Apple hires former vice president of Product at stock-trading app Robinhood, and a prominent venture capitalist, Josh Elman to help improve iOS app discovery in the App Store. The announcement was made on Twitter by Elman on Monday.
Elman also said that he will be leaving his role as a board member of prominent tech companies like Discord and Medium, as well as his role as board partner at the firm Greylock Partners. Elman joining the Apple team would help improve the company’s relationship with developers, which has been quite shaky this year over App Store’s 30% commission rate.
Josh Elman Joins Apple’s App Store Team
Making the announcement on Twitter, Elman wrote that he will “help customers discover the best apps for them.” As a former investor and board member of Houseparty, a chat app that was acquired by Fortnite‘s creator Epic Games, Elman is expected to improve and strengthen the company’s rapport with developers.
Recently, the company tried to amend things with its developers’ community by announcing a new small business program that cuts the company’s 30% App Store commission in half for those developers who make less than $1 million per year. The Cupertino giant also tried to compromise with a number of app developers and tech rivals, like Microsoft over complaints regarding a few App Store restrictions.
https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/1333471692438441984
Apple is currently engaged in an acrimonious legal battle with Epic Games, and is under investigation by European, Russian, Japanese, and other antitrust regulators over its App Store policies and practices.
Neither Elman nor Apple has confirmed what position will he be filling. However, Elman said wrote that “I am really excited to get to build ways to help over a billion customers and millions of developers connect.” Given Elman’s standing in the software industries along with his ability to identify apps that have the potential of becoming multibillion-dollar businesses, he will definitely provide valuable insight into the upcoming big iOS apps.
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