Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox

In 2019, facing down extensive investigations by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that showed Apple's App Store clearly and consistently ranking its own apps ahead of competitors, Apple claimed it had done nothing wrong - a secret algorithm containing 42 different variables was working as intended, top executives told the Times, insisting that Apple doesn't manually alter search results. Why do I bring this up? An intriguing email chain has surfaced during the Epic v. Apple trial where it sure looks like Apple did the exact opposite - seemingly admitting it manually boosted the ranking of its own Files app ahead of the competition for 11 entire months. "We are removing the manual boost and the search results should be more relevant now," wrote Apple app search lead Debankur Naskar, after the company was confronted by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney over Apple's Files app showing up first when searching for Dropbox. "[W]ho green lit putting the Files app above Dropbox in organic search results? I didn't know we did that, and I don't think we should," he says. While Apple didn't challenge the idea that Files was unfairly ranked over Dropbox, the company says the reality was a simple mistake: the Files app had a Dropbox integration, so Apple put "Dropbox" into the app's metadata, and it was automatically ranked higher for "Dropbox" searches as a result. What matters is the result: for 11 months, Apple's new Files app owned exact searches for its competitor Dropbox, a company Steve Jobs reportedly swore he would kill off, and it took the CEO of a prominent Apple partner emailing the company before Apple did something about it. Based on The Wall Street Journal's investigation, Apple may not have done much: the Files app still ranked #1 in the App Store for cloud storage in June 2018, a month after this email chain was resolved, according to an infographic that accompanied the WSJ story.