The commentary stream I was watching described it as "An whole lot of Sherlocking going on": Passwords app, Window Snapping, iPhone to mac Display mirroring. It feels especially tone deaf that they're doing it at their developer conference
If you're unfamiliar with the term, "Sherlocking" is the act of Apple introducing some 3rd-party's App features as a core component of the operating system, essentially obviating the app and the developers that created it.
An incomplete list of "Sherlocked" things:
- Watson - a tool for finding stuff on your Mac. Replicated by Apple's "Sherlock", hence the name of the phenomenon.
- Growl - Popover notifications Replicated by Apple's "Notifications"
- Konfabulator - provided a layer of widgets that could do various things, sort of like the old desk accessories applets. Replicated by Apple's "Dashboard"
- Camo - Allowed you to use your iPhone as a webcam. Replicated by Apple's "Continuity Camera"
What’s the problem? 99% of Mac users would never download and use those apps due to convenience. But if Apple builds the features into the OS, it will get used much more and benefit the users.
I don’t use a password manager. I refuse to pay a subscription for one. Yet, I’ve been wanting Apple to convert Keychain into a real password manager for a long time. They actually did it and I’m happy.
- this reduces the incentive to develop better solutions, and
- Apple's version of power user utilities will 99% of the time be worse, so your expanded user base will come at the expense of a loss of functionality for the power users (since backwards compatibility is poor, so eventually those more powerful single apps break)
There is already an equilibrium of developers coming up with great ideas, make sales, and then the OS integrates it directly.
Just because a 3rd party developer came up with a password manager first, doesn't mean that Apple/Microsoft/Google can't make one themselves and give it to everyone for free.
I think there is a significant ethical issue related to inviting others to build software on your platform, prove that software’s market value, and then you under-cutting them by creating your own version of it for free to increase sales.
Something like window snapping has been out since Windows Vista or 7, I forgot. If you make an app to do this on macOS, you would have had nearly 20 years to make sales.
To me, these apps don't have any moat anyway. Developers for this category of apps should already understand that if it's essential, Apple or Google or Microsoft will integrate it into their OS eventually.
To be precise, Sherlock was first and Watson came later (hence the name). However, Sherlock 3 then seemingly took quite a bit of inspiration from Watson in terms of features.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, "Sherlocking" is the act of Apple introducing some 3rd-party's App features as a core component of the operating system, essentially obviating the app and the developers that created it.
An incomplete list of "Sherlocked" things:
- Watson - a tool for finding stuff on your Mac. Replicated by Apple's "Sherlock", hence the name of the phenomenon.
- Growl - Popover notifications Replicated by Apple's "Notifications"
- Konfabulator - provided a layer of widgets that could do various things, sort of like the old desk accessories applets. Replicated by Apple's "Dashboard"
- Camo - Allowed you to use your iPhone as a webcam. Replicated by Apple's "Continuity Camera"
The list goes on and on.