As an end user, am I happy that Apple took your idea and built it in the OS, stripped of ads, premium features, tracking and analytics, etc? Yes, yes I am.
>As an end user
This is a developer-focused site.
We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
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Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#32On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
I'm not 100% committed to this idea, but VPNs all offer some trade-off between value and security, right? And, it seems weird that Apple, the company that continually finger points at Google and Facebook as invasive of privacy, would not support user choice here. Their OS should permit VPNs and businesses running through VPNs, or they are in many ways doing the same thing that Google is doing with its changes to Chro…
Apple does “support VPNs”. There is a setting for it.
Settings -> General -> VPN.
But the article even said the company got the idea from Onava. A company that tracked your app usage and sold the data and that was bought by Facebook.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#33This story has been repeated time and again. There is even a term, 'getting Sherlocked'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
The damning part to me is not so much that Apple copied it, but that they copied it, then removed their competitor from the app store.
It was removed as a part of a general thrust towards removing shady VPN apps. Onavo the VPN app that’s mentioned in the post was also removed from the App Store around the same time. The article is trying to spin the narrative of a causal connection between Apple removing their app from the App Store and then introducing the same feature in iOS, but that doesn’t seem to be the true.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#34May I say the title should be taken with a grain of salt. From the article: > A month before being removed from the App Store, the app raked in ~$45,000 in revenue. This means the product was operating at a $500,000 annual run rate. It's an extrapolation, from the first month.
That plus they are talking about extrapolated "revenue". They didn't mention what the server costs were for having to handle the traffic of that many users. Server costs for such would be pretty high. Also other operating costs, development costs etc. Revenue doesn't matter, profit does.
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Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#35May I say the title should be taken with a grain of salt. From the article: > A month before being removed from the App Store, the app raked in ~$45,000 in revenue. This means the product was operating at a $500,000 annual run rate. It's an extrapolation, from the first month.
That plus they are talking about extrapolated "revenue". They didn't mention what the server costs were for having to handle the traffic of that many users. Server costs for such would be pretty high. Also other operating costs, development costs etc. Revenue doesn't matter, profit does.
I guess you aren't native english speaker. As a french speaker, I got bitten by it in the past. Revenu is the total income, you have probably profit in mind.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#36As an end user, am I happy that Apple took your idea and built it in the OS, stripped of ads, premium features, tracking and analytics, etc? Yes, yes I am.
I think that's fine. What's not fine is removing the app itself from the app store as it was generating $45k a year, the same week of releasing its competing app.
Either you remove it because it's against the TOS, anytime in the 1.5 years that the app existed, or leave it be. Don't 'coincidentally' remove it the same week you release a competing app. That's just nonsense.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#37On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
This is because this would have been the only method to "block" access to the apps. Apple provides no API for other apps to "moderate" the opening of other apps, like Screen Time can do. This is a workaround because they were working in the sandboxed environment that is iOS.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#38As an end user, am I happy that Apple took your idea and built it in the OS, stripped of ads, premium features, tracking and analytics, etc? Yes, yes I am.
Surely they had a meeting at some point and discussed and weighed this and many other risks.
I don't see anything wrong here. They just got a really frustrating outcome.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#39On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
Agree with the sentiment here. Whilst I have all the deepest sympathies for the guy, it does seem like a hack to tunnel it through a VPN to get it working. One could argue, the right approach would be if Apple opened up the hooks to measuring app usage for any 3rd party app, but I don’t think that will happen any time soon.
You would actually trust a third party app to track your usage?
Apple actually had to lock out Twitter and other apps from logging what other apps were on your phone for analytics.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#40On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
I'm not 100% committed to this idea, but VPNs all offer some trade-off between value and security, right? And, it seems weird that Apple, the company that continually finger points at Google and Facebook as invasive of privacy, would not support user choice here. Their OS should permit VPNs and businesses running through VPNs, or they are in many ways doing the same thing that Google is doing with its changes to Chro…
iOS does support VPN's.
However this was a VPN in an attempt to get around a limitation/restriction of the OS.
Especially recently, I have had an issue with user choice. Since I feel like many (Google and Facebook largely, but apps like this on a smaller scale) don't fully communicate to a user what is actually happening to their data. Most of us here are technical and just seeing "all data through a vpn" know what that means, vast majority of people would not.