Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC 2024) was all about ‘Apple Intelligence’ announcements. And, the internet just couldn’t seem to get over it.
While intense conversations centred around the security and privacy of Apple Intelligence, with Elon Musk even threatening to ban the devices at his companies, there’s no denying that with its impressive AI reveals, the company might be rendering various apps and startups useless all at once!
Apple Intelligence on the Hunt to Kill Apps
Unlike what some are saying, Apple Intelligence is not a ChatGPT wrapper and Apple did develop a lot of its own AI. The LLMs built into Apple Intelligence deliver deep natural language understanding, making so many of our day-to-day tasks faster and easier.
It powers brand-new writing tools that can rewrite, suggest, proofread, and summarise text for you whether you’re working on an article or a blog post.
With AI being deeply integrated into the Apple OS, you can access these tools automatically across mail, notes, Safari, Pages, Keynote and even your third-party apps.
Many are calling it a hard time for writing tools like Grammarly, QuillBot, copy.ai, and more. Then, we have Genmoji, or AI-generated emoji. Leveraging the power of Apple Intelligence, now you can create new emojis on your device for any moment or emotion.
You can literally type it like a prompt and the diffusion model will create that new emoji from scratch in the same style like all the other emojis. Now, with this by their side, why would anyone use apps like Newji and Bitmoji?
The ‘Image Playground’ feature allows users to generate images on-device and share them across apps, making it ideal for quickly responding to your friends with just the right image. Since Apple Intelligence understands personal context, AI-generated images can be personalised to users. So, you can also create illustrations with your face in them.
This serves the purpose of many GenAI image generator apps.
While impressive, the images are not yet close enough to those generated by Midjourney or Dall-E as these apps are more accurate to realistic images whereas Apple seems to have taken a playful route. Another interesting feature, Image Wand, lets users convert rough sketches into high quality images.
Built into Apple’s photos app is a cleanup tool which will identify background items. It will let you circle items you don’t like in your photos and just get rid of them super quick, challenging apps like Facetune.
Additionally, Apple went from not having a calculator to having the best calculator in iPads overnight, surpassing all the other such apps.
This clearly seems to be the end of all the calculator apps out there.
Source: X
The Calculator app on iPad also introduced the Math Notes feature. You can use the Apple Pencil to write out expressions and have the Calculator app solve the equation in your notes! With this, notepad calculator apps like Soulver will have a hard time staying relevant.
With the new improvements in the WatchOS, Apple seems to be going after fitness apps like Whoop, Athlytic, Strava, and more. And, with hiking routes and directions now native in Apple Maps, it’s a direct competition to apps like AllTrails.
Apple now lets you record your call on iOS 18. You can easily transcribe your calls, turn them into summaries, and share them across your apps and emails. So, there’s no need to download a separate app anymore to record and transcribe a phone call. This makes apps like TapeACall irrelevant.
MacOS also finally got window snapping, making third-party apps like Spectacle, Magnet, and Rectangle redundant.
The new iPhone mirroring feature lets you put your iPhone right on your Mac and use any app. This might be the end of apps like Bezel.
You can now tap to pay for Apple Cash in iOS 18 without a phone number or email. This feature might hurt apps like Venmo, Revolut, and CashApp.
Finally, now that Apple Intelligence will allow Siri to have on-screen awareness and take actions on a user’s behalf, and, it might be game-over for Humane and Rabbit as well.