We already know how Apple gets rid of things that do things on iOS that they didn't want people doing: they pull them from the store.

Apple didn't do that, in fact they've left it in the store and made it free. They've given it a design award in the past (which seems to tacitly endorse that they like parts of it), and we know they've had things to help with automation in some degree on the Mac for years (AppleScript, Automator). This may be one of those cases where they just saw a really good product and decided to start from it instead of building from scratch.

Not unlike what they did with MusicMatch Jukebox and a number of other things throughout their history. (iTunes was amazing. I'm not going to argue about the last 10 years or so, but when they bought it it was really nice software for many years).

I think they're trying to fight for the iPad Pro in some respect. Though they won't endorse programming on it, they will benefit from more automation systems on the iPad making it into a more viable alternative to the general purpose computer.

Given that Apple axed the position in charge of Mac automation tech (AppleScript, Automator, System Services, Apple Events, etc) last November, I can't help being pessimistic. Updates to products in the iWork suite repeatedly dumbed down their scripting support, and it's pretty clearly not been a priority for Apple in a long while.

Some background and commentary on Sal Soghoian's website. Until recently he was Apple's Product Manager of Automation Technologies: http://macosxautomation.com/about.html

"I hear you no longer work for Apple; is that true? A. Correct. I joined Apple in January of 1997, almost twenty years ago, because of my profound belief that “the power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.” That credo remains my truth to this day. Recently, I was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated for business reasons. Consequently, I am no longer employed by Apple Inc. But, I still believe my credo to be as true today as ever."

Wow.

The quote implies that Apple left him in the dust after 20 years, but if you look at careful phrasing it leaves open that Apple offered him an alternative position.

I agree. I doubt it is as black and white as people have interpreted. I suspect it was more along the lines of "we want to take a different approach to _automation_, are you with us or not?"

What's so "wow" about this ? This happens every second of every day across companies. People are always made redundant for business reasons e.g. restructures, strategic realignments etc.

It's definitely not unique for Apple which recently has seen them do a purge of areas they no longer want to be in e.g. Displays, Wifi routers.

He spent 20 years building technology to empower users, and Apple decided that user empowerment is an an area they no longer want to be in. That's wow a new era in computing, that is all in on changing users into mere consumers

They didn't decide that. They decided this particular guy was not necessarily the guy to do that. You don't just go and buy the best automation app on the marketplace because you don't like automation - you do it to bring in new blood and a new perspective.

This is all just speculation. We don't know anything. But it's possible that there was a difference in opinion about what sort of user to target.

Courting power users used to be much more popular than it is today. It seems that today all large tech companies target IT professionals and consumers with a completely separate set of offerings. There's very little in between any more. On the consumer side they go for ultimate scale because nothing else moves the needle for them.

It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had decided to deprecate everything that isn't accessible to all consumers, which would have frustrated someone who has worked for decades to let power users automate tasks in ways that the average consumer never would.

As I said, all pure speculation for our entertainment :-)

Unless of course they axed it because they knew this was coming and want it to take its place

Workflow is iOS-only and not a replacement for automation on the Mac.

True, but automation on the Mac is still a lot easier just because of the system design. In about sixteen years of using OS X (er, "macOS"), I've only used AppleScript for automation when forced, usually by programs like BBEdit that came of age in AppleScript's glory days. In most cases, writing a shell (or Python or Ruby or...) script is just easier. To be fair, AppleScript can be really powerful, but it's just not a very good language.

Also, it's worth noting that Workflow is, in a lot of ways, inspired by Automator on the Mac. At this point it's better than Automator is, albeit with all the caveats forced on it by the aforementioned differences in system design, but it wouldn't require an awful lot of effort to bring Automator up to par.

Things are a lot better now that you can do OSA scripting in JavaScript. I have a few OSA-JS scripts that are in my crontab. If I had to write AS rather than JS, I wouldn't bother.

Yet

Sal was a good friend and powerful advocate at Apple for many years.

Not many folks know he's also a fantastic jazz musician. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Soghoian)

> AppleScript, Automator, System Services, Apple Events

It was a mercy killing. AppleScript and Automator had become too complicated and obscure to be worthwhile anymore.

Simple stuff in Workflow basically looks like Automator, and advanced stuff in Workflow becomes inscrutable wizardy[1] even faster than AppleScript.

Workflow's advantages are that it A) covers the whole gamut of simple to insane with a single product, and B) has a sharing gallery so you can easily use someone else's magic without understanding it.

Maybe Apple killed the automation position because they were planning to replace it with Workflow, but do you expect them to backport the whole thing onto the Mac? In which case, are they going to actually maintain the user-submitted workflow gallery that makes it useful? Will it be a generally available API, or do they lock it down and use this as a stick to make people stop leaving the Mac App Store? I just don't have an easy time being optimistic about this, given where their priorities lie lately.

[1] Parse a Spotify response as a dictionary: https://workflow.is/workflows/1da14413405c4dcaa83904c2fe5cc3...

Nope. I'm not a coder. I use Automator for loads of things.

Wikipedia shows us that ~50% of Apple acquisitions result in a product, or an enhancement to an existing product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Wikipedia is simply missing information for the other 50%. Many are already in existing products or services e.g. Broadmap, Cue, Acunu.

The others are scheduled for upcoming products. LuxVue for example is widely predicted to be the basis for the new iPhone 8 screen. PrimeSense, Perceptio, Faceshift are all part of Apple's upcoming AR push.

Metaio too

Funny how more than half of them are after 2012. Gotta love the current state of the tech industry.

Substantially more than half of Apple's profits came since 2012. In fact eyeballing it, it looks like their profit in 2015 was bigger than their profit from 1977-2009 combined. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Financ...

You gotta account for inflation

It really doesnt make that big of a difference: https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Consumer_Price_Index/His...

In Apple's case, no, because their growth over the last decade is insane. But to be clear that table you posted shows that $1 in 1977 is worth $4.40 today. That is a big difference, mostly cause by the insane inflation of 1979-1981 (around 12% a year for three years). That makes the average inflation rate over the last 40 years 4%, which is double our target of 2%.

It's much cheaper to buy promising talent, I mean companies than to devote resources to do your own work from the ground up.

Apple actually has a surprisingly good track record with acquisitions. Off the top of my head:

NeXT -> OS X

LaLa -> iTunes Match

Siri -> Siri

My guess is that Apple saw a useful product that should be a part of the core of iOS.

Apple's acquisition of Fingerworks provided them with the multi-touch technology (and just as important, IP) that they used to build the iPhone. Definitely one of the most important acquisitions in their history.

I have an old Fingerworks trackpad and it works amazingly well even today.

Not just their history alone even. Fingerworks' tech was one of the most important IP acquisitions in recent history in my opinion.

I think there's some survivor bias in your list. I remember Apple acquired a public transit app (Embark, I think) and I'm not sure the fruits of that were ever known. Apple Maps has public transit features but it's a shadow of what that app provided.

I am one of the Embark founders. I'm no longer at Apple.

Our acquisition actually ended up with the spirit of our product living on in a way that I am proud of.

At Embark, we innovated by taking a regionally nuanced and tailored transit App and giving it scale. When Embark operated from 2008 to 2013, there were small bespoke apps and there were larger more generic experiences (like Google) and we filled a void in between.

Apple's approach was quite similar. Like Embark, Apple Maps Transit has a more regionally tailored experience than many bespoke transit Apps out there, but they're also able to bring it to scale. It's now at a scale we never got close to reaching at Embark.

If you're curious, Apple talks about their city-by-city approach in this WWDC video. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/241/

I seem to remember an incredibly nerdy and thoroughly enjoyable article about the arcane details of drawing subway lines. It was written, IIRC, by a startup that had automated the process of optimising these maps, only to have Apple launch their maps – which had brute-forced the problem by doing it manually.

Yeah it was by the Transit App guys. They do good work. Chronologically, Apple's transit maps launched first.

Well, Apple Maps used to have zero transit features and this was a major downgrade for those that relied on that feature at the time

Apple removed transit before the Embark acquisition.

You're cherry-picking the biggest, most visible of Apple's acquisitions. You should be comparing Workflow to the dozens upon dozens of Workflow-sized acquisitions they have made.

I can't recall many of them off the top of my head anymore, because they're gone and lost to memory.

Your forgetfulness is not evidence. This is not a compelling argument.

Don't forget TestFlight!

PA Semi -> A* CPUs

SoundJam -> iTunes

While I think you are being pessimistic, I don't think the pessimism is unwarranted. That being said, I have a feeling that this is, more than likely, an acquisition to bridge the gap between Siri, HomeKit, HealthKit, and all the other built-in iOS functions that are just ripe for "friendly" automation.

This was my first thought as well. Most home automation solutions are very limited and require integration with something like IFTTT to perform anything but the simplest on/off scheduling.

Workflow can only be better if its integrated in the OS. They've also made the app free and said it's staying in the store. I don't think it will be pulled (if ever) until it's integrated.

I share the pessimism, but there are a couple of glimmers of hope. Firstly, Acompli merely got rebranded, and Sunrise is (purportedly) getting merged into it. More cynically, though, if Apple wanted to shut it down, there are easier ways they aren't above.

Edit: Furthermore, they gave it an Apple Design Award in 2015, so they're clearly alright with its existence.

Sunrise was integrated into Outlook quite some time ago.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12895358/microsoft-outlook...

Microsoft (not Apple) bought Accompli and Sunrise.

Sure, I use them as examples because the parent comment did.

Ah, sorry, the comments weren't contiguous and so I missed that. I'm not sure what Microsoft acquisitions prove, but I'll continue thinking on it until enlightenment happens.

> More cynically, though, if Apple wanted to shut it down, there are easier ways they aren't above.

It sort of depends on the definition of "shut it down"(see Beats, Swell, FoundationDB, etc.). At minimum, Workflow goes away and rises from the ashes (with a new name) as an automation feature for a future version of iOS. Or, maybe it's just an acqui-hire[1] and they'll start over with a new codebase on something more integral to the OS.

[1] "It seems that in scaling back recruiting efforts, Apple is moving to a staffing model fueled by so-called 'acqui-hires,' or purchases of smaller companies for talent." http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/25/apple-reportedly-w...

You're pessimistic. But perhaps you are not wrong to be so here.

On the other hand, this functionality would be a brilliant match for Siri, and they've been looking to move in exactly that sort of direction for some while now, as Alexa and Google Assistant have increasingly made Siri's rough edges and limitations show by comparison.

Also worthy of note is that Apple doesn't have a first-party tool in the iOS automation space. So I'm not sure what purpose you suggest it would serve to buy Workflow for the purpose of killing it.

Well it's most a matter of Apple sherlocking features vs. shutting down because they want complete control over the user interaction model. As with most acquisitions, unless the team will continue to work on that app (and based on Sunrise, etc. even if they did), the existing version of Workflow will probably languish and the team's output probably won't surface to actual users for another couple of years.

It's mainly the idea that Apple doesn't want anybody else dictating how iOS should be used.

> Call me pessimistic, but how likely is this acquisition by Apple going to result in them integrating it directly into iOS versus completely shutting down in the future?

I think it's pretty likely. I also think it's likely to return as something more integrated, but of course, the gap between when they shut this down and when the new thing arrives will suck for current users.

If they just wanted to shut it down, they would've done that. There's nothing in the history of the App Store that indicates Apple needs to buy an app to shut it down – all they have to do is change a rule or interpret it a little bit differently and boom - no more workflow. Apple didn't do this, they bought it instead which makes me very optimistic.

A couple of years ago there was a patent by Apple that made the rounds on tech blogs detailing automation in iOS. It actually patented things that, say, Tasker on Android was already able to do. So, I think integrating it into iOS is a sure bet.

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