9 apps and products Apple copied for iOS 13 and macOS Catalina - The Verge

Another WWDC, another set of apps, products, and services that may have just been “Sherlocked” by Apple. The term, used as a colloquial way to refer to when Apple builds a native feature that effectively renders a third-party app or product useless, comes up every year as the company grows its OS offerings and introduces new capabilities worthy of your 30 or so minutes to update.

So what did Apple try to get rid of, or at least borrow from, this year? While not every single item here will be considered dead by the time Apple rolls out iOS 13 and macOS Catalina by the fall, at the very least these developers must now figure out ways to differentiate themselves enough to keep customers from switching to Apple’s version.

Single Sign On

Of all the different companies Apple is trying to go after, it’s obvious that Google and Facebook have been in the company’s crosshairs for the longest time, especially in regards to security. With Sign in with Apple, users can now opt to have Apple sign them up for apps and services instead of connecting through a Facebook or Google account. Apple promises to provide less information to apps than Facebook or Google would, and it even goes a step further and offers users a way to generate a random email that apps and services can spam without giving those companies your actual address. It’ll also allow users to sign in with Face ID.

Menstruation and fertility tracking apps

Apple has been criticized for its lack of comprehensive female health tracking support (it didn’t add female health tracking as a category until 2015), and this year at WWDC it finally announced that users can track their menstruation cycles through both the new Apple Watch Cycles app or the iOS Health app. This feature is rather belated, allowing for third-party apps like Clue, Flo, Eve, and Glow to take over the market for most of the past decade. Some of these apps have also come under fire for using sensitive quantified data for marketing and R&D. Another, Femm, was recently discovered to have been funded by anti-abortion groups, with the app claiming to monitor menstrual cycles while encouraging users to avoid using hormonal birth control.

Being able to track your cycles locally on your device mean users no longer have to worry about what third parties your data is potentially being shared with. It’s also included in the cost of your iPhone and Apple Watch, so no more paying for an app or dealing with ad-supported free apps.

Drawing tablets

macOS Catalina includes a new feature called Sidecar that allows you to use an iPad as a secondary screen to your Mac desktop. Since the iPad supports the Apple Pencil, that means if you own all three items already, you won’t need a Wacom-style dedicated tablet to draw inside your Mac apps anymore. And since the iPad has its own OS, and most drawing tablets don’t, it’s likely to be a much more worthwhile investment for artists who draw and design on the go since they can also use it with any relevant illustration apps. Still, it won't replace huge drawing tablets like the Wacom Cintiq.

Luna, Duet Display, and other sketching / second display apps

In the same vein, Sidecar also means that third-party apps that let you use the iPad as a second screen are no longer needed. Some of the more popular app for this are Luna and Duet Display, though the latter company also offers support for PC to iPad, so it’s not entirely dead just yet for households with varied OSes.

Google Street View

I’m not quite certain that Apple will have Google’s Street View beat just yet, but it’s at least trying. By including its own version of Street View (called “Look Around”), Apple is trying to recruit users back from Google Maps with the hopes that they’ll eventually populate its apps with more data. After all, Google Maps has grown into almost its own travel guide given all the different businesses that are listed alongside user-submitted photos and reviews, and Apple clearly wants a slice of that pie.

Apple Watch voice memo apps

Voice Memo is coming to the Apple Watch in watchOS 6, so there’s not really a reason to use free voice recording apps from third-party vendors anymore. There’s probably less of a reason to use paid ones too, unless they offer more in-depth tools like transcriptions or editing. Still, they’re features that Apple could reasonably build if enough users / developers want them, especially as it works to expand its accessibility tools.

Video editing apps

With iOS 13, users will be able to edit videos to adjust color balance, sharpness, saturation, and more. You can now even rotate and crop videos or apply filters! It’s not as in-depth as other video editing apps that let you cut and paste footage or layover music tracks for a complete edit suite on the go, but it’s enough that the casual person editing to share on social media can do so without a third-party app.

Home security camera cloud storage

Apple has long touted its on-device encryption for any data that users send through, whether that’s passwords, Siri voice data, or health information, and now it’s bringing the same feature to HomeKit to combat third-party home security cameras that are vulnerable to hacking. The new HomeKit Secure Video API tweaks the way these products store security footage by encrypting video content before sending it to iCloud. Apple is also offering 10 days of free recording storage without eating into your iCloud space.

Though Apple isn’t selling its own security camera, it does make it harder for companies that don’t adopt HomeKit to sell theirs given recent news of how home security cameras and doorbells from Google’s Nest and Amazon’s Ring can get hacked. And since encrypted home security videos are included now with the cost of iCloud, it’ll be tough to convince customers to shell out extra money for companies like Nest and Canary to save their videos in the cloud.

SwiftKey / Swype

iOS 13 also offers a new way to type, allowing you to swipe around the keyboard to type the word you want without lifting a finger. Apple calls it “QuickPath Typing,” which sounds an awful lot like Swype and SwiftKey, two of the more popular apps that started offering this feature years ago. It’s like Apple isn’t even going to pretend someone else popularized this input behavior with that naming mechanism.

Tile

Tile's stick-on Bluetooth trackers aren't quite killed by Apple yet, but it does borrow the same idea in terms of how the technology works. Both Tile and Apple’s new Find My app on macOS uses the power of crowdsourcing to locate a misplaced product by letting its Bluetooth connection ping other people’s devices, which relay that info back to the cloud. This allows the Find My app to work even when a MacBook is closed and offline.

So while it does depend on the MacBook having enough battery power to last until it’s found, it is one less device for a Tile to be stuck on. Of course, people don’t just use Tiles for Apple laptops, so for now the device lives to see another day. Emphasis on ”for now.”

If we missed any products Apple duplicated the functions of at WWDC 2019, feel free to drop them in the comments. It’s worth noting that Apple isn’t alone in this practice (we don’t have to tell you how many iPhone knockoffs are out there) — technology companies find, ahem, inspiration from one another or take different amounts of time to launch similar features all the time. As my colleague James Vincent put it, it’s just an occupational hazard of being an app developer nowadays.

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651190/apple-ios-13-mac-os-catalina-third-party-apps-products-copy-wwdc-2019

2019-06-04 14:47:04Z
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