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

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.