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OpenAI acquires Sky.app
- TheAmazingRace 1y agoI've personally known Ari, the guy behind Sky, since the mid 2000s when he was a frequent visitor to the forum insanelymac.com, back when OSx86 was a big deal. Even back then, he really stood out and I'm glad he's continuing to make waves.
- rpwilcox 1y agoTo jog people's memory about Sky: yes this is the app created by former Shortcuts/Workflow.app people
- mentalgear 1y agoAnd another consolidation in the space to make the big players even bigger, when actually it's hard time to break up the tech feudalism party.
- jimmydoe 1y agoAmreicans want to make the economy looks good, so they have to fake AI growth. To do that, they have to give OpenAIs a lot of money. OpenAIs have so much money they have to make bets. The best ways to make bets are: (a) do what others do: social video, app store, online shopping... (b) buy out other small promising companies so investors have no where else to look.
- mentalgear 1y agobtw: Don't know what they think their competitive advantage is going to be with this. Either apple will just clone it, or more likely and quicker (and probably already done) there will be a better open-source version of this that let's you freely choose your local/cloud LLM model provider.
- tyre 1y agoApple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious. Siri still makes so many mistakes, Homepod can't answer anything substantial without "I've sent a link to your iPhone". If they simply let Claude back Siri, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoWe're still where we were for the past 2 years: by far the best voice assistant available on the market is... Home Assistant wired to a SOTA LLM via API key.
- fnordsensei 1y agoThere is precedence for Apple waiting for technologies to mature before using them (last mover advantage), and then dominating by being the platform owner. Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around being discontent with the currently available alternatives. Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.
- consumer451 1y agoMy entirely unsubstantiated theory is that Apple is a company that would not want to release a product it can't control 100%. You can't control an LLM 100%, so here we are. "Hey Apple, why was Steve Jobs considered to be such a jerk?" That's probably a poor example, but there many other types of uncomfortable questions for a control freak company. Does that sound plausible to anyone else?
- tsunamifury 1y agoThis is for sure the case. Apple’s core product DNA (Run like an appliance, simple and reliably) does not jive with the LLM at all. Now if only they listened to themselves and fixed their keyboard
- consumer451 1y agoYeah, I think you nailed it better than I did, just the lack of predictability is likely enough. I should also point out that I use an iPhone, partially because Apple being a control freak can lead to great products. That was not meant as an insult to them.
- krackers 1y ago> Either apple will just clone it They've had two years to do so, and haven't done anything. Their decision to completely abandon applescript has come back to bite them. Also I wonder if the current dev team for macOS even knows much about the features that exist. Since mac os 9 apple has included a "summarize" service, you'd think this would be the first thing to be sprinkled with LLM magic. Instead they've just left that to rot and added a new layer for this
- seyyid235 1y agoI don’t know how this will help but okay.
- an0malous 1y ago> Disclosure: An investment fund associated with Sam Altman held a passive investment in Software Applications Incorporated.
- colesantiago 1y agoWere there any revenue numbers for this acquisition?
- saagarjha 1y agoSky was never publicly available.
- airstrike 1y ago> We’ve always wanted computers to be more empowering, customizable, and intuitive. Agreed > With LLMs, we can finally put the pieces together. I think this is true > That’s why we built Sky, an AI experience that floats over your desktop to help you think and create. Never mind, hard pass
- wiseowise 1y agoSo it begins, they’ve acquired the first half. Now they just need to buy or fork .Net from Microsoft.
- geor9e 1y agoi honestly thought it was the entire joke of the headline and all the comments would be mentioning skynet but ctrl-f says net appears once
- dang 1y agoDiscussed (a bit) here. Others? The Sky's the limit: AI automation on Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691 - June 2025 (71 comments) Sky, Natural Computing for the Macintosh - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121891 - May 2025 (4 comments)
- samfriedman 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691
- stopachka 1y agoInteresting! The folks who built this made what became Shortcuts on iOS. They are great hackers.
- MisterTea 1y agoThere are a few other comments like yours but it it doesn't mean anything to someone who doesn't use iOS. I had to look it up and it lets you create automated tasks using different iOS apps.
- stopachka 1y agoYes. Some more interesting background: The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time. They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a default application that people actually like. One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to their app.
- conradev 1y agoThat makes me so happy to hear! I programmed my dad's old TI-82 to stay entertained in high school math, and I always wondered if kids would do that with Shortcuts. you can see where it all started back in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49JJnJ2i4oc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49JJnJ2i4oc
- jimhi 1y agoThanks for sharing, absolutely amazing
- TheAmazingRace 1y agoNice to see you around these parts, Conrad.
- bossyTeacher 1y agoWhich afaik is something that has been in Android for ages. What's so special about the iOs implementation?
- troupo 1y agoOpenAI is rapidly skating to where Apple should be, and isn't.
- johnzim 1y agoWow! I was wondering why they were so quiet! Great news
- yahoozoo 1y agoNext step towards AGI?
- tartoran 1y agoPerhaps Artificial General Illusion?
- luma 1y agoI'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS. Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic" does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?
- technocrat8080 1y agoSky is macOS only. It essentially gives an LLM access to various system APIs coupled with a floating user interface that you can access on command.
- toephu2 1y ago"Software Applications Incorporated"... what a very generic company name
- jasonjmcghee 1y agohere's their website https://software.inc/ https://software.inc/
- YAndreaRusso 1y agothats a cool website. thanks for sharing
- geoffpado 1y agoBetween this and The Browser Company of New York (Arc, Dia) it seems like having a generic name is the way to get acquired these days.
- WorldPeas 1y agoI've been thinking more recently, do you think that an OpenAi-Apple merger will happen this cycle as it did with AOL-TimeWarner in the past? The thought being that an aging gatekeeper attempts to merge with an up-and-coming company when they feel it's too late to be relevant only for there to be another paradigm shift that obsoletes that decision. Though that is very much speculation.
- fourseventy 1y agoI wonder how that would even work with OpenAI's weird 'non profit' shenanigans.
- WorldPeas 1y agoMS was sizing them up a short time ago, I would imagine it'd be something strange like laying everyone off then hiring them again, or moving the IP to a child corporation Firefox-style
- username223 1y agoThat would be wild: a cash furnace merges with a pile of cash. I had forgotten just how late in the dot-com bubble AOL/TW happened. I think it's far more likely that Microsoft lets OpenAI hang, then pillages the corpse, while Apple goes on to boringly make giant piles of money from hardware.
- gtirloni 1y agoI actually think it's smart of Apple to play it safe, considering all the hype and insanity around LLM's. Also, OpenAI's valuation is not grounded in actual revenue so I doubt it's a good deal to buy them right now. Don't they have something like >400 P/E?
- rvz 1y agoThe AI grift must continue.
- technocrat8080 1y agoSeems pretty obvious Sky.app's functionality will land in the macOS ChatGPT app at some point. I wonder how Atlas fits into that story.
- ignoramous 1y agoAtlas will evolve to collect data for training. There's a bunch of context and content bots can't process or access, but a browser not only gives the mothership a closer look at all the walled-garden services and virals a user consumes but also a residential IP address.
- gigatexal 1y agoMaybe this is what smart actually useful Siri could become?
- mrtksn 1y agoCongrats to the Sky app developers, so OpenAI believes that the future is in computer assistants? I don't buy this, it doesn't make sense to me that tools and interfaces made for human comfort and consumption is the right place to plug the AI to automate our lives. IMHO the computing is ripe for a re-do with everything already being enshitified and putting another lay to cover all the shit we are in isn't going to help anybody.
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- rco8786 1y agoWhat IS Sky? Their landing page is just about the acquisition and I can't infer much from the OpenAI announcement.
- mikeiz404 1y agoNot sure if you saw the demo video but the blue "Trailer" button at the bottom of their page pops it up to watch. https://sky.app/ https://sky.app/
- isaacremuant 1y agoThoroughly unimpressed. Every one of these assistant apps always go to "send message/add something to calendar". Hopefully the actual features and interoperability prove the ad wrong and there's a game changing UX behind it.
- typpilol 1y agoI've yet to see a useful case for these AI browsers that is something other than a dead simple task. But when I browse the net, I'm not thinking about asking AI about the info on my screen. I can just read it? And by no means am I anti AI, I use it a bit for coding
- atonse 1y agoIt feels like it's always the same 3-4 things. Travel Bookings Recipes Calendar/Email integration But maybe if you look from a first principles standpoint, do most human tasks decompose to some form of these same 4-6 tasks? (not talking about brainstorming, which is already well covered, or socializing, which is offline)
- CuriouslyC 1y agoAI browsing the web is dumb AF if you think about it. Using an API through a REPL is so much better, we're doing all this work to basically work around jackass site operators who make everything require javascript and don't provide a documented user facing API. The irony is that as the agentic boom really takes off, all these no-api, no accessibility sites are going to lose to small competitors who just offer a reliable agent interface, so people can use their service without having to use their service. Good riddance to the dinosaurs.
- the_duke 1y agoThe recent prioritisation of the Apple ecosystem is interesting. Sorra, Atlas, buying Sky. There have been signs that Apple is going with Anthropic instead of OpenAI for integrating AI features. This may partially be an aggressive strategic push to take the wind of out such a potential partnership.
- Jianghong94 1y agoMy take is that it's a standalone business consideration: Apple users are more inclined to pay for software (definitely the case for iPhone vs. Android, although I haven't found a source for Windows).
- notatoad 1y agojust from my own anecdotal experience, it's easy to prioritize apple because apple users are not only more inclined to pay for software, they're more inclined to use it. even on web apps that are exactly the same across platforms my experience is you might more signups from windows users because somebody told them "hey, you should check this out", but the metrics on actual usuage usually favor the mac users.
- locusofself 1y agoI was surprised by the launch of the chatGPT desktop app for mac only, and then Sora only for iOS. Kinda seems like a middle-finger to Microsoft, which is strange considering how closely MS and OpenAI were aligned not long ago.
- radicaldreamer 1y agoThe first version of Microsoft Office was Mac only.
- the_duke 1y ago> Kinda seems like a middle-finger to Microsoft I think it might be more the opposite! They could be staying away to not intrude into Microsoft's "turf". MS is also pushing lots of AI integrations.
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- ef2k 1y agoComes to prove that a great UI/UX can work wonders for users. This is what Alfred back in the day was dabbling with, except that Sky seems to have a modern natural language spin to it.
- notepad0x90 1y agoThis is..disturbing. When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating. Maybe that's not the right word? At least it's past it's peak. Consider the efforts and costs of merging a new team with yours, getting different cultures and people to work together, integrating an entirely new code base with your own. Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does mostly pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use this strategy going forward. Think of it this way, even with lots of capital on hand, will a company just poach/hire the other companies engineers or guy it out right for it's "IP"? I find it concerning because OpenAI's failure will have a cascading effect. And failure doesn't mean collapse, just a declining stock, an out-competed company. Its leadership must feel like they're big enough to where buying out the competition or to add new product lines is a good strategy, but they haven't (as far as I know) turned a healthy profit yet? They already have so many skeptics that claim OpenAI could never raise enough revenue to match its valuation. And it's not like they have any shortage of competition. Alphabet alone can play the acquisition game and win more readily. ChatGPT and Sora are great, but not they don't have enough of a difference for it to be a moat. I don't know, I just hope it isn't consultants and MBA's making decisions now over there. And Sky.app is for MacOS? Shouldn't they be locking in a stronger partnership with Apple and get a stake in Siri instead of competing against Siri and Apple Intelligence? I guess I just don't get business enough, I'm sure this all makes sense to entrepreneurs.
- atonse 1y agoSeems like an acquihire. Honestly, I'm shocked that Apple didn't purchase them, given that Apple has nearly ZERO to show after three years since ChatGPT. I mean, this seems to be exactly the sort of thing Apple was trying to sell us, right? And they still haven't pulled it off.
- notepad0x90 1y agoApple is the smart one then maybe. You don't need to hire all the non-technical people, that's what causes issues/stagnation. They could have poached all their people instead. Or, they could have developed a competitor in less than a year (imho). I doubt they'll integrate it with their core-brand any sooner anyways. My concern is, Sam Altman is now thinking "meh, let's just buy that company" instead of "damn, we need to dig in and beat these small guys".
- ndneighbor 1y agoI think this acquisition makes a lot of sense and it's good business. Finding good MacOS developers who know the system level APIs more so than the docs is a tough go. It would make a lot of sense that OpenAI would just go ahead and hire out this expertise as they try to get their Mac app and their iOS app to get closer and closer to the system.
- geoffbp 1y agoFirst I’ve heard of this app Interesting..
- jlarocco 1y agoWhy didn't they "vibe code" their own version?
- reilly3000 1y agoAqui-hire?
- crossroadsguy 1y agoI'd guess that's where PC's "vibe code" part aimed to quip at?
- schnable 1y agoTo adopt a persona I don't care for - you can't vibe code taste! And the Sky has some history of good product taste/talent.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoMy guess is they wanted to snatch all their existing customers? Not familiar with the app. It seems to me ChatGPT wants to replace Cora and Siri. The Jarvis of AI.
- whilenot-dev 1y agoThere are no existing customers of a yet unreleased product.
- benterix 1y agoThis really got me curious. I watched the demo and was unimpressed. I mean, this is what Apple Intelligence is for but I never enabled it (and Apple is not pushing it too hard up our throats). So I wonder what's Altman plan on this, really. Do they really plan to market this product to Mac users or is something else at play? (Not that it matters much, with the amount of money he has he can experiment freely and buy whatever he wants.)
- jhatax 1y agoSurprised that Apple didn’t acquire Sky. Raycast might be an acquisition target if their code can become a service / extension for Spotlight in macOS. Usability win for macOS users if done right and Apple puts the right guardrails & privacy protections in place.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Lorenzo45 1y agoMaybe they tried but the founders rejected. The founders created another company that was acquired by Apple and worked there for a few years. Probably not a fun place to work for ambitious engineers who want to build AI products.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI feel like they just wanted to work on new thing to make macOS better with no guard rails. If Tim Pool was worth his salt he would hire them to let them do that, Apple needs a skunkworks for macOS. They should “overpay” them for it. If it yields superior internal products whats not to love?
- 4k93n2 1y agoim just imagining Tim Pool being the CEO of Apple and still wearing that beanie at every single keynote lol
- giancarlostoro 1y agoLol what a typo, at first I was not sure I understood what you meant, then it dawned on me.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago> They should “overpay” them for it. Big companies wrap themselves in bureaucracy that makes this hard to do.
- davidkunz 1y agoOne step closer to Skynet
- DeathArrow 1y agoWhy is this important?
- gtirloni 1y agoBecause it helps OpenAI justify its insane valuation by showing the market... something (which is better than the almost nothing we've seen lately).
- testfrequency 1y agoOAI wants to build an OS don’t they? Am I wild for assuming this? Everything to me now from them appears to be a moonshot to be the replacement for - not an addition to. Obviously they are not there yet with many of their products, but they all feel…weirdly intentional steps to overtake existing ecosystems.
- podgietaru 1y agoNot surprising. The AI in her was considered an operating system, and OpenAI are creatively bankrupt.
- seanthemon 1y agoA mobile OS most likely, or at least a complete cover over all of our applications, this is the only way for them to get more real training data.
- sumedh 1y agoTheir biggest fear is that Apple or Google or MS can take away their users.
- rramon 1y agoIt almost seems like OpenAI being a stealth operation by Apple with Altman becoming the new Jobs in an Nextstep like aquisition move. Ive/Altman.jpg, the focus on Macs, Apples unexplainable AI strategy and getting devs snatched by Meta. Why put up a fight if you already own the biggest player..
- Hendrikto 1y ago> getting devs snatched by Meta. Why put up a fight if you already own the biggest player. Why match 100 million pay packages when nobody is actually making money? Apple is profitable. Big AI is not.
- Zufriedenheit 1y agoProbably not easy to build this type of deep integration as a third party developer. Apple could easily cripple the access for „security“ reasons and build a much better competitor themselves with first class integration into the os.
- nightfox1 1y agoI feel like this will also put a lot of gpt voice models into more dominance.
- nektro 1y agoyet another sign OpenAI doesn't quite have the moat they'd like you to think they do
- dzink 1y agoFrom Hackathons, to Workflow, Apple Shortcuts, Sky and now OpenAI… Congratulations Ari! His team knows Apple software better than anyone, but will Apple allow third parties access to all functionality under the pretext of sandboxing or security?
- fadedsignal 1y agoI don't think it's a meaningful acquisition. I am wondering how much cash OpenAI is holding. They literally bought dozens of startups/companies while they were/are still not profitable.
- ActionHank 1y agoI would be looking to see who is benefiting from their investments and acquisitions right now. They know enterprise is not seeing the gains expected and that the average joe likes the product if it is basically free. Neither means meaningful revenue for them let alone enough to keep shovelling money into the gpu furnace. They are going to be looking for ways to extract what liquid cash they can now.
- andy_ppp 1y agoI hope Apple allows me to do all this locally... I've no desire to be sending all this stuff to OpenAI.