Apple will use it's dominant position to create lock in like how they did with iMessage instead of cooperating with other platforms on a common standard.
Oder friends and family are surprised when they want to video call over Facetime and find it hard to believe other people's phones don't have Apple apps.
The app allows iPhone users to create an event. Anybody on any device or browser can RSVP. The event can be shared as a link. Making an event invite app that only works for users on one platform would be pointless.
Also - non-Apple users have been able to join FaceTime calls via. A link for several years.
This product, much like iMessage and others, provides an inferior experience to non-Apple users. It aims to make other devices and operating systems look less capable and cheap.
iMessage also partially works with other phones. This doesn't change the fact that its intention is to create a lock-in effect, as evidenced by internal Apple emails.
There's nothing really wrong with Invites if you're happy to only have photos from people with iPhones or to let the music be exclusively chosen by Apple users, but you can't pretend it's a fair and equal system.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
Not being an asshole? It's normal instinct unless one's brain has been thoroughly eaten by competitiveness.
> Why is that bad?
Because in this, Apple is attacking the commons. They're trying to provide an alternative to normal invite system - one that's been established and battle-tested over decades, one that works okay-ish across any device, real or virtual, on any platform, and one that people know how to use. An alternative that gives some bells and whistles exclusively to the Apple users, and perhaps even is more ergonomic in practice. An alternative that overlaps with the commons just enough to perhaps get the significant chunk of Apple-first userbase to switch over, but purposefully doesn't overlap enough to work well for non-Apple users (as well as professional users).
Take commons, drive a wedge down the side, use it as lever for your massive userbase to push everyone else off it. Screw everyone else. Hell, even screw your own users too for having Android users (or Windows or Linux desktop users!) among family and friends. The next generation of users should remember that thou shalt only befriend and marry people from within your corporate community.
If they now make it possible to invite people in your radius they even get a share of dating apps.
And if the people who try Invites discover that it isn't, in fact, superior to this "normal invite system"—whatever you believe it to be—that you claim is "established and battle-tested," they won't continue using it and will go back to what they were doing before.
>An alternative that gives some bells and whistles exclusively to the Apple users, and perhaps even is more ergonomic in practice.
Do you believe that all vendors should be forbidden from shipping any new application or feature that doesn't offer full interoperability and feature parity with everybody else or is that a limitation you believe should be applied only to Apple?
Exclusivity is a basic part of business model. Look at PS4 with exclusive titles. Hell, look at your local store with exclusive products only available in their stores.
I would have agreed with you if Apple had done this for a basic feature like calling. But this sure is a privileged feature and there is nothing wrong in making it exclusive to iPhone (but they haven't you see).