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?
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