Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app?

It's going to be the same people, working on the same product, but now, it's going to unavailable via their cheif competitor. Tell me how on earth you can consider that not killing competition.

When I first read "killing their competition" I thought it meant killing competition in the form of weather apps. That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app. Only after re-reading that sentence a few times did I realize the OP meant killing Android.

That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.

> That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app

But now it won't have to pay for API access anymore, since they'll own the whole backend.

> Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app?

Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.

And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

Is it realy important that a greater number of people may someday use it in the medium term when in the short term there are less actual users and in the long term the potential is again less.

>And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

45% of ios users are well off Americans. Outside of the US 90% of phones are Android who won't be able to use it anymore.

> Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.

Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.

What’s stopping someone from now making a truly great Android weather app? If anything it allows for more competition.

My experience with Shazam is that it has got less good at identifying music since Apple bought it. My guess is that it now ONLY identifies music from the Apple Music catalog.

This suggests that Apple may only buy to augment their product line; whilst still making the core experience worse for everyone overall.

I’ll admit I’ve not done a proper study of post-acquisition Shazam. I’m going on casual observation here.

Where can I buy a Primesense-based USB RGBZ camera these days?

Are you suggesting that Apple bought Primesense because they wanted to kill the competition of USB RGBZ cameras?

RGBZ in general. They killed a market just to have a minor feature in their phones. Also keep in mind that Primesense's biggest precious licensee was an Apple competitor.

They’re adding rear facing depth sensor for use with ARKit and are known to have an AR headset in development. I think the new sensor works differently from Primesense (which used a grid projector and a camera instead of LiDAR?) but clearly Apple is doing more with this. I'd be shocked if they didn't have years worth of prototype phones with Primesense systems on the back.

Unfortunately this is still a very narrow vision of what is possible with RGBZ or just Z. You won't want to strap an iPad to a robot, or mount a bunch of iPads on your ceiling, or below your TV connected to your game console.

FaceID uses this technology?

Presumably the rear-facing LiDAR sensor in the new iPads as well, and I suspect those are basically a developer preview for the iPhone 12 Pro hardware so that improved ARKit apps can be ready for the fall