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Apple has copied some of the most popular apps in the App Store

465 points by rgbrenner 7y ago

itsangaris 7y ago
Sans paywall: https://outline.com/nJ84Ea https://outline.com/nJ84Ea
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/cUxGy http://archive.is/cUxGy
kposehn 7y ago
This is an example of what I call "Feature vs. Product." A classic example is Snapchat and Instagram. Snapchat was never something that stood on its own, as everything that made it unique would easily be duplicatable by Instagram, down to the tiniest feature. Theoretically, the network of users would be the unique value but it was nowhere near Facebook's size, and thus would not be able to truly compete. All it took was Instagram copying most every good feature to dominate the space. In the article's case, each of the apps (Clue, Duet, DoApp, Voxer) were creating something that, while valuable to users at the time, was simply an addition to the existing functionality and in no way was a valuable product outside the context of the phone or iOS itself. Effectively, they were features wrapped in an app that in no way stood on their own. If you want to make a successful app in the App Store, make something with value to a user that can stand alone.
- chongli 7y ago
  And yet lots of people still use Snapchat, myself included. I have zero need for Instagram, on the other hand, since I am not into sharing photos publicly. I use Snapchat for chatting, bitmojis, and simple photos/videos with one person. There's nothing superfluous to annoy me.
  - kposehn 7y ago
    Yep - plenty of people will prefer one platform over the other, such as yourself. But in the end the only thing that really stands to differentiate them is the network, not the app, as either one can duplicate the other’s functionality at the drop of a hat.
- erikig 7y ago
  You would think that having a successful product with a strong user base would be enough but it seems tough to work w/Apple when you are reliant on their platform and they have a competing product as Spotify (which compete's with Apple's iTunes) can attest. Spotify recently launched Time to Play Fair and their FAQs are quite a read: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/frequently-asked-questions/ https://www.timetoplayfair.com/frequently-asked-questions/ How's a company supposed to stay relevant against such odds?
  - kposehn 7y ago
    If you’re making something people use because Apple doesn’t make it then you don’t pass the test, and there’s zero reason Apple shouldn’t do it themselves, especially if they can do it better. To stay relevant, don’t expect to plug gaps in Apple’s product offerings if you don’t want them to one day render you irrelevant. Spotify isn’t one of the examples I’m pointing at either, but it is still relevant as they aren’t doing something Apple can’t do better (in Apple’s mind). I’m not going to weigh in on preferential treatment vs Spotify here as that’s a whole different kettle of fish though :)
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      Part of the reason Apple may do it better is because they handicap developers' access to iOS. That's not competing on merit.
      - sincerely 7y ago
        Sure but that means that from the user's perspective the app is probably going to be better/more seamless in some way. I'm fine with Apple making their own versions of popular apps if they are hamstrung in some meaningful way by access to low level iphone stuff.
        ineedasername 7y ago
        Yes, obviously, of course Apple's app is more seamless as a result. That is entirely the point. They are only able to beat other developers in this area because they don't let developers even compete with them. Saying their app is better, so it's all okay, misses the point that other developers never have the opportunity to show if they could equal or surpass what Apple does. It's like if Ford went to every other car manufacturer and sabotaged their brakes. Sure, Ford's cars are better! They can brake! Who wouldn't choose that over a car that can't stop? But it's not competition.
- cheeze 7y ago
  Anyone have any examples of the opposite? Where a feature did actually stand as a product?
  - kposehn 7y ago
    I’d say an attempt was made by Microsoft to render the web browser a feature of Windows. That didn’t pan out in the long run as (a) a web browser was a horrid file browser, and (b) IE just wasn’t that good. Because they tried to make it a feature, it lost ground in terms of functionality and performance and users preferred a different option with a better experience. That brings me to another point - you can make a feature into a product by creating a fundamentally better experience. It isn’t easy though and you can find the tide shift against you long run.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      Anyone who says "IE wasn't that good" wasn't making active use of the current browsers at the time for browsing and web development. IE had a better feature set, better development tools, and was generally just more pleasant to use than current Netscape at the time. Stuff like XHR appeared in IE first. Of course IE eventually rotted, but it's silly to claim that low quality was actually the case or that low quality was the result of it being bundled with the OS. It's not as if we had auto-installed monthly or weekly browser updates back then - if you were using Netscape 4 the odds were you didn't update it very often at all. If anything the odds were better that grandma's PC would get a Windows security update/service pack with IE fixes/improvements installed than a critical Netscape update. IMO the point at which IE truly started falling behind was around when Firefox came onto the scene, and once Chrome was a thing its fate was sealed. Before that point I don't think you could realistically argue that it "wasn't that good" because there was no superior alternative out there and it got the job done. Shipping a web view as an OS component is also a good idea in general, as demonstrated by the fact that all the major commercial OS vendors are doing it. Many apps rely on webviews and in the past major software was using IE to render HTML content (Steam, for one example)
      - rangibaby 7y ago
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I don't disagree, but I think Apple to could this a lot better than they do. Imagine this alternate universe for a moment, app developers assign Apple, as part of their developer status, a non-expiring option to license in perpetuity their application for one million dollars by Apple Inc. Apple adds an "application acquisition fee" of $50 on the sale of every iOS device. At the end of each quarter, Apple distributes a fractional share of the acquisition fee amongst all of the developers for whom it has opted to take their application. Those payouts continue until Apple has paid out $1M to the developer. From the developer's perspective, if their App gets consumed by Apple they now get an infusion of capital to spend the time on the next big thing, so having Apple decide to incorporate their 'feature' into the Apple 'product' is a win. From Apple's perspective its a win because they have a bunch of developers working for "free" trying to produce the next big thing, and only after the market has said "Hey, this is something worth paying for." Does Apple incur a forward liability which comes out of future revenue, not cash on hand, and without a specific due date. So easy to manage on an earnings call and when planning cash flow. By "sharing the wealth" in that way, Apple can make better partners out of their developers than they currently do.
  - kposehn 7y ago
    I definitely agree they can handle some things better. After all - why not try and buy out those little app makers to add more great talent? There’s a ton of PR/brand/goodwill to build there and it’s a total lost opportunity. And interesting idea— I’m going to mull that one over!
    - dwaite 7y ago
      You don't think Apple does this?
      - kposehn 7y ago
        Oh, they certainly do this; but they could also do it vastly better than they currently do.
- yeldarb 7y ago
  You talk about Snapchat like it went out of business.. it’s a publicly traded company worth $22 billion.
  - kposehn 7y ago
    Nah, it’s not out of business, but the point about there not being much of a fundamental differentiation from Instagram that gives it unique value stands. That may change over time as these things aren’t set in stone of course.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And it’s losing money.....
colejohnson66 7y ago
Skimming through, I found this: > Copying technology has gotten tech giants in trouble before. Two decades ago, the Justice Department and 20 states sued Microsoft, whose operating system Windows was dominant at the time, after Microsoft copied the Netscape Web browser and made its own version, Internet Explorer, the default option in Windows. Microsoft settled the case. That’s not exactly why they were sued. It was because they made it hard to uninstall IE and hard to install other browsers.
- chrisan 7y ago
  It is impossible to uninstall the iOS apps, right?
  - rgovostes 7y ago
    As of iOS 10, it became possible to hide many first-party apps. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221 In iOS 12 this evolved to actually removing them from internal storage. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I believe you could “actually” delete apps a bit earlier than iOS 12.
  - Gaelan 7y ago
    A few reasons ago, you became able to “delete” default apps. IIRC that was initially cosmetic, but I think maybe they are actually deleted now?
    - yellow_postit 7y ago
      Sure but you can’t redirect. For example Apple let’s you uninstall Mail but most other apps, especially those made by Apple, will just fail on an email link if Apple mail isn’t installed instead of letting the user open with Gmail, Outlook, etc. Personally this is one of the appeals of the Apple ecosystem, there’s aspects to the walled garden I think as a end user are useful but I can see why plenty of users and app developers chafe against this.
deftturtle 7y ago
1. Make a platform so locked down that basic features are lacking. 2. Prevent users from easily writing and executing scripts to add functionality, like Greasemonkey. 3. Sell apps that cover missing features. 4. Improve your original operating system, rendering paid apps useless. I’d like to see Apple let AppleScript be executed on the Apple Phone. I’d like to have more control over my device, like an Android. Maybe someday...
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  If you want to have more control over your device I do not see why you would buy one which you know does not allow this type of control. This is, after all, the tool the market offers to take care of this type of problem: competition. Use it.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Prevent users from easily writing and executing scripts to add functionality, like Greasemonkey. Shortcuts?
- mcphage 7y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the point of your (2). If it means that you can't add functionality, then how can that functionality be added via an app in (3)? And if the functionality could be added via a script in (2), then would there even exist a market for the app in (3)? It seems like your sequence really should be: (1) Make a platform that doesn't do everything. (2) Sell apps to cover missing features. (3) Improve your original operating system, rendering paid apps useless. And that'll always work, at least until your operating system does do everything.
- scarface74 7y ago
  That’s what Shortcuts is for.
BooneJS 7y ago
Sherlock’d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked_as_a_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
- panic 7y ago
  Yeah, anyone remember Konfabulator? Apple's been at this for a while.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    This is an old wives tale. Apple first had a keyboard shortcut to get to widgets in 1986 with the Apple //gs.
0xCMP 7y ago
IIRC many of the period tracking apps sold their user's data. Seems like a good reason for Apple to introduce a version which uses the OS level features to keep data synced and in the user's hands.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  So Apple wants to curate an app store and demand a 30% cut, but they don't keep trash apps like you describe from sharing data. Then they get to play good guy and make their own app? How is that not absolutely abusive? They abuse users by effectively lying about the quality of apps in the store, they abuse app creators by changing the rules to suit their whims, and they abuse their position as a monopolist over iPhone software to keep any real competition from sticking around.
  - d35007 7y ago
    The guiding principle in the Apple world goes something like this: If your entire app is really just a feature that should exist in a 1st party app, Apple will probably implement it eventually. The iPhone comes with a 1st party email app, but many people prefer 3rd party apps. Same for calculators, weather apps, podcast players, music players, password managers, calendar apps, etc. In another comment in this thread, I linked to several articles that were critical of Apple for not including a menstrual cycle tracker in their Health app. Some 3rd party apps filled the gap for a while, but it seems like it was really a feature that lots of people wanted in the 1st party app. You can call it abusive if you want, but others might say that Apple was answering the needs of its customers. If the 3rd party apps provide better functionality (as they often do... see the examples I listed above), people will continue using them.
- d35007 7y ago
  Apple also got a lot of flak for not including a menstrual cycle tracker in their Health app. It was a popular sign of Silicon Valley’s male bias for a while. To wit: > Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Apple’s first diversity report did show that the company is mostly white and male. So it’s likely that menstrual cycles just aren’t a concern for a majority of the company’s employees. But that shouldn't be an excuse. https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/25/6844021/apple-promised-an-expansive-health-app-so-why-cant-i-track https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/25/6844021/apple-promised-an... > But considering that plenty of other, extremely popular apps for menstrual tracking already exist (Clue and Period Tracker are two stand-outs), all we have to say is, thanks for finally including women in your world, Apple. Welcome to ours. https://www.health.com/pregnancy/apple-finally-adds-period-tracker-to-its-health-app https://www.health.com/pregnancy/apple-finally-adds-period-t... > That Apple overlooked period tracking as a key function that roughly half the population would expect to see included in a comprehensive health tracking app is not entirely a surprise. > Apple today is a company where only 30 percent of its employees are female, and only 20 percent of those in engineering positions are female. https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/apple-stops-ignoring-womens-health-with-ios-9-healthkit-update-now-featuring-period-tracking/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/apple-stops-ignoring-women... This last one comes from The Washington Post, perhaps demonstrating that sometimes you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t: > Apple notoriously ignored women's health issues as it developed previous versions of Health https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/06/17/apple-wants-to-know-if-you-use-protection/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/06/17...
rgovostes 7y ago
Of course Apple copies features—Camera+'s volume button shutter was initially blocked from the App Store then wound up in the first-party Camera app. But I don't buy the premise of the article. There were dozens of flashlight apps in the store when iPhone OS 2 came out, so the OS can never have a built-in flashlight feature? That article's examples of "copied" features are also straightforward evolutions of existing ones that have been around for years, but the author doesn't mention that. Sidecar, ostensibly a clone of Duet Display, builds off of the ability to wirelessly extend the display to an Apple TV since Mavericks (2013). Regarding Clue, the second release of the Health app added reproductive health tracking in iOS 9 (2015). Certainly at the time engineers and product managers would have been thinking about the future direction of these features. In fact, it strikes me that Apple is _very_slow_ at making obvious improvements, creating opportunities for third-party developers to make plenty of money. Those ad-infested, 100 LoC flashlight apps made cash for 5 years before the feature became part of the OS. Whether copied or not, I'm extremely skeptical that App Store analytics are influencing OS features. It's never been Apple's style to be analytics-driven.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  It seems like the article ends up a bit focused on the wrong things here and there. Of course Apple is going to build features their customers want and those feature are going to line up to some degree with what is available on the app store. This, in itself, is not a problem as any IP theft here should be covered under IP laws. The real issue is that when Apple does release an app (especially a paid app like Apple Music), that they don't compete fairly. This happens in three ways which are mentioned in the article: API parity: >> the in-house version often benefits from functionality that outside developers are prohibited from using. Apple Music, for instance, is the only streaming service that is entitled to take full advantage of Siri. Apple says it plans to change that policy in its new operating system, iOS 13. Apple’s walkie-talkie app, which launched after independent apps had proved the appeal of the concept, is the only one that can operate on Apple Watch. Information Parity: >> what makes Apple’s practice different is its access to a trove of data that nobody else has. The App Store, where the original apps were offered and competed for downloads, collects a vast amount of information on which kinds of apps are successful—even monitoring how much time users spend in them. That data is shared widely among leaders at the tech giant and could be used to make strategic decisions on product development Power imbalance and IP lawsuits: >> They generally don’t sue Apple because of the difficulty and expense in fighting the tech giant—and the consequences they might face from being dependent on the platform. You said: > Whether copied or not, I'm extremely skeptical that App Store analytics are influencing OS features. It's never been Apple's style to be analytics-driven. Do you have a basis for this? This seems to be contradicted by this quote: >> That data is shared widely among leaders at the tech giant and could be used to make strategic decisions on product development, said Phillip Shoemaker, who served as Apple’s director of App Store review from 2009 to 2016. “I think Apple gets a lot of inspiration from apps that are on the App Store,” he said.
1123581321 7y ago
I’m sympathetic to my fellow product developers. As a user, I’m glad Apple adds features to iOS without charging for updates, and does so using a consistent and legible privacy/security model. Unlike on macOS, every “sherlocked” iOS app costs Apple App Store revenue, so they’re working against incentives to make a feature first-party. That suggests the decisions are at least motivated by a belief in doing right by users. Still, I’d like developers to be compensated for being put out of business.
- benologist 7y ago
  The EU has grumbled about platform owners also being publishers so hopefully they intervene at some point. Look at how well-behaved Microsoft the iOS publisher is, compared to where and when they have dominated as both platform and publisher. I think we will all be better off when the iOS app store has a mandate not to compete. Same with Twitter on their platform, Amazon with theirs, Facebook, Google etc.
  - 1123581321 7y ago
    I’m inclined to agree with you about Apple Music and Spotify. Most of the Sherlocked apps become core features of iOS and watchOS, so I don’t know if a publisher/platform split would make a difference. These third party apps would need to be protected by a mandatory OS feature freeze, which seems unlikely. Microsoft’s iOS apps also use good ideas from smaller third party apps, especially Outlook and OneNote. Since Apple made macOS and iWork free, and done the same on iOS, with no ulterior goal to eventually sell higher priced office software or operating systems, it isn’t analogous to Windows and Office, though customers should certainly maintain demand for that not to change.
  - selestify 7y ago
    Was Office on Windows not well-behaved or something?
    - benologist 7y ago
      Many years ago when Windows represented close to 100% of computing, before smartphones as we know them, Microsoft deliberately killed off competing browsers by bundling IE for free and coupling it so deeply with Windows you couldn't even uninstall it for the longest time. Just by being able to bundle their own software they had a huge competitive edge because to use anything else meant downloading browsers on dial-up internet, and they leveraged that to destroy all other browsers' market share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars The first browser war ended with Internet Explorer having no remaining serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; until 2006 there was only one new version of Internet Explorer since version 6.0 had been released in 2001. It wasn't until Firefox that browser competition emerged again then some years later Chrome followed. IE was so prolific iirc both Firefox and Chrome had extensions that would actually use IE6 or IE7 to power a tab so you could access sites with IE-only technology or support. After antitrust cases in the US and EU the software bundled with Windows didn't really grow in variety again, and we got browser selection choices and stuff forced upon Microsoft. Today on iOS and Android where MS is only a publisher they compete on the merits of their software instead of unfairly leveraging the platform. We also see Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Amazon pretty wantonly leveraging their platforms against the people using them to displace them with official alternatives. I don't really feel like Google is or has been as predatory but might just be out of my purview.
ummonk 7y ago
If you’re trying to make a living off a flashlight app, I’m not going to be very sympathetic to your plight.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  This is a strawman.
mastazi 7y ago
I’m surprised f.lux isn’t mentioned here, if I remember correctly not only Apple copied its functionality but it also prevented the app from being published on the App Store https://justgetflux.com/ios.html https://justgetflux.com/ios.html
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > …but also prevented the app from being published on the App Store… The only thing Apple did to "prevent" f.lux from being published on the App Store was to not offer any public APIs that could be used to implement it. This wasn't some sort of deliberate decision to get in the way of f.lux; there was simply no clear use case for an API to allow an app to change the behavior of the screen on a global basis.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > there was simply no clear use case for an API to allow an app to change the behavior of the screen on a global basis. Except to implement color shifting for nighttime use, which they implemented themselves in a later version. That's a pretty tough justification to pull off.
    - duskwuff 7y ago
      There's a pretty big difference between allowing the system to alter the display settings in a specific, well-defined way, and making that available to any app in a more general form.
  - deadmutex 7y ago
    > there was simply no clear use case for an API to allow an app to change the behavior of the screen on a global basis. A usecase is f.lux's functionality. There is definitely a clear use case. The decision to expose the API could have other factors to it, but lack of use case doesn't seem to be it.
    - duskwuff 7y ago
mjparrott 7y ago
I much prefer features built in to my iOS than left as sketchy, personal information stealing, gaping privacy 3rd party apps
cronix 7y ago
Many ios features were copied from cydia as well, especially early on.
rblion 7y ago
capitalism encourages this type of behavior. does it not?
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Does it though? Copyright anyone?
  - rblion 7y ago
    you can't copyright an idea for an app, a name yes. you can patent something though but there are always ways around that. I'm not agreeing with Apple, just stating an observation.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      I meant copyright as a vehicle of capitalism contrary to this behaviour where something that works, is bluntly copied without caring for the individual. You know: "for the greater good" of the system.
TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
And this is the reason intellectual property exists, to protect inventors from being copied
- mikl 7y ago
  Pretty sure Clue were not the first people to figure out how to track things with a database. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t even among the first 100 period trackers in the iOS App Store. It’s a really obvious and easy app to build.
- lostmyoldone 7y ago
  Unfortunately, IP law doesn't really help when the platform owner can just say 'no' and cut off your entire revenue stream, perpetually. While you might have the law on your side regarding the IP, Apple seem to have the law on their regarding their right to cut you off. For small Apple only businesses, this is essentially a "license to kill", and you have no recourse but - possibly - to cause enough bad publicity.
pluc 7y ago
They've been doing that since the early days of the Cydia store and jailbroken mods.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  They’ve also hired a number of people from the jailbreak community, FWIW.
kvartz 7y ago
Apple shouldve bought f.lux instead of copying it. I believe flux even had a patent for warmth values.
tw04 7y ago
Of course Apple copied apps from the App Store. As a developer you should expect that, and the solution is pretty easy, just look at Shazaam. Pick an app that's sufficiently difficult to copy, at which point they'll try to buy you if they find the app sufficiently important to the platform. And if not, they probably won't spend the capital to try to dethrone you. If you make an app that say... changes alerts based on location, I'd probably expect it's just a matter of time until they copy your app.
williesleg 7y ago
Y'all got sherlocked with your apps
AceJohnny2 7y ago
Store brand copies popular product they distribute, news at 11. (offtopic, I'm always in awe at how blatant Walgreens is, down to the packaging style, sometimes having two identical products just copying two different competitors' packaging)
- panny 7y ago
  Since this is a Jeff Bezos' washingtonpost.com hit job, it's worth pointing out that Amazon Basics does the same as well, https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/number-of-amazonbasics-best-sellers-up-fifty-percent-in-a-year https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/number-of-amazonba...
Causality1 7y ago
"Good artists copy; great artists steal"
- terasepu 7y ago
  Xiaomi must have an amazing team of artists!
  - idonotknowwhy 7y ago
    Yep! I love their products. Their Roomba and Fitbit clones are great and so much cheaper and they make great powerbanks. The Jaybird clones from "Taotronics" are another great money saver, and the audio quality is better too. Almost forgot their sonic toothbrush and wiha screwdrivers (I don't even know what they're clones of)
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      > [...] and they make great powerbanks. Do they? From what I understood they don't have good efficiency. > Their Roomba and Fitbit clones are great (Haven't checked their Roomba.) The Amazfit Bip cannot disable Bluetooth. Battery life is decent though. > Almost forgot their sonic toothbrush and wiha screwdrivers (I don't even know what they're clones of) The iFixit screwdriver set is the one I got. What I paid for it (during a Black Friday deal) isn't that much off the wiha screwdriver set from Xiaomi. And you support an organization which is part of the Right To Repair movement. I got one of Xiaomi's Bluetooth speakers as well. I also got a Dafang camera of them. They're both decent and cheap, but not great. Which sums up my Xiaomi experience. Its not as if Xiaomi is so good quality; rather the rest from China is terrible, and we accept it apparently as such (yes some Western brands also deliver abysmal experience but then you got decent warranty).
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Apps are like music in this case. Apple listens to the popular tunes and adds thematic elements to their core. The use of the word ‘copy’ here is misleading, because Apple could literally copy-paste, bit-by-bit, compiled code banks into their core, but they don’t. They rewrite the theme. Especially in the case of health apps that are meaningful, more humans worldwide benefit when Apple includes it in the core (at some point). What these App developers might want to do is file IP to protect core concepts if they want 20 years of protection. Patents have a lifetime cost of ~$100k, so it is a risk/reward consideration.
sunflowerfly 7y ago
Apple was the first to develop what we know as an Office suite on the Lisa. Due to developers crying foul over competing with them they let Microsoft copied it and developed MS Office. The first version arrived about two years later. They no longer seem concerned about competing with developers.
prometheus76 7y ago
Ask the developers of Delicious Library about this. Apple completely ripped off their design and the functionality of their app without so much as a thank-you.
- dwaite 7y ago
  It is of course certain someone at Apple had seen Delicious Library, and likely one of the people who had seen that design were involved in the original iBooks. But there is no functionality overlap with Delicious Library - DL was about cataloging media and managing loans, not accessing digital media itself. I was not able to add a digital book or movie to DL, nor could I make a reference to a physical book or movie I own in iBooks. But its also not like there were that many skeuomorphic UIs for managing books. Actually two - a bookshelf showing spines, and one showing fronts. And if you are going to maintain a picture of the front, you're probably going to want to show it by default.
  - wil_shipley 7y ago
    It’s odd literally no apps that we’ve ever seen did the front view before we did it in November 2004. I think it required a large database of front covers before anyone thought of it — before Amazon came along there’d be no decent way to get the covers to display.
- wil_shipley 7y ago
  Apple certainly was inspired by the look of Delicious Library but I’m not upset to have influenced them. For me the whole point of UI design is to move the state of the art forward for everyone. I’d be disappointed if Apple didn’t take my interface and use it, it’d mean Mike and I kind of failed. I mean, I didn’t invent the push-button, but I use it everywhere in my apps, as we all do. Someone, somewhere invented it first, and I thank them.
  - prometheus76 7y ago
    That is a mature and selfless viewpoint, and I'm impressed. I was a user of Delicious Library at the time, and I couldn't believe my eyes when iBooks showed up in the keynote. I haven't used a mac in a long time, but that example of an egregious lifting of a design aesthetic has always stuck with me. Thank you for your years of sitting in a Starbucks with your friends to make what was a beautiful and useful app. I don't use macs anymore, or else I would still be a happy customer.
stock_toaster 7y ago
"Apple sometimes listens to their customers and supplies things they want/ask for"
kbumsik 7y ago
To be more precisely Apple copies ideas not only from Apple Store but from any startups. One of the most notable one is Sidecar introduced in iPadOS 13. This is basically a dual-screen feature paired with a macbook, which some startups like Duet and Astropad have been doing for years.
- ladberg 7y ago
  I paid for Duet and am excited to never have to use it again. It's caused tons of weird display and graphics driver issues and from the small amount of sidecar I've used in the beta, I can tell it's a lot better.
- dwaite 7y ago
  Sure, but it isn't like Apple moved into this market all of a sudden. They've had the capability to use Airplay to wirelessly create a second display, as well as built-in OS support for drawing tablet displays for ages. Nor is it like it was some genuinely new idea. Nor did Apple copy their technology, or violate some partnership agreement or noncompete/nondisclosure. Nor is Apple violating some patent. Nor does Apple treat it as a product or a revenue source or even a lead in to a new software revenue source - it is an improvement to the platform. If they sold product targeting Linux systems that did this, someone built the wireless functionality into Wayland to do this and distros bundled the updated releases, would those distros now be somehow acting "unfairly"? So I don't quite know what "system of fairness" would be here - a platform shouldn't evolve existing features if someone has a paid solution, even if that solution only partially solves the problem or does so in an inferior way?
dzonga 7y ago
apple's biggest con was convincing the poor uneducated masses both in tech and out of tech, that they need mobile apps. most functionality out there, can be replicated by web apps. but hey, let apple run a racket
- cultofmetatron 7y ago
  iPhone originally only supported web apps. demand for native apps was so great Jobs was brought kicking and screaming into it if anything
Mathnerd314 7y ago
In some sense developers are already ripping off their users, because they've made the app but are still charging for it / monetizing it, even after it's paid back the development costs and then some. Many apps don't reach that threshold and live in the minimal adoption range, but it's hard to assign blame to Apple for that. And the apps talked about here are the popular ones that have presumably recouped their initial investment many times over. So the complaints in the article read like "I was getting paid tons of money for doing almost nothing and then Apple stopped it." I imagine in a better world the business model for apps would be simpler, something like a vulnerability bounty program but instead an app bounty program. Same with Amazon, maybe they could acquire Kickstarter and provide product development services instead of sniping new products. And in both cases the end user would get it for unit cost (0-ish for software, more for physical stuff). It requires people to get used to buying products months away from release though, not sure how to address that.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Why would the later customers be entitled to free stuff once the first round of clients paid? What about updates?
csande17 7y ago
Apple does this in other areas, too. In 2017, for example, they encouraged/pressured video-streaming apps to integrate with their new "TV" app which, at the time, they claimed was just an aggregator for all your streaming services. Part of that integration involved reporting which shows were watched when to Apple. And now, they're using the data they collected from third-party services to decide which shows to produce for their own offering.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Is that something proven or a speculation? Judging from the shows they are producing I have hard time believing that.
- scarface74 7y ago
  By 2017, everyone in the industry knew that they were working on a streaming media service and even after the announcement, Disney and other companies are still adding support.
villgax 7y ago
The worst hit I think is Duet Display
dehrmann 7y ago
What's the right model for this? It seems like this is a problem platforms always run into. Early on, you need a third-party tool for some esoteric task. If that task becomes commonplace, people start to expect it from the platform. And how do you do it in a way that doesn't burn the developer community. In 1998, it might have made sense that I had to use a third-party tool to burn CDs with Windows, but by 2001, Windows XP shipped with this capability. And this wasn't some large, IE-scale strategic play--it was table stakes for an OS back then.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Treat features like bugs and offer a bounty if you decide to implement something a user did already. It could be part of the terms that the user has to accept in order to be on the store. If it's a feature that lots of people implemented (eg the flashlight) split the money between them.
shanev 7y ago
Since the App Store launched in July 2008 until Nov 2011, my app, Drum Kit, was one of the top apps in the Music category. It went up to #2 at one point, only behind Smule's Ocarina, and had over 10 million downloads. The day GarageBand launched, my app went from something like #24 in Music to #64, and downward from there. Fun times! Interestingly, at an Apple conference sometime in 2010 (either C4 or WWDC), some guy asked me all kinds of detailed questions about the custom audio engine I wrote. Back then the "iPhone SDK" (now iOS SDK) audio APIs had too much latency for a drum app. So I had to write my own in C++ based on Audio Units (a low level C API). A tricky thing I had to do was mix multiple buffers of audio to create the resonance effect drums make when you hit them repeatedly (most prominent in cymbals). Later I found out the person asking me the questions worked at Apple, on the team that made GarageBand. They didn't launch with a blended resonance effect. When you hit a cymbal repeatedly, it would cut off the sound and play the sound again. Ew. People miss out when they don't try some of the more indie apps. A lot of care goes into making them.
- nier 7y ago
  With Apple buying Emagic in 2002, I’m surprised they weren’t able to do a better job. Emagic was the company that originally made Logic, the professional audio application Apple still sells today.
  - H1Supreme 7y ago
    And the EXS24 sampler still looks the same. They've re-skinned every other plugin, but this thing is still straight out of 1999.
- holy_city 7y ago
  I was a huge fan of your app! We used to play around with it a bit in high school. To be fair to Apple here (and this was way before my time, so I'm probably mixing stuff up) - Garageband dates to 2004 with the eMagic acquisition and was (iirc) built on top of the Logic Pro audio engine. And back then, you still had to deal with the raw CoreAudio API (if anyone wants an adventure, try finding the documentation for it... you'll have to generate it yourself!) on MacOS. I recently had to dig through the old CoreAudio mailing list and read a book [1] on the API for low latency stuff, and I'm guessing that in terms of their engine there wasn't much needing change (at least architecturally) to port to iOS. I seem to recall the biggest difference between desktop/mobile versions was the featureset and UI, I think the problem you mention was present even in Logic. You had to get hacky with ES24's key/velocity maps to do what you mention. From working in the pro audio world for awhile, I've found that other folks in the space just love to talk shop about how they do things. Audio devs are nerds like that. Doesn't always mean people are stealing from others. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Core-Audio-Hands-Programming/dp/0321636848/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=learning+core+audio&qid=1567746383&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Core-Audio-Hands-Programming...
awinter-py 7y ago
from 7.10 in the facebook platform policy > We can create apps or products that offer features and services similar to your app Would love to be a fly on the wall in the room when this was added https://developers.facebook.com/policy https://developers.facebook.com/policy
hkarthik 7y ago
What is old is new again. This is just Apple’s version of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.
tqi 7y ago
It feels like the big issue here is not that Apple is copying apps in the app store (everyone copies everyone) but rather that they are using proprietary data (num installs, time spent, retention, etc) to guide their roadmap.
- lostmyoldone 7y ago
  Plus that they are using API's nobody else are allowed to use, and that they generally don't seem to abide by the rules of the app store themselves.
codesternews 7y ago
How to bypass paywall?
- adambowles 7y ago
  Mirror: https://outline.com/nJ84Ea https://outline.com/nJ84Ea
75dvtwin 7y ago
I think it would be ok for Apple to create apps that fill a particular, yet to be explored niche, or to create foundational quality and functionality standard for a given area. Sort of 'Apple-basics'. However it is very anti competitive, and monopolistic to target mid/upper tier product segments, against your market participants. It would be like NASDAQ running their own brokerage business.
grey-area 7y ago
This is not a new thing really, it's quite tricky for Apple as probably every idea they come up with internally someone else has already had in some form, so I don't see how they can avoid it, though they could try to be graceful if they completely replicate a tool, and offer to buy it out. Back in the day I produced a little shareware utility which was a speaking clock for Mac OS. Apple took notice and I was invited to SF by someone at Apple, but had other commitments at the time and couldn't go at the time. They asked for partial source code (I think after a bug I reported to them) and I sent it over, and that was the last I heard about it. Soon after they introduced the feature in the OS and it is still there to this day in Clock settings - Announce the time on the hour. I was actually pleased about that, as I never made significant money from the utility anyway - I'm not really sure if they were inspired by the tool but always suspected they were.
chmike 7y ago
The cynicism of Apple is pathetic. Steve Jobs is reported to have said [https://www.pcmag.com/commentary/329826/why-steve-jobs-went-thermonuclear-over-android https://www.pcmag.com/commentary/329826/why-steve-jobs-went-...]: > "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this," the late CEO famously said.
siempreb 7y ago
Yes, curious what will happen with the private repositories on Github now it's Microsofts'. Will no one in the company ever check what's going on?
mikl 7y ago
Everything is a remix. Every app has copied some parts of its functionality from elsewhere, and the world is better for it. If Apple could only add features to iOS that isn’t covered by an app store app, there would be almost nothing new they could add. Sure, it is annoying for the devs who get sherlocked, but most such apps are pretty obvious in the first place. And this is not a new phenomenon. Given Apple’s focus on health these last many years, it’s hardly a surprise that they’re adding period tracking. If the period-tracking-app didn’t see this coming, they really need to hire someone with a little bit of foresight.
gommm 7y ago
I actually still miss Watson/Sherlock. It was a great timesaver. I always wonder if Watson would have survived longer if Apple hadn't copied them and then let Sherlock to rot.
psv1 7y ago
I'm just waiting for the new version of Reminders in iOS 13 which will largely kill the need for tools like Todoist/Wunderlist/Things.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Todo apps are largely safe I think, because people have varying and strong opinions about how task management should be handled. What irks me is that the new reminders have killed the URL scheme support. So no integrations from outside world either.
adambowles 7y ago
Mirror: https://outline.com/nJ84Ea https://outline.com/nJ84Ea
braythwayt 7y ago
Like all platform owners, Apple gradually commoditizes its complements. The most extreme end of this behaviour is when they release a free app or feature that wipes everyone else out (or drives them into tiny niches). iTunes was a famous example: It instantly obsoleted indie music apps on the Macintosh. We had a good time discussing this fifteen years ago(!) when Cabel Sasser, cofounder of Panic Software, wrote about the demise of Audion at the hands of iTunes: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ My own take on this is to think of building apps and services on top of a platform as sharecropping: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard... This doesn’t mean I countenance Apple’s behaviour. Far from it. It simply means I think of it as inevitable that platform vendors will court indie developers and partners when they need them to grow the platform, then turn on them when the vendor thinks it needs to commoditize their work. Twitter and its indie clients is another example.
_pmf_ 7y ago
Ideas are worthless.
newsgremlin 7y ago
Good to see Apples business model has not changed at all since its inception. Good to see a big company stick to its roots.
soraminazuki 7y ago
While it may be that Apple has an unfair advantage regarding the App Store ecosystem, this particular example seems ridiculous IMO. Period tracking doesn't seem like something new, and it's quite a stretch to suggest that Apple copied the idea.
AshleysBrain 7y ago
Hasn't this always been a risk for third-party developers - that the platform owner might incorporate popular third-party features to the main platform? I vaguely remember Microsoft Word used to have a third-party addon for a spell checker, then made it built-in - and got sued by the third-party developer. I think they lost though...
- Someone 7y ago
  It has been going on forever. As lower levels of the OS get commoditized, OS providers have to provide more functionality if they want to continue making money. Back in the day, people would buy graphics libraries to draw lines on the screen, buy utilities such as ZIP or defragmentation utilities, and each program had its own logic for printing, with each of them, at setup time, asking questions such as “what should I sent to you printer to get bold text?”, “how many characters on a line does your printer support?”, and “should I wait a bit longer between lines to make sure your printer is ready to accept new input?” Now, of course, Apple doesn’t need to make money on their OS, but I think they are forced to move ‘up’ to compete with Microsoft.
- Shorel 7y ago
  > I vaguely remember Microsoft Word used to have a third-party addon for a spell checker I remember I coded a spell checker for WordPerfect 5.1 after I used Word and wanted to have the same. Sadly the 40MB hard disk where it was died many years ago.
14 7y ago
Well back when the iPhone first came out, my thoughtful Canadian carrier Rogers thought it would be funny to sell me a phone that does not even take videos but sell me a 1000 Video text messages with my plan. Hilarious I thought, I just bought a 1000 video messages and this phone only takes pictures. While looking into that I discovered the jailbreaking scene and those guys hacked the phones to take videos. For people saying what the hell is this guy talking about, when iPhones were first released they literally could not take videos, only photos. The jailbreak scene was FULL of ideas that apple eventually made standard on the phone.
yani 7y ago
The same is happening with Microsoft GitHub Actions and the impact it has over Travis CI.
- beckler 7y ago
  Granted, Travis CI was sold to some private venture, and the first thing they did was fire most of their engineers.
KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
Anti-trust, break up the app store + hardware.
twodayslate 7y ago
I remember a quote of sorts that went something like if your product relies on another company then (you aren't a product or you are the product?). I remember it being tossed around when Twitter was killing all the competing applications. Anyone have a source or remember it better than me?
zepto 7y ago
I guess Apple can just preinstall the software and not put it in the store. Maybe operating system design can be government regulated. Or maybe they can be split up as she proposes to enable Samsung and Xiaomi to have an advantage. This just shows that Elizabeth Warren’s advisers don’t understand software and that she is dangerously unelectable.
modsiw 7y ago
Isn’t this Apple’s entire business model?

465 points by rgbrenner 7y ago

itsangaris 7y ago

Sans paywall: https://outline.com/nJ84Ea https://outline.com/nJ84Ea

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/cUxGy http://archive.is/cUxGy

kposehn 7y ago

This is an example of what I call "Feature vs. Product." A classic example is Snapchat and Instagram. Snapchat was never something that stood on its own, as everything that made it unique would easily be duplicatable by Instagram, down to the tiniest feature. Theoretically, the network of users would be the unique value but it was nowhere near Facebook's size, and thus would not be able to truly compete. All it took was Instagram copying most every good feature to dominate the space. In the article's case, each of the apps (Clue, Duet, DoApp, Voxer) were creating something that, while valuable to users at the time, was simply an addition to the existing functionality and in no way was a valuable product outside the context of the phone or iOS itself. Effectively, they were features wrapped in an app that in no way stood on their own. If you want to make a successful app in the App Store, make something with value to a user that can stand alone.

chongli 7y ago
And yet lots of people still use Snapchat, myself included. I have zero need for Instagram, on the other hand, since I am not into sharing photos publicly. I use Snapchat for chatting, bitmojis, and simple photos/videos with one person. There's nothing superfluous to annoy me.
- kposehn 7y ago
  Yep - plenty of people will prefer one platform over the other, such as yourself. But in the end the only thing that really stands to differentiate them is the network, not the app, as either one can duplicate the other’s functionality at the drop of a hat.
erikig 7y ago
You would think that having a successful product with a strong user base would be enough but it seems tough to work w/Apple when you are reliant on their platform and they have a competing product as Spotify (which compete's with Apple's iTunes) can attest. Spotify recently launched Time to Play Fair and their FAQs are quite a read: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/frequently-asked-questions/ https://www.timetoplayfair.com/frequently-asked-questions/ How's a company supposed to stay relevant against such odds?
- kposehn 7y ago
  If you’re making something people use because Apple doesn’t make it then you don’t pass the test, and there’s zero reason Apple shouldn’t do it themselves, especially if they can do it better. To stay relevant, don’t expect to plug gaps in Apple’s product offerings if you don’t want them to one day render you irrelevant. Spotify isn’t one of the examples I’m pointing at either, but it is still relevant as they aren’t doing something Apple can’t do better (in Apple’s mind). I’m not going to weigh in on preferential treatment vs Spotify here as that’s a whole different kettle of fish though :)
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Part of the reason Apple may do it better is because they handicap developers' access to iOS. That's not competing on merit.
    - sincerely 7y ago
      Sure but that means that from the user's perspective the app is probably going to be better/more seamless in some way. I'm fine with Apple making their own versions of popular apps if they are hamstrung in some meaningful way by access to low level iphone stuff.
      - ineedasername 7y ago
        Yes, obviously, of course Apple's app is more seamless as a result. That is entirely the point. They are only able to beat other developers in this area because they don't let developers even compete with them. Saying their app is better, so it's all okay, misses the point that other developers never have the opportunity to show if they could equal or surpass what Apple does. It's like if Ford went to every other car manufacturer and sabotaged their brakes. Sure, Ford's cars are better! They can brake! Who wouldn't choose that over a car that can't stop? But it's not competition.
cheeze 7y ago
Anyone have any examples of the opposite? Where a feature did actually stand as a product?
- kposehn 7y ago
  I’d say an attempt was made by Microsoft to render the web browser a feature of Windows. That didn’t pan out in the long run as (a) a web browser was a horrid file browser, and (b) IE just wasn’t that good. Because they tried to make it a feature, it lost ground in terms of functionality and performance and users preferred a different option with a better experience. That brings me to another point - you can make a feature into a product by creating a fundamentally better experience. It isn’t easy though and you can find the tide shift against you long run.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    Anyone who says "IE wasn't that good" wasn't making active use of the current browsers at the time for browsing and web development. IE had a better feature set, better development tools, and was generally just more pleasant to use than current Netscape at the time. Stuff like XHR appeared in IE first. Of course IE eventually rotted, but it's silly to claim that low quality was actually the case or that low quality was the result of it being bundled with the OS. It's not as if we had auto-installed monthly or weekly browser updates back then - if you were using Netscape 4 the odds were you didn't update it very often at all. If anything the odds were better that grandma's PC would get a Windows security update/service pack with IE fixes/improvements installed than a critical Netscape update. IMO the point at which IE truly started falling behind was around when Firefox came onto the scene, and once Chrome was a thing its fate was sealed. Before that point I don't think you could realistically argue that it "wasn't that good" because there was no superior alternative out there and it got the job done. Shipping a web view as an OS component is also a good idea in general, as demonstrated by the fact that all the major commercial OS vendors are doing it. Many apps rely on webviews and in the past major software was using IE to render HTML content (Steam, for one example)
    - rangibaby 7y ago
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I don't disagree, but I think Apple to could this a lot better than they do. Imagine this alternate universe for a moment, app developers assign Apple, as part of their developer status, a non-expiring option to license in perpetuity their application for one million dollars by Apple Inc. Apple adds an "application acquisition fee" of $50 on the sale of every iOS device. At the end of each quarter, Apple distributes a fractional share of the acquisition fee amongst all of the developers for whom it has opted to take their application. Those payouts continue until Apple has paid out $1M to the developer. From the developer's perspective, if their App gets consumed by Apple they now get an infusion of capital to spend the time on the next big thing, so having Apple decide to incorporate their 'feature' into the Apple 'product' is a win. From Apple's perspective its a win because they have a bunch of developers working for "free" trying to produce the next big thing, and only after the market has said "Hey, this is something worth paying for." Does Apple incur a forward liability which comes out of future revenue, not cash on hand, and without a specific due date. So easy to manage on an earnings call and when planning cash flow. By "sharing the wealth" in that way, Apple can make better partners out of their developers than they currently do.
- kposehn 7y ago
  I definitely agree they can handle some things better. After all - why not try and buy out those little app makers to add more great talent? There’s a ton of PR/brand/goodwill to build there and it’s a total lost opportunity. And interesting idea— I’m going to mull that one over!
  - dwaite 7y ago
    You don't think Apple does this?
    - kposehn 7y ago
      Oh, they certainly do this; but they could also do it vastly better than they currently do.
yeldarb 7y ago
You talk about Snapchat like it went out of business.. it’s a publicly traded company worth $22 billion.
- kposehn 7y ago
  Nah, it’s not out of business, but the point about there not being much of a fundamental differentiation from Instagram that gives it unique value stands. That may change over time as these things aren’t set in stone of course.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- scarface74 7y ago
  And it’s losing money.....

colejohnson66 7y ago

Skimming through, I found this: > Copying technology has gotten tech giants in trouble before. Two decades ago, the Justice Department and 20 states sued Microsoft, whose operating system Windows was dominant at the time, after Microsoft copied the Netscape Web browser and made its own version, Internet Explorer, the default option in Windows. Microsoft settled the case. That’s not exactly why they were sued. It was because they made it hard to uninstall IE and hard to install other browsers.

chrisan 7y ago
It is impossible to uninstall the iOS apps, right?
- rgovostes 7y ago
  As of iOS 10, it became possible to hide many first-party apps. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221 In iOS 12 this evolved to actually removing them from internal storage. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I believe you could “actually” delete apps a bit earlier than iOS 12.
- Gaelan 7y ago
  A few reasons ago, you became able to “delete” default apps. IIRC that was initially cosmetic, but I think maybe they are actually deleted now?
  - yellow_postit 7y ago
    Sure but you can’t redirect. For example Apple let’s you uninstall Mail but most other apps, especially those made by Apple, will just fail on an email link if Apple mail isn’t installed instead of letting the user open with Gmail, Outlook, etc. Personally this is one of the appeals of the Apple ecosystem, there’s aspects to the walled garden I think as a end user are useful but I can see why plenty of users and app developers chafe against this.

deftturtle 7y ago

1. Make a platform so locked down that basic features are lacking. 2. Prevent users from easily writing and executing scripts to add functionality, like Greasemonkey. 3. Sell apps that cover missing features. 4. Improve your original operating system, rendering paid apps useless. I’d like to see Apple let AppleScript be executed on the Apple Phone. I’d like to have more control over my device, like an Android. Maybe someday...

Yetanfou 7y ago
If you want to have more control over your device I do not see why you would buy one which you know does not allow this type of control. This is, after all, the tool the market offers to take care of this type of problem: competition. Use it.
saagarjha 7y ago
> Prevent users from easily writing and executing scripts to add functionality, like Greasemonkey. Shortcuts?
mcphage 7y ago
I'm not sure I understand the point of your (2). If it means that you can't add functionality, then how can that functionality be added via an app in (3)? And if the functionality could be added via a script in (2), then would there even exist a market for the app in (3)? It seems like your sequence really should be: (1) Make a platform that doesn't do everything. (2) Sell apps to cover missing features. (3) Improve your original operating system, rendering paid apps useless. And that'll always work, at least until your operating system does do everything.
scarface74 7y ago
That’s what Shortcuts is for.

BooneJS 7y ago

Sherlock’d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked_as_a_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...

panic 7y ago
Yeah, anyone remember Konfabulator? Apple's been at this for a while.
- scarface74 7y ago
  This is an old wives tale. Apple first had a keyboard shortcut to get to widgets in 1986 with the Apple //gs.

0xCMP 7y ago

IIRC many of the period tracking apps sold their user's data. Seems like a good reason for Apple to introduce a version which uses the OS level features to keep data synced and in the user's hands.

henryfjordan 7y ago
So Apple wants to curate an app store and demand a 30% cut, but they don't keep trash apps like you describe from sharing data. Then they get to play good guy and make their own app? How is that not absolutely abusive? They abuse users by effectively lying about the quality of apps in the store, they abuse app creators by changing the rules to suit their whims, and they abuse their position as a monopolist over iPhone software to keep any real competition from sticking around.
- d35007 7y ago
  The guiding principle in the Apple world goes something like this: If your entire app is really just a feature that should exist in a 1st party app, Apple will probably implement it eventually. The iPhone comes with a 1st party email app, but many people prefer 3rd party apps. Same for calculators, weather apps, podcast players, music players, password managers, calendar apps, etc. In another comment in this thread, I linked to several articles that were critical of Apple for not including a menstrual cycle tracker in their Health app. Some 3rd party apps filled the gap for a while, but it seems like it was really a feature that lots of people wanted in the 1st party app. You can call it abusive if you want, but others might say that Apple was answering the needs of its customers. If the 3rd party apps provide better functionality (as they often do... see the examples I listed above), people will continue using them.
d35007 7y ago
Apple also got a lot of flak for not including a menstrual cycle tracker in their Health app. It was a popular sign of Silicon Valley’s male bias for a while. To wit: > Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Apple’s first diversity report did show that the company is mostly white and male. So it’s likely that menstrual cycles just aren’t a concern for a majority of the company’s employees. But that shouldn't be an excuse. https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/25/6844021/apple-promised-an-expansive-health-app-so-why-cant-i-track https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/25/6844021/apple-promised-an... > But considering that plenty of other, extremely popular apps for menstrual tracking already exist (Clue and Period Tracker are two stand-outs), all we have to say is, thanks for finally including women in your world, Apple. Welcome to ours. https://www.health.com/pregnancy/apple-finally-adds-period-tracker-to-its-health-app https://www.health.com/pregnancy/apple-finally-adds-period-t... > That Apple overlooked period tracking as a key function that roughly half the population would expect to see included in a comprehensive health tracking app is not entirely a surprise. > Apple today is a company where only 30 percent of its employees are female, and only 20 percent of those in engineering positions are female. https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/apple-stops-ignoring-womens-health-with-ios-9-healthkit-update-now-featuring-period-tracking/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/09/apple-stops-ignoring-women... This last one comes from The Washington Post, perhaps demonstrating that sometimes you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t: > Apple notoriously ignored women's health issues as it developed previous versions of Health https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/06/17/apple-wants-to-know-if-you-use-protection/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/06/17...

rgovostes 7y ago

Of course Apple copies features—Camera+'s volume button shutter was initially blocked from the App Store then wound up in the first-party Camera app. But I don't buy the premise of the article. There were dozens of flashlight apps in the store when iPhone OS 2 came out, so the OS can never have a built-in flashlight feature? That article's examples of "copied" features are also straightforward evolutions of existing ones that have been around for years, but the author doesn't mention that. Sidecar, ostensibly a clone of Duet Display, builds off of the ability to wirelessly extend the display to an Apple TV since Mavericks (2013). Regarding Clue, the second release of the Health app added reproductive health tracking in iOS 9 (2015). Certainly at the time engineers and product managers would have been thinking about the future direction of these features. In fact, it strikes me that Apple is _very_slow_ at making obvious improvements, creating opportunities for third-party developers to make plenty of money. Those ad-infested, 100 LoC flashlight apps made cash for 5 years before the feature became part of the OS. Whether copied or not, I'm extremely skeptical that App Store analytics are influencing OS features. It's never been Apple's style to be analytics-driven.

shkkmo 7y ago
It seems like the article ends up a bit focused on the wrong things here and there. Of course Apple is going to build features their customers want and those feature are going to line up to some degree with what is available on the app store. This, in itself, is not a problem as any IP theft here should be covered under IP laws. The real issue is that when Apple does release an app (especially a paid app like Apple Music), that they don't compete fairly. This happens in three ways which are mentioned in the article: API parity: >> the in-house version often benefits from functionality that outside developers are prohibited from using. Apple Music, for instance, is the only streaming service that is entitled to take full advantage of Siri. Apple says it plans to change that policy in its new operating system, iOS 13. Apple’s walkie-talkie app, which launched after independent apps had proved the appeal of the concept, is the only one that can operate on Apple Watch. Information Parity: >> what makes Apple’s practice different is its access to a trove of data that nobody else has. The App Store, where the original apps were offered and competed for downloads, collects a vast amount of information on which kinds of apps are successful—even monitoring how much time users spend in them. That data is shared widely among leaders at the tech giant and could be used to make strategic decisions on product development Power imbalance and IP lawsuits: >> They generally don’t sue Apple because of the difficulty and expense in fighting the tech giant—and the consequences they might face from being dependent on the platform. You said: > Whether copied or not, I'm extremely skeptical that App Store analytics are influencing OS features. It's never been Apple's style to be analytics-driven. Do you have a basis for this? This seems to be contradicted by this quote: >> That data is shared widely among leaders at the tech giant and could be used to make strategic decisions on product development, said Phillip Shoemaker, who served as Apple’s director of App Store review from 2009 to 2016. “I think Apple gets a lot of inspiration from apps that are on the App Store,” he said.

1123581321 7y ago

I’m sympathetic to my fellow product developers. As a user, I’m glad Apple adds features to iOS without charging for updates, and does so using a consistent and legible privacy/security model. Unlike on macOS, every “sherlocked” iOS app costs Apple App Store revenue, so they’re working against incentives to make a feature first-party. That suggests the decisions are at least motivated by a belief in doing right by users. Still, I’d like developers to be compensated for being put out of business.

benologist 7y ago
The EU has grumbled about platform owners also being publishers so hopefully they intervene at some point. Look at how well-behaved Microsoft the iOS publisher is, compared to where and when they have dominated as both platform and publisher. I think we will all be better off when the iOS app store has a mandate not to compete. Same with Twitter on their platform, Amazon with theirs, Facebook, Google etc.
- 1123581321 7y ago
  I’m inclined to agree with you about Apple Music and Spotify. Most of the Sherlocked apps become core features of iOS and watchOS, so I don’t know if a publisher/platform split would make a difference. These third party apps would need to be protected by a mandatory OS feature freeze, which seems unlikely. Microsoft’s iOS apps also use good ideas from smaller third party apps, especially Outlook and OneNote. Since Apple made macOS and iWork free, and done the same on iOS, with no ulterior goal to eventually sell higher priced office software or operating systems, it isn’t analogous to Windows and Office, though customers should certainly maintain demand for that not to change.
- selestify 7y ago
  Was Office on Windows not well-behaved or something?
  - benologist 7y ago
    Many years ago when Windows represented close to 100% of computing, before smartphones as we know them, Microsoft deliberately killed off competing browsers by bundling IE for free and coupling it so deeply with Windows you couldn't even uninstall it for the longest time. Just by being able to bundle their own software they had a huge competitive edge because to use anything else meant downloading browsers on dial-up internet, and they leveraged that to destroy all other browsers' market share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars The first browser war ended with Internet Explorer having no remaining serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; until 2006 there was only one new version of Internet Explorer since version 6.0 had been released in 2001. It wasn't until Firefox that browser competition emerged again then some years later Chrome followed. IE was so prolific iirc both Firefox and Chrome had extensions that would actually use IE6 or IE7 to power a tab so you could access sites with IE-only technology or support. After antitrust cases in the US and EU the software bundled with Windows didn't really grow in variety again, and we got browser selection choices and stuff forced upon Microsoft. Today on iOS and Android where MS is only a publisher they compete on the merits of their software instead of unfairly leveraging the platform. We also see Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Amazon pretty wantonly leveraging their platforms against the people using them to displace them with official alternatives. I don't really feel like Google is or has been as predatory but might just be out of my purview.

ummonk 7y ago

If you’re trying to make a living off a flashlight app, I’m not going to be very sympathetic to your plight.

dwaltrip 7y ago
This is a strawman.

mastazi 7y ago

I’m surprised f.lux isn’t mentioned here, if I remember correctly not only Apple copied its functionality but it also prevented the app from being published on the App Store https://justgetflux.com/ios.html https://justgetflux.com/ios.html

duskwuff 7y ago
> …but also prevented the app from being published on the App Store… The only thing Apple did to "prevent" f.lux from being published on the App Store was to not offer any public APIs that could be used to implement it. This wasn't some sort of deliberate decision to get in the way of f.lux; there was simply no clear use case for an API to allow an app to change the behavior of the screen on a global basis.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > there was simply no clear use case for an API to allow an app to change the behavior of the screen on a global basis. Except to implement color shifting for nighttime use, which they implemented themselves in a later version. That's a pretty tough justification to pull off.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    There's a pretty big difference between allowing the system to alter the display settings in a specific, well-defined way, and making that available to any app in a more general form.
- deadmutex 7y ago
  > there was simply no clear use case for an API to allow an app to change the behavior of the screen on a global basis. A usecase is f.lux's functionality. There is definitely a clear use case. The decision to expose the API could have other factors to it, but lack of use case doesn't seem to be it.
  - duskwuff 7y ago

mjparrott 7y ago

I much prefer features built in to my iOS than left as sketchy, personal information stealing, gaping privacy 3rd party apps

cronix 7y ago

Many ios features were copied from cydia as well, especially early on.

rblion 7y ago

capitalism encourages this type of behavior. does it not?

Krasnol 7y ago
Does it though? Copyright anyone?
- rblion 7y ago
  you can't copyright an idea for an app, a name yes. you can patent something though but there are always ways around that. I'm not agreeing with Apple, just stating an observation.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    I meant copyright as a vehicle of capitalism contrary to this behaviour where something that works, is bluntly copied without caring for the individual. You know: "for the greater good" of the system.

TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago

And this is the reason intellectual property exists, to protect inventors from being copied

mikl 7y ago
Pretty sure Clue were not the first people to figure out how to track things with a database. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t even among the first 100 period trackers in the iOS App Store. It’s a really obvious and easy app to build.
lostmyoldone 7y ago
Unfortunately, IP law doesn't really help when the platform owner can just say 'no' and cut off your entire revenue stream, perpetually. While you might have the law on your side regarding the IP, Apple seem to have the law on their regarding their right to cut you off. For small Apple only businesses, this is essentially a "license to kill", and you have no recourse but - possibly - to cause enough bad publicity.

pluc 7y ago

They've been doing that since the early days of the Cydia store and jailbroken mods.

saagarjha 7y ago
They’ve also hired a number of people from the jailbreak community, FWIW.

kvartz 7y ago

Apple shouldve bought f.lux instead of copying it. I believe flux even had a patent for warmth values.

tw04 7y ago

Of course Apple copied apps from the App Store. As a developer you should expect that, and the solution is pretty easy, just look at Shazaam. Pick an app that's sufficiently difficult to copy, at which point they'll try to buy you if they find the app sufficiently important to the platform. And if not, they probably won't spend the capital to try to dethrone you. If you make an app that say... changes alerts based on location, I'd probably expect it's just a matter of time until they copy your app.

williesleg 7y ago

Y'all got sherlocked with your apps

AceJohnny2 7y ago

Store brand copies popular product they distribute, news at 11. (offtopic, I'm always in awe at how blatant Walgreens is, down to the packaging style, sometimes having two identical products just copying two different competitors' packaging)

panny 7y ago
Since this is a Jeff Bezos' washingtonpost.com hit job, it's worth pointing out that Amazon Basics does the same as well, https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/number-of-amazonbasics-best-sellers-up-fifty-percent-in-a-year https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/number-of-amazonba...

Causality1 7y ago

"Good artists copy; great artists steal"

terasepu 7y ago
Xiaomi must have an amazing team of artists!
- idonotknowwhy 7y ago
  Yep! I love their products. Their Roomba and Fitbit clones are great and so much cheaper and they make great powerbanks. The Jaybird clones from "Taotronics" are another great money saver, and the audio quality is better too. Almost forgot their sonic toothbrush and wiha screwdrivers (I don't even know what they're clones of)
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    > [...] and they make great powerbanks. Do they? From what I understood they don't have good efficiency. > Their Roomba and Fitbit clones are great (Haven't checked their Roomba.) The Amazfit Bip cannot disable Bluetooth. Battery life is decent though. > Almost forgot their sonic toothbrush and wiha screwdrivers (I don't even know what they're clones of) The iFixit screwdriver set is the one I got. What I paid for it (during a Black Friday deal) isn't that much off the wiha screwdriver set from Xiaomi. And you support an organization which is part of the Right To Repair movement. I got one of Xiaomi's Bluetooth speakers as well. I also got a Dafang camera of them. They're both decent and cheap, but not great. Which sums up my Xiaomi experience. Its not as if Xiaomi is so good quality; rather the rest from China is terrible, and we accept it apparently as such (yes some Western brands also deliver abysmal experience but then you got decent warranty).

mensetmanusman 7y ago

Apps are like music in this case. Apple listens to the popular tunes and adds thematic elements to their core. The use of the word ‘copy’ here is misleading, because Apple could literally copy-paste, bit-by-bit, compiled code banks into their core, but they don’t. They rewrite the theme. Especially in the case of health apps that are meaningful, more humans worldwide benefit when Apple includes it in the core (at some point). What these App developers might want to do is file IP to protect core concepts if they want 20 years of protection. Patents have a lifetime cost of ~$100k, so it is a risk/reward consideration.

sunflowerfly 7y ago

Apple was the first to develop what we know as an Office suite on the Lisa. Due to developers crying foul over competing with them they let Microsoft copied it and developed MS Office. The first version arrived about two years later. They no longer seem concerned about competing with developers.

prometheus76 7y ago

Ask the developers of Delicious Library about this. Apple completely ripped off their design and the functionality of their app without so much as a thank-you.

dwaite 7y ago
It is of course certain someone at Apple had seen Delicious Library, and likely one of the people who had seen that design were involved in the original iBooks. But there is no functionality overlap with Delicious Library - DL was about cataloging media and managing loans, not accessing digital media itself. I was not able to add a digital book or movie to DL, nor could I make a reference to a physical book or movie I own in iBooks. But its also not like there were that many skeuomorphic UIs for managing books. Actually two - a bookshelf showing spines, and one showing fronts. And if you are going to maintain a picture of the front, you're probably going to want to show it by default.
- wil_shipley 7y ago
  It’s odd literally no apps that we’ve ever seen did the front view before we did it in November 2004. I think it required a large database of front covers before anyone thought of it — before Amazon came along there’d be no decent way to get the covers to display.
wil_shipley 7y ago
Apple certainly was inspired by the look of Delicious Library but I’m not upset to have influenced them. For me the whole point of UI design is to move the state of the art forward for everyone. I’d be disappointed if Apple didn’t take my interface and use it, it’d mean Mike and I kind of failed. I mean, I didn’t invent the push-button, but I use it everywhere in my apps, as we all do. Someone, somewhere invented it first, and I thank them.
- prometheus76 7y ago
  That is a mature and selfless viewpoint, and I'm impressed. I was a user of Delicious Library at the time, and I couldn't believe my eyes when iBooks showed up in the keynote. I haven't used a mac in a long time, but that example of an egregious lifting of a design aesthetic has always stuck with me. Thank you for your years of sitting in a Starbucks with your friends to make what was a beautiful and useful app. I don't use macs anymore, or else I would still be a happy customer.

stock_toaster 7y ago

"Apple sometimes listens to their customers and supplies things they want/ask for"

kbumsik 7y ago

To be more precisely Apple copies ideas not only from Apple Store but from any startups. One of the most notable one is Sidecar introduced in iPadOS 13. This is basically a dual-screen feature paired with a macbook, which some startups like Duet and Astropad have been doing for years.

ladberg 7y ago
I paid for Duet and am excited to never have to use it again. It's caused tons of weird display and graphics driver issues and from the small amount of sidecar I've used in the beta, I can tell it's a lot better.
dwaite 7y ago
Sure, but it isn't like Apple moved into this market all of a sudden. They've had the capability to use Airplay to wirelessly create a second display, as well as built-in OS support for drawing tablet displays for ages. Nor is it like it was some genuinely new idea. Nor did Apple copy their technology, or violate some partnership agreement or noncompete/nondisclosure. Nor is Apple violating some patent. Nor does Apple treat it as a product or a revenue source or even a lead in to a new software revenue source - it is an improvement to the platform. If they sold product targeting Linux systems that did this, someone built the wireless functionality into Wayland to do this and distros bundled the updated releases, would those distros now be somehow acting "unfairly"? So I don't quite know what "system of fairness" would be here - a platform shouldn't evolve existing features if someone has a paid solution, even if that solution only partially solves the problem or does so in an inferior way?

dzonga 7y ago

apple's biggest con was convincing the poor uneducated masses both in tech and out of tech, that they need mobile apps. most functionality out there, can be replicated by web apps. but hey, let apple run a racket

cultofmetatron 7y ago
iPhone originally only supported web apps. demand for native apps was so great Jobs was brought kicking and screaming into it if anything

Mathnerd314 7y ago

In some sense developers are already ripping off their users, because they've made the app but are still charging for it / monetizing it, even after it's paid back the development costs and then some. Many apps don't reach that threshold and live in the minimal adoption range, but it's hard to assign blame to Apple for that. And the apps talked about here are the popular ones that have presumably recouped their initial investment many times over. So the complaints in the article read like "I was getting paid tons of money for doing almost nothing and then Apple stopped it." I imagine in a better world the business model for apps would be simpler, something like a vulnerability bounty program but instead an app bounty program. Same with Amazon, maybe they could acquire Kickstarter and provide product development services instead of sniping new products. And in both cases the end user would get it for unit cost (0-ish for software, more for physical stuff). It requires people to get used to buying products months away from release though, not sure how to address that.

yoz-y 7y ago
Why would the later customers be entitled to free stuff once the first round of clients paid? What about updates?

csande17 7y ago

Apple does this in other areas, too. In 2017, for example, they encouraged/pressured video-streaming apps to integrate with their new "TV" app which, at the time, they claimed was just an aggregator for all your streaming services. Part of that integration involved reporting which shows were watched when to Apple. And now, they're using the data they collected from third-party services to decide which shows to produce for their own offering.

yoz-y 7y ago
Is that something proven or a speculation? Judging from the shows they are producing I have hard time believing that.
scarface74 7y ago
By 2017, everyone in the industry knew that they were working on a streaming media service and even after the announcement, Disney and other companies are still adding support.

villgax 7y ago

The worst hit I think is Duet Display

dehrmann 7y ago

What's the right model for this? It seems like this is a problem platforms always run into. Early on, you need a third-party tool for some esoteric task. If that task becomes commonplace, people start to expect it from the platform. And how do you do it in a way that doesn't burn the developer community. In 1998, it might have made sense that I had to use a third-party tool to burn CDs with Windows, but by 2001, Windows XP shipped with this capability. And this wasn't some large, IE-scale strategic play--it was table stakes for an OS back then.

onion2k 7y ago
Treat features like bugs and offer a bounty if you decide to implement something a user did already. It could be part of the terms that the user has to accept in order to be on the store. If it's a feature that lots of people implemented (eg the flashlight) split the money between them.

shanev 7y ago

Since the App Store launched in July 2008 until Nov 2011, my app, Drum Kit, was one of the top apps in the Music category. It went up to #2 at one point, only behind Smule's Ocarina, and had over 10 million downloads. The day GarageBand launched, my app went from something like #24 in Music to #64, and downward from there. Fun times! Interestingly, at an Apple conference sometime in 2010 (either C4 or WWDC), some guy asked me all kinds of detailed questions about the custom audio engine I wrote. Back then the "iPhone SDK" (now iOS SDK) audio APIs had too much latency for a drum app. So I had to write my own in C++ based on Audio Units (a low level C API). A tricky thing I had to do was mix multiple buffers of audio to create the resonance effect drums make when you hit them repeatedly (most prominent in cymbals). Later I found out the person asking me the questions worked at Apple, on the team that made GarageBand. They didn't launch with a blended resonance effect. When you hit a cymbal repeatedly, it would cut off the sound and play the sound again. Ew. People miss out when they don't try some of the more indie apps. A lot of care goes into making them.

nier 7y ago
With Apple buying Emagic in 2002, I’m surprised they weren’t able to do a better job. Emagic was the company that originally made Logic, the professional audio application Apple still sells today.
- H1Supreme 7y ago
  And the EXS24 sampler still looks the same. They've re-skinned every other plugin, but this thing is still straight out of 1999.
holy_city 7y ago
I was a huge fan of your app! We used to play around with it a bit in high school. To be fair to Apple here (and this was way before my time, so I'm probably mixing stuff up) - Garageband dates to 2004 with the eMagic acquisition and was (iirc) built on top of the Logic Pro audio engine. And back then, you still had to deal with the raw CoreAudio API (if anyone wants an adventure, try finding the documentation for it... you'll have to generate it yourself!) on MacOS. I recently had to dig through the old CoreAudio mailing list and read a book [1] on the API for low latency stuff, and I'm guessing that in terms of their engine there wasn't much needing change (at least architecturally) to port to iOS. I seem to recall the biggest difference between desktop/mobile versions was the featureset and UI, I think the problem you mention was present even in Logic. You had to get hacky with ES24's key/velocity maps to do what you mention. From working in the pro audio world for awhile, I've found that other folks in the space just love to talk shop about how they do things. Audio devs are nerds like that. Doesn't always mean people are stealing from others. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Core-Audio-Hands-Programming/dp/0321636848/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=learning+core+audio&qid=1567746383&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Core-Audio-Hands-Programming...

awinter-py 7y ago

from 7.10 in the facebook platform policy > We can create apps or products that offer features and services similar to your app Would love to be a fly on the wall in the room when this was added https://developers.facebook.com/policy https://developers.facebook.com/policy

hkarthik 7y ago

What is old is new again. This is just Apple’s version of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

tqi 7y ago

It feels like the big issue here is not that Apple is copying apps in the app store (everyone copies everyone) but rather that they are using proprietary data (num installs, time spent, retention, etc) to guide their roadmap.

lostmyoldone 7y ago
Plus that they are using API's nobody else are allowed to use, and that they generally don't seem to abide by the rules of the app store themselves.

codesternews 7y ago

How to bypass paywall?

adambowles 7y ago
Mirror: https://outline.com/nJ84Ea https://outline.com/nJ84Ea

75dvtwin 7y ago

I think it would be ok for Apple to create apps that fill a particular, yet to be explored niche, or to create foundational quality and functionality standard for a given area. Sort of 'Apple-basics'. However it is very anti competitive, and monopolistic to target mid/upper tier product segments, against your market participants. It would be like NASDAQ running their own brokerage business.

grey-area 7y ago

This is not a new thing really, it's quite tricky for Apple as probably every idea they come up with internally someone else has already had in some form, so I don't see how they can avoid it, though they could try to be graceful if they completely replicate a tool, and offer to buy it out. Back in the day I produced a little shareware utility which was a speaking clock for Mac OS. Apple took notice and I was invited to SF by someone at Apple, but had other commitments at the time and couldn't go at the time. They asked for partial source code (I think after a bug I reported to them) and I sent it over, and that was the last I heard about it. Soon after they introduced the feature in the OS and it is still there to this day in Clock settings - Announce the time on the hour. I was actually pleased about that, as I never made significant money from the utility anyway - I'm not really sure if they were inspired by the tool but always suspected they were.

chmike 7y ago

The cynicism of Apple is pathetic. Steve Jobs is reported to have said [https://www.pcmag.com/commentary/329826/why-steve-jobs-went-thermonuclear-over-android https://www.pcmag.com/commentary/329826/why-steve-jobs-went-...]: > "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this," the late CEO famously said.

siempreb 7y ago

Yes, curious what will happen with the private repositories on Github now it's Microsofts'. Will no one in the company ever check what's going on?

mikl 7y ago

Everything is a remix. Every app has copied some parts of its functionality from elsewhere, and the world is better for it. If Apple could only add features to iOS that isn’t covered by an app store app, there would be almost nothing new they could add. Sure, it is annoying for the devs who get sherlocked, but most such apps are pretty obvious in the first place. And this is not a new phenomenon. Given Apple’s focus on health these last many years, it’s hardly a surprise that they’re adding period tracking. If the period-tracking-app didn’t see this coming, they really need to hire someone with a little bit of foresight.

gommm 7y ago

I actually still miss Watson/Sherlock. It was a great timesaver. I always wonder if Watson would have survived longer if Apple hadn't copied them and then let Sherlock to rot.

psv1 7y ago

I'm just waiting for the new version of Reminders in iOS 13 which will largely kill the need for tools like Todoist/Wunderlist/Things.

yoz-y 7y ago
Todo apps are largely safe I think, because people have varying and strong opinions about how task management should be handled. What irks me is that the new reminders have killed the URL scheme support. So no integrations from outside world either.

adambowles 7y ago

Mirror: https://outline.com/nJ84Ea https://outline.com/nJ84Ea

braythwayt 7y ago

Like all platform owners, Apple gradually commoditizes its complements. The most extreme end of this behaviour is when they release a free app or feature that wipes everyone else out (or drives them into tiny niches). iTunes was a famous example: It instantly obsoleted indie music apps on the Macintosh. We had a good time discussing this fifteen years ago(!) when Cabel Sasser, cofounder of Panic Software, wrote about the demise of Audion at the hands of iTunes: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ My own take on this is to think of building apps and services on top of a platform as sharecropping: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard... This doesn’t mean I countenance Apple’s behaviour. Far from it. It simply means I think of it as inevitable that platform vendors will court indie developers and partners when they need them to grow the platform, then turn on them when the vendor thinks it needs to commoditize their work. Twitter and its indie clients is another example.

_pmf_ 7y ago

Ideas are worthless.

newsgremlin 7y ago

Good to see Apples business model has not changed at all since its inception. Good to see a big company stick to its roots.

soraminazuki 7y ago

While it may be that Apple has an unfair advantage regarding the App Store ecosystem, this particular example seems ridiculous IMO. Period tracking doesn't seem like something new, and it's quite a stretch to suggest that Apple copied the idea.

AshleysBrain 7y ago

Hasn't this always been a risk for third-party developers - that the platform owner might incorporate popular third-party features to the main platform? I vaguely remember Microsoft Word used to have a third-party addon for a spell checker, then made it built-in - and got sued by the third-party developer. I think they lost though...

Someone 7y ago
It has been going on forever. As lower levels of the OS get commoditized, OS providers have to provide more functionality if they want to continue making money. Back in the day, people would buy graphics libraries to draw lines on the screen, buy utilities such as ZIP or defragmentation utilities, and each program had its own logic for printing, with each of them, at setup time, asking questions such as “what should I sent to you printer to get bold text?”, “how many characters on a line does your printer support?”, and “should I wait a bit longer between lines to make sure your printer is ready to accept new input?” Now, of course, Apple doesn’t need to make money on their OS, but I think they are forced to move ‘up’ to compete with Microsoft.
Shorel 7y ago
> I vaguely remember Microsoft Word used to have a third-party addon for a spell checker I remember I coded a spell checker for WordPerfect 5.1 after I used Word and wanted to have the same. Sadly the 40MB hard disk where it was died many years ago.

14 7y ago

Well back when the iPhone first came out, my thoughtful Canadian carrier Rogers thought it would be funny to sell me a phone that does not even take videos but sell me a 1000 Video text messages with my plan. Hilarious I thought, I just bought a 1000 video messages and this phone only takes pictures. While looking into that I discovered the jailbreaking scene and those guys hacked the phones to take videos. For people saying what the hell is this guy talking about, when iPhones were first released they literally could not take videos, only photos. The jailbreak scene was FULL of ideas that apple eventually made standard on the phone.

yani 7y ago

The same is happening with Microsoft GitHub Actions and the impact it has over Travis CI.

beckler 7y ago
Granted, Travis CI was sold to some private venture, and the first thing they did was fire most of their engineers.

KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago

Anti-trust, break up the app store + hardware.

twodayslate 7y ago

I remember a quote of sorts that went something like if your product relies on another company then (you aren't a product or you are the product?). I remember it being tossed around when Twitter was killing all the competing applications. Anyone have a source or remember it better than me?

zepto 7y ago

I guess Apple can just preinstall the software and not put it in the store. Maybe operating system design can be government regulated. Or maybe they can be split up as she proposes to enable Samsung and Xiaomi to have an advantage. This just shows that Elizabeth Warren’s advisers don’t understand software and that she is dangerously unelectable.

modsiw 7y ago

Isn’t this Apple’s entire business model?