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Yes, that's the point. Apple ties you into its ecosystem by creating apps that only work on their platform and in this case pressuring your friends to also buy from them. This isn't anything new. This app isn't trivial to create so it has to be funded by them somehow. If another company created an app similar to this then they would follow probably a different pattern which would be to first release on iOS, pay for it by some subscription model and then eventually have an option on Android if the company doesn't get bought out by Apple / Android or get Sherlocked.

What does "getting Sherlocked" mean?

From wikipedia…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)

Advocates of Watson made by Karelia Software, LLC claim that Apple copied their product without permission, compensation, or attribution in producing Sherlock 3. Some disagree with this claim, stating that Sherlock 3 was the natural evolution of Sherlock 2, and that Watson was obviously meant to have some relation to Sherlock by its very name.

The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.

Usually something to do with running a tumblr full of Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman fanfic.

But in this case, it refers to the fact that there used to be a Mac app called Watson (made by Karelia Software) that let you search all your personal files. Then Apple added an OS feature called Sherlock that did the same thing and ripped the rug out from under the third party developer. (Sherlock has since been replaced by Spotlight in more recent MacOS versions)

By analogy, anyone making software in the Mac ecosystem (or any ecosystem really) risks being ‘Sherlocked’ by having their idea ripped off and turned into an OS feature.

Calling it ”sherlocked” is recency bias on our part. Apple learned it from Microsoft, who took a thing that happened from time to time and operationalized it into a full-blown business strategy.

One by one, Microsoft took aim at successful DOS and Windows applications, especially business applications, and displaced them. Lotus… WordPerfect… Everyone, really. Unless your app was for a niche too specialized to be worth the hassle, Microsoft wanted to use you for market research and then either buy you, buy your competitor, or clone you.

> Calling it ”sherlocked” is recency bias on our part.

It has been called “sherlocking” in the Mac sphere ever since the Sherlock 3 incident. Any bias is not on our part, as this was more than 20 years ago. Yes, some of us were there (I was, so maybe I share some responsibility), but the combination of the minuscule Mac market share at the time and its steady growth for the 2 following decades means that the people who were around at the time are a statistically insignificant fraction of us today.

It is not unique and in retrospect we can find many historical examples before that, but it was a particularly high-profile one, it made a lot of noise, and the name stuck. Also, most Mac users at this point avoided Windows (or eve worse, dog forbid, MS-DOS) like the plague so this would not have been in people’s minds.

If you really want to go back we could say both Apple and Microsoft Sherlocked Xerox PARC… at the same time.

When accused by Steve Jobs of ripping Apple’s technology and designs off, Bill Gates is said to have cooly replied:

"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

So they, er xeroxed Xerox?

:) That's a better term.

Long-form answer with a story from the dev who got Sherlocked first

https://www.karelia.com/blog/the-long-story-behind-karel.htm...

Microsoft Teams being preinstalled with the OS and set to automatically start when the OS boots would be an example.

There were several other options to do the same thing, but Microsoft added their own that came with the OS.

Since iOS15, you have been able to invite Android and PC users to FaceTime calls.

What if someone in the group on Android or PC wants to initiate the call?

They should use something else, or switch to iOS.

Facetime is a feature of the Apple ecosystem.

> Facetime is a feature of the Apple ecosystem.

Let's rephrase that: Facetime is arbitrarily limited to the Apple ecosystem by Apple's desire to weaponise it for anti-competitive reasons.

If Apple published the protocol there would be 15 clients on other platforms overnight without Apple lifting a finger.

I do not think you understand what "anti-competitive" means.

It is a key aspect of of business that manufacturers add features to their products that other makers do not have, or do not execute as well. To insist that one such maker share their feature with everyone else is bananas.

If you don't like Apple, great. Buy something else. But to then come back and whine that you can't use Apple services without using an Apple device is ASTONISHINGLY entitled. Apple is nowhere close to a monopoly. They are therefore free to establish whatever platform rules they like.

Don't like it? Use something else; we live in an age of wonders where there are several other platforms, and several other video-calling tools, available to chose from.

This logic suggests that any feature of any platform should be made open to all other platforms, even competitor platforms. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Creating a better mousetrap involves creating features on YOUR product that other makers don't have on THEIR product.

There are plenty of other video calling options.

In this particular case, sure, it's true that Facetime works far, far better than any other option I've seen. But a good chunk of that is doubtless due to the fact that Apple controls both hardware and software for Facetime. It's easier to establish a high quality experience if you have that control -- and much harder to ensure it when you don't.

> add features to their products that other makers do not have, or do not execute as well

Generically that's true. If we were talking about bananas and Apple's banana's were better than Google's or Facebook's then that's legitimate competition.

But not all features are the same. Some features have secondary effects. The secondary effect in some cases has a competitive overlay. Once somebody starts using Facetime they can't switch out of the Apple ecosystem easily any more. It becomes very hard because you have to convince all the people you normally talk to switch to different apps. So there's clearly a benefit to Apple beyond Facetime being a good application in its own right.

When Apple competes by making Facetime a good product and there is zero friction to choose a different one, and hence users are choose Facetime - that's competition. When Apple introduces friction that stops users choosing a different produce no matter whether it is better or not - that is anticompetitive.

You are correct that Apple benefits from owning the full stack and that allows them to create a "better" experience". However it magnifies the anticompetitive aspect because competitors can't achieve the same experience as Facetime, even if the want. Not because of how much they are willing to invest, how skilled they are etc. Purely because of arbitrary barriers preventing them because Apple maintains proprietary control of the technical means to achieve it.

>Generically that's true. If we were talking about bananas and Apple's banana's were better than Google's or Facebook's then that's legitimate competition.

That's exactly what's happening here.

People switch platforms all the time. I suspect it's more into iOS than out of it, and I think that's evidence of Apple being straight-up better.

There's nothing stopping Google from trying to build that same interconnected smooth experience. They certainly have the money and expertise. But nothing you've said provides any justification for forcing Apple to open their platform's features to all comers.

(And, again, Facetime is better not just because of the protocol or software or servers; it matters that Apple controls the hardware side of the equation, too. That wouldn't be true if they published a Facetime client for Android, or allowed others to do so. The whole notion is anathema to the way they've built their ecosystem -- not just from a biz POV, but also from a smoothness/polish POV.)

Alternative viewpoint:

This enhances collaboration to the standard of the Apple ecosystem. Many people want to avoid "the Android/Windows/shitty third party app experience".

Reading from the page, I’m still not sure what Freeform does better than FigJam for instance. I also wouldn’t exchange Meet or Zoom for Facetime in a professional setting.

I’m not sure what work or collaboration app do you see from Apple that exceeds the popular third party ones.

I can tell you what the benefits are. Whether those benefits make it better than FigJam or whatever is a tradeoff evaluation for each person to make for their use case, it could be that FigJam is right for Alice while Freeform is right for Bob, meanwhile Charlene despises them both.

But there are Facetime users. Not you, and not me at work, but me at home for sure. And there are Apple ecosystem dwellers who use a lot of apps. And definitely Apple ecosystem users that store their data in iCloud.

What Freeform offers those people is a collaboration app (not web app) with the data in iCloud. That has some value for people who already have everything in iCloud.

One kind of person has their passwords in 1Password, their docs in the g-suite, their reminders in some other company’s cloud, &c. They’re happy mixing and matching apps and logins and cloud storage.

They don’t have a compelling need for Freeform.

But what if your passwords and TOTP authenticators are in iCloud via the keychain? What if your docs are in Keynote and Pages and Numbers, stored in iCloud as well? What if you like having Mac and iOs native apps?

Then you have a case for considering Freeform.

I don’t think Apple launched it to take over the collaboration market, but for folks already fully in the ecosystem, it offers benefits.

This is a terrible viewpoint as all it does is imply that if apple doesn't make it, then it's shitty?

What the comment says is that the third-party app ecosystem on Android is shitty. Which is not the same thing as saying that Android itself is shitty, or that Google’s apps are shitty.

Just that for various reasons, statistically, 90% of third-party android apps are shitty. This is absolutely true, but then again, judging an ecosystem by 90% of its apps is probably not very helpful.

90% of everything is crud, as Phil Sturgeon remarked. App ecosystems have winner-take-all economics, so 90% of the apps are poorly funded things thrown into the world like notes in bottles thrown into the sea.

If we lower the barriers to entry, we necessarily get more crud. The big question for a user is not whether 70%, 80%, or 90% of the apps are crud, it’s whether there are enough good apps for each user to have a good experience, and whether those good apps are discoverable.

The open web has created a world where 99.9999999% of all web pages are shit. But we don’t care right now, because HN isn’t one of them, and making it open makes it easier for the HNs of the world to be created.

If there was a “web gatekeeper” charging “developer membership” subscriptions, there would have been fewer shitty web pages, but no HN or raganwald.com either.

—-

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to ask whether Apple’s ecosystem is also 90% crud. It could be the case, but if you find the apps you need and they’re excellent, how would you ever know what the other five million iOS fart generators and home-brew to-do list apps look like?

> What the comment says is that the third-party app ecosystem on Android is shitty. Which is not the same thing as saying that Android itself is shitty, or that Google’s apps are shitty. Just that for various

A lot of Android (and iOS for that matter) first party apps are also shitty, so the provenance doesn't really matter.

> It could be the case, but if you find the apps you need and they’re excellent, how would you ever know what the other five million iOS fart generators and home-brew to-do list apps look like?

How is that any different compared to Android? I have found the apps that I need and are excellent, and I don't care about the rest.

I am in no way saying that the Apple ecosystem is superior to the Android ecosystem, or that Keynote is superior to Slides or PowerPoint, for that matter.

Just that all reasonably open ecosystems are full of crud, and while pointing out that any one ecosystem is full of crud is true, it is also not a particularly helpful.

The provenance of the Phil Sturgeon quote is helpful. He was praised for being an excellent author, and asked why he wrote SciFi, a genre in which 90% of the published works were crud.

His remark that “90% of everything is crud” illuminated a truth that people tend to associate the quality of a genre they like with the good works in that genre that they are familiar with, while associating the quality of a genre they don’t like with the mean or even worst works in that genre.

It absolutely is the same between Apple, Android, and Microsoft. I’m an Apple person, I found the set of apps I need, I think they’re excellent. My brother is all-in on Google, from Android to hardware, everything. He also has an excellent set of apps he needs, I have no reason to think he’d be happier switching to Apple.

Apple is years late to everything, so the marketing narrative around that is "Apple would rather do it right than do it early".

No thanks. Happy to be 'early' to mouse, kb, pen and external monitor support on Android. Just got a foldable phone that's perfectly combined my phone + tab use cases, so I can do it all on one device.

As a non-power user, I have never felt the need for those support, really.

I wish it wasn’t! Borne out of experience.

It's not a viewpoint, it's an observation :)

What shitty third party app experience, specifically? And are you under the mistaken assumption that everything Apple releases is solid gold? Apple Music is an abomination, Pages screws up formats by default, etc. They are not flawless.

Yes, it's an egocentric company, that's for sure, but most people here already know that.

> This limits collaboration to those in the Apple ecosystem.

Not only that, it limits collaboration to those running only the newest version of iOS/MacOS.

Though it says 'designed for collaboration' it is good to have infinite page for one's own content.

Also it would interesting to see how responsive the collaborative whiteboard would be. Online multiuser whiteboards are really useful when one sees in real-time the action taken by other online users - text being edited, object being dragged by remote users, etc.

Basically useless for actual collaboration. Hope it's at least good enough to present my tablet as a whiteboard while sharing my laptop screen in a meeting.

Users without an iDevice can still join a FaceTime call.

Facetime works in the browser as well these days.

I‘ve never used it like that myself though, so no idea if it is actually usable.