[jonpaine]

A big part of Apple's product appeal is the ecosystem, and a big part of the ecosystem is that amazing features simply work, and work well. They don't have to be configured or hunted for. Taken a step further, the problems some of these new features solve don't even have to be fully apparent to the user.

To that end, Apple improves their ecosystem by making good features standard. Tim Cook mentioned that there were 1 billion Apple devices in circulation. How many of those do you think have users that were even aware of the existence of those two apps? Or even the problem that they address?

I'm not a fan of any bigCo squashing innovative software (and I'm certainly not defending it), but there's no question that in cases like this bringing that feature into the fold leads to a better user experience across the board. To those of us who knew the circumstances it might be cringeworthy, but for the other 98% of users it's just another advance in a progression of features that keeps the ecosystem's user-experience better than any other.

[riscy]

> Apple improves their ecosystem by making good features standard.

Only if you buy their latest devices. Case in point: I just updated to iOS 9.3 for the hue feature and I come to find out (by the fine print on their website) that it's not available for iPhone 5 users for no reason other than to force upgrades.

If they handled the Flux app situation fairly I wouldn't need to buy a new phone for such a simple but important feature.

[jonpaine]

I don't disagree with you. I'm not being an Apple apologist, just commenting why from their viewpoint it makes sense to bring the very best features into the fold of standard, native, functionality.