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 w

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.