Much like Adobe did to Macs in the 1990s, WeChat has become so powerful they control the platform.
Apple can’t remove WeChat because most consumers would rather change device hardware than lose access to WeChat.
Apple can’t remove WeChat because most consumers would rather change device hardware than lose access to WeChat.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-pri...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-b...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/23/15399438/apple-uber-app-s...
I'd enjoy listening to the story here, spacebanana.
Adobe’s motivation was largely revenge against Apple for opening up printing standards. Previously Adobe had a de facto monopoly license on these.
Steve Jobs was extremely pissed off by seeing Apple get hurt for making a pro consumer decision that was good for the wider industry, and held the grudge for a long time. Even though he wasn’t CEO for much of this period.
This article has more detail if you’re interested [1]
[1] https://www.alphr.com/blogs/2010/05/05/apple-adobe-history/
Bumpgate affected AMD products too, this was the era of baking your 7850 to try and reflow the solder bumps, and apple was just trying to get the supplier to pay for the problems with the RoHS solders that apple specified in the product designs. Apple has always been a clientzilla that ruthlessly leans on its partners and suppliers (most recently Goldman Sachs is feeling the pain from the Apple Card) and believes that it’s a privilege to hold their business. And nvidia isn’t a company that got rich by bending over for that kind of treatment either (see also their relation with Microsoft).
Apple really wanted to terminate their relationship with nvidia anyway and this was just them demanding a big check on the way out the door. Nothing like making your ex pay for the cost of you moving out during the breakup.
When Apple acquired NeXT, the original plan was for the NeXT API (now called Cocoa) to become the only way to build apps on the new Mac OS. But Adobe made it clear they were not going to port everything to Objective-C. In response Apple came up with Carbon, which was a port of essential plain-C APIs from Classic Mac OS to the new environment.
Apple retaliated pretty hard in 2007-2010 by first knifing 64-bit Carbon when it had already shipped in Leopard betas, and later strangling Flash.
I loathe the idea of giving Microsoft credit for anything, but one thing they got right was their focus on backward compatibility. Certainly that has frayed at times here and there, but MS generally doesn't ask their developers to completely rewrite their applications to use a new application framework.
Considering how Microsoft has failed to move past Windows while Apple uses the same OS more or less for watches, phones, tablets, monitors, set top boxes, etc without having to support legacy crap.
That's pretty easy when you have no qualms whatsoever about breaking support for software which is older than 2-3 years and offer very limited support for third party software on all of your platforms except one.
> The only device running a variant of iOS that doesn’t have third party software are the displays.
That seems to be the case, yes.
E.g. if someone comes to our organization and ask to rewrite half of what we do in their new language, we won't move. Should that someone hold a grudge against us?
I imagine some kind of deal along the lines of “no WeChat no iPhone in China” was done.
This seems like an understatement.