Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a scathing attack on Apple’s business practices in a near three-hour-long interview with Joe Rogan, accusing the tech giant of stifling innovation and using its market dominance to squeeze others.
Taking Apple’s 30 percent commission on App Store transactions as an example, Zuckerberg argued this “Apple tax,” as it often called by critics, limits innovation and prevents smaller developers from growing.
“They haven’t invented anything great in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he said. “They’re just squeezing everyone.”
Citing Meta’s request to use Apple’s connection protocol for their Ray-Ban smart glasses, which was denied due to security concerns, Zuckerberg suggested that the refusal was motivated by business interests rather than genuine concern for user privacy. He countered that the protocol lacked security because Apple hadn’t built it in.
“It’s insecure because you didn’t build any security into it. And then now you’re using that as a justification for why only your product can connect in an easy way,” Zuckerberg alleged.
The Meta chief executive further criticised Apple’s “blue bubble, green bubble” strategy with iMessage, which he believes creates peer pressure, particularly among younger users, to stay within the Apple ecosystem. This tactic, he argued, is a deliberate attempt to lock users into Apple products like iPhone and Apple Watch.
“I’m not even sure they’re selling more iPhones year over year at this point. I think the sales might be declining,” Zuckerberg revealed.
He warned that the lack of innovation could ultimately lead to Apple’s downfall.
“If you just don’t do a good job for like 10 years, eventually you’re just going to get beat by someone,” Zuckerberg said.
The Vision Pro was touched upon too, but while Zuckerberg did call it “one of the bigger swings at doing a new thing that Apple tried in a while,” he concluded by saying, “it definitely did not hit it out of the park.”
“[Still] I don’t want to give them too hard of a time on it, because we do a lot of things where the first version isn’t that good, and you want to kind of judge the third version of it,” he said, adding that “I heard it’s really good for watching movies.”
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