In that case, isn’t it a race to the bottom with just someone else doing something similar? What makes this special?

Good product is first about understanding the user and the problem statement very well foremost. Most product moats are just that, everything else is a function of that.

Designing a great UX to interact with the system is the other key ingredient, that requires step 1 and also a great deal of creativity.

Anyone can copy same the features after someone as good as Christian Selig has made an app, Few can do similar or better starting on their own, especially indie developers, so he can always be ahead if he wants to.

Christian also chooses apps to work which are third party platform controlled for a reason I think. He can operate in markets like this as a extremely talented indie developer that very few competent teams with capital funding would attempt with platform risk. Beeper is the most recent example on Apple, Christian himself got burned in Reddit[1][2].

Finally he prices at a point so low that people are just paying for the brand - for a well designed reliable software which won't crash on them.

He likely will not lose all that much sales if a lower priced/free product comes out Safari browser based Youtube.com is already there .

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[1] He can afford to in the sense his monthly cash burn is very low compared to any normal company and he doesn't have 100's of employees to worry about if he gets kicked out.

[2] Even then he has carefully choose an API that Google will have a hard time just blocking him ( and not every other use of embedded playback), and he also is careful not to use APIs to render the UI he has just skinned the main website with light CSS.

Technology doesn't need to be "special" to be useful.

Nothing makes this special, maybe a well-known indie developer.

The fact that he wrote the apollo app? I don’t know. It’s not exactly revolutionary is it

It's the first one so it's currently the best one. If someone else makes a worse app, why would you use it? I don't get what's confusing here.

"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."

If you have a link to the other similar ones that would be useful.

I thought the article did a good job addressing it. There were a lot of nice touches which make this app work well with the vision pro.

The iframe embed API is API access, and YouTube can remove, paywall, or rate limit it any time they want. How old the underlying technology is is completely irrelevant to that.

Unlike Reddit, Apollo was stopping users from seeing ads and Reddit gaining ad revenue from them, so they went to charge the Reddit app devs for this loss in revenue.

The YouTube embed API supports ads, and works perfectly with Premium so Google are not losing any potential revenue with this app existing.

Sounds like Christian learned his lesson with his experience with Reddit: "don't get in the way of the company's ad revenue".

Your statement still stands though, you are ultimately correct.

That's an interesting way to frame the reddit debacle. Reddit could have mandated ads to be displayed as a part of their TOS of API usage, but just decided not to - for the clear reason of centralizing users to their app. It wasn't /just/ about the loss of revenue - it was also about the metrics they can collect on their platform which they could not do on others'.

YouTube disabling embedding would be fucking insane.

I'm 100% expecting YouTube to cease&desist him

> https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en

The YouTube API Terms of Service and Developer Policies apply to all access and use of the YouTube embedded player.

> https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...

You and your API Clients must not, and must not encourage, enable, or require others to:

use YouTube API Services to create, offer, or act as a substitute for, or substantially similar service to, any YouTube Applications. API Clients must not mimic or replicate YouTube's core user experiences by recreating features or process flows unless they add significant independent value or functionality that improves users' interactions with YouTube. For example, an API Client must not recreate the browse experience from any YouTube Application without adding significant independent value to that flow.

I think it's a reasonable argument that because YouTube have deigned to not support this device with a first party app that they are indeed adding "significant independent value or functionality that improves users' interactions with YouTube" with this program?

Specifically this appears to offer a better experience than what YouTube choose to offer.