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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

Apple keeps doubling down on platform specific services and APIs but as their market share dwindles this becomes increasingly untenable. Porting Apple Music to Android was a step in the right direction but they have a long way to go in the new world where services are more important than devices.

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How do you mean it dwindles? It seems to hold steady and increase in some countries.

This is a somewhat recent figure I found. https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/11/ios-market-share-kantar/

Depends what stats you consider:

http://fortune.com/2017/05/23/apple-iphone-gartner-market-sh...

But the essential point is that nobody can afford to ignore Android and building to iOS-specific APIs doesn't make sense.

Of course Apple and developers can choose to ignore Android.

The market within the iOS space is huge and if building an iOS only app using ARKit is more profitable then why not ? It's all about ROI. There isn't an equivalent for ARKit on Android and building one would be costly and time consuming.

There is, it's called project tango and they have had development devices for sale for a while (probably a year or so).

How large of a device marketshare could a developer count on at this point from Tango to justify investing heavily in that platform? One thing is for sure, developers can count on a significant share of paying customers if they go with ARKit.

There have been AR libraries for years. Apple is pretty late to the game.

For example ARToolKit is available for Unity, or even Anddroid.

https://artoolkit.org/documentation/doku.php?id=6_Unity:unit...

Unless you are targeting a specific audience (for example artists that use the iPad Pro) for most developers it really doesn't make sense to confine yourself to iOS.

ARToolKit isn't markerless like ARKit though.

There have been MP3 players for years. Apple is pretty late to the game.

There have been smartphones for years. Apple is pretty late to the game.

> But the essential point is that nobody can afford to ignore Android and building to iOS-specific APIs doesn't make sense.

For broad market maybe, but for niche markets a good example would be ForeFlight https://www.foreflight.com/products/foreflight-mobile/ It's pretty much the gold standard among pilots, from private to airline transport, and it's IOS only. Makes support and dealing with fragmentation a whole lot easier.

This is an almost silly point. How many less significant than this features hold companies hostage to Microsoft? So it's ok when Microsoft makes Microsoft/Windows only frameworks and software but not when Apple does it? Sheesh. Of course vendors are going to specialize their offerings.

> But the essential point is that nobody can afford to ignore Android and building to iOS-specific APIs doesn't make sense

Surely you are referring to some future point in time, because most can still afford to ignore Android, use iOS-specific APIs, and be profitable.

Mobile platforms have gotten large enough that market share isn't necessarily a useful metric. There are many hundreds of millions of iOS devices out there. That's a pretty decent market to be addressing. (It also happens to be almost all of the top end of the mobile market, so an iOS only offering has a TAM of hundreds of millions of people who are more likely to spend money. Not bad really :)

I'm willing to bet the only reason they did that is because they already had beats customers on android.

The whole point of these APIs is to let developers make a better apps on iOS so people want an iOS device. If they port any of them to android all they're doing is making it easier for people to leave their platform.

Sure that's the goal but in practice I don't think it's working. People use cross platform tools like Unity or React Native or OpenCV because they know they have to support Android and can't kick that can a year or two down the road like they used to.

Many devs are doing a good life being specialists in a specific platform, whatever it may be.

So then use Unity with ARKit and wait for an equivalent android AR library. I’ve looked into ARKit myself already - it is dead simple to get started. And so much data is already provided, including scale and lighting estimates.

Yes, you lose out on android for now, but in the mean time you support millions of iOS devices in a category that will be getting a ton of media attention in the next year.

> Porting Apple Music to Android was a step in the right direction but they have a long way to go in the new world where services are more important than devices.

Are they though? There's still a huge amount of people buying phones and computers, which cost a lot of money, periodically. There's paid services, sure, like Apple Music, which might become self-sustaining businesses, but a lot of these other "services" by the big tech companies are operated at a loss, like email, maps, cloud-storage, messaging, vide-calling, AI assistants, etc.

The only reason to make free services like all those at a loss is to bring value to a platform so users will stick to it, and Apple keeping its services platform-specific makes its platform even more sticky. Apple benefits from this directly, because it makes money selling its platform. To use iOS you need a device from which Apple makes loads of cash.

Google on the other hand is still essentially just an ads company with hobbies, and its profit from the platform its building is much less murky, indirect, and IMHO flimsy. The only way their platform brings them substantial profits is by collecting data to better target ads, which is concerning too.

The lifetime of devices is growing, so in the long term we have to see if Apple can keep selling as many devices as it does; their main source of income is not entirely future-proof. If you ask me, however, Google might be in a more delicate position, especially considering the growing issues with internet ads (concerning privacy, tracking, obnoxiousness etc) and that so many players are in the ads business nowadays. Some, like Facebook, are moving in deep-- challenging Google in user data analytics and engagement time.

tl;dr: Only some services (like Music) make money. All the rest are more valuable if they serve your core business, and Apple is very much doing that.

Why would Apple port core technologies to a competing platform ? Did Google port Play Services to Windows ? No. And no one would expect them to since it is a core differentiator for their platform.

ARKit isn't a backend service it's an OS library so doesn't make sense to be cross platform.

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