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Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening", it should be viewed as an opportunity for startups to step out of the comfort zone and offer genu

Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening", it should be viewed as an opportunity for startups to step out of the comfort zone and offer genuine innovation, which will further benefit the consumer. Having basic features integrated in the OS is essential, and will happen more and more, especially with so many horror stories of seemingly innocent apps brokering user information for cash. Startups need to step up their game in privacy as well as technological and product innovation. Good luck.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
I’ve always thought that if your business can be made redundant simply by another product implementing a new feature, then you have a really obvious business risk and should make decisions accordingly.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Isn't there a famous quotation along those lines, maybe from Steve Jobs, about "it's a feature, not a product?"
  - CarlRJ 7y ago
    I recall that being his response to Dropbox (if I recall correctly Apple made a pitch for buying them and they said "no").
- _bxg1 7y ago
  The counter-argument is that Apple's implementations aren't "playing fairly", because iOS's restrictions mean Apple can give its own features special integration into the OS that third-parties don't have access to. Of course, some degree of this is inevitable with any platform. So there isn't a clear line where it becomes anti-competitive.
  - aabhay 7y ago
    As long as Apple makes great products, the truth is that people will support a monopoly. I always think of the Microsoft-IE antitrust debacle as karma for making a truly horrible product.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I don’t think that’s a valid counter-argument at all. The same line of reasoning applies to any service. There’s plenty of products that are essentially 3rd party implementations of features in other services. If you’re going to make a product like that, you absolutely must know that your entire value prop can be wiped out if the 3rd party ever happens to get around to implementing that feature themselves. Apple does plenty of stuff that could be argued as anti-competitive, but I don’t think “implementing my product as a feature” is one of them. It is perhaps a good reason to think twice before making an iOS app though. But as a consumer I prefer it to the opposite approach, which I’d consider a company like Atlassian to have. If you ask Atlassian when they’re going to implement a rather basic and highly demanded feature, the answer tends to be “never, buy it on the market place”.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      > If you’re going to make a product like that It's... it's basically all products. Virtually any product on iOS would function and perform and integrate better if implemented by Apple. It's just a question of at what point it gets popular enough that they want to bother doing so. > The same line of reasoning applies to any service iOS is a special case because of how locked-down it is. Not only can't third-parties do things like draw over other parts of the UI or add items to system UIs, they can't even (truly) run in the background. Of course, on Android, apps can do all of these things and that's part of why it's a security nightmare. Which is why as I said, there's no clear answer to the problem. But it is a problem.
      - AmericanChopper 7y ago
        > It's... it's basically all products I looked through every app I have installed on my iPhone and I only found a couple that would fall into that category. I have a shopping list app which Apple could theoretically implement as a feature if it wanted to (but not fully, as this particular shopping list app allows me to share lists with android users), and Authy. The rest of the apps I have installed are just interfaces for 3rd party services. Apple doesn’t have the power to subvert the value of those services any more than any other service provider does (Apple has a maps app, I still use google maps). I guess Apple could also make a Sudoku app if it really wanted to, but I’d consider that pretty unlikely. I think there’s a strong argument for saying something like Spotify vs Apple Music is anti-competitive, but for rather different reasons.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  Indeed. Any feature-oriented startup or company will eventually find stiff competition from other companies which can copy the feature, while adding to a portfolio of other related features, giving a net benefit to the customer, while the feature-only company has little to compete.
monadic2 7y ago
> Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening", Well the consumer has a clear loss here if they don’t extend the functionality to all apps, eg give them control over which links open which apps and ability to remove built in apps like safari, mail, the absolutely useless news app, etc.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  According to some of the rumors from leaked code, Apple will offer setting default mail and browser apps, iirc.
- briandear 7y ago
  How is News “absolutely useless.” Tens of millions of people would disagree.
  - monadic2 7y ago
    Presumably you can ask them why they like it :)
danudey 7y ago
I remember an anecdote I'd heard a while ago; long before Starbucks was ubiquitous, and before coffee culture was what it is in North America, a cafe owner heard that Starbucks was going to be moving in down the street. He was worried, because he thought Starbucks was going to take all his business, so he called someone he knew who also ran a cafe, who'd had a Starbucks open in his town, to ask what he should do. The friend told him this was the best thing that could have happened to his cafe, for a simple reason: Starbucks, and all the media surrounding their launch, will tell potential customers what the whole deal is with cafes and coffee culture, and people will flock to them in droves, and Starbucks will be insanely busy. A lot of those potential customers, and a lot of customers who really get into the coffee culture Starbucks brings, will come to the smaller cafes for more personal service, more handcrafted drinks, and a better atmosphere. I heard the story in the context of Apple adding a feature to iOS years back, I forget which one. The point of the story is that Starbucks, or Apple in our case, is going to make a feature with mass-market appeal to a broad range of people. Customers who've never thought about it before will try it and see the benefit; customers who like it, but don't necessarily like Apple's offering, will go further afield to find better offerings from third-party developers. Typically, the companies that tend to get completely Sherlocked are the ones who make a simple product with potentially mass appeal, and don't go beyond that, or who go beyond it with features that aren't practical or useful to most people. Take Growl for example; a great notification framework that everyone used. Suddenly Apple adds support for native notifications, and push notifications, and Growl is thrown by the wayside, because all it did was offer notifications. No deferment, no forwarding to other devices (e.g. your iPhone). The only features it had were the obvious features that you would imagine for a notification service. I think John Gruber said it best[1]: "when a utility is designed to compensate for a hole in Mac OS X, the developer should not expect the hole to remain unfilled by Apple forever". [1] https://daringfireball.net/2003/10/commandtab https://daringfireball.net/2003/10/commandtab
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  In the case of the native Tile and Airpods, though, Apple is using their walled garden to provide an experience that's pretty strictly better than what you'd get from competitors. It's not a hole in Apple's OS per se, it's more like a privileged route to the OS. For your analogy, it'd be as though the Starbucks owned the street the two shops were on, and gave the entrants to the Starbucks a privileged position on the street.
inkaudio 7y ago
Yes, and the author is misinformed to think that Peloton can lose the customers who take their online classes to Apple free options. People take classes for the inspiration and guidance from the teachers. Before Apple there were plenty of free options so this isn’t new, fitness is and will continue to be a very competitive market.
GeekyBear 7y ago
Another benefit to the consumer of Apple offering a first party option is that the third party apps keep getting caught selling consumer data. For instance, third party menstrual cycle tracking apps. https://www.cnet.com/news/these-menstrual-tracking-apps-reportedly-shared-sensitive-data-with-facebook/ https://www.cnet.com/news/these-menstrual-tracking-apps-repo...
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  Yes, one of the egregious cases I was thinking of. I am very wary these days of installing apps. I try to really confine myself to the system apps, or to a few apps that I trust the developer, or build my own helper apps.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
There's not a single statistic to prove that anything what you say is logical. mI'm pretty sure your old customers will not look further if there's already an option on their phone and completing with the richest company of the world is dumb. They did their research too

AmericanChopper 7y ago

I’ve always thought that if your business can be made redundant simply by another product implementing a new feature, then you have a really obvious business risk and should make decisions accordingly.

reaperducer 7y ago
Isn't there a famous quotation along those lines, maybe from Steve Jobs, about "it's a feature, not a product?"
- CarlRJ 7y ago
  I recall that being his response to Dropbox (if I recall correctly Apple made a pitch for buying them and they said "no").
_bxg1 7y ago
The counter-argument is that Apple's implementations aren't "playing fairly", because iOS's restrictions mean Apple can give its own features special integration into the OS that third-parties don't have access to. Of course, some degree of this is inevitable with any platform. So there isn't a clear line where it becomes anti-competitive.
- aabhay 7y ago
  As long as Apple makes great products, the truth is that people will support a monopoly. I always think of the Microsoft-IE antitrust debacle as karma for making a truly horrible product.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  I don’t think that’s a valid counter-argument at all. The same line of reasoning applies to any service. There’s plenty of products that are essentially 3rd party implementations of features in other services. If you’re going to make a product like that, you absolutely must know that your entire value prop can be wiped out if the 3rd party ever happens to get around to implementing that feature themselves. Apple does plenty of stuff that could be argued as anti-competitive, but I don’t think “implementing my product as a feature” is one of them. It is perhaps a good reason to think twice before making an iOS app though. But as a consumer I prefer it to the opposite approach, which I’d consider a company like Atlassian to have. If you ask Atlassian when they’re going to implement a rather basic and highly demanded feature, the answer tends to be “never, buy it on the market place”.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    > If you’re going to make a product like that It's... it's basically all products. Virtually any product on iOS would function and perform and integrate better if implemented by Apple. It's just a question of at what point it gets popular enough that they want to bother doing so. > The same line of reasoning applies to any service iOS is a special case because of how locked-down it is. Not only can't third-parties do things like draw over other parts of the UI or add items to system UIs, they can't even (truly) run in the background. Of course, on Android, apps can do all of these things and that's part of why it's a security nightmare. Which is why as I said, there's no clear answer to the problem. But it is a problem.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      > It's... it's basically all products I looked through every app I have installed on my iPhone and I only found a couple that would fall into that category. I have a shopping list app which Apple could theoretically implement as a feature if it wanted to (but not fully, as this particular shopping list app allows me to share lists with android users), and Authy. The rest of the apps I have installed are just interfaces for 3rd party services. Apple doesn’t have the power to subvert the value of those services any more than any other service provider does (Apple has a maps app, I still use google maps). I guess Apple could also make a Sudoku app if it really wanted to, but I’d consider that pretty unlikely. I think there’s a strong argument for saying something like Spotify vs Apple Music is anti-competitive, but for rather different reasons.
LeoNatan25 7y ago
Indeed. Any feature-oriented startup or company will eventually find stiff competition from other companies which can copy the feature, while adding to a portfolio of other related features, giving a net benefit to the customer, while the feature-only company has little to compete.

monadic2 7y ago

> Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening", Well the consumer has a clear loss here if they don’t extend the functionality to all apps, eg give them control over which links open which apps and ability to remove built in apps like safari, mail, the absolutely useless news app, etc.

LeoNatan25 7y ago
According to some of the rumors from leaked code, Apple will offer setting default mail and browser apps, iirc.
briandear 7y ago
How is News “absolutely useless.” Tens of millions of people would disagree.
- monadic2 7y ago
  Presumably you can ask them why they like it :)

danudey 7y ago

I remember an anecdote I'd heard a while ago; long before Starbucks was ubiquitous, and before coffee culture was what it is in North America, a cafe owner heard that Starbucks was going to be moving in down the street. He was worried, because he thought Starbucks was going to take all his business, so he called someone he knew who also ran a cafe, who'd had a Starbucks open in his town, to ask what he should do. The friend told him this was the best thing that could have happened to his cafe, for a simple reason: Starbucks, and all the media surrounding their launch, will tell potential customers what the whole deal is with cafes and coffee culture, and people will flock to them in droves, and Starbucks will be insanely busy. A lot of those potential customers, and a lot of customers who really get into the coffee culture Starbucks brings, will come to the smaller cafes for more personal service, more handcrafted drinks, and a better atmosphere. I heard the story in the context of Apple adding a feature to iOS years back, I forget which one. The point of the story is that Starbucks, or Apple in our case, is going to make a feature with mass-market appeal to a broad range of people. Customers who've never thought about it before will try it and see the benefit; customers who like it, but don't necessarily like Apple's offering, will go further afield to find better offerings from third-party developers. Typically, the companies that tend to get completely Sherlocked are the ones who make a simple product with potentially mass appeal, and don't go beyond that, or who go beyond it with features that aren't practical or useful to most people. Take Growl for example; a great notification framework that everyone used. Suddenly Apple adds support for native notifications, and push notifications, and Growl is thrown by the wayside, because all it did was offer notifications. No deferment, no forwarding to other devices (e.g. your iPhone). The only features it had were the obvious features that you would imagine for a notification service. I think John Gruber said it best[1]: "when a utility is designed to compensate for a hole in Mac OS X, the developer should not expect the hole to remain unfilled by Apple forever". [1] https://daringfireball.net/2003/10/commandtab https://daringfireball.net/2003/10/commandtab

freewilly1040 7y ago
In the case of the native Tile and Airpods, though, Apple is using their walled garden to provide an experience that's pretty strictly better than what you'd get from competitors. It's not a hole in Apple's OS per se, it's more like a privileged route to the OS. For your analogy, it'd be as though the Starbucks owned the street the two shops were on, and gave the entrants to the Starbucks a privileged position on the street.

inkaudio 7y ago

Yes, and the author is misinformed to think that Peloton can lose the customers who take their online classes to Apple free options. People take classes for the inspiration and guidance from the teachers. Before Apple there were plenty of free options so this isn’t new, fitness is and will continue to be a very competitive market.

GeekyBear 7y ago

Another benefit to the consumer of Apple offering a first party option is that the third party apps keep getting caught selling consumer data. For instance, third party menstrual cycle tracking apps. https://www.cnet.com/news/these-menstrual-tracking-apps-reportedly-shared-sensitive-data-with-facebook/ https://www.cnet.com/news/these-menstrual-tracking-apps-repo...

LeoNatan25 7y ago
Yes, one of the egregious cases I was thinking of. I am very wary these days of installing apps. I try to really confine myself to the system apps, or to a few apps that I trust the developer, or build my own helper apps.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

There's not a single statistic to prove that anything what you say is logical. mI'm pretty sure your old customers will not look further if there's already an option on their phone and completing with the richest company of the world is dumb. They did their research too