There were even more stories, but you get the drift. While Stratechery started out extensively covering the App Store and Apple’s relationship to its developers from the moment it launched, the last year has brought the issue to the forefront in a major way: last WWDC Apple had a public clash with Basecamp faced an antitrust lawsuit from Epic received a statement of objections from the European Commission over its treatment of third-party music apps, most notably Spotify saw CEO Tim Cook testify in an industry-wide antitrust hearing and was dressed down in a hearing specifically focused on App Stores. Now users can get useful weather information without having to worry that their data is being traded for access to said information - it’s a reason to buy an iPhone. The result was a race to the bottom, with user privacy as the casualty: AccuWeather was shown to be sharing precise geolocation data with advertisers, as was WeatherBug, Weather Forecast, and World Weather Accurate Radar.įrom this perspective Apple deciding to nuke the entire category, not by outlawing weather apps from the App Store, but rather by investing in delivering a superior weather app by default on the iPhone, is less about being anti-developer than it is about being pro-user. The challenge for weather app makers, though, is that weather information is a commodity that costs money: app makers had to pay for the data, but that data was open to anyone willing to pay. The problem for users is that it is not as if they could turn location data off: unless a user wanted to manually enter their location every time they used a weather app the app would be fairly useless for its intended function - displaying the weather wherever the user was. There is another way of thinking about Apple’s new Weather app in 2019, a year before the Dark Sky acquisition, the city of Los Angeles sued the IBM-owned Weather Company for collecting and selling location information from its popular Weather Channel app the company eventually settled with an agreement to better disclose that it was leveraging user location data for more than delivering weather reports. This isn’t a complete surprise - the public WWDC keynote is focused on consumers, while the afternoon Platforms State of the Union is for developers - but the new Weather App was only the most extreme example of Apple deciding what part of the iPhone user experience was theirs, and what was left for developers. What made these 49 seconds notable is that they came at a developer conference, and yet Apple’s acquisition of Dark Sky and iOS 15’s new weather app are quite clearly focused on obviating 3rd-party weather apps built by the developers WWDC is theoretically for.
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