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Access to NFC is a huge one. This has a ton of use-cases in for instance IoT and smart home, and Apple limiting access prevents a lot of innovation in that spa
by skohan 4y ago
Access to NFC is a huge one. This has a ton of use-cases in for instance IoT and smart home, and Apple limiting access prevents a lot of innovation in that space which might compete with their offering.
Another example is Apple's privileged access to your wifi credentials. Basically this means if you want to share wifi access via your app, as you might want to do in setting up an IoT device, this is only possible if you enter Apple's expensive MFI program.
So in other words, to have a seamless and competitive IoT hardware setup process, you essentially have to enter an agreement with Apple which involves giving them a percentage of your overall hardware sales revenue on MFI devices.
- FreqSep 4y agoAre IoT and Smart Home actually *that* huge?
- capableweb 4y agoBypassing if it is or not, how could we ever know how big it is if Apple is stopping anyone from even trying?
- skohan 4y agoIt's a massive example of how Apple inserts themselves as a toll collector on an entire industry which they are largely unrelated to. Let me pose it to you this way: if you are developing an IoT product, the only way to have a UX competitive with Apple's own offerings is to pay them a toll on every device you sell. In return, you get a couple dozen bytes of data Apple prevents other apps from accessing. Does that sound like anti-trust regulation is operating as it should?