Elon Muskthe richest man in the world, owner of Tesla and SpaceX, recently also took over the reins of the social network Twitter, blowing up all its foundations and having to deal with new difficulties.
And Elon Musk’s journey with Twitter will not be easy, at least during these first years, because he will even have to anticipate possible external decisions that may affect the social network, and one of them could be that both Google and Apple decide to remove the Twitter application from their respective stores.
It has been a situation exposed by Liz Wheelera conservative commentator, who last night tweeted that “if Apple and Google remove Twitter from their app stores, Elon Musk should produce his own smartphone. Half the country would happily ditch the biased and nosy iPhone and Android. This man builds rockets to Mars so a smartphone should be easy right?”.
To everyone’s surprise, Musk himself responded to this hypothetical situation by pointing out that “I certainly hope that we don’t go to these extremes, but if it did, if there is no other option, I would make an alternative phone”.
I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2022
These comments come after Phil Schiller, responsible for running the App Store, deleted his account from Twitter.
An unlikely risk
On the other hand, Yoel Rothformer head of Twitter’s security trust, commented in an op-ed for the New York Times that “Twitter risks being banned from Apple and Google app stores if it doesn’t follow the guidelines”.
“Failure to follow Apple and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter being banned from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to get Twitter services. This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.”, he added.
However, at this time there are no signs that Apple or Google will make this decision by removing Twitter from their respective app stores and, if that were to happen, Twitter could continue to be available as an app in stores like Amazon’s which also has a wide global reach.
On the other hand, it is not essential to have a native application that can be downloaded from stores, since Twitter works in any browser, so iPhone and Android users could continue to access Twitter through their favorite browsers.
In any case, the possibility of seeing a Tesla phone on the market is practically remote, and despite the fact that Tesla has plummeted 54% so far this year, shareholders would not see very favorably that Musk reuse the brand for a Twitter-related matter.