Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening", it should be viewed as an opportunity for startups to step out of the comfort zone and offer genuine innovation, which will further benefit the consumer. Having basic features integrated in the OS is essential, and will happen more and more, especially with so many horror stories of seemingly innocent apps brokering user information for cash. Startups need to step up their game in privacy as well as technological and product innovation. Good luck.
I remember an anecdote I'd heard a while ago; long before Starbucks was ubiquitous, and before coffee culture was what it is in North America, a cafe owner heard that Starbucks was going to be moving in down the street. He was worried, because he thought Starbucks was going to take all his business, so he called someone he knew who also ran a cafe, who'd had a Starbucks open in his town, to ask what he should do.
The friend told him this was the best thing that could have happened to his cafe, for a simple reason: Starbucks, and all the media surrounding their launch, will tell potential customers what the whole deal is with cafes and coffee culture, and people will flock to them in droves, and Starbucks will be insanely busy. A lot of those potential customers, and a lot of customers who really get into the coffee culture Starbucks brings, will come to the smaller cafes for more personal service, more handcrafted drinks, and a better atmosphere.
I heard the story in the context of Apple adding a feature to iOS years back, I forget which one. The point of the story is that Starbucks, or Apple in our case, is going to make a feature with mass-market appeal to a broad range of people. Customers who've never thought about it before will try it and see the benefit; customers who like it, but don't necessarily like Apple's offering, will go further afield to find better offerings from third-party developers.
Typically, the companies that tend to get completely Sherlocked are the ones who make a simple product with potentially mass appeal, and don't go beyond that, or who go beyond it with features that aren't practical or useful to most people.
Take Growl for example; a great notification framework that everyone used. Suddenly Apple adds support for native notifications, and push notifications, and Growl is thrown by the wayside, because all it did was offer notifications. No deferment, no forwarding to other devices (e.g. your iPhone). The only features it had were the obvious features that you would imagine for a notification service.
I think John Gruber said it best[1]: "when a utility is designed to compensate for a hole in Mac OS X, the developer should not expect the hole to remain unfilled by Apple forever".
In the case of the native Tile and Airpods, though, Apple is using their walled garden to provide an experience that's pretty strictly better than what you'd get from competitors. It's not a hole in Apple's OS per se, it's more like a privileged route to the OS.
For your analogy, it'd be as though the Starbucks owned the street the two shops were on, and gave the entrants to the Starbucks a privileged position on the street.
I don't think Apple is going to simply stop giving applications background location access now that they have their own offering. It'd be like only allowing audio using AirPods and not letting any other headphones connect via bluetooth.
It may never do because Apple's philosophy for window management isn't to make windows any bigger than they need to be — except for full screen windows, which is clearly made for the MacBook Air crowd.
In the mean time, try BetterSnapTool for all your snapping needs. :-)
Yes, one of the egregious cases I was thinking of. I am very wary these days of installing apps. I try to really confine myself to the system apps, or to a few apps that I trust the developer, or build my own helper apps.
I’ve always thought that if your business can be made redundant simply by another product implementing a new feature, then you have a really obvious business risk and should make decisions accordingly.
The counter-argument is that Apple's implementations aren't "playing fairly", because iOS's restrictions mean Apple can give its own features special integration into the OS that third-parties don't have access to. Of course, some degree of this is inevitable with any platform. So there isn't a clear line where it becomes anti-competitive.
I don’t think that’s a valid counter-argument at all. The same line of reasoning applies to any service. There’s plenty of products that are essentially 3rd party implementations of features in other services. If you’re going to make a product like that, you absolutely must know that your entire value prop can be wiped out if the 3rd party ever happens to get around to implementing that feature themselves. Apple does plenty of stuff that could be argued as anti-competitive, but I don’t think “implementing my product as a feature” is one of them.
It is perhaps a good reason to think twice before making an iOS app though. But as a consumer I prefer it to the opposite approach, which I’d consider a company like Atlassian to have. If you ask Atlassian when they’re going to implement a rather basic and highly demanded feature, the answer tends to be “never, buy it on the market place”.
It's... it's basically all products. Virtually any product on iOS would function and perform and integrate better if implemented by Apple. It's just a question of at what point it gets popular enough that they want to bother doing so.
> The same line of reasoning applies to any service
iOS is a special case because of how locked-down it is. Not only can't third-parties do things like draw over other parts of the UI or add items to system UIs, they can't even (truly) run in the background.
Of course, on Android, apps can do all of these things and that's part of why it's a security nightmare. Which is why as I said, there's no clear answer to the problem. But it is a problem.
I looked through every app I have installed on my iPhone and I only found a couple that would fall into that category. I have a shopping list app which Apple could theoretically implement as a feature if it wanted to (but not fully, as this particular shopping list app allows me to share lists with android users), and Authy.
The rest of the apps I have installed are just interfaces for 3rd party services. Apple doesn’t have the power to subvert the value of those services any more than any other service provider does (Apple has a maps app, I still use google maps).
I guess Apple could also make a Sudoku app if it really wanted to, but I’d consider that pretty unlikely.
I think there’s a strong argument for saying something like Spotify vs Apple Music is anti-competitive, but for rather different reasons.
Would Apple have implemented these feature if the originals didn't exist?
Unless the answer to that question is a clear "yes" in every case, this behaviour is de facto - and possibly de jure - on the wrong side of anti-monopoly law.
The problem is that iOS and MacOS are not specifically operating systems. iOS especially is an OS bundled with a curated non-trivial application suite.
That suite puts Apple into direct competition with iOS developers. And of course Apple has an impossibly huge monopolistic advantage in that space.
The ethical and above-board option would be to buy the rights to these apps and/or acquihire the devs who make them.
Apple has done that in the past, but seems less and less inclined to operate like that now.
All of that is very much just your opinion, and very much not an opinion shared by the courts or the legislature. It’s also a criticism that applies equally to all products or services that expose any interface that a 3rd party can develop integrations for.
As long as Apple makes great products, the truth is that people will support a monopoly. I always think of the Microsoft-IE antitrust debacle as karma for making a truly horrible product.
Indeed. Any feature-oriented startup or company will eventually find stiff competition from other companies which can copy the feature, while adding to a portfolio of other related features, giving a net benefit to the customer, while the feature-only company has little to compete.
> Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening",
Well the consumer has a clear loss here if they don’t extend the functionality to all apps, eg give them control over which links open which apps and ability to remove built in apps like safari, mail, the absolutely useless news app, etc.
Yes, and the author is misinformed to think that Peloton can lose the customers who take their online classes to Apple free options. People take classes for the inspiration and guidance from the teachers. Before Apple there were plenty of free options so this isn’t new, fitness is and will continue to be a very competitive market.
There's not a single statistic to prove that anything what you say is logical. mI'm pretty sure your old customers will not look further if there's already an option on their phone and completing with the richest company of the world is dumb. They did their research too
