I noticed a few instances of sherlocking at this year’s event.
iMessage stickers:
Webcam screenshare layering:
Journaling:
Any others?
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I think it’s too early to say for Day One, to be honest. Day One has a ton of functionality. Not sure that they’re sherlocked at all, so much as Apple has provided an on-ramp for people to try journaling for free.
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What about https://www.fluidapp.com/ ? I saw Safari is adding the ability to create web apps.
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I’m seeing it this way as well, but I’m keeping an open mind. If Apple lets you import previous entries I might be tempted to import my old Day One journal, but honestly it’s pretty unlikely. I’ve got many, many years of journal entries and metadata in Day One, it’d be hard to leave it.
On the other hand, I think I saw that Apple is making the APIs their Journal uses for collecting data available to third parties, so I’m sure Day One will incorporate that. They already do a little with what they can, I’m excited to see what they can do with a better API.
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The possibilities to do things with PDFs have been extended. For example, auto-filling of forms was shown in the Keynote. Thus, developers of PDF apps might be worried.
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Journaling was practiced for eons before Apple appeared, and will continue long after the last iPhone is crushed in a landfill somewhere.
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Obviously. I think @snelly was implying that “Apple has provided an on-ramp for people to try journaling” using Apple’s enhanced capabilities to add images, movies, files and media, as well as automatic geo-tagging, and quick checkins, " for free."
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The thing to remember is that Apple doesn’t have to replace a product completely in order to drastically alter or destroy a market.
Let’s imagine an extreme scenario where half of Day One’s subscribers leave. If the majority of Day One’s costs are development (i.e. “not incremental”), Day One’s price would have to double for the company to remain profitable at the same rate. Which might push more people to quit and try to get by with Apple’s (or another company’s) alternative. Which causes a potential spiral.
You would obviously counterbalance that with the number of people starting journaling via Apple’s app that decided they wanted a fancier program to do their journaling.
A massive imbalance between those two numbers will significantly affect the market though.
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You’re all quite right. I’m just saying it’s too early for me to judge One way or another.
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Yep. Here are 20 characters
I read the Health Journaling announcement as Apple providing an API for others to use the iOS data. I don’t at all see DayOne as being Sherlocked.
Keep in mind that when Apple killed Watson, they didn’t just copy the idea, they entirely lifted it, including the complete feature set and much of the UI.
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I’m glad Unite (app-ifying Safari windows, spiritul successor to Fluid mentioned above) is Sherlocked. I was happy to buy and use it, but that works best as a built-in browser feature.
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I’m not sure you can say that Apple sherlocked Day One. The idea of digital journals incorporating images, health and location data etc. is pretty ubiquitous (there are quite a few apps, some of which predate Day One)
What Apple will do, though, is shake up that app space. The built in becomes the default for anyone new to digital journalling so if you want to compete, you have to offer added value enough for people to pay for it. At the moment, multiple journals and all devices might be enough but I’d be very surprised if every developer of journalling apps isn’t already studying the “suggestions” API and aiming to launch for the new OSes.
What about AllTrails? It looked to me as if some of the updates, especially to Watch, seemed to… er, pilfer from that app…
I would move my journal to the new app IF is was also on the iPad or Mac, but my understanding is that it will initially be on the iPhone only. Is my understanding accurate?
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I hear folks on Day One’s extended feature set.
Obviously, though, sherlocking is a bit of a spectrum. Apple Notes getting links isn’t sherlocking Obsidian, just a bit of an encroachment on those wiki-notes apps. Fluid entirely replacing Unite et al.'s functionality is a different story.
So, I agree with @webwalrus. Apple creating a default competitor that does most of what an app offers while doing some things better is going to make it a lot harder for a product. 80% sherlocked is still sherlocked in my books.
There are other topo map apps that are likely more in danger than AllTrails. I didn’t notice - does this update include searching for trails, hiker reviews, recommendations, difficulty ratings, etc.? Or is it just “now you can have topo maps on your wrist”?
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Plus, Apple opened up the journaling API to third-party apps. So, I think more robust third-party apps are still viable even after this new first-party offering. On the other hand…
This is a really good point. Nevertheless, my hunch is that the Apple app will bring more people into journaling than it will eat into, say, Day One’s market.
I think many people are confused about what this API actually is. I’ve heard from a couple different articles (and they talked about it on ATP this week) that apps don’t get to READ from that API - they can only WRITE to that API.
In other words, Day One wouldn’t be able to read Apple’s cool natively-integrated ML suggestions for journaling prompts - but apps like Apollo could tell Apple that you spent a ton of time reading /r/babyyodamemes, and Apple could therefore suggest that to you.
This makes sense since Apple has access to a ton of data, and those suggestions could theoretically contain data you wouldn’t want a random third-party app having access to. But it’s definitely the sort of thing that would give Apple an edge, and make it harder for third-party apps to compete.
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Well, if that is how it’s going to be, then this is (potentially) a larger problem for Day One (and similar journaling apps).
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