Startups threatened by iOS 14’s new features | Hacker News Reader

Startups threatened by iOS 14’s new features

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106 pointsTomte86 comments

Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening", it should be viewed as an opportunity for startups to step out of the comfort zone and offer genuine innovation, which will further benefit the consumer. Having basic features integrated in the OS is essential, and will happen more and more, especially with so many horror stories of seemingly innocent apps brokering user information for cash. Startups need to step up their game in privacy as well as technological and product innovation. Good luck.

I’ve always thought that if your business can be made redundant simply by another product implementing a new feature, then you have a really obvious business risk and should make decisions accordingly.

Isn't there a famous quotation along those lines, maybe from Steve Jobs, about "it's a feature, not a product?"

I recall that being his response to Dropbox (if I recall correctly Apple made a pitch for buying them and they said "no").

The counter-argument is that Apple's implementations aren't "playing fairly", because iOS's restrictions mean Apple can give its own features special integration into the OS that third-parties don't have access to. Of course, some degree of this is inevitable with any platform. So there isn't a clear line where it becomes anti-competitive.

As long as Apple makes great products, the truth is that people will support a monopoly. I always think of the Microsoft-IE antitrust debacle as karma for making a truly horrible product.

I don’t think that’s a valid counter-argument at all. The same line of reasoning applies to any service. There’s plenty of products that are essentially 3rd party implementations of features in other services. If you’re going to make a product like that, you absolutely must know that your entire value prop can be wiped out if the 3rd party ever happens to get around to implementing that feature themselves. Apple does plenty of stuff that could be argued as anti-competitive, but I don’t think “implementing my product as a feature” is one of them.

It is perhaps a good reason to think twice before making an iOS app though. But as a consumer I prefer it to the opposite approach, which I’d consider a company like Atlassian to have. If you ask Atlassian when they’re going to implement a rather basic and highly demanded feature, the answer tends to be “never, buy it on the market place”.

> If you’re going to make a product like that

It's... it's basically all products. Virtually any product on iOS would function and perform and integrate better if implemented by Apple. It's just a question of at what point it gets popular enough that they want to bother doing so.

> The same line of reasoning applies to any service

iOS is a special case because of how locked-down it is. Not only can't third-parties do things like draw over other parts of the UI or add items to system UIs, they can't even (truly) run in the background.

Of course, on Android, apps can do all of these things and that's part of why it's a security nightmare. Which is why as I said, there's no clear answer to the problem. But it is a problem.

> It's... it's basically all products

I looked through every app I have installed on my iPhone and I only found a couple that would fall into that category. I have a shopping list app which Apple could theoretically implement as a feature if it wanted to (but not fully, as this particular shopping list app allows me to share lists with android users), and Authy.

The rest of the apps I have installed are just interfaces for 3rd party services. Apple doesn’t have the power to subvert the value of those services any more than any other service provider does (Apple has a maps app, I still use google maps).

I guess Apple could also make a Sudoku app if it really wanted to, but I’d consider that pretty unlikely.

I think there’s a strong argument for saying something like Spotify vs Apple Music is anti-competitive, but for rather different reasons.

Would Apple have implemented these feature if the originals didn't exist?

Unless the answer to that question is a clear "yes" in every case, this behaviour is de facto - and possibly de jure - on the wrong side of anti-monopoly law.

The problem is that iOS and MacOS are not specifically operating systems. iOS especially is an OS bundled with a curated non-trivial application suite.

That suite puts Apple into direct competition with iOS developers. And of course Apple has an impossibly huge monopolistic advantage in that space.

The ethical and above-board option would be to buy the rights to these apps and/or acquihire the devs who make them.

Apple has done that in the past, but seems less and less inclined to operate like that now.

All of that is very much just your opinion, and very much not an opinion shared by the courts or the legislature. It’s also a criticism that applies equally to all products or services that expose any interface that a 3rd party can develop integrations for.

Indeed. Any feature-oriented startup or company will eventually find stiff competition from other companies which can copy the feature, while adding to a portfolio of other related features, giving a net benefit to the customer, while the feature-only company has little to compete.

> Instead of thinking of this as "sherlocking" or "threatening",

Well the consumer has a clear loss here if they don’t extend the functionality to all apps, eg give them control over which links open which apps and ability to remove built in apps like safari, mail, the absolutely useless news app, etc.

According to some of the rumors from leaked code, Apple will offer setting default mail and browser apps, iirc.

How is News “absolutely useless.” Tens of millions of people would disagree.

Presumably you can ask them why they like it :)

I remember an anecdote I'd heard a while ago; long before Starbucks was ubiquitous, and before coffee culture was what it is in North America, a cafe owner heard that Starbucks was going to be moving in down the street. He was worried, because he thought Starbucks was going to take all his business, so he called someone he knew who also ran a cafe, who'd had a Starbucks open in his town, to ask what he should do.

The friend told him this was the best thing that could have happened to his cafe, for a simple reason: Starbucks, and all the media surrounding their launch, will tell potential customers what the whole deal is with cafes and coffee culture, and people will flock to them in droves, and Starbucks will be insanely busy. A lot of those potential customers, and a lot of customers who really get into the coffee culture Starbucks brings, will come to the smaller cafes for more personal service, more handcrafted drinks, and a better atmosphere.

I heard the story in the context of Apple adding a feature to iOS years back, I forget which one. The point of the story is that Starbucks, or Apple in our case, is going to make a feature with mass-market appeal to a broad range of people. Customers who've never thought about it before will try it and see the benefit; customers who like it, but don't necessarily like Apple's offering, will go further afield to find better offerings from third-party developers.

Typically, the companies that tend to get completely Sherlocked are the ones who make a simple product with potentially mass appeal, and don't go beyond that, or who go beyond it with features that aren't practical or useful to most people.

Take Growl for example; a great notification framework that everyone used. Suddenly Apple adds support for native notifications, and push notifications, and Growl is thrown by the wayside, because all it did was offer notifications. No deferment, no forwarding to other devices (e.g. your iPhone). The only features it had were the obvious features that you would imagine for a notification service.

I think John Gruber said it best[1]: "when a utility is designed to compensate for a hole in Mac OS X, the developer should not expect the hole to remain unfilled by Apple forever".

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2003/10/commandtab

In the case of the native Tile and Airpods, though, Apple is using their walled garden to provide an experience that's pretty strictly better than what you'd get from competitors. It's not a hole in Apple's OS per se, it's more like a privileged route to the OS.

For your analogy, it'd be as though the Starbucks owned the street the two shops were on, and gave the entrants to the Starbucks a privileged position on the street.

I don't think Apple is going to simply stop giving applications background location access now that they have their own offering. It'd be like only allowing audio using AirPods and not letting any other headphones connect via bluetooth.

> "when a utility is designed to compensate for a hole in Mac OS X, the developer should not expect the hole to remain unfilled by Apple forever".

So when is snap-to-edge coming ~_~.

It may never do because Apple's philosophy for window management isn't to make windows any bigger than they need to be — except for full screen windows, which is clearly made for the MacBook Air crowd.

In the mean time, try BetterSnapTool for all your snapping needs. :-)

I simply don't get that philosophy. That's maybe the only thing that I can't comprehend from them.

It doesn't bother me at all, I can handle all the Operating systems "natively"

Yes, and the author is misinformed to think that Peloton can lose the customers who take their online classes to Apple free options. People take classes for the inspiration and guidance from the teachers. Before Apple there were plenty of free options so this isn’t new, fitness is and will continue to be a very competitive market.

Another benefit to the consumer of Apple offering a first party option is that the third party apps keep getting caught selling consumer data.

For instance, third party menstrual cycle tracking apps.

https://www.cnet.com/news/these-menstrual-tracking-apps-repo...

Yes, one of the egregious cases I was thinking of. I am very wary these days of installing apps. I try to really confine myself to the system apps, or to a few apps that I trust the developer, or build my own helper apps.

There's not a single statistic to prove that anything what you say is logical. mI'm pretty sure your old customers will not look further if there's already an option on their phone and completing with the richest company of the world is dumb. They did their research too

I've been having these thoughts recently that app stores were just proving grounds for the corporations.

Everything that isn't held by patents is a proving ground for everyone else who has time and resources, including other corporations, startups and individuals.

It's why you need a moat, or you don't really have anything stable for the long term.

Just because you had first idea & implementation that worked in the market doesn't mean you have the best implementation (of the features that actually matter)

Still a good strategy to be the first to implement. Collect the profit as much as you can, then move on.

If your great startup/business/whatever is threatened by new features added into a new iteration of an OS then it was not great to begin with. And I don't have pity for mediocrity.

Like "only Internet Explorer" or "only Safari"?

Watson[1] was a great product, in no way did anybody consider it mediocre. Apple pretty much cloned it when they introduced Sherlock.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson

And yet Alfred[1] remains enormously popular and is a clear step-up from Sherlock.

[1] https://www.alfredapp.com/

Mobile startups that don't have a substantial value add outside just what they do on the phone are just prototyping new features for the FAANG companies.

I guess you’re being downvoted because it’s an unpopular opinion and/or there’s some historical precedents that “it’s just a feature” (eg Dropbox) doesn’t always hold true.

That said, I can’t see a world where if Dropbox was a startup today, that they wouldn’t either get acquired, or cloned as a good enough native feature, putting them out of business, which is ultimately your point.

> I can’t see a world where if Dropbox was a startup today, that they wouldn’t either get acquired, or cloned as a good enough native feature

Like iCloud Drive?

It’s really great. If the startup flops FAANG is out 0. If it’s a must have they just add it to the next release.

Thinking this has happened for a while. What happened to all the disk defraggers when windows added one built in? I think maybe they licensed it... it it sure didn’t help the market.

It helped consumers though. It would be terrible if every binary in my system was a separately licensed purchase.

Does open source have this issue? Serious question I’m trying to think of examples but coming up short.

A smart Windows partner would step in to co-design and contribute technology around a core feature in windows, to make sure they had what they needed from the platform while still having a lot of value-added sale.

The disk defragmenter included with Windows was somewhat lousy, but it gave OS hooks needed for other tools to do live defragmentations. The problem is that in both the consumer and enterprise spaces, underlying disk storage maintenance was just a checkbox - you had to sell any specialized version as part of a performance and antivirus suite.

Citrix also did something similar with Windows Terminal Services. Before terminal services, Citrix had to maintain a Windows NT source license just to be able to manage all of the required OS hooks.

Microsoft used Spyglass Mosaic as the foundation for Internet Explorer 1, and Direct3D was from an acquired company called RenderMorphics.

Apple of course does something similar - see their acquisitions of Siri, Shazam, Testflight and Workflow. They are stories around Steve Jobs trying to acquire DropBox pretty early in its history as well.

That of course was one of the things that got Microsoft in monopoly trouble way back when. I suppose the current players are lucky they have a duopoly.

Your not wrong, but it's also a bit depressing that we live in a world where giant companies can just wait until they see something becoming successful enough and then use their essentially unlimited resources to copy it and put the original creator out of business.

Tech was exciting for a time, but human history is full of gatekeepers demanding their rents and only allowing others in their turf if they aren't too threatening.

We've been living through the good parts. It is only going to get more "normal".

Think different.

Thanks for this comment. It saddens me whenever I hear normality is the gold standard, because what is normal?

Patents provide one way of stopping this kind of predation, but everybody hates patents so we have to pretend otherwise.

That seems to make the assumption that creative ideas and experimentation are more important or more valuable for product innovation than having the resources and scale to actually mass-produce or "productize" new innovations. I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but I think it's easy to tip too far toward valuing "being the first to do something" and not recognizing the value of the other part.

The Sherman-Antitrust Act recognizes that value and how power can be abused in absence of that value.

This argument seems more relevant to intellectual property laws. The complaint was about Apple stealing ideas from their app developer community.

Isn't the idea these days that you make a successful startup in the hopes that it gets acquired by a giant company, as it would be more economical to buy their competition out, with their customers and IP, than replicate it themselves?

When the platform owner can kill your product with a flick of a switch, your negotiating position is weak

If FAANG does it better then why does it matter? If their business was successful enough to get copied by FAANG then they probably already made enough money to move onto something else.

This sounds right but still feels wrong. You could argue that even Uber (can one imagine a bigger mobile "startup"?) is "just prototyping new features for the FAANG companies".

Any manufacturer who sells exclusively (or even primarily?) on Amazon.com (think Ring) is potentially an acquisition target from Amazon.com

Personally, I don't have any solution but it gets in the way of my dream: I'd prefer the mobile platforms (iOS, Android) require that independent software vendors submit human and machine readable source code and build instructions and have the app store build and serve binaries with its own keys (think F-droid). Probably opt-in to begin with but eventually, I'd like this to be a requirement to be on the app stores.

I think what's missing is a true regulatory grappling with the nature of "platforms." Businesses have long had and used the ability to pull the rug out from under their clients/customers. But the current situation is a different beast. We now have a whole category of businesses that can only reach their customers through one of several competing platforms. But when you use these platforms, as you must, you exist and function entirely at the whim and pleasure of the platform. The platform can, at any time and for any reason, essentially swallow you and grow commensurately more powerful. The only brakes that exist right now are essentially the fear of regulation, good will/reputation management, and desire for focus on the part of the platforms. Those are some flimsy brakes.

These are uncharted waters, if you ask me.

Uber is a transportation logistics company's and a regulatory arbitrage company, not a "mobile app" company or a "gadget" company.

It’s actually a marketplace for independent drivers to offer their services.

Isn't this why parents exist?

It's also why Linux exists.

As tech companies continue the hard turn from value proposition to value extraction, it's getting easier to say "no thanks" and switch to open systems shared among the public.

It will be interesting to see how AirTags is designed. I love my Tile that I got as a gift this last Christmas, but the app experience is terrible. I have been kicking around the idea of reversing the Bluetooth protocol so I can write my own that gets out of my way and stops trying to sell me stuff. I suspect that Apple will obviate that desire if AirTags don't end up coming with a three-digit price tag.

I'm doing this, but for pets. https://ppn.gethuan.com/.

There's no need to reverse engineer anything - it's using standard BLE and iBeacon, and you can buy ready-made tags and program them however you like from Alibaba suppliers.

unrelated to article but why on earth does this site completely demolish my ability to go back to HN on safari, obnoxious

I thought it was my phone until I saw your post lol.

This is why I’ve come to just opening these kinds of links in a new tab. Easier to press cmd W than to deal with TC’s stupidity/assholeishness

Got curious so opened the link, waited to load, and pushed back. It worked without issue This is with Firefox on Android, and the uBlock add-on.

I tried again, this time with uBlock disabled. It took like 30 full seconds to load, but still the back action worked fine... so it must be an issue specific to Safari.

Because it’s Yahoo TechCrunch which wants to set tracking cookies on 20 domains because they’d rather have no visitor than one they can’t invasively track. Typically I just go back once I see the consent form, that does work.

https://archive.is/3jx7e

What technology does tile use? Bluetooth? How will airtags work?

Tile uses bluetooth. (at least the versions I used a few years ago did)

Speculation: This could be powered by the underreported U1 chip that included int he latest iPhone models. Ultra-wideband positioning power driven by this chip would allow spatial location of these tags potentially. Many people speculated this was going to happen when the chip was first announced.

Bluetooth. I think AirTags will most likely use some combination of bluetooth and the new U1 chip included in the iPhone 11 Pro which should hopefully give it more granularity than a plain old bluetooth tracker would.

The ultra-wideband U1 chip is going to be the main push behind AirTags. As I understand it, with 3+ devices close to each other, you can pinpoint the exact location of any of the other devices, so I imagine there will be an app for finding your AirTags in AR by moving your phone's camera around.

I really hope this is the case. The biggest issue I always have with the trackers is the granularity just doesn't seem to be fine enough.

Mind you I have never tried Tile, so they may be better in that regard, but there is only so much you can do off a single bluetooth signal

I've tried Tile, it'll tell you if it's within 15-20 feet and then has an audible noise. Kinda OK, but not great.

It also uses Apple's anonymizing tracker functionality so that any iPhone that is near the lost tile can report it's location back to the owner.

Does this also allow other people to locate your device(s) easier?

I was thinking of Tesla Radar [1] which allows people to track Model 3 via Bluetooth (cannot be disabled by user).

[1] https://www.teslaradar.com/

Probably Bluetooth 5.1 with AoA/AoD extensions for direction finding, now that it's standardized. You can expect similar functionality in the next Android version, as soon as the API is defined by Google...

https://www.silabs.com/products/wireless/learning-center/blu...

Note: ultra-wideband U1 chip is not suitable for general tag finding, as it requires practically uninterrupted line-of-sight because of the very high frequencies.

The key is that you’ll be able to find AirTags anywhere in the world. Not just near your phone. It’s a game changer. And they do this not by giving each tag WiFi or 3G, they do it by leveraging a Bluetooth mesh network of all iOS devices out there. So if anyone is near your lost AirTag with an iPhone you’ll be able to find it. Imagine the coverage of the global iPhone user base.

And it’s all done securely so that no individual phone that’s participating can know what it’s even doing.

Happy Sherlocking!

There should be a Mac Mausoleum as an equivalent to the Google Graveyard- except the programs in there weren't created by Apple.

Well it's not like Apple doesn't do this transversally across its hardware products and software apps or cloud services.

We don't give a damn. :)

Won't someone please think of the, uh, smartphone wallpaper startups‽

This article seems like clickbait.

Agreed. I couldn’t identify even one “startup” actually threatened by these changes in the article.

The big one is Tile. The company so afraid of a product that is only a rumor at this point they testified to Congress about how evil Apple is.

Perhaps Tile should step up their game then or add more value.

> This article seems like clickbait.

I disagree. Being aware of potential pitfalls like these could help the founders of future startups think more deeply about their value proposition than if they were not paying attention to what is going on with other startups.

And actually additionally after reading this I am left wondering, as a customer of Apple products, might this also affect me in my personal life? I might be jumping the shark here but, I am thinking that if this is the strategy that Apple has moving forward might we eventually see them implement too many different features? So that they then become unable to support all of the features they built and then they either leave the features unmaintained or alternatively shut down the servers supporting those features and removing said features? There is at least one FAANG company known for doing that, and the name of that company starts with a capital G.

Back to startup land this then raises the question whether Apple might begin acqui-hiring more startups when if in the future they find themselves unable to support all of the features that they built. And if so, when would be the right time to try and get in touch with Apple to raise their awareness about your startup, if your startup is building something with a set of features that Apple added to their software and for which they might end up unable to support that feature to a satisfying degree?

>This article seems like clickbait.

Because it is. The headline gives no real information, and clicking the link doesn't either, because the content is blocked by a popup.

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