Very happy to see this
You're paying for Apple Invites whether you realize it or not. There's immense value in making their platform more sticky.
In a few years you'll read articles about uncool Android kids not getting invited to parties. And that's your answer.
One of these behaviors is way more insidious.
I'm not stuck to Apple's platform, I'm quite happy here. Apple services aren't drenched in ads end to end. Apple's services aren't constantly asking for nickels and dimes; it's one charge, every month, for a buffet of services that are regularly added to and actually improved, making them distinct from... fuck, the rest of the Internet basically, which seems to boil down to a revolving door of stupidly named services backed by VC funding that get popular, quickly, because they don't charge anything and aren't drenched in ads, and then slowly they add the ads, but there's an ad free tier for not much money, oh but now there's ads in that tier, which is also more expensive, and then the service shuts down because they didn't hit 60 billion users before their runway ran out, but there's this new service...
And while I'm certain they do some spying and whatnot to facilitate targeted ads, they at least pay lip service to my privacy, and my experiences developing stuff for their hardware tells me that at least there is a whiff of security to their hardware. There are a lot of things as a developer I'm straight up not allowed to do.
The "insidiousness" of Apple's plan so far seems to be, largely, making damn good products that people want to use, and backing them up with cloud services that work well. I wish more tech firms took that approach to be totally honest.
In exchange, FB gets access into your offline graph: people you interact IRL but not on social media. They can approximate relationships through Plus 1 invites.
Work in an instagram component for sharing photos / albums / reels from an event. You’re pumping right back into the FOMOmachine.
Most things that just charge a subscription are good and get better.
Nowadays when I'm looking for a new software product or service with a good number of options, first thing I do is check how they're funded.
Funny thing is that teams are catching on to this! Very recently I've seen two products have a separate "Are you VC backed?" heading in their landing FAQ (both answered with "no"). I can see this becoming a trend - if I were to create a product, I'd do the same.
Apple has a multi-billion dollar ads business. You are still the product, even if the execution isn't as brazenly anti-consumer as Google and Facebook.
No, but they have made privacy a key selling point of their platform and communicated that clearly to customers.
Just because they never have formally stated “oh and by the way this increases the price of our products by X/unit”, doesn’t mean that feature isn’t included in the cost.
I'm an Apple user, and it serves me well, but it absolutely uses really sinister dark patterns to separate me from contacts in the Android world.
Like I've heard of teenagers giving each other shit for it, I have never ever once in my life, myself or any person I've worked or been friends with, gives it a second thought. And if I actually heard someone attempting to make this into a thing I would judge them incredibly harshly.
I don’t mind it at all, nor would I care, but it others people that don’t have an iPhone (especially teenagers), and they also suggest this in their explanation (that a green bubble means the chat is no longer encrypted, even though WhatsApp and RCS exist).
It’s a dark pattern that they’ve rightly been criticized for, but no-one has thus far cared enough to do something about it.
The only problem is services where hosting costs need to be paid somehow and network effects mean that for-profit competition will win the market even if the product is inevitably enshittified. Doesn't matter how good your open and community funded event platform is if Apple and Facebook can afford to shove their solution in front of everyone you want to interact with.