How Apple's market power blocked ICEBlock

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0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods. It's becoming a familiar sight in Chicago and its neighboring suburbs. Residents and bystanders spot masked and armed agents that look like they're part of the federal government's deportation campaign there. That's led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Neighborhood residents honk their car horns when they see agents. They blow whistles. Get out of here! They film video on their phones. They text each other and call in tips to local immigration advocacy groups. This activity is hard to escape. I live in a Chicago suburb, and I've seen helicopters circling overhead, and my social media groups are blowing up.

0:56And it's not just Chicago. Agents from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are also carrying out immigration enforcement in cities like Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. And a lot of residents are using their phones to document and report sightings of agents. But the federal government is going after major tech platforms that facilitate these alerts. It asked Facebook to suspend a group called Ice Siting Chicagoland that had almost 80 ,000 members. And it asked Apple to remove an ice-spotting mobile app from its platform. Today on the show, we talk to the developer behind that Apple app.

1:32And we learn what the government crackdown on these tech tools has to do with the ongoing legal battle over Apple's power in mobile apps.

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3:05Link your accounts in minutes, see your full financial picture, and say goodbye to manual spreadsheets forever. Get 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code THRIVE. Joshua Aaron caught the tech bug early. He learned his first computer language at an after-school program in fourth grade. When he was 13, he wrote a blackjack program on an Apple computer. Later on, he got certified as a desktop technician for the company. I love their operating system. Their devices are phenomenal. I happen to love their products. Fast forward to 2024 and the presidential election. Joshua was alarmed at what he read in Project 2025.

3:46That's the conservative policy document that provided a roadmap for what a Trump presidency might look like. And on the election night. My brain started going a mile a minute. And, you know, what can I do? I have to do something. Joshua focused his energy on immigration. Project 2025 had talked about mass deportations and heightened enforcement. As an Apple guy, he decided to make an iPhone app that would let people report ice sightings. It would be similar to how people who use Waze or Google Maps for navigation can report construction or state troopers on the side of the highway. Joshua started coding his iPhone app in January.

4:23He wanted to make something so simple that anyone could use it, regardless of age or tech-savviness. And he called it IceBlock. So here's what the app looks like. The main screen has a map. Below the map is a list of reported sightings within a five-mile radius of the user's location. Someone can make their own report by tapping the map. That's about it. It's free. Joshua says IceBlock doesn't collect or store any information about its users, and it doesn't ask for an email address or solicit donations. It's a crowdsourced early warning system. So there's not a million bells and whistles or funky-looking buttons or how do I do this and how do I manage that.

5:04It needed to be incredibly fast, incredibly stable, and incredibly simplistic. And that was the design. Joshua submitted Iceblot to Apple for approval. He says there was some back and forth with the company. And ultimately, the only change he had to make was tweaking permissions for using someone's location. He says Apple never objected to the app's fundamental purpose of reporting ice sightings. I had multiple conversations, you know, video calls, messages, all that kind of stuff. They said, we get it. It's fine. You know, this is obviously protected speech by the First Amendment. You're not doing anything nefarious.

5:40IceBlock launched in the App Store in early April. Joshua says only a few thousand people were using it at first. It wasn't enough to generate meaningful reports. And this was before ICE activity ramped up in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. But then in June, CNN reported on ICE block. And White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt was asked about the CNN story in a briefing. But certainly it's unacceptable that a major network would promote such an app that is encouraging violence against law enforcement officers who are trying to keep our country safe. The political rhetoric escalated from there.

6:16The acting director of ICE releases a statement about it. Pam Bondi's on Hannity threatening me and Kristi Noem's talking about it. And we go from 3 ,000 users to 25 ,000 users to 85 ,000 users to 200 ,000 users. And when Apple removed it, we had 1.14 million users. Attorney General Pam Bondi asked Apple to take down ICE block in October. And Joshua says he got a message from Apple. It said the company had received information that the app was targeting law enforcement officers. It didn't elaborate further. Now, anyone who had downloaded the app earlier could still use it, but IceBlock was gone from the app store.

6:56They cited objectionable content and their guideline 1.1.1, which basically says you can't have hate speech or target an individual or group. We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the media is spinning Apple's removal of ice tracking apps as, quote, caving to pressure instead of preventing further bloodshed and stopping law enforcement from getting killed. We asked Apple for comment via email and registered letter. We did not hear back. The company did say in October that it removed ice block and similar apps based on information it received from law enforcement about safety risks.

7:37Joshua believes there are two things at risk here. Neither is about the safety of offices. One is free speech. The other is a competitive market for iOS apps. There's just one app store. And for Joshua, who is an iOS developer, that means he doesn't have another way to get IceBlock into the world. He likes Apple security features. He didn't make an Android version of his app. iOS and Android roughly split the US market for smartphones. When you allow a corporation to decide what you can and cannot use on a device that you paid for and you own, that's a problem. We had a tool that over a million people were using every single day.

8:22And because Apple decided that they were going to remove it, now nobody can have it and nobody can install it on any iOS device. An alternate marketplace for iOS apps does not exist in the U.S. But does that make Apple's App Store an illegal monopoly? This was the question at the heart of a huge, years-long legal battle between Apple and Epic Games. Epic makes the blockbuster game Fortnite. And its main grievance is that in-app purchases had to go through Apple's payment system. Apple typically takes a 30 % cut of those sales. A federal judge delivered a split ruling in the case in 2021. She ordered Apple to allow other payment options, but upheld the overall structure of the App Store as legal.

9:07In Europe, regulators have taken a firmer hand. Users there can get iPhone apps from alternative marketplaces, but not in the U.S. Rebecca Allensworth is a law professor at Vanderbilt University who studies antitrust. She says IceBlock is an example of Apple's market power in the U.S. If there was just a bigger market, a more competitive market for apps, then you could have this app appear in stores, could be downloaded and used in ways that Apple wouldn't have the same power to totally take away. Rebecca also points out a number of sensitive areas for Apple's relationship with the Trump administration.

9:44There's tariffs, for example, and the Justice Department has its own pending antitrust case against Apple over whether the company blocks certain kinds of apps and services. Rebecca says these were probably considerations for Apple when the administration asked the company to take IceBlock off the App Store. It could have fought the government. I mean, it could have just said no. Now, I think that to say that as if it was going to be consequence-free for Apple is naive. Meanwhile, the Epic versus Apple battle continues in a federal appeals court. And Joshua Aaron says he's going to fight Apple in court, too.

10:21This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with engineering by Ko Takasugi Chernavan and Kweisi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kicking Cannon edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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