Apple Invites

But no-one without an Apple Account can create them - you can only respond to Apple-having friends. There is social pressure in that too.

A company creating a useful tool that encourages people to buy their product is incredibly boring, typical, and not at all controversial until it's Apple doing it.

It may have something to do with the duopolistic nature of mobile phones and the absolute size and dominance of Apple.

If I'm inviting someone and they RSVP, that transaction is successful and done to me.

If they use some other system (and people do) I'll respond via that system.

I suspect it has a lot more to do with the concentration of mobile devs and FOSS types here, along with people who really can't understand that not everyone wants their phone to be something other than "Working out of the box."

Im just excited about a possible alternative to FB for this kinda stuff.

You need a Google Account to use Google Calendar.

Anyone can have an Apple Account whether or not they own an Apple Device.

In this case, too, you can create Invites on icloud.com on non-Apple devices. Including the webpage seems nicely responsive and can probably make them in an Android Chrome tab if you wanted.

The only remaining obstacle is that it isn't a free feature of an Apple Account, but requires an iCloud+ subscription. But that's useful for Apple Music and Apple TV+ and other products, too, many of which work just fine on non-Apple devices as well.

Fair points.

Ah yes the classic false dichotomy, that it either has to be closed/proprietary/locked down and "just works" or it can be open but unusable. In reality the two are completely orthogonal. There's nothing magical about publishing the source that suddenly changes the code or the product and breaks it. If Apple open sourced ever line of code they have tonight, would iPhones suddenly stop working?

So, what's stopping you from becoming Apple's competition? If a significant number of people crave your idea of FOSS and you have ideas to make a superior product, I'm sure the market will reward you.

Google account is still free while iCloud+ subscription is not.

That's a big difference.

Did you ever see any Linux laptop in a store? They do have some market share but never existed to the ordinary people.

Also, GNU/Linux phones exist (Librem 5 is my daily driver). However without Apple's budgets, you can't create the same smooth experience. You just can't compete with the duopoly.

So what you're saying is that alternatives do exist, but they aren't popular... that doesn't sound like a "duopoly" exists, it just sounds like Android and Apple cover the needs of the vast majority of people. I'm sure it's difficult to be part of a niche, but that doesn't mean that there's some conspiracy against you.

> I'm sure it's difficult to be part of a niche, but that doesn't mean that there's some conspiracy against you.

Yes, it does: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/. Purism tried to created their own smartphone not relying on Apple and Google and it was almost impossible to find the necessary chips. Nobody wanted to share the schematics or open the drivers. People are just locked-in into the duopoly. It's impossible to use popular apps without it, like Whatsapp or even Signal (!).