At this year's annual All Things Digital conference hosted by AllThingsD, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook, where he revealed that Apple is planning to open up additional APIs in the future, giving third party developers more control over iOS.
According to Cook, while Apple will open up more APIs, it will continue to protect customers from the "risk of bad experiences."
Always a fine line, or maybe not so fine. The customer pays us to make choices on their behalf. But you'll see us open up more.
When Facebook released its Home software for Android phones in April, Facebook director of product Adam Mosseri mentioned that the company was in ongoing talks with Apple about bringing Home (and its Chat Heads functionality) to iOS.
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According to Cook, while Chat Heads were not the ideal choice, Apple will allow third party apps to take over some iOS features in the future, allowing developers to build better and more versatile experiences.
During the question and answer session, Cook also mentioned that Apple had no issue with porting Apple apps to Android or other platforms should the need arise in the future, though such functionality doesn't make sense at the current point in time. Full coverage of Tim Cook's comments can be found here.
Top Rated Comments
The alternative is to have endless popups. IE, what should happen when you download a file? The answer, 99% of the time, is it should go into downloads, TYVM, get out of my way. Other OS's and browsers will present other options when you want to download a file. You as the user may not even understand the implications of certain choices.
If you don't like Apple making the choices for you, you should ditch iOS and get pure Android, and you should ditch OS X and get pure Unix or Linux. Then you can begin to understand the choices that Apple has made on your behalf and the time and frustration they've saved you in doing so. Or maybe you really like all that control, and you don't like Apple making those choices, in which case, good for you, stick with those other platforms where you can make your own choices.
I, for one, think the choices that have been made tend to be pretty good... there's a few exceptions... Mission Control really sucks and I can no longer organize 90% of my windows because I no longer have a grid of spaces to work with... the only organization I have is Spotify is always full screen to the right of my main space, and everything else is piled up in my main space.
Also, I absolutely do not pay Apple to make choices for me. That is profoundly asinine.
WHAT??? I can't see Steve saying half the stuff Tim says... porting Apple apps to Android?? Steve was probably rolling in his grave.