Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, has alleged that Apple Inc. is planning to remove the Twitter app from the iOS App Store, the billionaire revealed this in a series of tweets yesterday.
“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk tweeted on Monday.
Aside from the threat to remove Twitter from its App Store, Musk also disclosed that Apple has mostly’ stopped advertising on Twitter.
In the following tweet, Musk claimed that Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. “Do they hate free speech in America,” he asked.
Investors King had reported that a number of big brands which include Ford, Volkswagen, and General Motors have paused paid advertising on the microblogging platform.
The brands have alleged that Twitter under the leadership of Elon Musk will open the social media platform to hate speech.
If Apple eventually removes Twitter from the iOS store, it would be detrimental to Twitter’s business, which is already struggling with a loss of advertisers following Musk’s takeover.
Millions of users get the Twitter application from the Apple iOS store. Therefore new users will not be able to download the Application on the iOS store while existing users will be deprived of updating the app.
Washington Post reported that Apple was the top advertiser on Twitter in the first quarter of 2022, spending $48 million on ads on the social platform.
The newspaper added that Apple’s spending accounted for more than 4 percent of Twitter’s revenue in that quarter.
Although Apple CEO, Tim Cook nor any of the company’s representatives responded to Musk’s post.
The tweet however caught the attention of United States lawmakers who have proposed bipartisan legislation that aims to dismantle the power that Apple and Google wield through their app stores.
“This is why we need to end the App Store duopoly before the end of this year,” one of the lawmakers, Rep. Ken Buck tweeted.
“No one should have this kind of market power,” he added.
