In a nearly three-hour interview with Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg scathingly criticized Apple’s business practices, accusing the tech giant of stifling innovation and using its market dominance to stifle others.
Using the example of Apple’s 30 percent fee for transactions in the App Store, Zuckerberg argued that this “Apple tax,” as it is often called by critics, limits innovation and prevents smaller developers from developing.
“They haven’t invented anything great for a long time. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just sitting on it 20 years later,” he said. “They’re just pushing everyone else out.”
Referring to Meta’s request to use Apple’s connectivity protocol for their Ray-Ban smart glasses, which was rejected for security reasons, Zuckerberg suggested that the rejection was motivated by business interests rather than genuine concern for user privacy. He denied that the protocol lacked security because Apple did not build it into it.
“It’s insecure because you didn’t build any security into it. And now you’re using that as an excuse for why only your product can connect easily,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta’s CEO also criticized Apple’s “blue bubble, green bubble” strategy with iMessage, which he believes creates peer pressure, especially among younger users, to stay in the Apple ecosystem. This tactic, in his opinion, is a deliberate attempt to tie users to Apple products such as the iPhone and Apple Watch.
“I’m not even sure they’re selling more iPhones year over year at this point. I think sales may be declining,” Zuckerberg said.
He warned that a lack of innovation could eventually lead to Apple’s downfall.
“If you just don’t do a good job for 10 years, eventually someone will just beat you,” Zuckerberg said.
The Vision Pro was also mentioned, but although Zuckerberg called it “one of Apple’s biggest attempts to do something new in a long time,” he concluded by saying that “it certainly didn’t work out well.”
“[Still] I don’t want to judge them too much for that, because we do a lot of things where the first version isn’t that good and you want to judge the third version,” he said, adding that “I’ve heard it’s really good for watching movies.”
