TheQuartering [11/21/2022]
Apple head honcho Phil Schiller has deactivated his Twitter account due to unknown reasons. At Apple, Phil Schiller is no longer head of marketing having stepped down in 2020, but remains an Apple Fellow responsible for the App Store and the company’s media events.
Indeed, he is more notably known as the one Apple executive that usually gets tons of screen time during Apple keynotes, showing the ins and outs of the newest hardware on stage.
Twitter has been a trending topic for all the wrong reasons in the past few weeks as the Elon Musk takeover has seemingly thrown the company in shambles, with mass layoffs, lax content moderation, as well as allowing some controversial and previously banned Twitter users back on the social media site. Donald Trump, Kanye West, and Andrew Tate are just a few of the re-admitted personae non gratae.
What was the final nail in the coffin that forced Phil Schiller to deactivate his account, however?
We might never know, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman speculates that the rather public display of stance towards the changes over at Twitter could be an indication about an upcoming conflict between Twitter, on one hand, and Apple/Google on the other. Gurman expects that Apple and Google could remove Twitter from the App Store and Google Play Store due to “content moderation issues”, or a much more trivial reason—Elon Musk’s latest multi-billion purchase could contest the two platforms’ 15%-30% revenue cuts.
In May 2022, Elon Musk publicly criticized the App Store on Twitter, claiming that the 30% commission that Apple takes is “definitely not ok”, and 10 times higher than it should be. This criticism came shortly after Musk announced he had began to acquire Twitter shares and became the largest shareholder.