Hasn't this always been a risk for third-party developers - that the platform owner might incorporate popular third-party features to the main platform? I vaguely remember Microsoft Word used to have a third-party addon for a spell checker, then made it built-in - and got sued by the third-party developer. I think they lost though...
It has been going on forever. As lower levels of the OS get commoditized, OS providers have to provide more functionality if they want to continue making money.
Back in the day, people would buy graphics libraries to draw lines on the screen, buy utilities such as ZIP or defragmentation utilities, and each program had its own logic for printing, with each of them, at setup time, asking questions such as “what should I sent to you printer to get bold text?”, “how many characters on a line does your printer support?”, and “should I wait a bit longer between lines to make sure your printer is ready to accept new input?”
Now, of course, Apple doesn’t need to make money on their OS, but I think they are forced to move ‘up’ to compete with Microsoft.
