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iOS 18 could 'sherlock' $400M in app revenue
- toomuchtodo 2y agoAlternatively, could provide users substantial consumer excess at no additional cost. Ideas are not the value, no?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago> With the release of iOS 18 later this fall, Apple’s changes may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Actually, it will be far better for consumers than that. I am sure, that pretty much none of those apps have thought about security and privacy implications with this kind of data on the level that Apple has, and is implementing for these features. In addition, a substantial number of these apps are ad-supported which brings up a lot of issues related to privacy and tracking. In addition, if they are VC funded, under pressure to make money, they may try to sell the data they have. Consumers are far better with Apple doing this.
- bsaul 2y agoI don’t think password managers are ad-supported. One thing for sure, apple is going to leverage ios to make sure it’s better integrated to the OS, and it’s also going to make it harder for you to move to a competitor (android or windows). So, in the short term, you’re probably right, but in the long term certainly not.
- c4wrd 2y agoYou have a fair point in that a native experience will more than likely keep privacy in mind and have more resources to produce a potentially better experience. The concern is that these are unethical practices. Now, they don’t own a monopoly over the smartphone market, but they do have a monopoly on the actual app purchase market, so the monopoly question is debatable. Apple has both created the game (marketplace), owns the game and has private information on how the game is being played. They are then using that information to increase the value of their offering. They have a statistically unfair advantage against any offering on their marketplace and can use that to build up their own product. I’m not a lawyer and I can’t speak to the legality, although this is something that would be classified as at least suspicious, although it’d be hard to build a case on, if at all possible. Ethically, their practice of appearing to target successful offerings and undermining them is debatable. There’s no right answer here, it’s a matter of opinion. But this repeated behavior would signal to anyone looking to build a commercial success on their marketplace: don’t be too successful. You have to remember that you have a multi-trillion dollar international corporation suppressing the success of small (internationally <$1B business is considered small) businesses, who have employees that believe in their mission. And you can see I keep referring to “their marketplace” that they legitimately own, and I understand they may not be doing anything “illegal” as defined by current law, but when you look at a multi-decade view of this practice, I think we’re going to start to see new laws being drafted and regulations put on place. I’m not sure how you even begin to fight a “virtual monopoly” which has little physical monopoly dominance. I will caveat that I do thoroughly enjoy Apple products and the seamless Apple native applications and integrations with each other. I do appreciate their craftsmanship and attention to detail. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when we see a similar headline every year each of the last few years, where a closed environment controlled by one entity is swallowing more and more of the world’s resources and preventing others from growing.
- lupire 2y agoConsumers benefit when Apple builds an OS with insecure APIs, where developers can't built apps that guarantee data protection? That's an inverted way to look at it. Why would you trust Apple if you can't trust apps built on Apple's platform?
- mdhb 2y agoWhy you would ever want to be an iOS developer is beyond me. No company treats their developers as badly as Apple.
- hpen 2y agoThat's really subjective. I've done web dev, embedded and now iOS. Quality of life has never been higher IMO
- danielinoa 2y agoQuality of life in what sense? How do you contend with the fact that your iOS apps, unlike web apps, can be arbitrarily gate-kept?
- bsaul 2y agoAfter 15 years of ios development, i must say i’m quite relieved that my next project is going to be web first.
- runnr_az 2y agoAllTrails has, I think, seen this coming and offers their sub as part of a larger package that includes some other, related apps.
- prepend 2y agoHow is ios18 replacing all trails?
- Legend2440 2y agoThey're adding topographic maps of hiking trails to Apple Maps.
- foundart 2y agoIf they aren’t also providing user reviews and reports of trails then they aren’t really replacing AllTrails
- duskwuff 2y agoAnd if all it took to replace AllTrails was a topo layer and trail markers in Maps, they didn't have much of a product.
- steve1977 2y ago… in the US.
- prepend 2y agoGoogle maps has had that for years, right? I don’t think this threatens AllTrails. I’ve used AllTrails for 10+ years and they’ve degraded by trying to force into paid subscriptions for basic functions. So I use them less and less (I just want maps and tracking hikes). So I’m happy that Apple is adding them and I don’t think will make me use AllTrails any less.
- whaines 2y ago[dead]
- MissTake 2y agoUsers: Why do Apple implement features that are already paid for apps that I like? Also users: Why do I need to buy third party apps to do [X]? It should be native. I get it - I’ve been a happy user of things like PCalc for years, but for every Apple Mail, there’s a Spark. For every calendar there’s a Fantastical. And so on. But Apple are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.
- duskwuff 2y agoArguing that device manufacturers should refrain from including commonly used features in their OS so that third parties can profit from selling those features to users is certainly a take. Can't say that I find it particularly convincing, though.
- INGSOCIALITE 2y agothis fleecing of customers is my most hated software business model, ever. salesforce is utterly useless unless you head on over to the app store and buy the functionality you actually wanted, same with airtable, microsoft anything, all anyone sells is frameworks with an app store now and it makes me want to go full office space on my computer
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThe annealing of the OS in the long term is great though. It opens up that $400MM to different apps that will become core features in the future as people vote with their wallet.
- lotsoweiners 2y agoLOL that is one way to spin it. I’d rather just stay out of mobile development unless my ideas were too difficult to implement. No one wants to be a bullet point on Tim Apple’s yearly slideshow presentation.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoLetting your ideas live like butterflies helps them go global.
- joshstrange 2y agoAhh yes the “My ideas are so good that Apple will steal them so they aren’t worth doing”-argument. I find this argument to be completely unrealistic. It’s like the people that want you to sign an NDA to talk about their idea. Ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything. Yes, Apple might sherlock you but Apple has never and will never serve all the use cases people want (and that’s ok!). They often cover the 80% use-case which leaves room for third party apps to serve the power/niche users while Apple raises the bar for the category. I use a ton of third party apps (and pay for them) that Apple has their own versions of because they cover my needs better than the stock apps. Drafts, Carrot, Things, CleanShotX (desktop), Annotatable, and the list goes on. Just say you aren’t interested in mobile development, you aren’t good at it, or that you find it uninteresting. Don’t hide behind “Apple will steal my idea”.