This has been true for many. many iOS releases. The good apps that become essential eventually get built into the operating system. This happened with sleep trackers, menstruation trackers, numerous other HealthKit apps, SwiftKey/Skype, Tile (the AirTag-like thing), camera features borrowed from the best third party camera apps, the list goes on and on.
Building for iOS is a great way to show Apple that there's a market for something :)
I believe this is why ycombinator does not recommend building a business on top of another company's platform. I suspect OpenAI based businesses will eventually learn this lesson.
The number of YC startups this batch centered around OpenAI seems to belie this. Although I do remember YC stating this often in effect, at least in past, older content.
To counter my own argument, the other possibility is OpenAI like features become a commodity. I.e. build a product around OpenAI and switch to Google's (eventual) offering at some point.
However, embeddings might end up being the true vendor lock in of our time. If I've based my entire company on OpenAI embeddings (and spent lots of money on these), it isn't clear there would be an easy way to translate to another vendor's offerings.
It's fine to build a business on top of another company's platform. You do need a contingency plan, especially if what you offer can be easily replicated in that platform.
What would the contingency plan be in this case? It seems that it would just be to build something else compelling instead. In which case it seems that starting with plan B might be a good idea.
Apple vs Epic Games is currently challenging this in courts over Fortnite. You can play on other platforms but the argument is on mobile, you're forced to use their walled garden and let them take 30%.
Yes, and as per the very recent ruling, one would suggest that ycombinator is entirely correct in regards to not relying on a singular other company's platform, since they've decided that Apple is within their rights in regards to a walled garden.
The ruling still deemed illegal restrictions on making people aware that other options exist. But yes, the more one relies on someone else's platform, the more one is just a sharecropper.
SwiftKey is still the only keyboard that supports fluently typing both Swedish and English without switching layouts in iOS. It is literally the only keyboard I can use, and Microsoft was about to kill it in 2022, thankfully they changed their mind and finally implemented a feature I'd been requesting for 2 years, the ability to access the input cursor by long-pressing spacebar.
Long-pressing spacebar was previously reserved for changing input layout, and only appeared (and replaced input cursor) when multiple layouts were selected, which is required on SwiftKey for iOS when having both Swedish and English enabled, even though SwiftKey for Android allows users to select the Swedish QWERTY layout for the English language, resulting in two languages but only one layout enabled, and input cursor would continue working.
As a consumer, I prefer Apple building all of that into the OS because I assume any other business will sell out at some point. I recall quite a bit of bad publicity when the menstruation trackers were found to be selling data.
> I typically do too until they incorporate some feature in a bad way. See: Dark Sky.
As a Dark Sky fan for years, I understand losing something you've gotten used to. But Apple Weather is great for most people, and die-hards like me can move to apps like Weathergraph.
The nice thing about Apple is it's incentives are not misaligned. Its revenues are largely based on selling products, not people's data. Whether or not they sell data anyway is perhaps an open question but decisions should tend to err on the side of product sales and most consumers want to control their data.
Nothing wrong with Apple building in-house solutions or integrating things into the OS. Problems start when a trillion dollar corporation uses their platform to strong-arm smaller development studios or individuals, shuts down their revenue stream for bullshit, confusing reasons, and steals their efforts instead of paying what is effectively chump-change to them, to reward the people who provided content to their platform.
Isn't this true any time you build a business adding a small bit of value to a larger platform?
The aftermarket showed carmakers demand for superchargers, cup holders, and bigger wheels.
Third parties, including Microsoft, showed Google the demand for Gmail.
And on and on. I am forever at a loss at people's surprise and dismay that a large platform maker will seek to improve their platform by incorporating features that their users are signaling are missing by acquiring from third parties.
The funniest part is when an apple/big tech recruiter contacts you, you get to explain your app's design choices during the interview process, they don't hire you and launch that competitor of yours.
If a big company is so bereft of design ideas they have a process to collect them from interview debrief and build them into product requirements, that company is dead. I'm very skeptical that ever happens.
I'm sure that there have been times when someone mentioned design / arch / marketing strategies in an interview and later saw the same thing implemented, but I mean have have had multiple times in my life where I told nobody an idea and still saw it implemented somewhere else. Ideas are not half as unique as people like to think they are.
Does this actually happen outside of Silicon Valley plotlines? I can't see a SWE interview debrief having enough detail to leak anything useful about a competitor that you wouldn't have gathered through common sense.
This happened to an e-commerce business I did some work for. They became a top seller in their product category but then found themselves competing with Amazon. Only the manufacturers themselves could compete at that point.
New product category of some food or condiment suddenly starts selling, the store has the sales data and finds someone to make the same thing and sells it under a house brand.
iOS is a platform and I think it can be argued that platforms are stronger with generic implementations of things most people use. Apple doing this pre-dates Sherlock. The patent aspect is disturbing on the face of it becuase it seems to go beyond healthy competition. I would just argue that platforms should integrate generic features. We all sleep and why can't I get a taste of what a sleep monitor is like as seamlessly as possible. If Apple's built in platform has a better implementation than a company specializing in sleep monitoring I see it as raising the table stakes.
Apple showed the world there was a market for an always connected capacitive touchscreen slab. The world keeps changing and what was once an App becomes a feature.
yes for a large enough portion of the population - if your app is useful for every kid, every adult or all of one general traditional gender - that's a big market - if you're very successful the platform will take over.
If on the other hand you have the top selling real estate portfolio management app in the world I don't expect the platform will fold that up in their offerings, even if you are making more money on that than any of the apps with more universal appeal.
>If on the other hand you have the top selling real estate portfolio management app in the world I don't expect the platform will fold that up in their offerings
Why not? In hindsight, we see "menstrual tracking" as an obvious fit now for a more complete Apple Health, but it's very easy to apply that same exact thinking to menstrual tracking.
Using your real estate portfolio management app, ok maybe Apple doesn't replicate it exactly as is, but what's stopping them from turning Apple Home into a more complete home control experience, where you can buy and sell in an easier way or incorporate Airbnb elements. Heck, having more control over your home totally fits their privacy MO. It might seem far fetched now if you don't have the vision, but again same about things like health tracking just 8 years ago!
So I would rethink this angle, I don't believe the determining factor is if it's a big market vs a niche market. A weather app is a niche market, yet they gobbled that up. An infinite canvas brainstorming app is a niche market, here comes Apple's Freeform.
actually I guess I was unclear earlier, when I said real estate portfolio management I was thinking about a real estate agent managing the properties they needed to flog and contacts for said flogging.
>A weather app is a niche market, yet they gobbled that up.
I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree about how much of the population is affected by the weather, I say all of it, you evidently much less.
Gobbling it up is actually interesting for weather apps, because the weather app, and the clock and other apps that have to do with stuff that everyone in the world needs is basically the kind of thing my argument says will always happen for a platform.
>>If on the other hand you have the top selling real estate portfolio management app in the world I don't expect the platform will fold that up in their offerings
>Why not?
Apple's main business is selling devices with other ancillary businesses growing up to support this primary business, of course from outside it can look like these ancillary businesses are very nice to have indeed and any one of us might be happy to have them but for Apple they are rounding errors. And if you have one of these businesses already and Apple comes calling then it's like the WSJ article points out - not good for your business because Apple might just decide to pack it up in their platform and give it away for free or provide a much better implementation than you can and up the profile of their apps in their store.
But in the end Apple is mainly interested in making one of these apps because it enhances their platform for the general population (or their historical target demographics that are still of some importance to the Apple brand). Thus Apple is not going to be making apps targeted at lawyers even though such apps might make a LOT of money because a lawyer app LOT of money to Apple is a pittance.
This just occurred to me: there is 100% chance that there is Genshin clone by Apple by the end of the decade.
Microsoft already has Steve from Minecraft, Apple will have a 14 years old girl on Apple Campus Lunar in aluminium boots over latex suit, named, say, Isaac, at which point the online landscape will be so absurd that Zuckerberg in Meta avatar explaining their Nintendo partnership is going to look as natural and comforting as an Uber Orbit’d bowl of soup out at the side of a mountain in rural Mongolia.
And I bet, the audiences’ focus in 2029 WWDC Keynote will be, whether she will finally reveal her $19840/mo. R18+ plans on iPatreon.
Building for iOS is a great way to show Apple that there's a market for something :)