There's a remarkable, vivid story behind this, and perhaps one day I’ll tell it. Today isn't that day, so I'll just share a little context before I turn my attention back to our users, partners and team. We're busy and there's much to do.
The tl;dr is we're suing Apple on patent infringement and antitrust grounds. Apple hopped on Camo when it was still in beta, encouraged us to go all in, had thousands of staff run it internally, nominated it for an innovation award, and made all sorts of promises about how they'd help. Yet once we'd proven it could be done and users loved it, they took it and built our features into a billion iPhones, Macs, displays, iPads and TVs, while shutting us out and preventing additional interop we could provide to the ecosystem. I found myself at WWDC '22 seeing our technology demoed, now as Apple’s “Continuity Camera,” by members of a team who'd previously been in my dms telling me they used Camo every day at work.
It was fascinating to see Apple’s playbook in the aftermath. I received messages of contrition from senior people, unprompted, and was taken out for a chat where they acknowledged the issue, telling me they took it seriously and would address it. For the most part, they were careful not to commit very much to writing.
They thanked me for "not spitting the dummy"—a metaphor in which, as I understand it, I'm a baby. The hope seemed to be that I'd either throw a tantrum that would blow over quickly, or that I might be rocked gently to sleep in my pram. That rocking took the form of “let’s follow up in a fortnight”, which turned into “no updates yet but soon”, and dragged on for nearly two years until they felt confident I was asleep in my pram and told me they didn't want to buy the company. This puzzled me: I'd never offered to sell it.
There are many good people working at Apple. Kind people who value innovation, craft, and Apple’s stated position of "do the right thing, even when it's not easy." Messages and coverage of our demise started coming the moment Continuity Camera was announced. The rational response might have been to throw that tantrum or fold quietly, but I believe in our mission. We care deeply about the experience our users have on Apple platforms, and while our capacity to invest in those platforms would be much greater had this not happened, we've continued to make our mission a reality for them. We chose a third path – talking to users, building partnerships, and shipping – and despite the setback, grew the business in other ways.
Go back in time: "phone as webcam" tools were clearly products and not features for the years they languished, unexamined. They had poor UX, complex pairing, painful drivers, slowed your computer, and had no controls on the computer side. Instead, you had to fiddle with your phone which often necessitated using the inferior selfie camera. Worse, they were barely usable, relying on "virtual cameras" which Zoom, Webex and others blocked at the time. Our continued innovation involved seeing beyond the status quo that had existed for years, reinventing the format, and successfully lobbying the industry to allow virtual cameras.
When Apple shipped Continuity Camera — after the pandemic, and after we'd spent two and a half years investing in Camo with their encouragement — I was puzzled. Connecting two devices and seeking out a mount didn’t seem like the sort of setup that Apple would lean into. A global pandemic had been underway, and I figured that if Apple was focused on user needs, recognised the problems with their cameras and the move to remote and hybrid work, they might seek to rapidly replicate innovation, perhaps even with a point release, while also putting in play some multi-year initiative to lead with the cameras in MacBooks. But they did neither: 2020 and 2021 passed, the pandemic wound down, the sense of urgency diminished, and as I write this the webcams in many Windows devices still outclass the one in my MacBook. If they weren't going to tackle video holistically, why bother cutting our legs off? The answer soon became clear: we’d not come between Apple and users, we'd come between Apple and their walled garden.
Apple’s goal wasn't to make Continuity Camera great, it was to hinder innovation that levelled the experience between platforms. The story I'd hear again and again is how seamless interop between iPhone and Apple devices is a significant sales driver, supported by keeping Android, Windows and other platforms locked out. Our response, it was implied, should be to price up and reposition Camo as a product for professionals, or to pivot. Conveniently, neither response would involve competing with Apple, or shipping a product that would benefit consumers.
The question our suit asks isn’t really about Camo, it’s whether there’s room for developers to stimulate the building blocks of the digital experience, or whether we must limit ourselves to building platforms that stand alone in the cloud, or ideas that are too insignificant to duplicate and freeze out. Apple likes to boast about the scale and breadth of developers in its ecosystem, but, as I heard muttered at WWDC: outside a few industries, app developers are mostly subsistence farming on the App Store. Rather than competing with us, Apple deployed a series of obstacles to tilt the playing field, infringed our IP, and did so in service of preventing competition from rival platforms. It’s a fractal of anticompetitive behaviour, denying the 6bn people that use mobile devices and computers a better, more productive future.
From the techniques behind mobile forensics and the privacy frameworks that shaped Apple's own positioning, to the interop patterns that became Continuity Camera, our work over the last 18 years has quietly shaped how phones and computers talk to each other. Apple has benefited from this more than once. Should what's between users and the web be left in the hands of Apple and a small number of platform owners, eager to feed us a diet of glass, AI promises, and stolen innovation?
We want to make great software that touches the lives of billions of people, moves the future of work and play forward, and helps the world be happier and more productive. All we need is a level, legal playing field.
Wish us luck.