The reality is that Apple doesn't need them and their company was built on a single feature. It sucks, but the harsh reality is that most startups today are just that—features. They aren't companies. They aren't businesses. They are a missing feature to another product.

Even companies like Spotify become redundant once someone like Apple decides to get into the game. They can hang on for a while because of their service, loyal fanbase, or particular implementation–but they can no longer grow. All of the growth as a result of new users and population growth just ends up going to the Apple product.

Companies are about growth, and if someone like Apple can throw their hat into the ring and completely freeze your growth then chances are you weren't really a company to begin with.

Much of the startup world is based on selling before people figure this out.

Does Flux have a real business? Do they make any money? Just because they created something doesn't mean they have a company.

It's a closed-source color temperature changer on a timer. I don't think it's gotten any new features in years, and they didn't patent this feature so sucks to be them.

Their main page:

> f.lux is patent pending. Do you make a cell phone, display, lighting system, or other cool sleep tech, and want to talk about collaboration? Email us: support@justgetflux.com

My point is that Apple doesn't need them. At all. Whether they are a company or a product or whatever they call themselves. They are now irrelevant.

As Steve Jobs said: "You're a feature, not a product."

How did Apple "fuck them"? f.lux depends on APIs that are not public, and probably never will be. There is no legal way for f.lux to operate on iOS short of being distributed as open source and compiled by every customer (the same mechanism they tried to abuse a few months ago to distribute a precompiled binary). Since f.lux cannot be distributed for iOS to begin with, Apple's not doing anything wrong by building the feature into the OS.

Am I wrong? I don't think I am. If I were a f.lux developer, given the reality that f.lux will almost certainly never be allowed to distribute on the iOS App Store, I'd be happy that Apple decided the functionality was useful enough to put into the OS. It's not like they're charging money for f.lux anyway, so there's no lost revenue here.

It's completely legal to operate on iOS, it's just against the App Store rules. They made it available to jailbroken users starting with the 3G iPhone and have a pretty strong following.