When Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, he was working for RCA, which had everything invested in AM radio, an incompatible technology. RCA chose not to invest, and used their political clout to lobby the FCC to cripple FM radio, and their lawyers to drive Armstrong into debt in a protracted legal battle. This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration. For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong http://www.free-culture.cc/
"IBM purchased the Weather Co. in 2016 and sells weather data to, among others, Apple, for its weather app. The purchase could signal that Apple will develop its own weather model rather than continue to use IBM-derived data, or it may indicate that Apple, too, liked the design of the app." https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/03/31/apple-buys...
It's turtles all the way down[1]. The Weather Company also leverages NOAA data and is listed as such as a weather service provider on NOAA's site[2]. Although they ostensibly augment it with other sources and apply their own forecasting models to the data, they're still basically repackaging NOAA data in one form or another.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
[2] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/success/weather-service-providers
... in the USA. But one of its great advantages is the data it receives from tens of thousands of amateur weather reporting stations globally. The Wunderground forecast for our locality is hyper-localised and very accurate for that reason, particularly compared to the national Met Office forecast which applies to an airport 35 miles away, beside a lake and on the other side of mountains.
I remember fondly using their Wunder Radio app in the early iPhone years.
[1] https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/categories/200450271-About-Yr-t...
Buy things and make them exclusive just so no one else can have them.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
That is in the case of Epic not the OP.
This is just nonsense.
Every acquisition they've ever done can directly be seen in future projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
The products you don't see give a hint into their roadmap.
It's going to be the same people, working on the same product, but now, it's going to unavailable via their cheif competitor. Tell me how on earth you can consider that not killing competition.
That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.
But now it won't have to pay for API access anymore, since they'll own the whole backend.
Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.
And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.
>And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.
45% of ios users are well off Americans. Outside of the US 90% of phones are Android who won't be able to use it anymore.
Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.
This suggests that Apple may only buy to augment their product line; whilst still making the core experience worse for everyone overall.
I’ll admit I’ve not done a proper study of post-acquisition Shazam. I’m going on casual observation here.
It's a terrible story and he was treated badly, but you're making it more dramatic than it was.
as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows?" it took a second to process that properly.
but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits.
i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to the shady data broker that is the weather channel.
The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). The origin of the word "defenestrate" ("out of the window") is believed to come from the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of the castle window and wrote an extensive Apologia to this act.
For those who are extra slow like me: he killed himself by jumping out of a window.
Is the value of the weather channel that investors expect the national weather service to be abolished?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/25/weather-i...
"In 2017, Trump nominated Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, a company that has advocated for the privatization of large parts of the National Weather Service, to lead NOAA. However, his nomination stalled, in part because of conflict-of-interest concerns since his family still owns the private forecasting company."
It certainly wouldn’t be profitable for Accuweather to have to do things like gather weather data and have supercomputers to analyze.
i'd be super happy if they switched to the national weather service, but absent that, dark sky is more privacy preserving than the weather channel (who reportedly sell location data, for example).
I for one am super happy that people with this attitude have been totally unable to penetrate the medical devices field!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
TLDR: A $3000 ventilator was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013” and then Covidien bought out the competition to prevent it coming to fruition.
Apple believes it should make/provide the whole “widget”. If they think every phone should ship with a really good weather app, they’ll do one. If one comes on the market that they think is better, they’ll buy it and make it the new default.
I mean they’re not in the weather app business. They aren’t competing against Dark Sky. What they’re competing against is Android, and if their phone comes with a stellar weather app out of the box, that is good for Apple. Others can continue to make weather apps.
iOS comes with a calculator. People still buy PC Calc and Calcbot despite the built-in being pretty useful.
I heard it was because Apple’s C-levels weren’t happy with any of the concepts for a calculator UX that fills the screen of an iPad - and they’re right, even the best iPad calculator there is (PCalc) feels weird to use just to do some quick sums because it fills up my 13-inch iPad Pro’s screen.
I remember some early fan-made concepts for the iPad had it running iPhone apps in floating windows - I think if Apple baked that functionality into the iPad OS from the beginning it would have meant a whole slew of small utility apps like the calculator, clocks and alarms, compass, etc wouldn’t need to be remade - but I’m sure they killed that idea because it wouldn’t motivate developers into making first-class iPad apps - and by “punishing” users with the terrible full-screen iPhone app mode it incentivises developers to put effort into making good native iPad apps - while at the same time making small utility apps an impossibility for iPad OS (though this doesn’t seem to have convinced Instagram...)
To be fair, they could exist now as a Today Screen widget, but then you can’t use it while you have another app open. It’s only with iOS 12+ multitasking support for slide-over and side-bar apps that a calculator app could now work - but it would still need to support full-screen mode - but we’re so close now! And given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did allow iPad apps to run only in sidebar or floating mode - but only if an app really won’t work as a full-screen app - and when/if they do, they’ll definitely launch their own calculator app.
Y’know the Apple Watch didn’t get a first-party calculator until 2019?
> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces
You definitely see this with not just Apple but any big tech company. Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.
To make the list more complete I've seen large tech companies acquire another tech company for their users and/or their brand. Think about Microsoft buying Github or Skype.
Skype was almost certainly some sort of scheme to kill Skype and bring lawful intercept to the platform. Skype at one point owned consumer voip globally.
A lot of stuff known as quintessentially Apple today was bought by them; Siri, Logic, Final Cut, as well as tech like Face ID and soon AR.
This is one way Apple tries to lock people in, and it's really frustrating. This isn't an efficient market situation, this is a monopolist protecting their walled garden kingdom by slurping up the cross platform innovators. I'm terribly disappointed in the Dark Sky authors for doing this to long time loyal customers, no matter what their paychecks look like.
The EU, for example, aims its anti-competitive regulation towards firms who have a "dominant market position" rather than a "monopoly".
People are raising concerns over Apple buying a small company and shutting down its offerings to any platform that isn't Apple's.
Apple has a pattern of purchasing companies that already offer products on other platforms and immediately shutting all non-iOS products down.
Obviously, they're free to run their business however they want, but it's also understandable that fans of those products might be upset that their app (or APIs that power other apps they enjoy) are no longer available simply because Apple did "their usual thing". Many companies (including Apple in rare cases) maintain or even develop codebases for applications across more than one platform.
There's nothing wrong with Apple buying companies to shut them down. It just sucks for the end-users who no longer get to use those companies' products for the sole reason of "they got bought by Apple".
A monopoly exists when there is a single seller of a commodity. Copyrights and patents are government-granted monopolies.
A broader definition is that a monopolist is a provider that has pricing power - the ability to set prices.
Apple has a monopoly on the channel to deliver iOS apps. Anyone seeking to deliver an iOS app must accept Apple's terms, including Apple's cut of revenue.
That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative (like Burger King, or Android).
Buying a burger is an independent transaction. Buying a Big Mac one day doesn't make you less likely to buy a Whopper the next.
Buying a phone is an investment that locks you into that ecosystem for ~2 years (until you buy a new one), and once that time comes, both ecosystems encourage you to stick with your existing choice via purchase transfers, exclusives, and (more) seamless data transfers.
Your comparison would only make sense in a world where McD and BK competed by lacing their burgers with different drugs to get you chemically addicted.
Fuck Apple, fuck Google, and fuck Tim Cook in particular. This is fucking depressing, and almost makes COVID seem appealing. At least it would take your mind off this bullshit for a while.
I think the best analogy would be video games on console platforms, does Sony have a 'monopoly' on PlayStation games? Well, kind of if you squint really hard, not that it seems to stand in the way of a vibrant and competitive console industry and that's the key issue. If there's a competitive market that is serving customer needs, and no deceptive practices so customers have a clear choice then it's hard to argue there's a market dysfunction such as a monopoly.
Yes? The whole console industry is equally awful, and does the same bullshit. That said, there used to be a few mitigating factors for consoles, but they have never been relevant for phones:
1. Generational incompatibility: Since console generations generally weren't backwards-compatible, every new generation would more or less reset the playing field.
2. You could have multiple consoles connected to your TV. You probably won't bring multiple phones with you every day.
"That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative" (like living in the next town over, or solar power, water delivery, and portable toilets).
The fact that alternatives exist (live somewhere else! live disconnected!) does not negate the fact that the utility is a monopoly provider of those services.
The primary difference between utility monopolies and the iOS monopoly is that utilities are a "natural" monopoly (there are significant infrastructure costs to enter the market of providing running water to homes in a city) whereas the iOS monopoly is government-granted via copyrights and contracts and digital locks that exclude competitors, and those locks are again protected by DMCA copyright law.
There is no natural reason there cannot be a competing app store on iOS, except that Apple wants to preserve its monopoly.
Would you let a home builder dictate what food delivery options you have? Why let a phone builder dictate what software delivery options you have?
Yes but that's inline with what you'd expect Apple to do though. They won't support any non-Apple ecosystem unless they have to - it's just their way of doing things
I'd argue the exact opposite. They keep pronouncing they're now a services company. If that's TRULY their go-forward model, they should be selling services to the broadest possible audience. Shutting it down to other audiences tells me they're still a hardware company that can't see past their walled garden.
If anyone at Apple is listening, I'll say it for the thousandth time: Support Messages on Android and Windows and you will own the messaging market. If you keep kicking the can, someone will eventually take it from you. Just look at Blackberry and what you did to them... it can and will happen to you as well. BES was thought to be an impenetrable wall. Narrator: It wasn't.
This coming from someone who switched back to iPhone after the last round of goog privacy snafu's.
It's not a matter of seeing past the walled garden. So long as there is a roadmap for deep platform integrations (identity, payments, AR, GPU, etc) and the desire for those integrations to be 100% available to _anyone_ with a blue bubble, the service will not leave Apple. IMO, it's about protecting the path of innovation while keeping a key feature (compatibility across all users) in play. Available is key because feature adoption spreads virally. Nobody wants to see someone do something in iMessage and then learn they can't do it.
But putting Messages on Android would level the playing field as well. It might give them the dominant messaging platform, at least outside a China, but so what? There’s no reason for them to care about that. They’re not Facebook.
And that player will need to be in the App Store, follow Apple's policies, and give them a cut of any IAPs. Either way, Apple wins.
iMessage just needs to have a better reputation than the built-in messenger for other platforms. It does _not_ need to beat all other messengers.
Messaging needs a network effect. The other alternative besides advertising is charging customers. Can you point to one successful platform that has a network effect and charges customers?
Microsoft Office (or maybe just Excel?) may qualify too, if VBScript is sufficient to label it as a platform.
Also for Office, what free alternatives were there when Office was gaining popularity?
Compare that to now. How did Windows Mobile work compared to Android?
This isn’t really true anymore…
To all the folks trying to make Swift server development compelling: please stop. Use Golang or Rust instead.
Apple is an antagonist of other platforms/ecosystems, and there's no reason to believe they won't use Swift to force developers to buy and run Macbooks.
Edit: Would the multitude of downvoters provide a counter argument? Why should we tolerate this behavior from Apple?
I'm upset when other companies use the same playbook. There's an equal opportunity for all companies to behave better here. As it stands, I do not support this.
Other than the fact that there has been no signs of this in the past five years?
Is it? Did Shazam stop working on Android when Apple ate it?
Honest question, since I don't have an Android device.
Shazam on Android is a net producer of data, while Dark Sky on Android is a net consumer of data.
I just wish they kept the API running though.
If the API and apps were profitable, why did they sell to Apple?
How much did Dark Sky for Android cost? Was the 50th percentile revenue per Android user $0? Was the 90th percentile, too?
Semi-related but for transit apps, I much prefer the dedicated "Transit" app over any of the mapping services.
It has great visualizations of nearby lines and departures, gives bike/walk/taxi alternative times, allows you to select which transit systems, much more customizable in route planning, alerts on stops, schedule changes, when to leave, and it utilizes live data from other riders on where a bus or train is if you're willing to share your location during your ride.
Worked well in every North American city I've been in with a transit system.
Have you tried Citymapper? It looks pretty similar in features and covers a different set of cities (there's some crossover but not as much as I'd of thought), might be useful.
They're all basically working with the exact same data, but I find Apple Map transit directions to be the easiest to use, providing I'm in one of the limited cities it supports.
I wrote my own little thing: https://jrock.us/mta.html. It just pulls the train arrival times for my home and work stations, the transfer stations along the way, and system-wide service advisories. It fits on one screen. The code is a trash fire (it's just jquery that injects raw HTML), but it works ;)
I'm an otherwise happy tvOS, macOS and MBP (though Android-using) customer but I'm going to need to re-consider lest I get bitten again in the future.
I think the thing that frustrates me is that I've been a paying customer for a long time only for the parent purchaser to shut me out. Like I said, I'm glad for the founders, but as the parent here has stated - I highly doubt Apple will do much of anything with this.
The major upside for most employees is that they just got acquihired into Apple and they get to put that on their resume. Not everyone is so fortunate.
I wish they would keep that alive in even a limited way and keep all the fanciness to Apple at the very least.
I can't buy a kindle book through the app on my device, because iBooks.
Added: Ended up back on an Android device pretty quickly.
It's not because of iBooks, it's because Amazon would have to pay 30% to Apple if they sold through the app.
1. Sideload apps that my government has decided they don't like and want banned.
2. Use real firefox to support diversity on the web
3. Use open audio codecs like FLAC without tying myself in knots
It's not perfect but in the respects that really matter it's a lot more free.
https://vox.rocks/resources/ios-flac-player
And then there is that whole running an operating system written by a company whose whole m.o. is to invade your privacy.
Privacy and openness are two independent, orthogonal concepts. I agree Apple has a better overall story on privacy but I care more about openness, especially in the current political climate.
- The hope that iPhone 9 will not be a gigantic phone and it might actually be around the size of SE.
- There's nowhere to go to. Can't go back to generic Android. That's just a non-starter. There are no OEMs who supports a privacy focussed Android ROM and sends "timely" patches and OS upgrades (there are some niche ones but they will either never start direct service/support in my country or in a decade maybe).
Rumors point to a big phone :(
Android phones on the other hand at least have the option of installing a variant that is more privacy focused, such as Copperhead[1].
I can install F-Droid and follow some of the other recommendations on the Free Software Foundation website to "Free my Android"[2]. All without having to jailbreak my device.
Now, granted this is an expert action, but it allows people that care about it to accomplish it. Do you lose a lot of functionality? Sure, but all Security and Privacy is about trade-offs.
[1]: https://copperhead.co/android/ [2]: https://fsfe.org/campaigns/android/liberate.en.html
If you are willing to sacrifice privacy, why not go android? If you do not want to, you must buy an android phone and tweak it. Using Apple is but a compromise.
That said I do wish there was a third option besides Apple and Google.
How can you say that on a day that they sold all the user data?
- Move to iOS - Apple Music - Beats - Shazam - Shazam Lite
I'm actually a little surprised they didn't release Apple TV+ for Android.
Profiles - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple+Inc.&h... - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple,+Inc.&...
Everyone I know in Japan defaults to Map from Yahoo.
This occurred to me as well, almost as soon as the economic impacts of COVID-19 was apparent. And in particular that this will strenghen the power of large coporations that can weather the storm, at the expense of smaller companies, and competition.
this is going to huge oil company consolidation now
It's a pissing match between MBS and Putin. MBS/SA wanted to increase production which lowers prices, Putin wanted to maintain current levels because lower prices let US shale oil back into the market.
Prices dropped to the mid USD 30s per barrel.
Then COVID-19 hit.
The result is that oil has dropped now to mid USD20s/barrel.
US shale oil producers are uneconomical below USD40/barrel.
I mean, congratulations to the founders of Dark Sky. It’s a wonderful app and they deserve all the money they’ll get from this and they deserve a lot of credit for not selling user data when almost every other weather app does. But shutting down the API and Android apps feels like an egregious move by Apple.
And I hope we actually see a good improvement to the Apple weather app as a result of this. I remember a few years ago Apple bought a fantastic public transit app (Embark?), shut it down and I still don’t think their Maps app comes close to the original transit app.
Vaguely topical thought: I wonder if we’re going to see a lot more of this. A large economic downturn means a lot of small, independent companies will struggle to survive. Being swallowed by a megacorp might be one of the few ways to keep something alive.