Facebook management apparently ordered to ditch their iPhones for Android

Mark Zuckerberg has apparently ordered the Facebook management team to use Android phones instead of iPhones. According to The New York Times (via CNET), the command came after Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized the way some companies use customer data to make money.

The publication pointed to comments made by Cook in an interview with MSNBC. Specifically, Cook said Apple was “not going to traffic in your personal life,” and that to Apple privacy is a “human right” and a “civil liberty.” The quotes arrived during Facebook’s Cambridge Audio Audio Analytica data-sharing scandal, where the personal data of around 87 million Facebook users was alleged to have been improperly shared with the analytics company.

According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg later ordered management to use Android phones, reasoning that more Facebook users use Android phones than iPhones (i.e. they could better understand the experiences of their users). We don’t know if the latter is true — Facebook keeps that information under lock and key — but it’s likely to be the case, given Android’s market share and Facebook’s global popularity.

This wouldn’t be the first time a decision like this has been made at Facebook. Back in 2015, the company’s chief product officer Chris Cox told some Facebook employees to start using Android so they could see how the service worked on the platform.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know what the actual motivation for the supposed decision was, if the orders were even followed, or which Android phones the Facebook managers might have picked up.

Next up: Switching from iPhone to Android – it’s not as hard as you think