Apple Services Everywhere
It seems that the age of platforms keeping to themselves and shutting out rivals is on the verge of ending. Now platform makers are actually playing to the strengths of their rivals as well. Apple has surprisingly made available not one but two Android apps, though one of them has been critically panned by Android users. Just recently, Apple updated its Apple Music app to add a feature that is technically impossible on the iPhone: saving music to a micro SD card for offline listening.
That move hinted that Apple was serious about its Android app, and apparently that was indeed more than the case. Under Cook, Apple has been trying to portray an image of a services company more than just a hardware and OS maker. Those services include iCloud apps and storage, Apple Pay, and iMessage, just to name a few.
In addition to providing a web interface for users to access the same data as your app, you can now easily read and write to the CloudKit public database from a server-side process or script with a server-to-server key.
Update (2016-02-09): Nathan Ingraham:
Cook may feel he needs to fight back and bring more Apple apps to Android -- but he first needs to make sure the company’s software runs better on its own hardware than it currently does.
"Apple has surprisingly made available not one but two Android apps, though one of them has been critically panned by Android users."
And the other one has been increasingly criticized by iOS users…