Competing with Apple - or "Never mess with your Landlord"

Not exactly. Camera+ was not approved for the app store because of the volume button as camera shutter feature, so they resubmitted but hid the feature from the reviewers by including it as an easter egg. It was removed for a while from the app store because of that intentional deception. They're lucky they were allowed to resubmit the app at all after that (and so are we all, it's a wonderful camera app).

This is why competition is good and investing all your eggs into a single walled garden is dangerous.

  > because he felt he could bring more to it
  > than Apple would

If you are willing to be more agile than the vendor you'll always have something, but if all you do provide something basic which can be simple replaced by the vendor, then yes, all you can do milk it as much as you can until vendor get there. (and for small project, one-man shops even this makes a lot of sense)

Actually I think Microsoft is partly responsible for the sense of self-righteous indignation that developers have when they get displaced. They deliberately held back on introducing even basic features into Windows for a remarkably long time. Things like anti-virus, paint programs, text editors, photo management - even opening zip files - were left with token or no support for 5 to 10 years after they were no brainers in terms of expected or useful functionality. Of course, MS had (and still has, though less so) a regulatory threat to worry about that nobody else does.

I won't stop using Instagram now, as I follow great photographers there. It's no longer about easy sharing or photo filters.

If the features are useful to such a great number of end-users, they should be there in the base install, it makes for a better user experience even if it does cause pain for some small business owners. Nobody is owed a business just because they already have one, this goes for app devs just as well as anyone else. As with browsers on Windows there will be plenty of room for alternatives to the base implementation so long as they offer a decent value proposition.

The only thing about this that would get me up in arms is if Apple started blocking updates to the existing apps because they "duplicate functionality". I don't think we can really count them out from doing that based on some past events, though I do hope they've moved beyond that by now.

I've been using and developing on Macs for as long as the Mac has existed, and I've never been more pessimistic about getting in bed with Apple. It's clear that they want to own their entire ecosystem; they want to own the application delivery, they want to own the advertising delivered by it or associated with it, they want to own the hardware and peripherals, they want to own the social atmosphere associated with it, they want to own their customers' data storage ...

And that's fine, for Apple and for their customers. But, I can't imagine any reason why any developer in their right mind would see competing with all of that as anything more than a short-term prospect. If you're successful, Apple will eventually try to own you (either by buying you, or, more likely, rolling out a competing product leveraged by the rest of their ecosystem); if you're not successful, it might not be worth doing in the first place.

Short-term (say, 1 to 2 year) projects can make decent money, and I guess that's good enough for most people, but there's no point to trying to develop longer-term relationships with customers, or branding, or a market of your own.

The chances are that whatever Joe Bloggs little app is, Apple want to do it better/differently. So they will. Why should Apple leave the "to-do list" market alone when they believe they can do it better. And in fact they almost always can do it better because they can integrate in a way no one else can.

I don't think this behavior is good or bad. I think it's expected.

I didn't criticise Microsoft when they did it. I don't criticise Apple now. I do laugh at folks who do the former but not the latter.

It's just business. The only point to take away is, if you are considering developing something for the Apple ecosystem, take into account the business risk that anything you do that is highly successful has a strong likelihood of being "steam rolled". Don't delude yourself that you'll be able to pick some low hanging fruit and make millions. You'll either solve something hard and have a barrier to entry or you'll solve something easy and get steam rolled, hopefully after having enough time in the sun to make it worth your while.

Meet the new boss, Just like the old boss.

When they're gap filling, then their best hope is acquisition, no matter how much they love their product. And remember acquisitions aren't guaranteed, and there are only ever one or two of them.

I believe destraynor realizes this too. He wrote, "Apple always look out for their customers." And that's exactly what businesses should do.

However, I hope, Apple can handle their relationships with their development community better than Twitter did. I'm curious to see how they'll deal with that.

Being "the guy" who solves "the problem" that everyone has is really tempting. Everyone will say things like "Oh you should install that app by Des Traynor, it lets you do X (where X is anything everyone wants to do)

Its great for a short term publicity kick, to get your name out there. It's just not something to build a business on.

I'm not defending the practice and saying that it's right or justified. I'm just pointing out that Apple isn't the only company that does this, and Mac OS X and iOS aren't the only platforms where this can happen.

Should they ignore the iOS market and let someone else pick up the money they're leaving on the table, or try to own their idea by patenting it and suing everyone else?

Also, that's a mighty powerful rhetorical weapon (going all the way back to African-American slavery) to be dropping in a discussion about some ticked-off software developers.