By Dan Moren for Macworld

October 6, 2017 6:13 AM PT

Apple’s relaxing its third-party standards—and that’s a good thing

Apple hasn’t always been a company that plays well with others. More often, it seems to enter into grudging arrangements with others–Motorola’s involvement in the ill-fated ROKR phone comes to mind–or form tenuous relationships that act as stopgaps until Cupertino can afford to cut the other party loose. (See, most recently, the company’s abandonment of Imagination, which up until then had made the GPUs for most of iOS devices.)

But in cases where the company is trying to encourage others to buy into Apple’s ecosystem, it’s been somewhat more welcoming–as long as it’s clear that Apple is the big dog in that relationship. The company has notoriously high standards, and it expects other firms to meet them if they want in.

Recently, however, Apple seems to be relaxing strictures on some of its technology platforms, seemingly with the intent of making it easier for third parties to develop products that work with Apple’s own. This bodes well for the future of those technologies–because without third-party investment, they’d likely be lying fallow.

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