It’s very sad to see the way that your company is behaving in this fight with Epic Games. To be clear, it’s just that: a schoolyard dust-up between a couple of immature boys.
But it’s more than that.
While your company still makes some great products, it’s becoming more apparent that the company is not made up of great people. The actions of your Developer Relations organization have been spiteful and vindictive, as well as capricious and hypocritical.
You keep your platform closed, hiding behind the banner of “user privacy”, but I’m certain that there’s more to it. The scrappy start-ups, like Apple of yesteryear, aren’t afraid of the competition. It’s the behemoths who hoard their wealth, who stomp on anything that comes close, who become territorial and possessive, who stifle any competition, for fear of losing those precious dollars for which they’ve worked so hard. That’s what Apple has become.
You claim to respect user privacy, but it appears that you respect nothing else, save perhaps the Almighty Dollar. You’re the most valuable company in the world right now, and you still act like you need to squeeze every last penny from everything around you.
You’ve become a bully.
While you may or may not be doing anything illegal, it’s certainly unethical, and lacks any sort of decent moral compass.
Your words to Congress recently were duplicitous and danced around the real issue, which you fully understood, and you took advantage of the ignorance of the politicians questioning you. I thought you were better than that.
While I will probably continue to use my Mac and iOS devices, it is with regret. You no longer have my loyalty, because it’s clear that you don’t really care.
Sincerely,
Paul Schifferer