Product Management

What’s good for Apple isn’t necessarily good for you

Apple always encourages adopting their latest APIs, tools, and languages like Swift; they’re incredibly powerful resources, but they also make us dependent on Apple’s ecosystem. From Apple’s perspective, they are happy to lock developers in. If they can have tons of incredible and unique apps that are exclusive to their platforms, that makes Apple’s products that much more compelling to their customers.

But for a third-party developer, dependency on Apple’s APIs puts you in a tricky spot: it limits your customer base, and it puts your business at risk if Apple decides to compete with your product offering. If Apple ever offers a similar product for free, bundled into the operating system, it will be tough for your app to compete.

Apple has an extensive history of sherlocking, and has continued this behavior with the most recent release of its mobile OS

Reading an email shouldn’t leave a long data trail, regardless of whether that trail is used in fairly innocuous ways, like an aggregate open-rate calculation, or in its most devious, like spying on whether a personal email has been seen and from where.

Privacy isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also better business. Discerning customers are already demanding it, and everyone else will too soon enough