A platform buying up cross-platform apps and making them uni-platform really should be slam dunk anti-trust. It's obviously anti-consumer and concentration of market power.
I think the simpler explanation is one you'll find in many comments here: Dark Sky was unusually good, and Apple bought it to get all that goodness to themselves.
[1] E.g.: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/8/23343336/apple-tim-cook-im...
If this is anti-consumer in your mind I would really like to hear what acquisition is not an antitrust problem from your perspective.
In a related vein, it's exciting that Apple is investing in Apple Maps as a competitor to Google Maps, especially since Google bought out Waze a few years ago.
https://www.androidpolice.com/dark-sky-api-android-weatherki...
Would I be better off dependent on Google? A company that has the attention span of a crack addle flea?
Would I be better off depending on a small private company?
The parent said that the data Dark Sky uses is public and that anyone could start their own alternative. They did not claim that it would be easy to do so.
They also said that it was probably cheaper for Apple to buy Dark Sky than build it themselves. That does not mean that Apple can’t build it themselves if sufficiently motivated.
I don’t see any inconsistency here in the above statements.
Saying that anyone can accomplish a task posits some level of triviality or easiness that enables anyone to be able to accomplish it.
If I say anyone can lose weight, it is safe to assume that I mean losing weight is easy enough that anyone can do it.
I would interpret “anyone can lose weight” to mean that anyone has the capability to lose weight, not that it is easy. On the contrary, I find losing weight to be pretty hard!
I do recognize that the phrase “anyone can do x” can often carry the connotation of being easy. But it depends on context.
Since we’re talking about a proprietary weather forecasting model and accompanying UI, I see no reason to assume it would be trivial. But rather that the data is available for anyone to use, should they decide to attempt to build the next Dark Sky. This is in contrast to building the next Google Maps, for example, where just getting a hold of the necessary data would probably cost a good deal of money.
They claimed something about barometer data but I don't honestly believe that they used it to improve their forecasts. I worked on this problem at different companies for many years, and with academia, and found it to be quite difficult. Possible, doable, but very difficult to demonstrate actual improvement. Significant academic work was done after Dark Sky made their claim, and the papers published used ensemble kalman filters among other on-device data-cleaning techniques that I do not believe Dark Sky implemented. So I doubt their barometer claims.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/dark-sky-weather-app-iphone-6-...
You may think the landlord is taking an outrageous cut of "your" sales, but the landlord thinks they own the relationship with their customer, and you only exist to do product/market fit and sizing research for them.
Joel Spolsky put it extremely well way back in the day in his "Strategy Letter V:" All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease... Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.
(Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657166)
Platforms always want to commoditize the apps that run on top of their platform. If they don't buy you and bundle your product, they'll do everything in their power to drive your revenue down until you are living on ramen noodles.
Anti-trust might help stop them from turning cross-platform apps into uni-platform apps, but the larger problem that remains unsolved is that platforms are powerful and it is in their best interests to drive app revenue down to zero.
https://www.androidpolice.com/dark-sky-api-android-weatherki...
"It's not true because X!"
"Here is something that is a fact, which we all (including you) agreed is true. It demonstrates why X is false."
"It's not true because X!"
Jesus.
https://www.androidpolice.com/dark-sky-api-android-weatherki...
Even if it didn’t, it’s not like little old Google doesn’t have the resources to give Android a similar capability.
Dark Sky wasn't even available to purchase in my country previously. But now, thanks to this investment by Apple, I get access to a bunch of great new features in the Weather app via a free software update. Calling this "anti-consumer" and declaring that it should be illegal is, in my opinion, an over simplification.
They block Firefox/Opera in preference to their own, they impose undue costs on Spotify etc. I see a need for separation of pipes and content. Break up the apple App business and it's platform otherwise the market abuse will continue.
There are ~3.3 million apps on Android. So no, I do not see the possibility of Apple denuding Android of all independent apps as a realistic concern.
> How would you quantify your limit if not one?
I don’t think setting a limit on the number of companies that Apple can acquire is the correct way to frame the question. Instead I think you need to take a look at each acquisition independently and look at things like the percentage of market share they are acquiring, what alternatives exist in the market, etc. I’m fairly sure Dark Sky never had a dominant market share, and plenty of alternative weather apps exist, so I really don’t see this as an anti-trust issue.
But more to the point, Android is backed by Google - a company with a 1T+ market cap. If Google can’t keep up with Apple, it’s not because of lack resources. It’s because Google has the attention span of crack addled flea.
I never used Lala, but I have used the iTunes "Sync Library" feature. So, in my case, yes I suppose I benefited from that acquisition.
Not claiming that "we all" benefited. But this seems to be another case where Apple bought some company for its technology, folded it into its own service and made it available to a much wider audience, and then killed off the original service. If you were a happy Lala user, then I think your disatisfaction is justified, and you certainly have my sympathy. But also need to recognize that Apple was able to reach a far wider audience with that technology than Lala did.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/04/apple-kills-lala-music-service...