Facebook and SnapChat have both attributed declines in revenue to new Apple features that give users more control over their data.
Facebook held its latest earnings call on Monday, telling investors the company earned $29 billion in revenue for the third quarter of 2021 – up 35% from Q3 of 2020, but flat compared to the $29 billion earned in Q2 of this year.
“Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth,” Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said.
Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel made similar statements last week’s when reporting revenue figures for his company. Snap earned about $1 billion in revenue this latest quarter, which about a 57% increase year-over-year but only 1% up from Q2 of 2021.
“Our advertising business was disrupted by changes to iOS and tracking that were broadly rolled out by Apple in June and July … making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS,” Spiegel said.
Among the recently introduced changes by Apple include measures that require apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. Apple has painted the updates as privacy enhancements, but Facebook says they’re anticompetitive.
Facebook has waged a public campaign against Apple over this year throughout 2021, with executives from both companies butting heads at times.
“Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to preference their own,” Mark Zuckerberg said during a January conference call. “This impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the world, including with the upcoming iOS 14 changes.”
Facebook also funded research published in June, arguing that Apple’s changes will prevent competitors from processing commercially relevant data in the Apple ecosystem – while preserving Apple’s right to do the same.
“Apple’s policy will have the pernicious effects of enhancing the dominance of iOS among mobile operating systems (OSs) and the dominance of its own apps and services within the iOS ecosystem, while reducing consumer choice and devastating the free-app ecosystem,” said a June paper written by Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and University of Florida Levin College of Law professor and white & Case senior advisor Daniel Sokol.
Zuckerberg reiterated these claims during Monday’s earnings call, saying that Apple’s changes don’t just hurt Facebook – but also numerous small businesses.
As Facebook faces multiple antitrust lawsuits, Zuckerberg also aimed to paint Apple and other companies like TikTok as major competitors to its business.
“Competition has also gotten a lot more intense, especially with Apple's iMessage growing in popularity, and more recently, the rise of TikTok, which is one of the most effective competitors that we have ever faced,” he said.