Facebook vs. Apple

Relations between Facebook and Apple are a bit like those between the United States and China.

The two companies, great powers in their own right, are neither friends, nor outright hostile toward each other. When I asked someone who has known the principals at Facebook for years about how Apple and Facebook view each other, he e-mailed me back a litany of somewhat contradictory emotions, using expressions like “mutual respect,” “cold and distrustful,” “not friends” and wanting to “find a way to work together.” (This person did not want to be identified talking without authorization about Facebook)

First, there are the obvious reasons that Apple and Facebook do not hate each other. It would be difficult to find two companies of their stature in the tech industry that compete less. Facebook does not make computers, an operating system, a tablet and, at least for now, a mobile phone.

Apple does have a social network, Ping, but it is a narrowly focused service aimed at people who want to share their musical tastes on iTunes. No one at Apple would argue with a straight face that it’s meant to challenge Facebook, and Ping seems largely to have been forgotten by the company and the public.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s late chief executive, professed his admiration for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder and chief executive, to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. He praised Mr. Zuckerberg for wanting to build a lasting Silicon Valley company, rather than selling it.

But there have been clear signs of tension between the companies, too. When Ping was introduced two years ago, Apple and Facebook could not come to an agreement on a way to integrate Facebook with the service so that Ping users could easily interact with their Facebook friends on Ping. At the time, Mr. Jobs told one reporter that Apple decided not to work with Facebook on Ping because Facebook demanded “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

Further, Apple did not integrate Facebook’s log-in service, Facebook Connect, directly into iOS, the operating system behind the iPhone and iPad, even though great benefits could have come of that. For example, it would have made it easier for people to post photos directly to Facebook from an iPhone’s camera without having to open a separate Facebook app. Instead, Apple made such an arrangement with Twitter, thumbing its nose at Facebook.

Relations between Facebook and Apple would very likely take a sharp turn for the worse if Facebook ends up releasing a mobile phone of its own design, as some have predicted. Google and Apple were once allies, and Eric Schmidt, then Google’s chief executive, served on Apple’s board. But that all ended after Google made a big push into the mobile market with its Android operating system.