It means Apple (or big tech) has adopted/cloned your product basically killing your products ability to succeed
In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson
In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson
Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner.
‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc).
Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete.
In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”.
1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
Response said "Working on an idea after it has been Sherlocked is a bold choice"
Child comment asked what Sherlocked meant. I explained.
Apple purchasing Swift Package Index is great. The Sherlocking above comment was in response to the suggesting that theyd create a project apple has already made first party