Elon Musk: Apple Threatened to Boot Twitter from App Store

Twitter owner Elon Musk said today that Apple has threatened to suspend the platform from its app store, threatening “war” against the hardware company in subsequent tweets.

“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” said Musk in a tweet posted Monday.

Musk also said that Apple has “mostly” stopped advertising on Twitter, asking if the company simply “hates free speech in America.”

There were already rumors that smartphone stores may crack down on Twitter due to Musk’s free speech ambitions.

Twitter’s former top censor, Yoel Roth, revealed in a New York Times column earlier this month that “calls from the app review teams” at Google and Apple had “already begun” as he was exiting the company.

If Twitter were banned from the Apple and Google app stores, it would be a major impediment to users installing the app on their phones.

Apple and Google hold a duopoly on the worldwide smartphone market, with over 99 percent of phones using either the Android or iOS operating systems.

Theoretically, it would be possible for users to download Twitter onto Android and Apple phones through the use of web apps, which can be added to users’ home screens via their browsers — however, the process is generally more complicated than the app stores, and currently unfamiliar to most smartphone users.

In subsequent tweets, Musk called out Apple for its 30 percent tax on purchases made through apps that use its app store, as well as an image suggesting he would “go to war” against the tech company.

Previously, Musk said he would build an alternative smartphone if app stores decided to censor Twitter.

LBRY, the blockchain-based file sharing and payment network, said that Apple also threatened them during the coronavirus pandemic, warning them that they would be blacklisted if they did not filter certain search terms.

“Who else has Apple censored?” asked Musk.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.