Apple’s actions to drop some Siri support with third-party apps in iOS 15 could make Apple look anti-competitive to lawmakers
In iOS 15, Siri will no longer support third-party to-do apps, nor will users be able to have the voice assistant help them pay bills using third-party apps. In the same vein, users will no longer be able to transfer money within a specific third-party app. Apple is asking developers to make the appropriate changes to any marketing material that promotes support from Siri to handle certain tasks that the latter will no longer support in iOS 15.
As if Apple needs another reason to have anti-competitive charges thrown in its face, the deprecation of SiriKit intent domains for third-party apps is bound to help Apple’s first-party apps since those will not lose Siri support. With lawmakers probing tech firms like Apple and Google, this surely seems like the wrong time for Apple to be doing this especially with some third-party apps no longer able to handle Siri-directed tasks that Apple’s own apps will still be allowed to handle.
