Why doesn’t Apple make a social media platform given all the major privacy concerns out of the popular platforms.

Google tried it and it failed miserably

The business case for social media is to sell ad space by using content that you didn't have to make yourself. How does that fit in Apple's business model?

Social Media is very hard to make insanely popular

Apple fundamentally misunderstands how to make a social network:

• "iTunes Ping" was a social media platform by Apple with focus on music and artists. It failed miserably.
• Apple Music Connect was their second attempt at the same thing. Nobody used it.
• Game Center is a current platform to add friends and play games together. It exists but hardly anyone knows it; the only way to invite friends is by using the Messages app, which isn't used in more than half of the world. Many people are signed into it but are not aware of that.

In the above cases, Apple's focus on privacy is a large reason for failure. Most social media networks immediately ask to access your contacts so you can instantly find your friends. Apple never does that so adding friends -only possible via Apple Messages- is a huge hassle and people don't understand why they don't see their friends automatically.

• Apple Developer forums: it does exist but is a wasteland. Posting something and then following your own post used to be impossible. Threads are organised in a weird way and Apple closes many posts even though they haven't been answered.
• Apple Customer Support forums: it does exist but is another wasteland. The Apple "Experts" that are present are very misinformed; they point to the dumbest answers like "switch your phone off and on" when clearly the user has already done that. Same weird threading issues, and no private messaging.

Both forums are not strictly "social media", but they show us how little Apple understands about building communities. People ignore these products and often don't even know they exist.

• Apple Messages: mostly used in the USA only, it offers a complicated mess of a user interface with tons of options people do not know about. Stickers, audio messages, file sharing and groups work in an "Apple" way that is weird for those who are used to WhatsApp or Signal. It used to be incompatible with Google Messages, causing it to be difficult for family and friends to talk to each other across platforms. With a lot of childish features and no social options such as public groups, company pages etc. it remains a sort of half-baked-social-media platform.

Messages of course also isn't strictly a social media platform, however competitors are offering many social features Messages does not offer. Apple clearly does not want to be in that space.

They used to have one as part of Apple Music. You could add friends, share liked music and update a status message. It didn’t gain any interest from the users.

Because in order to have a social media platform you have to do all the major privacy concerns or else you don't have the money required to run a social media service.

Social media if successful is disgusting work. Like literally. Bots flood every input. You need to hire moderators to moderate porn or gore or spam. All those lead to high manpower and for what? To sell ads?

its a tempting idea, but Apple's business model is the opposite of Meta's. Apple makes money by selling you hardware and services; they don’t need to sell your data. building a social platform requires heavy moderation, algorithmic curation, and ad infrastructure - things that often conflict with Apple’s 'privacy-first' brand.

instead of building one, they're likely betting on decentralized protocols, where we own our data, or integrating better privacy tools into existing social apps u/Mathemodel

It’s already there.

You create a shared iCloud photo album, your friends join, and you share photos and can comment and like each others posts.

Quite literally an almost perfect form of social media

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