And it’s never too early to start thinking about diversification. In our case, Sidecar hit our hardware product, Luna Display, pretty significantly but we’ve been able to stand on the other leg of our business, Astropad Studio, to keep us financially secure while we navigate what’s next. If Apple happens to threaten one of your products, it’s crucial to have other products to fall back on. Lesson #1: Think twice before cozying up to your platform provider (whether that’s Apple, Twitter, Facebook, or Google) because they’re the stealthiest and most powerful competitor. It turns out that they were… just not in the way we were thinking.

They also ordered thousands of dollar’s worth of our hardware, and we naively thought it was because they were interested in our product. Over the past few years, Apple routinely invited us to demo our products at their headquarters, and offered to help us out with whatever business and engineering challenges we faced. We admittedly got swept up in a false romance with Apple. But if your platform provider decides to step into your domain, it’s a tough battle to position your product against a free, native feature. There will always be infinite ways to differentiate yourself against other competitor companies via price, features, and target markets. In our case, we viewed Astropad and Luna Display’s biggest competitors as other second display and graphics tablet creators.īut all along, we really should have been worried about our platform provider, Apple. Watching Apple present Sidecar to the world was like seeing years of hard work flash before your eyes while someone else takes credit for it.Ī big misconception is that your main competitors are the other companies creating similar products to yours. For our team of just 13 people, it was devastating news. In June 2019, Apple announced a new feature in macOS Catalina called Sidecar that closely copied our product lines. We’re Astropad - a small, nimble, bootstrapped startup with products for creative pros like Astropad Studio and Luna Display. It’s oddly flattering and intensely infuriating, and I know this first hand because it happened to the company I work for.

It’s a phenomenon widely referred to as getting “sherlocked” (you can read more about how the term came to be here). At some point in the presentation, Apple will announce a new OS feature, while some developer watches in disbelief as Apple swindles their entire business. It’s pretty standard for at least a few third-party developers to get crushed during Apple’s annual press conference. This article has a one-year follow-up: Why Getting Sherlocked by Apple Was a Blessing in Disguise 6 Lessons We Learned the Hard Way

Sidecar and astropad studio