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.
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.
>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.
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.