[malandrew]

There are different layers of the cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

The only layer Apple gets is SaaS and really only for its own apps/services. Apple keeps trying to do PaaS, but the anti-decentralization and specifically wall-garden approach of a seemless experience across all your Apple devices, but a sometimes intentionally crippled experience across other devices you own and a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

They might be able to get somewhere with HealthKit, since AFAICT, that may be largely a single-player experience (at least for a while). HomeKit on the other hand is a different story. The moment you move to a household with more than one person, they will need to either play nicely with other devices not their own or become increasingly seen as irrelevant. HomeKit only working with Apple devices is a dealbreaker for every home with at least one resident using a non-Apple device. Now that Android has a comparable experience to Apple, that's a fairly common phenomenon.

Google understands PaaS and SaaS.

Amazon understands IaaS and PaaS.

[anko]

I think Apple understands both PaaS (the new icloud stuff in ios8/yosemite) and SaaS (most of their offerings which were decent up until now).

I don't think IaaS really comes into this discussion at all - If they did it or didn't do it, it wouldn't matter because it doesn't change how many phones or devices they sell. IaaS is targeted at a niche - companies/people who can afford server admins.

Calling apple's experience "intentionally crippled" is also disingenuous. Maybe you can find a few examples ie. storage size costs, but generally, they are trading off user simplicity and security against user control.

Apple's not alone in this regard either. You might say Google "intentionally cripple" their open source version of android: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-....

What I find more appalling is that google pretended to be open to get a marketplace advantage.

As for Homekit - can't you just buy home automation devices that adopt more than one standard? I would love for apple to open up more of their new apis to other platforms, but what do they do when an android device's insecurity causes someone's house to be hacked?

[malandrew]

Providing only device APIs and few to no network APIs counts as intentionally crippled in my book. But as you said, Google does this as well, but not nearly to the same degree as Apple.

Google doesn't cripple the end-developers, it cripples the OEMs and their ability to take Android in other directions. This sucks because it hurts diversity of ideas that can succeed in the market. I don't like either Google's or Apple's approach here, but Google's is the lesser of two evils.

[drewcrawford]

I don't think you understand HomeKit, or Apple's view of it.

What's important to Apple is that you have a good user experience. As this applies to HomeKit, there are a few important requirements: battery life, and security/privacy. Keep in mind we are in the early days of home automation, and all it takes is one bad story about the hacker adjusting your thermostat to sour the market.

The only way to achieve those objectives is to exercise some control over hardware manufacturers. Sure, you may lose some compatibility this way, but that is infinitely preferable to a security risk in a poorly-understood environment without good security hygiene traditions. As a software developer who works with Bluetooth hardware, the Apple MFI certification process is the only hardware cert for home automation I am aware of. So even if I was an Android dev, I would prefer to purchase hardware that went through MFI as it gives me a basic level of confidence that somebody signed off on this.

Secondly HK explicitly includes measures for compatibility, including a type of "bridge device" that can translate between HK and a manufacturer's proprietary (or open, as the case may be) format.

Thirdly you have to consider HK's target audience. One of the headline features inside the HK Apis is the support for multiple homes. The people who are early adopters of HK in the near future are not hackers sharing an apartment. It's the Tim Cooks of the world where throwing out the existing automation hardware is not of any concern.

Sure, at some point it will become ubiquitous, and as the market matures news stories about the dangerous thermostat hackers will be less of a concern. But that's not this release, and it may not be within the next five years. That's more than enough time to create HK bridges and poly lingual lightbulbs that speak multiple APIs and so on.

[coldtea]

I already aknowledged Amazon has a fine IaaS in AWS, but that's not really what we were talking about. The cloud we were talking about is the SaaS part.

Apple doesn't do IaaS anyway (at all), so it makes no sense to compare offerings in this area with Apple's.

For the SaaS that Apple does, it has huge successes with iCloud and iTMS and the App Store.

We might find them klunky or whatever (compared to what? Google Play? Kindle's sync?), but if it was a third party company called iTunes that had the #1 music store in the U.S, it would be hailed as a huge success in itself. And for Apple it's just a byproduct, and coming from a company with no roots in the music business at all when it started it.

>a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

At least Apple has the "seamlessly between Apple devices" right. There are platforms that even between devices of that one platform the sharing experience is subpar.

But, as someone who works with Windows and Linux too, and has an iPhone and a cheap Android phone, I really don't see any platform that does this cross-platform sharing thing any better ("first fiddle").

How's sharing from Android to iOS or Windows Phone or PC any better?