
Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad and iPhone - gerosan
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/22/apple-has-acquired-workflow-a-powerful-automation-tool-for-ipad-and-iphone/
======
canistr
Call me pessimistic, but how likely is this acquisition by Apple going to
result in them integrating it directly into iOS versus completely shutting
down in the future?

Perhaps Apple is using the acquisition strategy as a method to shut down an
app getting around iOS's "preferred workflow" and UX model. Sort of a strategy
taken by Microsoft, Google, and Apple whereby they buy competitors, claim to
leave the service running, but ultimately shut them down so it doesn't compete
with their main product (see: Sunrise, Acompli, Sparrow, Timely, etc.)

~~~
tyre
Apple actually has a surprisingly good track record with acquisitions. Off the
top of my head:

NeXT -> OS X

LaLa -> iTunes Match

Siri -> Siri

My guess is that Apple saw a useful product that should be a part of the core
of iOS.

~~~
untog
I think there's some survivor bias in your list. I remember Apple acquired a
public transit app (Embark, I think) and I'm not sure the fruits of that were
ever known. Apple Maps has public transit features but it's a shadow of what
that app provided.

~~~
davidwhodge
I am one of the Embark founders. I'm no longer at Apple.

Our acquisition actually ended up with the spirit of our product living on in
a way that I am proud of.

At Embark, we innovated by taking a regionally nuanced and tailored transit
App and giving it scale. When Embark operated from 2008 to 2013, there were
small bespoke apps and there were larger more generic experiences (like
Google) and we filled a void in between.

Apple's approach was quite similar. Like Embark, Apple Maps Transit has a more
regionally tailored experience than many bespoke transit Apps out there, but
they're also able to bring it to scale. It's now at a scale we never got close
to reaching at Embark.

If you're curious, Apple talks about their city-by-city approach in this WWDC
video.
[https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/241/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/241/)

~~~
matt4077
I seem to remember an incredibly nerdy and thoroughly enjoyable article about
the arcane details of drawing subway lines. It was written, IIRC, by a startup
that had automated the process of optimising these maps, only to have Apple
launch their maps – which had brute-forced the problem by doing it manually.

~~~
davidwhodge
Yeah it was by the Transit App guys. They do good work. Chronologically,
Apple's transit maps launched first.

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hyperbovine
> Workflow won an Apple Design Award in 2015, with Apple Accessibility
> engineer Dean Hudson waxed ecstatic about the way that it handled
> accessibility. “When I first saw the app, I was just like man, this
> accessibility is cray-cray. This is off the charts!”

Wow.

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
I think this is the strongest indicator that the won't axe the product.

~~~
simonh
I think that's he strongest indication is that they made the app free. Why
would they want to massively boost the user base of a product they intend to
axe?

------
kainolophobia
I love that Workflow was started at a hackathon.

Source:
[https://mhackswinter2014.devpost.com/submissions/20204-workf...](https://mhackswinter2014.devpost.com/submissions/20204-workflow)

~~~
dejawu
I was there! I remember seeing them win. Blew us all out of the water.

------
futurix
Latest update of Workflow that came out earlier today axed support for Google
services and Uber...

~~~
rcarmo
And Pocket. Two of my daily workflows ruined already.

~~~
intoverflow2
It's almost like building up professional tools and work patterns on top of
the iOS platform is a terrible idea or something.

~~~
zepto
Explain your logic?

~~~
intoverflow2
Apple's attitude to third party devs aside the system is broken for
professional work from the get go. It's entirely locked down and siloed.

I recently had to fix some issues with my parents iPad and it was a hell of a
eye opener into why it's a terrible idea to rely on these devices at all.

So my mother does painting as a hobby and recently has got into using Brushes
(2010 Apple Award Winner), at some point her iPad decided to update itself to
iOS 10 (note you cannot disable updates anymore, only postpone them) and was a
bit surprised she could no longer open any of the paintings she'd made in the
app over the last 3 years. I tried to update the app, it's the latest version

I tried to open them > crash, tried to email them to myself > crash, set up a
dropbox account to sync them off the device > crash.

I look online and find this app despite having won awards and being used by
famous artist David Hockney is no longer updated, but good news it's open
source so someone else has taken up the job of updating it to run on
"""modern""" iOS, so I install Brushes Redux, it works but none of her
paintings are in it. So 3 years of work is on the device, we have a version of
the app that should be able to open that work, but we can't because all files
are siloed within app.

Long story short after 5 hours of trying to sort this out I finally used a
very dodgy looking app to pull the hidden files out of the old brushes app and
into the new one. Let's just hope Hockney manages to figure this out too or
millions of pounds worth of artwork might be lost for good.

I use software in my day to day work way older than this brushes app but this
scenario will never be a problem in my work because my OS isn't locked down,
siloed and can disable updates.

~~~
zepto
Thanks - this is an unusually coherent and detailed reply on this subject.

------
acomjean
Well since Sal Soghoian was let go and the mac automation group shut down[1].
As a mac user this isn't comforting

1 [https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-
sogho...](https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-soghoian/)

------
seanmcdirmid
They have had similar tools in the past (automator, quartz composer) and they
habitually have abandoned them despite of their success. Why are they making
this move now?

~~~
tekklloneer
Those tools weren't successful by Apple-sized metrics.

------
pkamb
[https://twitter.com/viticci/status/844696444787445761](https://twitter.com/viticci/status/844696444787445761)

~~~
glhaynes
(For those unaware, Viticci's is the name that sprang into every "power" iOS
user's head when they saw this news. He writes often and well about using iOS
devices as "computer replacements" and uses Workflow extensively. c.f.
[https://www.macstories.net/stories/one-year-of-ipad-
pro/](https://www.macstories.net/stories/one-year-of-ipad-pro/))

~~~
MBCook
It wouldn't surprise me if he's one of the biggest users in the entire world,
or even uses it more than some of the people who made it. Following him is the
only reason I knew what this app is.

------
cstrat
I've had Workflow on my phone for years but have never found any reason to use
it. Things that I wanted to do were just out of reach. Someone else mentioned
in here changing wifi networks... but also things like: enabling/disabling
bluetooth, scheduling mute and dnd, scheduling a text message, scripting auto
replies to texts based on received texts etc...

Hopefully this changes all of that!!

~~~
aryehof
This echoes my experience and thoughts exactly.

~~~
wsinks
echo me too me too

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Ezhik
I wonder if it'll result in just Workflow alone being able to access all the
good stuff, like how Swift Playgrounds today is the only iOS coding app with
the ability to fork().

------
djrogers
Oddly enough, I had a premonition about this happening a few weeks ago. I was
thinking about how powerful iOS can be with simple workflow-like scripting,
and how much better it would be for iPad productivity if workflow were a
'native' solution.

This is really really great news!

~~~
cstrat
Yeah I am excited by what might come from this.

------
filleokus
Could this be a response to the whole "Apple is ignoring the pros"-narrative
(albeit planned, I'm not saying Apple is acquiring companies based on just som
bad press)?

And yes, yes, we want a MBP with 32 GB ram and a new Mac Pro and all other
kinds of stuff, but I still feel there is somewhat of an overlap between the
Workflow crowd and the "ignoring the pros"-crowd.

~~~
erik_seaberg
Pros are probably not comforted by an iOS acquisition after disbanding the
team they already had working on macOS automation.

~~~
cstrat
(I don't know enough about the team they disbanded - just my thoughts here)

Could this be a sign that the team was not up to scratch and this acquisition
is to replace them?

------
dmerrick
This is so exciting! If it's an official Apple app, it will get access to all
kinds of powerful things that other apps can't do.

Finally a way to mute my phone when I'm on a certain wifi network, and other
things IFTTT only wishes it could do.

~~~
zardo
And of course, it must lose access to all things that Apple finds threatening.

~~~
zepto
Or things that feel threatened by Apple

------
bitmapbrother
Best part? It's free now. Worst part? If you had any Google workflows they
probably don't work anymore.

------
nathanvanfleet
I find it kind of weird that this is so similar to things like Automator and
AppleScript. Which are things that Apple has never really put a lot of work
into. They introduce it with sparse features and then it just stays that way
forever. Apparently they already released a new version of the software that
removes integrations which work with Google etc. So it's typical Apple,
they're pulling back any features that aren't helping with Lock in and that's
about it.

------
bootload
_" Providing hundreds of actions that interact with the apps and content on
your device, Workflow opens up infinite possibilities of what you can do with
your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch."_

Interesting that Apple is looking at meta-tools ordinary users can program to
organise their workflow over more applications. [0]

[0] [http://my.workflow.is/docs/introduction-to-workflows-and-
act...](http://my.workflow.is/docs/introduction-to-workflows-and-actions)

------
citrusui
Looks like the Workflow Gallery is completely unavailable, not just closed for
new submissions. However, existing Workflow URLs appear to be working if you
wait long enough for them to load:
[https://workflow.is/workflows/ca14840de5e542c88ceaad0f733f8d...](https://workflow.is/workflows/ca14840de5e542c88ceaad0f733f8df8)

~~~
conradev
how about now

------
kornish
Congrats to the Workflow team!

------
mindcrash
Congratulations to Ari and the rest of the team!

You've come a long way dude!

\-- mindcrash (your former partner in crime at MacHeist)

------
amelius
> a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings
> of commands to automate tasks

I'm curious, how do they access functionality in other apps? Does iOS provide
an API for that? Do the apps somehow cooperate? Or did they hack into the iOS
kernel?

~~~
chatmasta
Workflow uses urlschemes mostly, but at least one co-founder (Conrad Kramer)
has a background in reverse engineering and jailbreak tools, which probably
helped him discover undocumented urlschemes in apps. Here's a great
presentation he gave on reverse engineering lyft:
[https://realm.io/news/conrad-kramer-reverse-engineering-
ios-...](https://realm.io/news/conrad-kramer-reverse-engineering-ios-apps-
lyft/)

------
cafebeen
Reading about Workflow makes me wish HyperCard were still around. If all of
iOS was essentially a HyperCard stack, this the kind of automation provided by
Workflow would possibly be more natural and powerful. I hope this is a sign
that Apple is moving away from the hard line between users and programmers,
but maybe that's too optimistic.

------
andyh2
Congrats Workflow team!

------
Jonovono
hah I emailed one of the guys on the team awhile back to ask him for help
about how to dissect an iOS app after watching his video about reverse
engineering apps. He was super helpful! Awesome to hear this!

------
intrasight
Cool. Apple does need such a tool in their ecosystem. The problem is that
Apple isn't really well regarded in terms of their cloud tools. Will be
interesting to see if they nurture it or kill it.

~~~
kornish
Workflow isn't a cloud tool – it's an automation tool for iOS.

~~~
intrasight
Local automation makes no sense.

~~~
detaro
why not?

~~~
intrasight
Because when your device is off, your automation doesn't run

~~~
detaro
Which is completely fine for automation of things on said phone, or that are
only accessed from it.

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benguild
My guess is that this app would have been hurt by an upcoming policy or
developer change.

~~~
benguild
Why did this get downvoted? Haha... I'm excited about this acquisition, but
Apple has been seemingly against the URL handler usage by third-party apps
since having been abused by advertisers.

Also, usage of these has been limited in recent iOS releases.

Anyway, yeah.

~~~
simonh
It got downvoted because not only didn't Apple shut down the app, they chose
to massively boost its user base by making it free. Not a policy very
consistent with discouraging its approach.

~~~
benguild
So you're confident that they won't replace the URL handler behavior with
something else?

~~~
simonh
I've got no idea. Conceivably they could come out with a new approach and
transition Workflow to it by having it support both mechanisms. That might be
easier to do and be less disruptive to users if the app is in-house. But even
if they do introduce a new mechanism, existing apps would still have to adopt
it which would take years.

So absolutely Apple could introduce a new mechanism, but their buying and
encouraging adoption of Workflow is a strong indication to me that they have
no intention of deprecating the URL mechanism any time soon.

~~~
benguild
I agree here. If they do have an idea for improved inter-app automation or
"dialogue", this would be a great example case and implementation of it. Plus
this team's knowledge in this field could help guide what's needed, and also
help out with Siri stuff to do on-the-fly "workflows".

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dalacv
Bought for the patents

~~~
MBCook
What patents are those?

------
brilliantcode
Congratulations. But there's one critical skill that lot of us here will not
have.

Luck.

There's probably a dozen automation tools out there. There are dozen chat and
dating apps as well.

Yet all the effort and attention is focused on becoming a lottery ticket.

~~~
macintux
Luck plays a huge role in everything, but by all accounts this team created
one of the best apps to grace the App Store. This wasn't a generic automation
app.

~~~
MBCook
Agreed. It may have been luck that they were successful at first (I honestly
have no idea), but it seems very clear that they took whatever advantages they
had and how to execute on them to continue to make a great product and keep
improving it. By the time you get to today I think it's fair to say they
earned their place. They're pretty far past where luck alone would take you.

~~~
brilliantcode
Local Man Discovers Hindsight Bias, Shocked By It's Accuracy.

