Reminds me of some of the anticompetitive behaviors that Amazon has long engaged in. Among other practices, they use their privileged position in the marketplace to gain insight into markets, then force sellers out of business by producing the same products at a loss. In this way, third party sellers on Amazon serve the purpose of conducting market research for Amazon.
It’s remarkable that Apple has been able to generally maintain such a cordial relationship with developers for this long. Hopefully change is coming.
Money talks. They can continue making these anti-competitive moves indefinitely, while the regulators allow it. Just look at a fine that Amazon got hit with this week. It’s not even a rounding error for them, but would put another business into the grave instantly.
When your brand is worth 3 trillion doll hairs, some minuscule fine won’t even put a dent into your plans
Apple has a history of stealing features from Jailbreak community, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they did the same to existing apps.
It’s hardly theft to add new features to your product.
IMHO, the big thing is the AI stuff. The propagation of LLMs and diffusion models were always going to be a big threat to certain companies, and that cat is out of the bag. MS and Google have already started integrating those things into their products, and it was really just a matter of time before Apple did the same.
Trail selection also feels like something that is inevitable for Apple and Google. The trails have been in both companies maps for years, and both companies have smart watches with GPS and hiking workouts. I’m not shocked that you can now actually tap on a trail. This feels more like an obvious missing feature.
And the other little stuff - a calculator on the iPad? Window snapping? Passwords moved the applications folder instead of the preference panel? Timed reminders finally showing in the calendar? The only shocking thing is that these features weren’t part of the 1.0 products.
I don’t really get what the problem is. Should Apple just stop developing new features?
Building features instead of apps is always a precarious situation.
Also, ironically, wouldn’t software patents help here? (I’m not advocating for them. But…)
If software patents are uncool. And Sherlocking isn’t cool. Then… how does one even begin to adjudicate this?
This is a very similar question to piracy vs unauthorised AI training and I think the underlying thing is power and agency.
It’s absolutely possible, consistent and valid to be for something in a situation where it equalises power and against it in a situation where it skews it even worse towards inequality.
I understand why it’s a loss for some developers, but I don’t think we should prevent Apple from integrating something in iOS just because of it.
You could also say these developers just benefited from the fact that Apple omitted to integrate some obvious features.
