Ask HN: What apps/businesses has Apple just rendered obsolete? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What apps/businesses has Apple just rendered obsolete?

17 pointsarturadib22 comments

Of course Apple is not coming out with all features supported by the apps below. But for average users like myself, Apple's new offerings will force me to abandon these apps, as they seem to cover most of my needs.

Off the top of my head:

- Dropbox (cf. iCloud)

- Instagram (cf. iOS5 Twitter integration in Photos)

- Zinio, Flipboard (cf. iOS5 Newsstand)

- Instapaper, ReadItLater (cf. iOS5 Safari Reading List)

- Camera+ (cf. iOS5 Camera)

- reQall, Remember-The-Milk, etc (cf. iOS5 Reminders with location support)

Any other unlucky souls?

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IMO, most of the mentioned services are not in danger if they focus on differentiation:

Dropbox: How long will it take until all Dropbox-enabled apps are upgraded to iCloud and Dropbox integration dropped? Differentiation for Dropbox: Ease of use across MULTIPLE platforms.

Camera+: Has a lot more to offer than just crop and rotate. Focus on best post-processing and sharing, turn it into a universal app. Camera+ can read the photo roll, so it can be used to optimize photos taken taken with the new camera app as well.

Instapaper, ReadItLater: Focus on social features, cross platform sharing.

Flipboard: Nothing in iOS5 seems to come near a "personal magazine". Newsstand? Not really something that comes near a 'personal social magazine'.

To-do apps: What about cross-platform, collaboration, reusable lists? Lots of room to differentiate.

In addition, all these developers either have made money through direct sales or advertising. Money they made by using an ecosystem built by Apple. They may make less money in the future if they can't differentiate. But as long as Apple isn't banning e.g. Dropbox-enabled apps, I don't think they are so 'unlucky' souls and nobody is forced to abandon these apps.

It's interesting, I wanted to teach myself iOS development and the best way for me was to come up with a project and see it to the end. My project was location aware reminders. I wasn't going to get rich or anything, just was solving a problem I had and learning a new framework/environment.

Seeing Apple's new Reminders app has really de-motivated me to finish it. Also before you point out TaskAve or any others, I only learnt about them today, in this thread. I purposely didn't go looking for location aware reminder apps as I knew it would de-motivate me to finish mine, and hence not learn what I wanted.

Although I can't miss reading what is coming in iOS 5 :)

Oh well, I'll have to think of something else to keep me interested.

Have you actually looked at iCloud? I can't imagine why a paid Dropbox user would abandon it in favor of such a scanty offering.

I found Dropbox's UI so easy & sensible that I'm surprised the iCloud folks didn't try to model their product more on Dropbox. But perhaps they will in a future version.

I think Apple would like to make the file system disappear (from an end user perspective). With that goal in mind, iCloud has no reason to emulate Dropbox's behavior.

Perhaps my app Remindly, but am waiting to see how easy they made it to schedule a reminder, as Remindly is intended to make creating an reminder simple enough that you can perform it in only a few seconds while multitasking, driving, on phone, etc.

The screenshots of Apple's location based alarms do make it appear much more robust than Remindly. I'm looking forward to playing with it to see how accurate they are, that's something I encountered huge issues with.

Dropbox, along with the rest of these, I imagine, have plenty of non-mac users.

To add to your comment: I use Dropbox on both my Macs as well as a couple PCs (and my Android phone). iCloud won't work for my type of usage.

The guys at TaskAve (Location aware notes - http://taskave.com/)

On twitter they immediately said "PIVOT!"

Which they then removed and replaced with "Ouch."

Sorry, I should have clarified pivot was from one of the founders (@skanwar) but ouch says the same thing ;-)

As much as I like Satish and wish him the best, their "product" was really a feature from day one.

Still, great learning lesson they won't soon forget :-)

The chromebook. Now that everyone's iThing can sync and back up, what need is there for this cut-down web browser OS?

Not everyone can afford an iOS or OSX device. For the rest who aren't tied to windows, the Chromebook might fit their needs.

Perhaps this will result in the same "vice-grip" effect as on mobile OS's: Apple on the high end and Google (with HW manufacturers) on the low end, except this time, it's going to be Microsoft rather than Nokia that's squeezed.

I disagree becuase the chromebook functions under the idea that 99% of what users need to do happens within the browser. OSX makes the guess that what the users need to do happens within the Apple Entertainment Ecosystem... (Disclaimer: I use both)

Interestingly, the Twitter app is itself obsolete since it'll be built into iOS. All the negative attention that Twitter got over advising against implementing additional clients and then adding the dickbar to their client was for nothing.

iOS can tweet, not read. Twitter for iPhone is really good for searching, seeing trending topics, profiles.

The big win for me with Instapaper is the cross-platform and cross-browser support. Apples offering is Safari and OSX centric. What use is read it later when I potentially can't get access on the device I'm using?

The "Red Pop" Kickstartr project suddenly looks less exciting also.

it's bigger than just apps. telecoms are in big trouble due to imessage and increased voip. also, all these new icloud features are going to put a heavy burden on their network. as soon as a relatively cheap and reliable data only service comes out, that's pretty much all you're going to need.

Well, I'm not going to use iCloud, and I'm sure I'm not alone, so probably none of them.

Have you ever used instagr.am? The appeal has nothing to do with twitter integration.

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