题型：阅读理解 题类：其他 难易度：难
The French have always loved Apple. Its elegant products and smart operating system, and its struggles against IBM and Microsoft in the 1980s, are especially appealing in a country that prides itself on being fashionable, clever and revolutionary. Apple’s two stores in central Paris lie in locations that are dear to French hearts — under the Louvre and directly opposite the Opera.
But the love affair is fading — in official circles at any rate — as concern grows that the technology giant’s market control does harm to a business in which French companies have been successful: designing applications for mobile devices. The government has complained Apple’s eviction (逐出) from its application store of a popular product developed by a French start-up firm — AppGratis. AppGratis offers its users one free application a day, charging developers for making products known to a wider audience.
Simon Dawlat, the boss of AppGratis thinks the application performs a valuable service in providing “a continuous stream of editorial picks” of the highest quality from the complex world of applications. Around 12 million people have downloaded AppGraits, he says, and perhaps a quarter of them at least consider the chosen application each day. First marketed outsideFrancein 2012, AppGraits has at times been the most popular free entertainment download for devices running Apple’s iOS operating system in 78 countries including the United States, according to App Annie, a market-research firm. In early 2013 AppGratis had raised more than $13 million for an expansion that has now been put on hold.
Apple says AppGratis disobeyed its bans on promoting other publishers’ products and on using “push” notifications (通知) for paid marketing. Apple dislikes applications that serve as shop-fronts for other ones. It worries that “app-discovery” products can help developers with deep pockets move their applications up the league tables and disturb the market. So it is rather puzzling that a version of AppGratis for iPads was approved less than a week before the mobile-phone version was evicted from the application store, and that other app-discovery applications are still available there. Perhaps AppGratis was growing too popular too quickly and that was its real fault.
Fleur Pellerin,France’s digital economy minister, blamed Apple on April 11th for its cruel treatment of AppGratis and spoke of tightening the regulation of giant Internet firms, in France and at European Union level. ‘The country’s competition authority is looking into the relationship between app stores — Google’s no less than Apple’s—and developers. The French have a lengthening list of grievances (抱怨) against the Internet giants including their failure to pay serious taxes, the refusal of Microsoft’s Skype to register as a telecoms operator and Twitter’s refusing to name those behind an outburst of racists. Ms Pellerin may not manage to cut them down to size; others have tried and failed. But for Apple and France, at least, it is looking increasingly like the end of the affair.
