{"id":33068,"date":"2021-07-07T16:09:18","date_gmt":"2021-07-07T20:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=33068"},"modified":"2021-10-15T15:17:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T19:17:41","slug":"ios-closing-of-the-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/07\/ios-closing-of-the-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"iOS: Closing of the Frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Francisco Tolmasky<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I think the \n@AppStore\n may represent a “Closing of the Frontier” moment (in the American history “Frontier Thesis” sense) that may in part explain the dramatic slowdown in UI and UX innovation in iOS (and even more so in iPadOS) following the iPhone’s initial dramatic launch.<\/p>

It’s no secret that macOS has… borrowed many of its now familiar workflows from 3rd party devs. Spotlight (Watson and QuickSilver), Widgets (Konfabulator), and iCloud Drive (Dropbox) to name just a few. And to be clear, this a good thing and has generally been wll received.<\/p>

The key thing here is that these utilities started on the “fringe”… the frontier.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

And IMO a big reason for that is because there’s no “frontier” for enthusiasts to experiment and possibly break into the mainstream. Innovation can only come from Apple, where changes are riskiest. The ecosystem has no way to derisk through organic growth in the market.<\/p>

And jailbreaking doesn’t (and can’t) serve this role. It’s a big scary binary switch (that is constantly being mitigated by Apple). You can’t install “one well known cool system extension.” There’s either jailbreaking your phone, or not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

No one can invent the next Dropbox on iOS, and perhaps not even on Android. I guess the frontier is now the desktop platforms, but do they have enough mindshare for the next big thing to break through?<\/p>\n\n

Tanner Bennett<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

On iOS, the features they take come from jailbreak tweaks.<\/p>\n

• Control center was SBSettings
\n• BiteSMS had quick reply before iOS
\n• PredictiveKeyboard (obvious)
\n• Someone delivered multitasking before  did, but it’s a stretch to call that a Sherlock; same with dark mode<\/p>\n

It’s actually crazy how many things the community beat Apple to, year after year. Most of them are obvious steps forward, but still a lot of them are definite Sherlocks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dan Grover<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nEven before “Sherlocking” became a verb, like half of System 7.5 was random 3P hacks that Apple bought out -- including the menubar clock! Sandboxed app stores were a faustian bargain: less stuff to Sherlock, but it bridged gap and made regular users behave more like power users.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n