Apple Is a Duopolistic Predator, and I Know What Their Next Move Is

Disclosure: I own AAPL stock. I’m betting on the predator because I know exactly how they hunt.

I’ve built an ambient audio app. The concept is simple: with zero friction, you don’t have to DO anything, it tells you factual and compelling stories about the places you walk or drive through, whispered through your AirPods or your car stereo.

It’s live, on TestFlight, and let me tell you… it has been hellish trying to execute a “audio first” experience like I’ve envisioned. It’s been a thousand paper cuts, just one “no” after another from the platform itself. Swimming upstream, week after week, I’ve figured something out. Every “nope, Taleway, you can’t do that” restriction they threw at me wasn’t a bug. It was a blueprint.

Apple isn’t protecting my battery life. Or privacy. Apple is protecting its next trillion dollars.

The Murder Pattern

Apple has a playbook, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

F.lux gave your screen a warm glow at night. Apple strangled it in 2015. Night Shift appeared in 2016. Tile helped you find your keys. Apple crippled their Find My access in 2019. AirTags launched in 2021. Workflow automated your iPhone. Apple bought it, gutted it, then repackaged it as Shortcuts.

See the pattern? Kill, copy, claim innovation. Restrict, reject, reimplement. It’s called “Sherlocking”.

My app, Taleway, isn’t your run of the mill “stare at the screen and tap” thing. It’s context- and location-aware audio stories. It’s your own slightly snarky tour guide that works any place on the planet, discovering the hidden history, only-the-locals-know quirks and TIL moments. Drive through Cincinnati, hear about the abandoned subway tunnels beneath you. Walk past a fountain in Rome, learn its secret history. No planning, no tourist traps. Just put in your AirPods and go.

Except Apple said “nope”. Not directly, of course. That would be too honest. They did it the Apple way: death by a thousand API restrictions.

Location updates? You get them every 500 meters. Find My gets them continuously. Same battery, different permissions. Voice control? You have to say “Hey Siri, tell Taleway to tell me a story.” Apple just says “Hey Siri.” Background execution? Your app gets murdered for “battery efficiency” while Apple Music runs forever.

Every. Single. Restriction. Points. To. Something. Apple. Is. Building.

Repeat after me: “preferential API Access is a competitive advantage”. See? That wasn’t so hard. Now you, too, can work at Apple!

The Technical Smoking Gun

Let me show you what developers actually see. The code doesn’t lie.

Reverse engineers and researchers have documented the existence of private frameworks, which is how we know the hardware capabilities are there.

// What Taleway gets*  
CLLocationManager.significantLocationChangeMonitoring
// Fires every 500m, maybe, if iOS feels like it*

// What Apple uses internally*    
_CLLocationManager.continuousHighAccuracyLocation

// Private API. Try to use it = instant rejection*

That underscore? That’s Apple’s middle finger. The capability exists. The battery impact is identical. But only Apple gets to use it.

Here’s another fun one. Want to know when your user is walking versus driving? Apple knows. Their apps know. But you? You get to guess based on speed, except speed updates come… whenever iOS decides you deserve them. Usually after your user has already parked.

The voice situation is even more insulting. iOS can listen for “Hey Siri” continuously, processing audio on-device, using negligible battery. But third-party apps? We get to route everything through Siri like it’s 1985 and we’re asking the operator to connect our call.

“Hey Siri, tell Taleway to play a story about this place.”

You’re calling that a user experience? Noooope, that’s hazing.

Meanwhile, background audio (the thing podcasts apps supposedly do all day) is Russian roulette. Your app works fine in testing. Ship it to real users? iOS kills it… randomly. “Excessive battery use,” is the lame excuse. But Apple Music plays for 18 hours straight. Your app plays for 20 minutes and gets taken out back and disappeared.

The message is clear: Ambient computing is reserved parking. For Apple only.

The Platform Nobody Sees Coming

Here’s what took me too long to understand: AirPods aren’t earbuds.

They’re computers that happen to play music.

H1 chip. H2 chip. Accelerometers. Gyroscopes. Beam-forming microphones. Spatial audio processors. These aren’t headphone features. They’re sensor packages. Apple has deployed hundreds of millions of always-worn, socially acceptable computers, and nobody noticed.

Gen Z wears them 16 hours a day. Not listening to music! Just… wearing them. As fashion. As identity. Apple didn’t plan this cultural conquest. They stumbled into it selling $200 entry drugs to the iPhone ecosystem. Then ChatGPT happened. Then Claude. Suddenly, Apple realized they weren’t sitting on successful accessories. Apple is sitting on the only socially acceptable always-in-body compute platform at the exact moment ambient AI became possible.

Incidentally, sometime shortly after the last ice age, the iPhone was the same play. Everyone else was making “better” phones (read: thinner). But Apple comes along and makes the first computer that happened to make calls. Coming soon is the same shift, updated for the AI age: The computer isn’t in your pocket anymore. It’s in your ears.

Mark me. The iPhone will become what the iPod became (a legacy function absorbed into the bigger platform). You’ll probably still have a “compute brick” (an iPhone) in your pocket, sure. But its job will be powering the real interface - conversation, via your ‘pods.

The Roadmap Written in Rejections

Every dead app reveals Apple’s product pipeline. Here’s what’s coming:

2026: “Ambient Intelligence for AirPods” Everything Taleway does, but “magical.” Location-aware narratives, proactive suggestions, continuous context. The demos will be exactly what I’ve been building. The tech press will lose their minds.

2026-2027: “AirPods OS”
The platform declaration. Suddenly AirPods aren’t accessories (they’re “your most personal computer.”) Audio Apps ecosystem launches, but only for blessed partners initially. Everyone else waits.

2027: “Conversational Siri” Direct activation, custom capabilities, everything they’ve forbidden. But only through AirPods Pro 4 or newer. “For the best experience. For your privacy. For the children.”

2028: iPhone as peripheral The messaging shift completes. iPhone becomes the “companion device” to your AirPods. Just like Apple Watch needed iPhone… until it didn’t.

That’s the con. They’re not preventing bad apps. They’re preventing good ones that arrive before Apple’s ready to claim credit.

The Reckoning

This isn’t competition. Competition would be building a better app. This is using monopoly control to eliminate threats while mining them for R&D. It’s predation, and everyone knows it. It’s “Sherlocking”.

The body count keeps growing. Every innovative ambient app, dead or dying. Developers building for a platform that’s actively hostile to innovation unless that innovation has an Apple logo. We’re not customers of Apple’s platform. We’re its R&D department. Unpaid.

Google can’t save us. Android has the technical capabilities but not the cultural penetration. Nobody wears Pixel Buds as identity. Microsoft and others are trying leapfrog to smart glasses and it won’t work. Meta’s Ray-Bans are… I dunno. Just weird.

Sad to say it, but this war is already over. Apple won it before anyone knew it was being fought.

So I did the only rational thing: I bought AAPL stock. Every time Apple put up another absurd roadblock to a feature in Taleway, I bought more shares. Mangled my background location access? Buy. Forced me through Siri? Buy. Watching my app get killed right in front of my eyes for the fifth time for “battery usage” while Apple Music ran forever? Buy buy buy.

You can’t beat sociopaths. But you may be able to profit from them.

The Future Is Already Here

The computer in your ears already exists. Apple just hasn’t told you it’s a computer yet.

Every API restriction, every rejected app, every “battery efficiency” and “privacy” excuse… Lies. They’re not protecting users. They’re protecting the most valuable real estate in tech history: the space literally in your ears.

When developers like me hit these walls, we’re not encountering technical limitations. We’re seeing the borders of Apple’s next empire. “Don’t go here!” But… why? It’s clear, now.

I’m not angry that I couldn’t build my app the way I wanted. I’m an entrepreneur. We adapt. But I do get a little ticked off that Apple pretends it’s about privacy, battery life, user experience.

It’s really not. It’s about making sure that when the ambient interface finally arrives (when computing becomes truly intimate and ever-present) it has a familiar Apple logo.

Want proof? Go hit Taleway right now at taleway.xyz and use the contact form. Drop me a line. I will send you an invite to use my app. Experience what Apple will “invent” in two years. We built it. It works. Users love it. Apple’s APIs just make it barely functional instead of magical.

The revolution is already in TestFlight. Apple just hasn’t approved it yet.

Hey Tim, when you copy Taleway in 2026, at least spell our name right in the lawsuit.

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