Amazon and Apple face German antitrust scrutiny over a policy that excludes independent sellers of brand products on the online market place. From a report: Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the country's antitrust regulator, is probing both companies over a policy at Amazon called "brandgating," the authority said in an emailed statement. The policy allows makers of branded products such as iPhones to have independent sellers removed from the platform as long as Amazon can sell the items, according to the statement. "Brandgating agreements can help to protect against product piracy," the Cartel Office said. "But such measures must be proportionate to be in line with antitrust rules and may not result in eliminating competition." Amazon and Apple are among the tech giants under intense scrutiny by regulators across the world, including in the European Union, which is poised to propose sweeping new laws to rein in Silicon Valley. Authorities are wrestling with how to act against companies that critics say run a rigged game when they set the rules for platforms that also host their rivals.

tsa shares a report from MacRumors: Starting early next year, iOS 14 will require apps to get opt-in permission from users to collect their random advertising identifier, which advertisers use to deliver personalized ads and track how effective their campaigns were. Ahead of this change, The Wall Street Journal reports that advertising companies and publishers have filed a complaint against Apple with France's competition authority, arguing that the enhanced privacy measures would be anticompetitive.

According to the report, the complaint alleges that the wording of Apple's permission prompt will lead most users to decline tracking of their device's advertising identifier, which could result in lost revenue. In August, Facebook warned advertisers that the prompt could lead to a more than 50 percent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue. In a statement, Apple reiterated its belief that "privacy is a fundamental right," adding that "a user's data belongs to them and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom." Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because it doesn't share the data with other companies.

Apple's iPhone 12 lineup has the ability to wirelessly charge an external accessory, according to a series of newly unveiled FCC filings that just went public yesterday. The Verge reports: The documents first spotted by VentureBeat's Jeremy Horwitz say the phone "supports a built-in inductive charging transmitter and receiver." Apple has not officially announced any such functionality that could be used to charge future AirPods or Apple's long rumored Tile-competitor dubbed "AirTags." "In addition to being able to be charged by a desktop WPT [wireless power transfer] charger (puck), 2020 iPhone models ... also support WPT charging function at 360 kHz to charge accessories," one of the documents reads. It lists a series of FCC IDs of iPhones with the new feature, which include the the iPhone 12 mini (BCG-E3539A), iPhone 12 (BCG-E3542A), iPhone 12 Pro (BCG-E3545A), and iPhone 12 Pro Max (BCG-E3548A). The maximum reverse wireless charging speed is listed as 5W, if we're reading the documents correctly.

It sounds like the iPhone 12's reverse wireless charging may be limited, at least at first. The documents say that "currently the only accessory that can be charged by iPhones is an external potential apple accessory in future" and that reverse charging currently "only occurs when the phone is connected to an AC power outlet." The FCC's testing appears to have been conducted using only a wall charger and USB-C cable, presumably the same USB-C to Lighting cable bundled with each iPhone 12. It's unclear why Apple did not officially reveal the functionality when it announced the phones themselves, though it could be because the accessory which works with the functionality isn't yet ready to be released. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman speculates that it might work with the company's upcoming AirPods revamp, whose existence was reported earlier this week.

Apple is stepping up efforts to develop its own search technology as US antitrust authorities threaten multibillion-dollar payments that Google makes to secure prime placement of its engine on the iPhone, Financial Times reported Wednesday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: In a little-noticed change to the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 14, Apple has begun to show its own search results and link directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen. That web search capability marks an important advance in Apple's in-house development and could form the foundation of a fuller attack on Google, according to several people in the industry. The Silicon Valley company is notoriously secretive about its internal projects, but the move adds to growing evidence that it is working to build a rival to Google's search engine. Two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google's head of search, John Giannandrea. The hire was ostensibly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant, but also brought eight years of experience running the world's most popular search engine. The company's growing in-house search capability gives it an alternative if regulators block its lucrative partnership with Google. When the US Department of Justice launched a case last week, over payments that Google makes to Apple to be the iPhone's default search tool, urgency was added to the initiative.

Facebook will soon be the latest tech giant to enter the world of cloud gaming. Their approach is different than what Microsoft or Google has built, but Facebook highlights a shared central challenge: dealing with Apple. From a report: Facebook is not building a console gaming competitor to compete with Stadia or xCloud; instead, the focus is wholly on mobile games. Why cloud stream mobile games that your device is already capable of running locally? Facebook is aiming to get users into games more quickly and put less friction between a user seeing an advertisement for a game and actually playing it themselves. Users can quickly tap into the title without downloading anything, and if they eventually opt to download the title from a mobile app store, they'll be able to pick up where they left off. Facebook's service will launch on the desktop web and Android, but not iOS due to what Facebook frames as usability restrictions outlined in Apple's App Store terms and conditions.

[...] For a user downloading a lengthy single-player console epic, the short pitstop is an inconvenience, but long-time Facebook gaming exec Jason Rubin says that the stipulations are a non-starter for what Facebook's platform envisions, a way to start playing mobile games immediately without downloading anything. "It's a sequence of hurdles that altogether make a bad consumer experience," Rubin tells TechCrunch.

The New York Times' looks at "a deal that controls the internet" — Apple's agreement to feature Google as the preselected search engine for iPhones, saying America's Justice Department views it "as a prime example of what prosecutors say are Google's illegal tactics to protect its monopoly and choke off competition..." The scrutiny of the pact, which was first inked 15 years ago and has rarely been discussed by either company, has highlighted the special relationship between Silicon Valley's two most valuable companies — an unlikely union of rivals that regulators say is unfairly preventing smaller companies from flourishing. "We have this sort of strange term in Silicon Valley: co-opetition," said Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel from 2009 to 2017. "You have brutal competition, but at the same time, you have necessary cooperation." Apple and Google are joined at the hip even though Mr. Cook has said internet advertising, Google's bread and butter, engages in "surveillance" of consumers and even though Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, once promised "thermonuclear war" on his Silicon Valley neighbor when he learned it was working on a rival to the iPhone. Apple and Google's parent company, Alphabet, worth more than $3 trillion combined, do compete on plenty of fronts, like smartphones, digital maps and laptops. But they also know how to make nice when it suits their interests. And few deals have been nicer to both sides of the table than the iPhone search deal.

Nearly half of Google's search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department, and the prospect of losing the Apple deal has been described as a "code red" scenario inside the company. When iPhone users search on Google, they see the search ads that drive Google's business. They can also find their way to other Google products, like YouTube. A former Google executive, who asked not to be identified because he was not permitted to talk about the deal, said the prospect of losing Apple's traffic was "terrifying" to the company. The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world's internet searches, the center of consumers' online lives...

[C]ompetitors like DuckDuckGo, a small search engine that sells itself as a privacy-focused alternative to Google, could never match Google's tab with Apple. Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google's search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple's annual profits. That's not money Apple would be eager to walk away from.

In fact, Mr. Cook and Mr. Pichai met again in 2018 to discuss how they could increase revenue from search. After the meeting, a senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that "our vision is that we work as if we are one company," according to the Justice Department's complaint. The article remembers Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone in 2007 — and then inviting Google CEO Eric Schmidt onto the stage. Schmidt, who was also on Apple's board of directors, joked "If we just sort of merged the two companies, we could just call them AppleGoo."

He'd also added that with Google search on the iPhone, "you can actually merge without merging."

The Washington Post reports: App developers are defying Apple in record numbers, according to a new coalition of companies aimed at breaking the iPhone maker's tight grip over its mobile software and the way it governs the App Store. The Coalition for App Fairness, which launched last month and counts as members video-game giant Epic Games, dating company Match Group and music streaming service Spotify, says the original group of 13 companies has grown to 40, and it has received more than 400 requests to join.

"The outpouring of interest we've received has exceeded our expectations," Sarah Maxwell, a spokeswoman for the coalition, said in an emailed statement. "As we bring on new members and hear their stories, it's evident that too many developers have been unable to make their voices heard." The soaring membership of the coalition represents a remarkable shift in thinking, as companies and individual developers take the risky step of speaking out in an effort to change the way Apple operates...

Developers say they worried that complaining about Apple would hurt their ability to get apps and updates approved. The company's App Store Review Guidelines once contained a warning for developers who might consider protesting Apple's policies: "If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps," the guidelines once stated, according to a securities filing...

The Coalition for App Fairness aims to sway lawmakers to take action against Apple, either through new legislation or legal action. More freedom on iOS would lead to more innovation, app developers say.

Apple paid an outside firm to lobby Congress on legislation targeting U.S. companies that do business in areas of China that may use slave labor. From a report: Congressional disclosure reports show that Fierce Government Relations lobbied for Apple on the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and other bills aimed at pressuring U.S. companies to ensure that their supply chains do not depend on companies that use slave labor, particularly from a region called Xinjiang where many Uighur live. Apple has previously been criticized for working conditions within its supply chain. More recently, activists have urged Apple, other U.S. companies to cut their ties to suppliers that allegedly use forced labor from the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in China. The Chinese government has been accused of forcing Uyghur's to work under oppressive working conditions and other human rights violations.

Online vacation rental giant Airbnb on Wednesday said it has hired former Apple CDO Jony Ive and his company LoveFrom to assist in the design of future products and services. AppleInsider reports: Announced in a blog post from Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, Ive will work on next-generation "products and services" as a design consultant. It appears that he will report directly to Chesky, or collaborate on design initiatives with the CEO, throughout what is described as a "multi-year relationship." "Jony will also help us continue to develop our internal design team, which he believes to be one of the world's best," Chesky writes. "I know he is particularly excited about a relationship that will evolve to become a deep collaboration with our creative team."

As noted by The Information, Ive and Chesky have known each other for years. Ive helped flesh out Airbnb's logo in 2014, while Chesky wrote Ive's biography for Time magazine's top 100 most influential people in 2015. Airbnb on Wednesday told employees that its chief design officer, Alex Schleifer, would step down to a part-time role, The Information reports. Schleifer led the company's design team for six years.

Apple has launched Apple Music TV, a free 24-hour curated livestream of popular music videos that will also include "exclusive new music videos and premiers, special curated music video blocks, and live shows and events as well as chart countdowns and guests," according to the announcement. From a report: Apple Music TV will be available to U.S. residents only on the Apple Music app and the Apple TV app. It can be found at apple.co/AppleMusicTV and in the browse tab in the Apple Music and Apple TV app. The service premiered Monday morning with a countdown of the top 100 all-time most-streamed songs in the U.S. on Apple Music. On Thursday (October 22), it will celebrate the upcoming release of Bruce Springsteens's "Letter to You" album with an "all day Bruce takeover" featuring music-video blocks of his most popular videos, an interview with Zane Lowe, anchor of Apple Music's radio station, and a special livestream fan event.

MojoKid writes: Apple has repeatedly asserted its dominance in terms of performance versus competitive mobile platforms. And it has been historically true that, in cross-platform benchmarks, iPhones generally can beat out Android phones in both CPU and GPU (graphics) performance. However, a new benchmark recently released from trusted benchmark suite developer UL Benchmarks sheds light on what could be the iPhone's Achilles' Heel in terms of performance, or more specifically, performance over extended duration.

The new benchmark, 3DMark WildLife, employs Apple's Metal API for rendering and Vulkan on Android devices. In testing at HotHardware, for basic single-run tests, again iPhones trounce anything Android, including flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, ASUS ROG Phone 3 and OnePlus 8. However, in the extended duration WildLife Stress Test, which loops the single test over and over for 20 minutes, the current flagship iPhone 11 Pro and A13 Bionic's performance craters essentially to Snapdragon 865/865+ performance levels, while Android phones like the OnePlus 8 maintain 99+% of their performance. Though this is just one gaming benchmark test that employs the latest graphics technologies and APIs, it's interesting to see that perhaps Apple's focus on tuning for quick bursty workloads (and maybe benchmark optimization too?) falls flat if the current class of top-end iPhone is pushed continuously.

The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019. From a report: Apple adopted CUPS for Mac OS X in 2002, and hired its author Michael Sweet in 2007, with Cupertino also acquiring the CUPS source code. Sweet continued to work on printing technology at Apple, including CUPS, until December 2019 when he left to start a new company. Asked at the time about the future of CUPS, he said: "CUPS is still owned and maintained by Apple. There are two other engineers still in the printing team that are responsible for CUPS development, and it will continue to have new bug fix releases (at least) for the foreseeable future." Despite this statement, Linux watcher Michael Larabel noted earlier this week that "the open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020." This contrasts with 355 commits in 2019, when Sweet still worked at Apple, and 348 the previous year. We asked Apple about its plans for CUPS and have yet to hear back.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Here's one of the weirdest aspects of Tuesday's iPhone launch event: Apple has been less than forthright about the real prices of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. At the event, Apple referred to these products as starting at $699 (iPhone 12 mini) and $799 (iPhone 12), but those prices are not actually accurate unless you slap a big asterisk on there. (As Apple does on its marketing pages, because it must.) Here's what's actually happening, at least in the U.S.: Apple has cut deals with AT&T and Verizon that give existing customers of those carriers $30 off their purchases. The actual prices of the two models are $729 and $829, and that's what you'll pay if you're a U.S. subscriber to Sprint, T-Mobile, any smaller pay-as-you-go carriers, or if you want to buy a SIM-free model with no carrier connection at all. (The 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max are the same price on all carriers.) It's embarrassing that Apple is hiding the real price of the iPhone 12.

Apple has poached a key member of Google's Project Zero, a hacking team at Google that has found dozens of critical vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS and other critical Apple software. From a report: Last year, Apple and Google fought over a series of vulnerabilities that Project Zero discovered in iOS, with Apple suggesting that Google was overselling the vulnerabilities. About a year later, Brandon Azad announced on Twitter at the beginning of October that he was leaving Google's elite team of hackers to join Apple. "My teammates at Project Zero have been among the kindest and smartest people I've met, and I've learned so much from them," Azad wrote. "I'll really miss working alongside everyone on the team. Thank you all for these wonderful experiences, and keep on hacking!" Azad has been widely considered one of the best iPhone hackers who didn't work for Apple, being named by Apple in countless security advisories, and presenting highly technical findings on Apple's products at major cybersecurity conferences around the world. Last year, Motherboard profiled Project Zero and revealed that Apple had been trying to poach a colleague of Azad, Ian Beer.

ttyler writes: As MacRumors reports, Apple's new HomePod Mini supports Thread networking technology. "Thread is a low-power IP-based networking technology for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offering a secure, mesh-based system that makes it easy to build an ecosystem of devices," reports MacRumors. "While Thread is essentially agnostic to the application layers that run on top of it, it can support multiple layers and may play a role in Project Connected Home over IP, the alliance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and other companies that is seeking to make it simpler to build devices compatible with multiple ecosystems such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant." In a footprint on the specs page, Apple says that HomePod mini's Thread support is limited to HomeKit devices, "so the technology can't yet be leveraged cross-platform and it remains to be seen how Apple will embrace Thread going forward," adds MacRumors.

Apple has announced a new version of its HomePod smart speaker, the $99 HomePod mini -- a smaller version of the speaker that shrinks down the original model into a more compact size. The Verge reports: Like the full-size HomePod, the HomePod mini still features a mesh fabric exterior in both black and white colors, along with a small display on top to show the Siri waveform and volume controls. The new model is more of a short, spherical shape, however, instead of the oblong design of the original. The HomePod mini features one main driver, two passive radiators, and an "acoustic waveguide" on the bottom. The new HomePod mini also features an Apple S5 chip, which Apple says allows for "computational audio" processing to adjust how your music sounds 180 times per second. Multiple HomePod mini speakers can play music in sync and "intelligently" create stereo pairing when placed in the same room. Apple is also using the U1 chips that it debuted in last year's iPhones to create a better Handoff experience later this year. Apple said third-party support is coming later this year for Pandora, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

There's also a new "Intercom" feature that allows for customers with multiple HomePod devices in different rooms to communicate throughout the house. "Intercom messages will also appear on connected iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches (although they won't immediately play out loud like they do on the HomePod mini)," adds The Verge. Preorders for the HomePod Mini start on November 6th and shipping begins on November 16th.

With the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro models no longer shipping with a power adapter, Apple has started selling the 20W USB-C power adapter that was first introduced with the iPad Air on a standalone basis for $19. From a report: The 20W power adapter is included in the box with the iPad Air, but those who want one for use with the new iPhone models will need to shell out $19. All of the new iPhone 12 models and older iPhone models ship only with a USB-C to Lightning cable, with customers expected to provide their own power adapters. Most people likely have several USB-C power adapters on hand from past device purchases, but this will be an inconvenience for those who have few power adapters available already.

At a virtual event on Tuesday, Apple unveiled the new iPhone lineup: the iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max. The new iPhones feature recent generation iPad Pro-like design. They all support 5G. The iPhone 12 mini, the most affordable handset in the new lineup, starts at $699. The iPhone 12 Pro Max, the most expensive, starts at $1,099. The company said it is also lowering the price of last year's iPhone 11, which not starts at $599.

More details: Apple debuts iPhone 12 family, focusing on 5G and 5nm chips.

Apple brings back MagSafe, sparks interest in magnetic phone charging.

Apple cuts iPhone XR and iPhone 11 prices by $100, kills iPhone 11 Pro.

A recently released tool is letting anyone exploit an unusual Mac vulnerability to bypass Apple's trusted T2 security chip and gain deep system access. The flaw is one researchers have also been using for more than a year to jailbreak older models of iPhones. But the fact that the T2 chip is vulnerable in the same way creates a new host of potential threats. Worst of all, while Apple may be able to slow down potential hackers, the flaw is ultimately unfixable in every Mac that has a T2 inside. From a report: In general, the jailbreak community haven't paid as much attention to macOS and OS X as it has iOS, because they don't have the same restrictions and walled gardens that are built into Apple's mobile ecosystem. But the T2 chip, launched in 2017, created some limitations and mysteries. Apple added the chip as a trusted mechanism for securing high-value features like encrypted data storage, Touch ID, and Activation Lock, which works with Apple's "Find My" services. But the T2 also contains a vulnerability, known as Checkm8, that jailbreakers have already been exploiting in Apple's A5 through A11 (2011 to 2017) mobile chipsets. Now Checkra1n, the same group that developed the tool for iOS, has released support for T2 bypass.

On Macs, the jailbreak allows researchers to probe the T2 chip and explore its security features. It can even be used to run Linux on the T2 or play Doom on a MacBook Pro's Touch Bar. The jailbreak could also be weaponized by malicious hackers, though, to disable macOS security features like System Integrity Protection and Secure Boot and install malware. Combined with another T2 vulnerability that was publicly disclosed in July by the Chinese security research and jailbreaking group Pangu Team, the jailbreak could also potentially be used to obtain FileVault encryption keys and to decrypt user data. The vulnerability is unpatchable, because the flaw is in low-level, unchangeable code for hardware. "The T2 is meant to be this little secure black box in Macs -- a computer inside your computer, handling things like Lost Mode enforcement, integrity checking, and other privileged duties," says Will Strafach, a longtime iOS researcher and creator of the Guardian Firewall app for iOS. "So the significance is that this chip was supposed to be harder to compromise -- but now it's been done."

Epic Games "did not win its preliminary injunction in its antitrust action against Apple, which would have forced Apple to allow Fortnite back onto the iPhone, iPad, and Mac," reports BGR, calling it "the decision we warned you about a few weeks ago." Gonzalez Rogers hinted during the injunction relief hearing a few weeks ago that she wasn't inclined to side with Epic when it comes to Fortnite. She pointed out at the time that Epic lied in its business relationship with Apple. "You did something, you lied about it by omission, by not being forthcoming. That's the security issue. That's the security issue!" Gonzalez Rogers told Epic. "There are a lot of people in the public who consider you guys heroes for what you guys did, but it's still not honest...."

Epic engineered a huge PR stunt to turn gamers against Apple over the expected Fortnite ban and then sued Apple for anti-competitive practices at the same time. Even if the antitrust case might have merit on its own, this doesn't change the fact that Epic breached its contract... The judge clarified that Epic has breached a contract unilaterally and cannot claim that it did it because of monopoly concerns. Judge Rogers also said that Epic's failure to show it's willing to work with Apple and the court to have the game reinstated proves that Epic isn't necessarily concerned with the well-being of iOS users. "Epic Games cannot simply exclaim 'monopoly' to rewrite agreements giving itself unilateral benefit..."
Epic did receive some good news in the ruling. "Epic Games is grateful that Apple will continue to be barred from retaliating against Unreal Engine and our game development customers," the company said in a statement which was quoted by Thurrott.com. "We will continue developing for Apple's platforms and pursue all avenues to end Apple's anti-competitive behavior."

And the same site also quotes Apple's own statement on the ruling. "We are grateful that the Court recognized that Epic's actions were not in the best interests of its own customers and that any problems they may have encountered were of their own making when they breached their agreement."