely clear. But what is clear is that Apple’s tactics when they did decide on the timing were fully set to push this in the press as a huge win for developers and also a magnanimous concession by Apple. It was neither.
At best, these were slight wins for developers. But they were all actually huge wins for Apple because it means that they don’t really have to change anything meaningful to the App Store right now. Remember, the biggest change was actually about “clarifying” a position, not actually changing one. And the hope, of course, is that this will settle the broader battles going on. It will not, obviously. But good effort?
Anyway, again, this is in many ways the job of Apple PR. And so kudos on the spin. But as both sides who have been around this long enough know, it’s not tenable to do these types of maneuvers. At the end of the day, the job should really be for both sides to do their jobs — and, critically, to be given the time to do their jobs — to the best of their ability. To lay out a perspective and to acknowledge there are other perspectives. Not to ram home a perspective at the end of a day and call it a day.
Published on August 29, 2021 📆Written from San Francisco, California 🇺🇸Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨
