Apple (and everyone else) tells Elon Musk he’s wrong about app favoritism

Apple has insisted it ranks apps based on “objective criteria” rather than favoritism, contradicting accusations of misconduct by Elon Musk earlier this week.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store,” the hotheaded billionaire tweeted on Tuesday, “which is an unequivocal antitrust violation.” Musk then claimed that his xAI company, which created ChatGPT rival Grok, would take “immediate legal action” in response.

But, as has happened before, users of Musk’s own site have undermined his claims. Anyone viewing his tweet is now informed, thanks to X/Twitter’s Community Notes feature, that in fact DeepSeek and Perplexity have both reached the top spot, the latter on the India App Store and the former overall, since the Apple-OpenAI agreement was signed, and preferential treatment might therefore be suspected.

X/Twitter

Unsurprisingly, Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI, also begged to differ, referring to Musk’s tweet as “a remarkable claim” given the way Musk is alleged to have manipulated X’s algorithms to favor his own tweets. And when Grok was called upon to settle the dispute, it sided with Altman, citing factual issues with Musk’s initial claims and pointing to his “history of directing X algorithm changes to boost his posts and favor his interests, per 2023 reports.” (For the record, Grok has often been wrong and shouldn’t be regarded as a reliable source. It’s just mildly amusing that even Musk’s own AI disagreed with him on this occasion.)

It might seem unnecessary at this point for Apple to wade into the dispute, but the company chose to email a statement to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who covered the original story.

“We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria,” the company said. “Our goal is to offer safe discovery for users and valuable opportunities for developers, collaborating with many to increase app visibility in rapidly evolving categories.”

It added, Gurman says, that the App Store “is designed to be fair and free of bias.” Which is an interesting phrasing: why only designed to be fair and free of bias, rather than actually being those things? (Similarly, why only say that safe discovery and valuable opportunities are a “goal,” rather than something users and developers can rely upon?)

While fairness is often an unattainable ideal, one would imagine that bias generally reflects intentionality, and that it should be relatively straightforward to ensure that certain apps are not given preferential treatment. Perhaps Apple wishes to emphasise that objectivity is baked into the system from the ground up: an element of its fundamental design, rather than something which relies on the way it’s currently run.

Regardless of the slight ambiguity of Apple’s statement (perhaps merely reflecting lawyer-advised caution), it’s hard to conclude that anyone has been made to look bad by this brief and ugly spat other than Elon Musk himself. Apple may very well have the motive to favor one app maker over another, particularly when its own apps and apps made by its business partners are in the mix, but Musk has failed to make a convincing case that it is doing so. And one would imagine that significantly more evidence will be necessary if the legal action is to succeed.