Fuck Yeah, Ecosystems

@fuckyeahecosystems

Ecosystems > Platforms > APIs

253 posts

LG joins a long list of high-profile device makers to give up on smartphones over the years, although many of the brand names have stuck around on devices made by third-party manufacturers. Nokia’s consumer-facing brand lives on atop handsets made by HMD, while Blackberry’s branding was initially used by TCL and is set to return this year on a device made by OnwardMobility. There’s also HTC, which still sells a few oddball handsets but sold most of its IP to Google in 2017. Who’s next?

LG is quitting the smartphone business - The Verge

#lg #android #the verge

It doesn’t have to peddle the idea of what people will get for $7 a month. Many would-be subscribers are already loyal Disney customers. They spend money at movie theaters to watch the new Frozen installment or Star Wars movie; theme park day outings are organized with friends and family; Spider-Man T-shirts are bought and Olaf plushies are gifted. These customers are already within Disney’s ecosystem. Subscribing to Disney+ becomes the obvious next step.

Disney+ doesn’t have to sell anyone on streaming - The Verge

#disney #ecosystem #disney+

And that’s the heart of it: it’s not the Apple Card, it’s the Goldman Sachs card with an Apple interface and an Apple layer of privacy protections.

Apple owns every mistake Goldman Sachs makes with its card - The Verge

#apple #apple card #goldman sachs #vertical integration #modularity

The company fails to mention that none of these apps can be chosen as the default messaging app, maps service, email client, web browser, or music player.

Apple’s latest defense of the App Store shows how hard it is to compete with Apple - The Verge

#apple #defaults #spotify #antitrust

In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor. As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system.

Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead - Open Voices

#regulation #antitrust #interoperability

Saying that a company with an agreement to be acquired for $2.1 billion was killed may sound like an exaggeration. Many start-ups aim to one

"Google’s problem in wearables isn’t due to a lack of data. In addition, Google’s lack of silicon expertise and dependency on Qualcomm aren’t fatal issues either. Ultimately, Google’s problem in wearables is that it isn’t a design company. At Google, designers are not given control over the user experience. Even if Google ramps up investment and hiring so that it is able to one day ship custom silicon that is competitive with Apple, the company would still need to come up with wearables that people want to be seen wearing. These products need to be born from a design culture in which the way people use technology is given more importance than just pushing technology forward.

Instead of acquiring Fitbit to find success in wearables, Google should work on changing its internal culture to empower designers at the expense of engineering. However, that change isn’t likely to materialize as the people who would be tasked with making such a decision would themselves hold less power and importance as a result of the change. "

#apple #google #Fitbit

content has largely lost its strategic value for technology companies, as I argued in detail here. When we bought content (whether music, ebooks, video or indeed VHS cassettes), we were committing ourselves to one standard or to one company’s platform, and so getting the content onto your company’s platform or device or standard was a way to get a customer and then to keep that customer. Buy a different device and you lose all the music you already bought. But now that we’ve gone to cloud and subscription, you can access the same service on any device (Netflix, Spotify, Kindle), or the same content on any service (music, books), or both. Content doesn’t stop you switching - unless it’s exclusive, and that’s a totally different budget. That changes its strategic value.

Netflix and software — Benedict Evans

#content #lock-in #strategic value #subscriptions

Since I can’t get my network to use something else, I owe it to them to use the thing they can’t switch away from.

Using secure chat is a moral imperative, and iMessage is my best option - The Verge

#network effects #lock-in #apple #imessage #the verge

The only online shopping Apple truly cares about happens within its ecosystem: in-app subscriptions for its new services, microtransactions in mobile games like Fortnite, Venmo-style peer-to-peer payments with Apple Cash, and purchasing of Apple hardware from within the Apple Store mobile app. All of this qualifies for the 3 percent cash back bonus, Apple confirmed to The Verge. And that arrangement sheds an interesting light on the entire Apple Card approach. Through its incentives, Apple is creating a system where you’ll shop in the real world at Apple Pay partners for an extra cash back bonus, switch your App Store credit card to an Apple one with an even better bonus, and rely only on the physical card for when you absolutely have to. And all of it is underpinned by Apple’s privacy pledge and relatively solid security track record, as well as the luxury status symbol provided by an Apple-branded piece of titanium, with its number-less design that non-coincidentally makes it easy to gloat about on social media

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/26/18282946/apple-card-credit-post-iphone-strategy-services-business-digital-wallet-payments

#apple #apple card #the verge #credit cards #apple pay

Or, maybe, you only give off the appearance of wealth. This being a credit card, the Apple Card is also a symbol for the United States’ addiction to debt, both at the national and personal level. Acquiring and using one may sink you deeper into debt. There’s something fundamentally un-Apple-like about trying to profit from people’s weaknesses. Yes, Apple has always been in the status symbol business, but the function of the status symbols it usually sells to people is to help with self-improvement, as the “Better You” Apple Watch ad suggests. The same company that urges us to monitor our phone screen time, make healthier choices, and live better lives is now getting into the icky business of debt, incentivizing spending by giving users cash back on their purchases. I like to think I’m financially responsible, but looking at that gorgeous, off-white card, I just want it. And the trouble with credit cards starts right about the time you get your first one. It’s the height of irony that Apple, on a quest to digitize the credit card and reduce it to a piece of software running on an iPhone, has created the most desirable and striking credit card I’ve yet come across. It’s the Paul Allen card of the banking world, and the only thing that could improve it is if it was a debit card, so it wouldn’t encourage me to spend money I don’t have.

Apple Card: Apple’s thinnest and lightest status symbol ever - The Verge

#services #apple #american psycho #the verge #apple card #credit card debt

If a court rules that Apple has an unlawful monopoly, it could require Apple to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars or even change its App Store model.

What happens if Apple loses its Supreme Court App Store antitrust appeal? - The Verge

#antitrust #apple #app stores

The iPhone users accused Apple of violating federal antitrust law by monopolizing the sale of paid apps, leading to inflated prices compared to if apps were available from other sources.

How much for that app? U.S. top court hears Apple antitrust dispute | Reuters

#antitrust #app stores #apple

Apple products will start rolling out on Amazon sites in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and India over the next few weeks, including both Apple’s devices and those sold under the Apple-owned Beats brand. The deal doesn’t include every Apple product, though. For example, Apple’s Echo-competing HomePod is notably not going to be sold on Amazon. ... As part of the deal, only Apple or Apple-authorized resellers will now be allowed to sell Apple and Beats devices through Amazon’s site. Any companies that are currently selling Apple products on Amazon will see their listings taken down starting on January 4th, and they’ll need to apply to Apple to become official resellers before they’ll be allowed to sell them again on Amazon.

Amazon strikes deal with Apple to sell new iPhones and iPads - The Verge

#amazon #apple #ecommerce

That's an awfully huge and diverse reach for a single ecosystem of applications — and an awfully huge and diverse set of potential users developers will be able to serve with a single Google Play Store creation. That creates a powerful incentive for those developers to make Android a priority, which can only be a good thing for users across all of those areas.

Android apps on Windows: Creating an ecosystem without borders | Computerworld

#android #windows

There’s a number of reasons why the Apple Watch is outshining the iPhone these days. The first and most obvious is that the iPhone has become boring, trapped by the diminishing returns Apple can wring out of the device year after year. It would seem, 11 years after the introduction of the first iPhone, that Apple’s marquee product has simply lost a majority of its luster. There are only so many upgrades and standout features you can add to a mobile product before its incremental changes are overshadowed by how much it costs.

The Apple Watch stole the show from this year’s new iPhones - The Verge

#apple #iphone #apple watch #the verge #s curve

But if the problem is the all-consuming size of the network, splitting off networks may lead to what Feld calls the “starfish problem.” “If you tear up a starfish, the pieces regrow and now instead of one starfish you have five starfish,” says Feld. “If you’re going to split up Facebook, what’s to prevent it from becoming three Facebooks, each one dominant in its particular market segment? That’s a hard problem for antitrust.”

The monopoly-busting case against Google, Amazon, Uber, and Facebook - The Verge

#facebook #antitrust #the verge #harold feld

This is, to say the least, a chilling trend. Nobody should celebrate a government that’s unresponsive to the needs of its citizens. But it’s even harder to celebrate corporate entities, free of oversight or accountability, stepping in to address some of those issues. …okay, that’s a bit of a tangent for this little post. But I think there’s something here that applies to AMP, and to initiatives like it. Heck, one could even argue the creation of AMP isn’t just Google’s failure, but our failure. More specifically, perhaps it’s pointing to a failure of governance of our little industry. Absent a shared, collective vision for what we want the web to be—and with decent regulatory mechanisms to defend that vision—it’s unsurprising that corporate actors would step into that vacuum, and address the issues they find. And once they do, the solutions they design will inevitably benefit the corporation first, and the rest of us second. If at all.

https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/i-for-one/

#governance #ethan marcotte

Fuck Yeah, Ecosystems @fuckyeahecosystems - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag