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Google Maps comes to Apple’s watchOS and CarPlay dashboard

Published August 10, 2020

Google Maps is now also available on the Apple Watch so you can get your walking, biking and driving directions right on your wrist.

Don’t expect to get a full-blown Maps app on your wrist, though. The new app is mostly focused on giving you directions to known places (think home, work, etc.). To start navigating to other destinations, you still have to start on your phone and then “pick up where you left off on your watch,” Google explains.

A few years ago, Google already offered a version of Maps for Apple’s watch but then dropped support in 2017. The Google Maps app for watchOS will roll out worldwide in the coming weeks.

Image Credits: Google

In addition to the new Maps app on watchOS, Google Maps now features slightly deeper integration with Apple’s CarPlay, thanks to iOS 13.4 now supporting third-party apps on the dashboard. If you’re a regular Google Maps user on CarPlay, you may know the frustration of using the CarPlay dashboard, only to be kicked back to seeing Apple Maps.

Apple originally launched support for third-party navigation apps in CarPlay with the launch of iOS 12. At the time, though, those apps were restricted to full-screen mode. With this update, you can now continue to see your Google Maps directions and still see your media controls or calendar at the same time.

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Amazon relaunches Twitch Prime as Prime Gaming

Published August 10, 2020

Amazon Prime is highlighting its offerings for gamers today with the launch of a service called Prime Gaming.

This is a new version of Twitch Prime, a service that Amazon launched four years ago tied to the popular game streaming platform that it acquired in 2014.

In both its old and new incarnations, Twitch Prime/Prime Gaming offers free games, game content (like weapons and skins) and a free Twitch channel subscription, all as part of a standard Prime membership. In today’s announcement, the company said Prime Gaming includes “more new content for more games than ever before, plus more free games, and a monthly Twitch channel subscription.”

Esports expert Rod Breslau tweeted earlier today that this rebranding was in the works.

Prime Gaming currently offers in-game content for Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online, Apex Legends, EA Sports FIFA 20, League of Legends and more than 20 other PC, console and mobile games. It also includes a free collection of PC games every month — this month the collection of 20-plus free games features SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, Metal Slug 2 and Treachery in Beatdown City.

“Prime members already get the best of TV, movies, and music, and now we’re expanding our entertainment offerings to include the best of gaming,” said Prime Gaming GM Larry Plotnick in a statement. “We’re giving customers new content that makes playing their favorite games on every platform even better. So no matter what kind of games you love, and no matter where you play them, they’ll be even better with Prime Gaming.”

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Three growth marketing experts share their best tools and strategies for 2020

Published August 10, 2020

At last month’s Early Stage virtual event, channel growth experts joined TechCrunch reporters and editors for a series of conversations covering the best tools and strategies for building startups in 2020. For this post, I’ve recapped highlights of talks with:

  • Ethan Smith, founder and CEO, Graphite
  • Susan Su, startup growth advisor, executive-in-residence, Sound Ventures
  • Asher King-Abramson, founder, Got Users

If you’d like to hear or watch these conversations in their entirety, we’ve embedded the videos below.

Ethan Smith: How to build a high-performance SEO engine

Relying on internet searches to learn about growth topics like search engine optimization leads to a rabbit hole of LinkedIn thinkfluencer musings and decade-old Quora posts. Insights are few and far between, because SEO has changed dramatically as Google has squashed spammy techniques “specialists” have pushed for years.

Ethan Smith, owner of growth agency Graphite, says Google didn’t kill SEO, but the channel has evolved. “SEO has built a negative reputation over time of being spammy,” Smith says. “The typical flow of an SEO historically has been: I need to find every single keyword I possibly can find and auto-generate a mediocre page for each of those keywords, the user experience doesn’t really matter, content can be automated and spun, the key is fooling the bot.”

Artificial intelligence has disrupted this flow as algorithms have abandoned hard-coded rules for more flexible designs that are less vulnerable to being gamed. What SEO looks like today, Smith says, is all about trying to “figure out what the algorithm is trying to accomplish and try to accomplish the same thing.” Google’s algorithms aren’t looking for buckets of keywords, they’re looking to distill a user’s intent.

The key to building a strategy around SEO as a company breaks down into six steps surrounding intent, says Smith:

  1. Target by intent

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Creators need better community tools — Circle wants to fill the gap

Published August 10, 2020

Entrepreneurial creators have to do a lot with limited time. They need to, well, create, but then they also need to build their marketing funnels, convert users to their paid products and manage business operations. Yet, perhaps the most important task they face is keeping their existing fans engaged, because ultimately, that engagement ties directly to the health of their brand long-term.

Social tools are abysmal on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, particularly when it comes to creators owning their own communities and building deeper relationships with them. Other products like Discord have been used to some success, although Discord was built with a different focus in mind and is being hammered in to fix the problem.

Circle believes there is a better way. The New York City-based startup officially launched today for creators (following eight months of product beta testing). The platform is designed from the bottom-up to offer better community building and engagement tools for creators, while also integrating with other software typical in the creator toolkit.

Circle co-founders Sid Yadav, Rudy Santino and Andrew Guttormsen. Photo via Circle.

The key DNA for the company is another NYC-based startup called Teachable. Two of Circle’s three founders, Sid Yadav and Andrew Guttormsen, hail from the edtech platform, which helps entrepreneurial teachers setup online storefronts for their classes. Teachable was sold to Hotmart earlier this year for what was reported to be a quarter of a billion dollars. Yadav was VP of Product there, and Guttormsen was VP of Growth and Marketing. Their third co-founder, Rudy Santino, knew Yadav from previous work.

Yadav spun out of Teachable and actually got his start as a contractor for Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad we were just talking about last week because he launched a new seed fund. He worked part-time as a product and design consultant, allowing him the flexibility to begin spending time thinking about new product ideas.

“I always knew that my next startup was going to be in [the creator] space,” Yadav said. “I just loved what they’re all about, which is about making an income from what they love doing.”

Teachable’s rapid growth in a small slice of the creator space taught Yadav some of the key challenges that creators face, and what a new product needed to solve in order to help them. With his co-founders, he enlisted a group of creators — including Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income and Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who operates a newsletter called Ness Labs — to actively build communities on Circle to prove out their various design and product decisions.

The growth of the platform and the engagement of potential customers attracted the attention of Notation Capital, a NYC-based pre-seed fund that just announced its third fund late last month. Notation led a $1.5 million seed round into Circle, which also included Lavingia, Ankur Nagpal (the founder and CEO of Teachable), Dave Ambrose and Matthew Ziskie, among others.

There is a growing movement of software designed to help creators start their businesses. Substack of course has gotten the most attention in Silicon Valley, with a platform designed mostly around email newsletter subscriptions. Pico, meanwhile, has focused on building out more of the infrastructure of the creator business through a CRM that integrates with most other platforms. Patreon handles more of the payments and revenue engagement of fans.

Circle may end up touching on those areas, but today, wants to be the destination where you send all your creators in between newsletters or blog posts or Instragrams. It’s a smart part of the creator stack to play in, and with strong early customer enthusiasm and a chunk of funding, seems ready to make a mark in this burgeoning market.

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US gaming industry records another excellent quarter as pandemic fuels sales

Published August 10, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has utterly decimated a number of industries over the past several months, but the U.S. gaming industry continues to benefit as people continue to be stuck at home. Yet another report from NPD highlights an excellent quarter, with spending hitting a new Q2 record in the States.

According to the figures, gamers spent $11.6 billion, marking a 30% increase over a year prior. It was also a 7% increase over Q1’s 10.9 billion, as spending continues while the pandemic continues to rage.

Games themselves comprised $10.2 billion of that figure (itself a 28% increase y-o-y), with some familiar titles occupying the top spots, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The gaming hardware category saw a 57% increase from 2019, with Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One all seeing strong sales.

The Switch isn’t a surprise, given shortages experienced earlier in the year. Perhaps a bit more unexpected are continued sales on the PS4 and Xbox One, given that both consoles are set to be eclipsed by next-generation devices later in the year. Of course, those upcoming systems aren’t doing gamers much good during the current moment of stay at home orders.

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With a renewed focus on creative skills, online learning company Skillshare raises $66M

Published August 10, 2020

Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper said 2020 has been a year of rapid growth — even before the pandemic forced large swaths of the population to stay home and turn to online learning for entertainment and enrichment.

Cooper (who became CEO in 2017) told me that the company decided last year to “focus on our strength,” leading to a “brand relaunch” in January 2020 to emphasize the richness of its creativity-themed content. At the same time, Cooper said the company defines creativity very broadly, with classes divided into categories like animation, design, illustration, photography, filmmaking and writing.

“It’s not Bob Ross,” he said. “And I love Bob Ross, but that’s a very narrow definition of creativity. Creativity can come in lots of different forms — art, design, journaling, creative writing, it can be culinary, it can be crafts.”

Cooper added that daily usage was already up significantly by mid-March, when the pandemic led to widespread social distancing orders across the United States. That created some challenges, particularly for the more polished Skillshare Originals that the company offers alongside its user-taught classes. (For example, Originals include a color masterclass taught by Victo Ngai, a class on “discovering your creative voice” taught by Shantell Martin and a creative nonfiction class by Susan Orlean.)

But of course the pandemic also meant that, as Cooper put it, “A lot more people had a lot more free time at home and were looking for a constructive way to spend it.” In fact, the company said that since its rebranding, new membership sign-ups have tripled, with existing members watching three times the number of lessons.

And Skillshare has continued producing Originals by sending instructors “a huge box of gear” and then supervising the shoot remotely. In fact, Cooper suggested that this has “opened up a whole new world” for the Originals team, allowing them to “look at parts of the world where we probably weren’t going to fly a camera crew to go shoot.”

The company now has 12 million registered members, 8,000 teachers and 30,000 classes — all accessible for $99 a year or $19 a month. And it’s announcing that it has raised $66 million in new funding led by OMERS Growth Equity, with managing director Saar Pikar joining the board of directors. Previous investors Union Square Ventures, Amasia, Burda Principal Investments and Spero Ventures also participated.

“Skillshare serves the needs of professional creatives and everyday creative hobbyists alike, which presents a highly-innovative value proposition for the online learning market,” Pikar said in a statement. “We look forward to deepening our partnership with Skillshare, and our fellow investors, in order to help Matt Cooper and his team scale up the company’s international reach – and help Skillshare achieve the full potential of its unique approach to online learning.”

Cooper added that the company (which had previously raised $42 million) was cash-flow positive for the first half of 2020, so it raised the new round to invest in growth — particularly in the Skillshare for Teams enterprise product, which allows customers like GM Financial, Vice, AWS, Lululemon, American Crafts and Benefit to offer Skillshare as a perk for their employees.

Cooper is also hoping to expand internationally. Apparently two-thirds of new member sign-ups are coming from outside the United States, with India as Skillshare’s fastest growing market, and that’s with “no local language content, no local language teachers.” While Cooper plans to remain focused on English content for the near future, he noted there are other steps Skillshare can take to encourage global viewership, like accepting payments in different currencies and supporting subtitles in different languages.

“Just by making it a little easier for those international users to get value from the platform, we expect to see dramatic growth in these international markets,” he said.

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Equity Monday: The TikTok saga rolls on as earnings season starts to wrap

Published August 10, 2020

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This morning was a bit of a grab-bag of news, but of course we had to start off with the biggest story from the past few weeks:

All that and earnings season is largely behind us, leaving tech companies generally unscathed. So, the good times will persist for a while yet. Have a great week!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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CakeResume, which wants to become Asia’s largest tech talent pool, raises $900,000 seed round

Published August 10, 2020

CakeResume is a startup creating an alternative for the tech industry to job search platforms like LinkedIn. The Taipei-based company, founded in 2016, announced today that it has raised $900,000 in seed funding from Mynavi, one of the largest staffing and public relations companies in Japan. The round will be used to expand CakeResume’s operations in other countries, including Japan and India.

Founder and chief executive officer Trantor Liu, who was a full-stack web developer at Codementor before launching CakeResume, said the startup’s goal is to have the biggest pool of tech talent in Asia. The platform currently has about 500,000 resumes in its database, 75% of which were created by job seekers in Taiwan. More than 3,000 employers, ranging from startups like Appier to large companies like Amazon Web Services, TSMC, Nvidia and Tesla, use it for recruitment.

The other 25% of resumes come from countries including India, Indonesia and the United States. CakeResume plans to expand in Japan with the help of Mynavi, a strategic investor, and is also seeking partnerships in Southeast and South Asia with recruiters. Liu said CakeResume has a particularly high conversion rate in India, and its goal is to build a pool of at least 100,000 resumes there.

In a statement about its decision to invest in CakeResume, a Mynavi representative said, “The global shortage of IT engineers is becoming more apparent and we are focusing on services related to IT talent in Asia. Among them, CakeResume’s service is excellent in product design, and the service is already used by many talent in the country,” adding that it expects the platform to become “the largest IT talent pool in Asia in the near future.”

In Taiwan, CakeResume’s main rivals are LinkedIn and job search site 104.com.tw. It also competes against other job sites like AngelList, Indeed and Glassdoor.

CakeResume differentiates by giving tech professionals more ways to show off their skills, since many tech companies want more in-depth resumes than the traditional one-pagers used in other fields. The startup was named because its resume builder enables job seekers to add more layers of information, like assembling a cake. For example, CakeResume’s template allows engineers to embed projects from GitHub, while designers can add data visualizations, instead of just including links to them.

“We aren’t just providing a form to fill in that you can then download as a formatted PDF resume. We want to allow you to be more creative,” said Liu. “You can easily embed project images and add descriptions, which makes it easier for HR to understand what you can contribute.”

Another difference between CakeResume and its competitors is that most people who create a profile are actively seeking new positions, instead of professional networking opportunities. Because it is also tailored for the tech industry, recruiters have a higher chance of getting responses from interested candidates, Liu said.

“We recently got a review from one of our clients, and they said when they used our platform to contact talent, they got about a 50% reply rate, but on LinkedIn it might be less than 10%,” he added.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many job seekers were willing to relocate, but chief operating officer Wei-Cheng Hsieh said CakeResume is now focusing more on helping people find remote jobs. More tech companies, including Facebook and Google, are extending their work from home policies until at least summer 2021.

Though many job postings still specify a location, Liu said CakeResume’s team anticipates this will change as companies continue adapting to the pandemic. While CakeResume will remain focused on matching applicants to jobs instead of networking, it also is also testing some social features to help workers around the world connect with companies and each other.

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IPO mistakes, fintech results, and the Zenefits ‘mafia’

Published August 10, 2020

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment. It’s broadly based on the weekday column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free. And it’s made just for you. You can sign up for the newsletter here. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk money, upstart companies and the latest spicy IPO rumors. 

(In time the top bit of the newsletter won’t get posted to the website, so do make sure to sign up if you want the whole thing!)

BigCommerce isn’t worried about its IPO pricing

One of the most interesting disconnects in the market today is how VC Twitter discusses successful IPOs and how the CEOs of those companies view their own public market debuts.

If you read Twitter on an IPO day, you’ll often see VCs stomping around, shouting that IPOs are a racket and that they must be taken down now. But if you dial up the CEO or CFO of the company that actually went public to strong market reception, they’ll spend five minutes telling you why all that chatter is flat wrong.

Case in point from this week: BigCommerce. Well-known VC Bill Gurley was incensed that shares of BigCommerce opened sharply higher after they started trading, compared to their IPO price. He has a point, with the Texas-based e-commerce company pricing at $24 per share (above a raised range, it should be said), but opened at $68 and is worth around $88 on Friday as I write to you.

So, when I got BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm on Zoom after its debut, I had some questions. 

First, some background. BigCommerce filed confidentially back in 2019, planned on going public in April, and wound up delaying its offering due to the pandemic, according to Bellm. Then in the wake of COVID-19, sales from existing customers went up, and new customers arrived. So, the IPO was back on.

BigCommerce, as a reminder, is seeing growth acceleration in recent quarters, making its somewhat modest growth rate more enticing than you’d otherwise imagine.

Anyhoo, the company was worth more than 10x its annual run-rate at its IPO price if I recall the math, so it wasn’t cheap even at $24 per share. And in response to my question about pricing Bellm said that he was content with his company’s final IPO price. 

He had a few reasons, including that the IPO price sets the base point for future return calculations, that he measures success based on how well investors do in his stock over a ten-year horizon, and that the more long-term investors you successfully lock in during your roadshow, the smaller your first-day float becomes; the more investors that hold their shares after the debut, the more the supply/demand curve can skew, meaning that your stock opens higher than it otherwise might due to only scarce equity being up for purchase.

All that seems incredibly reasonable. Still, VCs are livid. 

Market Notes

The Exchange spent a lot of time on the phone this week, leading to a host of notes for your consumption. And there was a deluge of interesting data. So, here’s a digest of what we heard and saw that you should know:

  • Fintech mega-rounds are heating up, with 28 in the second quarter of 2020. Total fintech rounds dipped, but it appears that the sky is still pretty much afloat for financial technology startups.
  • Tech stocks set new records this week, something that has become so common that the new all-time highs for the Nasdaq didn’t really create a ripple. Hell, it’s Nasdaq 11,000, where’s our gosh darn party?
  • Axios’ Dan Primack noted this week that SPACs may be raising more money than private equity at the moment, and that there were “over $1 billion in new [SPAC] filings over past 24 hours” on Wednesday. I’ve given up keeping tabs on the number of SPACs taking place, frankly.
  • But we did dig into two of the more out-there SPACs, in case you wanted a taste of today’s market.
  • The Exchange also spoke with the chief solutions officer of Rackspace, Matt Stoyka, before its shares had started to trade. The chat stressed post-COVID-19 momentum, and the continuing cloud transition of lots of IT spend. Rackspace intends on lowering its debt load with a chunk of its IPO proceeds. It priced at $21, the lower-end of its range, so it didn’t get an extra debut check. And as the company’s shares are sharply under its IPO price today, there was no VC chatter about mispricing, notably. (That stuff only tends to crop up when the results bend in a particular direction.)
  • I also chatted with Joshua Bixby, the CEO of Fastly this week. The cloud services company wound up giving back some of its recent gains after earnings, which goes to show how the market is perhaps overpricing some public tech shares. After all, Fastly beat on Q2 profit, Q2 revenue, and raised its full-year guidance — and its shares fell? That’s wild. Perhaps the income it generates from TikTok was concerning? Or perhaps after racing from a 52 week low of $10.63 to a 52 week high of over $117, the market realized that Fastly could only accelerate so much.

Whatever the case, during our chat Fastly CEO Joshua Bixby taught me something new: Usage-based software companies are like SaaS firms, but more so.

In the old days, you’d buy a piece of software, and then own it forever. Now, it’s common to buy one-year SaaS licenses. With usage-based pricing, you make the buying choice day-to-day, which is the next step in the evolution of buying, it feels. I asked if the model isn’t, you know, harder than SaaS? He said maybe, but that you wind up super aligned with your customers. 

Various and Sundry

To wrap up, as always, here’s a final whack of data, news and other miscellania that are worth your time from the week:

  • TechCrunch chatted with Intercom, which recently hired a CFO and is therefore prepping to go public. But then it said the debut is at least two years away, which was a bummer. The company wrapped its January 31, 2020 fiscal year with $150 million ARR. It’s now much larger. Go public!
  • The Zenefits “mafia” raised a lot, and a little this week. “Mafia” is a terrible term, by the way. We should come up with a new one.
  • Danny Crichton wrote about SaaS revenue securitization, which was cool.
  • Natasha Mascarenhas wrote about learning pods, which aren’t super germane to The Exchange but struck me as incredibly topical to our current lives, so I am including the piece all the same.
  • I spoke with the CEO of Wrike this week, noodling on his company’s size (over $100 million ARR), and his competitors Asana and Monday.com. The whole cohort is over $100 million ARR each, so I might turn them into a post next week entitled “Go public you cowards,” or something. But probably with a different title as I don’t want to argue with 17 internal and external PR teams about why I’m right.
  • The Exchange also chatted with VC firms M13 (big on services, various domestic office locations, focus on consumer spend over time) and Coefficient Capital (D2C brand focused, super interesting thesis) this week. Our takeaway is that there is more juice, and focus on the more consumer-focused side of VC than you’d probably expect given recent data. 

We’ve blown past our 1,000 word target, so, briefly: Stay tuned to TechCrunch for a super-cool funding round on Monday (it has the fastest growth I can recall hearing about), make sure to listen to the latest Equity ep, and parse through the latest TechCrunch List updates.

Hugs, fistbumps, and good vibes, 

Alex

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Apple goes to war with the gaming industry

Published August 9, 2020

Most gamers may not view Apple as a games company to the same degree that they see Sony with PlayStation or Microsoft with Xbox, but the iPhone-maker continues to uniformly drive the industry with decisions made in the Apple App Store.

The company made the news a couple times late this week for App Store approvals. Once for denying a gaming app, and the other for approving one.

The denial was Microsoft’s xCloud gaming app, something the Xbox folks weren’t too psyched about. Microsoft xCloud is one of the Xbox’s most substantial software platform plays in quite some time, allowing gamers to live-stream titles from the cloud and play console-quality games across a number of devices. It’s a huge effort that’s been in preview for a bit, but is likely going to officially launch next month. The app had been in a Testflight preview for iOS, but as Microsoft looked to push it to primetime, Apple said not so fast.

The app that was approved was the Facebook Gaming app which Facebook has been trying to shove through the App Store for months to no avail. It was at last approved Friday after the company stripped one of its two central features, a library of playable mobile games. In a curt statement to The New York Times, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said, “Unfortunately, we had to remove gameplay functionality entirely in order to get Apple’s approval on the stand-alone Facebook Gaming app.”

Microsoft’s Xbox team also took the unusually aggressive step of calling out Apple in a statement that reads, in-part, “Apple stands alone as the only general purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. And it consistently treats gaming apps differently, applying more lenient rules to non-gaming apps even when they include interactive content.”

Microsoft is still a $1.61 trillion company so don’t think I’m busting out the violin for them, but iOS is the world’s largest gaming platform, something CEO Tim Cook proudly proclaimed when the company launched its own game subscription platform, Apple Arcade, last year. Apple likes to play at its own pace, and all of these game-streaming platforms popping up at the same time seem poised to overwhelm them.

Image Credits: Microsoft

There are a few things about cloud gaming apps that seem at odds with some of the App Store’s rules, yet these rules are, of course, just guidelines written by Apple.  For Apple’s part, they basically said (full statement later) that the App Store had curators for a reason and that approving apps like these means they can’t individually review the apps which compromises the App Store experience.

To say that’s “the reason” seems disingenuous because the company has long approved platforms to operate on the App Store without stamping approval on the individual pieces of content that can be accessed. With “Games” representing the App Store’s most popular category, Apple likely cares much more about keeping their own money straight.

Analysis from CNBC pinned Apple’s 2019 App Store total revenue at $50 billion.

When these cloud gaming platforms like xCloud scale with zero iOS support, millions of Apple customers, myself included, are actually going to be pissed that their iPhone can’t do something that their friend’s phone can. Playing console-class titles on the iPhone would be a substantial feature upgrade for consumers. There are about 90 million Xbox Live users out there, a substantial number of which are iPhone owners I would imagine. The games industry is steadily rallying around game subscription networks and cloud gaming as a move to encourage consumers to sample more titles and discover more indie hits.

I’ve seen enough of these sagas to realize that sometimes parties will kick off these fights purely as a tactic to get their way in negotiations and avoid workarounds, but it’s a tactic that really only works when consumers have a reason to care. Most of the bigger App Store developer spats have played in the background and come to light later, but at this point the Xbox team undoubtedly sees that Apple isn’t positioned all that well to wage an App Store war in the midst of increased antitrust attention over a cause that seems wholly focused on maintaining their edge in monetizing the games consumers play on Apple screens.

CEO Tim Cook spent an awful lot of time in his Congressional Zoom room answering question about perceived anticompetitiveness on the company’s application storefront.

The big point of tension I could see happening behind closed doors is that plenty of these titles offer in-game transactions and just because that in-app purchase framework is being live-streamed from a cloud computer doesn’t mean that a user isn’t still using experiencing that content on an Apple device. I’m not sure whether this is actually the point of contention, but it seems like it would be a major threat to Apple’s ecosystem-wide in-app purchase raking.

The App Store does not currently support cloud gaming on Nvidia’s GeForce platform or Google’s Stadia which are also both available on Android phones. Both of these platforms are more limited in scope than Microsoft’s offering which is expected to launch with wider support and pick up wider adoption.

While I can understand Apple’s desire to not have gaming titles ship that might not function properly on an iPhone because of system constraints, that argument doesn’t apply so well to the cloud gaming world where apps are translating button presses to the cloud and the cloud is sending them back the next engine-rendered frames of their game. Apple is being forced to get pretty particular about what media types of apps fall under the “reader” designation. The inherent interactivity of a cloud gaming platform seems to be the differentiation Apple is pushing here — as well as the interfaces that allows gamers to directly launch titles with an interface that’s far more specialized than some generic remote desktop app.

All of these platforms arrive after the company already launched Apple Arcade, a non-cloud gaming product made in the image of what Apple would like to think are the values it fosters in the gaming world: family friendly indie titles with no intrusive ads, no bothersome micro-transactions and Apple’s watchful review.

Apple’s driver’s seat position in the gaming world has been far from a wholly positive influence for the industry. Apple has acted as a gatekeeper, but the fact is plenty of the “innovations” pushed through as a result of App Store policies have been great for Apple but questionable for the development of a gamer-friendly games industry.

Apple facilitated the advent of free-to-play games by pushing in-app purchases which have been abused recklessly over the years as studios have been irresistibly pushed to structure their titles around principles of addiction. Mobile gaming has been one of the more insane areas of Wild West startup growth over the past decade and Apple’s mechanics for fueling quick transactions inside these titles has moved fast and broken things.

Take a look at the 200 top grossing games in the App Store (data via Sensor Tower) and you’ll see that all 199 of them rely solely on in-app micro-transaction to reach that status — Microsoft’s Minecraft, ranked 50th costs $6.99 to download, though it also offers in-app purchases.

In 2013, the company settled a class-action lawsuit that kicked off after parents sued Apple for making it too easy for kids to make in-app purchases. In 2014, Apple settled a case with the FTC over the same mechanism for $32 million. This year, a lawsuit filed against Apple questioned the legality of “loot box” in-app purchases which gave gamers randomized digital awards.

“Through the games it sells and offers for free to consumers through its AppStore, Apple engages in predatory practices enticing consumers, including children to engage in gambling and similar addictive conduct in violation of this and other laws designed to protect consumers and to prohibit such practices,” read that most recent lawsuit filing.

This is, of course, not how Apple sees its role in the gaming industry. In a statement to Business Insider responding to the company’s denial of Microsoft’s xCloud, Apple laid out its messaging.

The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for customers to discover and download apps, and a great business opportunity for all developers. Before they go on our store, all apps are reviewed against the same set of guidelines that are intended to protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field to developers.

Our customers enjoy great apps and games from millions of developers, and gaming services can absolutely launch on the App Store as long as they follow the same set of guidelines applicable to all developers, including submitting games individually for review, and appearing in charts and search. In addition to the App Store, developers can choose to reach all iPhone and iPad users over the web through Safari and other browsers on the App Store.

The impact has — quite obviously — not been uniformly negative, but Apple has played fast and loose with industry changes when they benefit the mothership. I won’t act like plenty of Sony and Microsoft’s actions over the years haven’t offered similar affronts to gamers, but Apple exercises the industry-wide sway it holds, operating the world’s largest gaming platform, too often and gamers should be cautious in trusting the App Store owner to make decisions that have their best interests at heart.

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