Friday’s Apple Rumors — Hello, FTC

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Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Friday:

Hello, FTC: The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are taking interest in the new guidelines for subscription sales via Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) app store. The Journal says the FTC’s interest is at “a preliminary stage” and that a formal investigation has not been opened. With the threat of a ful-scale probe looming and the new competitive terms offered to publishers through Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) One Pass subscription service, Apple may relax its subscription policies quickly, much as it did with app store software sales last fall.

App Store Competition Heats Up: CNET published excerpts from a new IHC report that shows Apple’s app store still controls a majority share of the mobile market. Revenue generated by the app store in 2010 grew to nearly $1.8 billion, up from $769 million in 2009, a jump of more than 131%. Competitors like Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM), Nokia (NYSE:NOK), and Google still trail Apple by a dramatic margin, but they are gaining quickly. Apple’s market share fell to less than 83% last year from almost 93% in 2009, with the lost share spread evenly between RIM, NOK, and GOOG. With Google saying 300,000 Android phones are activated each day, the Android store share should continue to eat away at Apple’s dominance in 2011.

Beta This: Yet another beta version of the next update to Apple’s laptop and desktop operating system has been sent to developers. The Snow Leopard update Mac OS X 10.6.7 was delivered to software developers with the request that they test the functionality of Apple’s Safari web browser, the Mac App Store, Graphics Drivers, and Airport wireless router functionality. OS X 10.6.6 was released just one week ago and fixed minor issues with the recently opened Mac App Store. This will likely be one of the final updates to Snow Leopard before Apple releases OS X 10.7, named Lion, this summer.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2011/02/fridays-apple-rumors-hello-ftc/.

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