Building for iOS is a great way to show Apple that there's a market for something :)
However, embeddings might end up being the true vendor lock in of our time. If I've based my entire company on OpenAI embeddings (and spent lots of money on these), it isn't clear there would be an easy way to translate to another vendor's offerings.
Long-pressing spacebar was previously reserved for changing input layout, and only appeared (and replaced input cursor) when multiple layouts were selected, which is required on SwiftKey for iOS when having both Swedish and English enabled, even though SwiftKey for Android allows users to select the Swedish QWERTY layout for the English language, resulting in two languages but only one layout enabled, and input cursor would continue working.
But seriously, what a great app that is sorely missed now.
As a Dark Sky fan for years, I understand losing something you've gotten used to. But Apple Weather is great for most people, and die-hards like me can move to apps like Weathergraph.
The aftermarket showed carmakers demand for superchargers, cup holders, and bigger wheels.
Third parties, including Microsoft, showed Google the demand for Gmail.
And on and on. I am forever at a loss at people's surprise and dismay that a large platform maker will seek to improve their platform by incorporating features that their users are signaling are missing by acquiring from third parties.
I'm sure that there have been times when someone mentioned design / arch / marketing strategies in an interview and later saw the same thing implemented, but I mean have have had multiple times in my life where I told nobody an idea and still saw it implemented somewhere else. Ideas are not half as unique as people like to think they are.
If you prove an idea is successful on a large platform, that idea gets used by the platform directly.
New product category of some food or condiment suddenly starts selling, the store has the sales data and finds someone to make the same thing and sells it under a house brand.
Apple showed the world there was a market for an always connected capacitive touchscreen slab. The world keeps changing and what was once an App becomes a feature.
If on the other hand you have the top selling real estate portfolio management app in the world I don't expect the platform will fold that up in their offerings, even if you are making more money on that than any of the apps with more universal appeal.
Why not? In hindsight, we see "menstrual tracking" as an obvious fit now for a more complete Apple Health, but it's very easy to apply that same exact thinking to menstrual tracking.
Using your real estate portfolio management app, ok maybe Apple doesn't replicate it exactly as is, but what's stopping them from turning Apple Home into a more complete home control experience, where you can buy and sell in an easier way or incorporate Airbnb elements. Heck, having more control over your home totally fits their privacy MO. It might seem far fetched now if you don't have the vision, but again same about things like health tracking just 8 years ago!
So I would rethink this angle, I don't believe the determining factor is if it's a big market vs a niche market. A weather app is a niche market, yet they gobbled that up. An infinite canvas brainstorming app is a niche market, here comes Apple's Freeform.
>A weather app is a niche market, yet they gobbled that up.
I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree about how much of the population is affected by the weather, I say all of it, you evidently much less.
Gobbling it up is actually interesting for weather apps, because the weather app, and the clock and other apps that have to do with stuff that everyone in the world needs is basically the kind of thing my argument says will always happen for a platform.
>>If on the other hand you have the top selling real estate portfolio management app in the world I don't expect the platform will fold that up in their offerings
>Why not?
Apple's main business is selling devices with other ancillary businesses growing up to support this primary business, of course from outside it can look like these ancillary businesses are very nice to have indeed and any one of us might be happy to have them but for Apple they are rounding errors. And if you have one of these businesses already and Apple comes calling then it's like the WSJ article points out - not good for your business because Apple might just decide to pack it up in their platform and give it away for free or provide a much better implementation than you can and up the profile of their apps in their store.
But in the end Apple is mainly interested in making one of these apps because it enhances their platform for the general population (or their historical target demographics that are still of some importance to the Apple brand). Thus Apple is not going to be making apps targeted at lawyers even though such apps might make a LOT of money because a lawyer app LOT of money to Apple is a pittance.
Microsoft already has Steve from Minecraft, Apple will have a 14 years old girl on Apple Campus Lunar in aluminium boots over latex suit, named, say, Isaac, at which point the online landscape will be so absurd that Zuckerberg in Meta avatar explaining their Nintendo partnership is going to look as natural and comforting as an Uber Orbit’d bowl of soup out at the side of a mountain in rural Mongolia.
And I bet, the audiences’ focus in 2029 WWDC Keynote will be, whether she will finally reveal her $19840/mo. R18+ plans on iPatreon.