[HN Gopher] OpenAI acquires Sky.app
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OpenAI acquires Sky.app
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-10-23 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I've personally known Ari, the guy behind Sky, since the mid
| 2000s when he was a frequent visitor to the forum
| insanelymac.com, back when OSx86 was a big deal. Even back then,
| he really stood out and I'm glad he's continuing to make waves.
| rpwilcox wrote:
| To jog people's memory about Sky: yes this is the app created by
| former Shortcuts/Workflow.app people
| mentalgear wrote:
| And another consolidation in the space to make the big players
| even bigger, when actually it's hard time to break up the tech
| feudalism party.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Amreicans want to make the economy looks good, so they have to
| fake AI growth. To do that, they have to give OpenAIs a lot of
| money.
|
| OpenAIs have so much money they have to make bets.
|
| The best ways to make bets are: (a) do what others do: social
| video, app store, online shopping... (b) buy out other small
| promising companies so investors have no where else to look.
| mentalgear wrote:
| btw: Don't know what they think their competitive advantage is
| going to be with this. Either apple will just clone it, or more
| likely and quicker (and probably already done) there will be a
| better open-source version of this that let's you freely choose
| your local/cloud LLM model provider.
| tyre wrote:
| Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious. Siri
| still makes so many mistakes, Homepod can't answer anything
| substantial without "I've sent a link to your iPhone". If they
| simply let Claude back Siri, they'd be light years ahead of
| where they are now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We're _still_ where we were for the past 2 years: by far the
| best voice assistant available on the market is... Home
| Assistant wired to a SOTA LLM via API key.
| fnordsensei wrote:
| There is precedence for Apple waiting for technologies to
| mature before using them (last mover advantage), and then
| dominating by being the platform owner.
|
| Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their
| offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around
| being discontent with the currently available alternatives.
| Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.
| consumer451 wrote:
| My entirely unsubstantiated theory is that Apple is a company
| that would not want to release a product it can't control
| 100%. You can't control an LLM 100%, so here we are.
|
| "Hey Apple, why was Steve Jobs considered to be such a jerk?"
| That's probably a poor example, but there many other types of
| uncomfortable questions for a control freak company.
|
| Does that sound plausible to anyone else?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| This is for sure the case. Apple's core product DNA (Run
| like an appliance, simple and reliably) does not jive with
| the LLM at all.
|
| Now if only they listened to themselves and fixed their
| keyboard
| consumer451 wrote:
| Yeah, I think you nailed it better than I did, just the
| lack of predictability is likely enough.
|
| I should also point out that I use an iPhone, partially
| because Apple being a control freak can lead to great
| products. That was not meant as an insult to them.
| joomla199 wrote:
| I wanted to look up Japanese vocab easily with my voice while
| running. Wouldn't let me do it (it could show me dictionary
| pages but wouldn't speak the translation into my AirPods).
| However, I could look up English words just fine.
|
| So I had to set my Siri language to Japanese, and now I can
| look up English translations of Japanese words...though I do
| have to speak Japanese.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| > Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious.
|
| Plenty of us are glad. Look at Microsoft and Google tried to
| force feed users inmature broken LLM tech no one asked for
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Lol, I pay no mind who post stuff like that. They are
| clueless.
| seyyid235 wrote:
| I don't know how this will help but okay.
| an0malous wrote:
| > Disclosure: An investment fund associated with Sam Altman held
| a passive investment in Software Applications Incorporated.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Were there any revenue numbers for this acquisition?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Sky was never publicly available.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> We've always wanted computers to be more empowering,
| customizable, and intuitive. _
|
| Agreed
|
| _> With LLMs, we can finally put the pieces together._
|
| I think this is true
|
| _> That's why we built Sky, an AI experience that floats over
| your desktop to help you think and create._
|
| Never mind, hard pass
| wiseowise wrote:
| So it begins, they've acquired the first half. Now they just need
| to buy or fork .Net from Microsoft.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed (a bit) here. Others?
|
| _Sky, Natural Computing for the Macintosh_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121891 - May 2025 (4
| comments)
| stopachka wrote:
| Interesting! The folks who built this made what became Shortcuts
| on iOS. They are great hackers.
| MisterTea wrote:
| There are a few other comments like yours but it it doesn't
| mean anything to someone who doesn't use iOS. I had to look it
| up and it lets you create automated tasks using different iOS
| apps.
| stopachka wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Some more interesting background:
|
| The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate
| startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time.
| They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a
| default application that people actually like.
|
| One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to
| their app.
| conradev wrote:
| That makes me so happy to hear! I programmed my dad's old
| TI-82 to stay entertained in high school math, and I always
| wondered if kids would do that with Shortcuts.
|
| you can see where it all started back in 2014:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49JJnJ2i4oc
| jimhi wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, absolutely amazing
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Which afaik is something that has been in Android for ages.
| What's so special about the iOs implementation?
| basisword wrote:
| Does Android have it? Some Googling tells me it has third
| party apps which enable it but no built-in equivalent.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Shortcuts is about a decade old and was acquired by Apple 8
| years ago. It has hooks into the OS and allows apps to
| expose their own hooks for automation.
|
| Are you looking for a real answer or is this some weird
| defensive Android thing in response to someone describing
| the existence of an Apple feature?
| big_toast wrote:
| macOS exposes a lot of affordances to code/xrpc/services/etc
| that Shortcuts (and previously automator) used. They let you
| do basically anything you'd want on macOS programmatically,
| without going through accessibility frameworks, code signing
| and sand-boxing issues. iOS as well to some extent.
|
| Presumably if OpenAI is dog-walked/locked out of these by
| Apple at some point, they would be stuck in the
| Chrome/Chromebook feature jail. My guess is this gives OpenAI
| a team to put in charge to give them a chance to wedge
| themselves into the OS before Apple changes their mind or
| puts scare-box dialogs everywhere.
|
| Either that or there's nothing so complicated and OpenAI just
| wants to re-build this stack inside ChatGPT as quickly and
| well as they can.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Shortcuts is the strangest programming "language" that I make
| useful things in.
|
| My favorite is an automation that triggers when I turn on my
| motorcycle helmet's bluetooth module, it checks the time of
| day and starts playing my favorite type of music for riding
| at that time - hard rock at daytime, EDM/synthy music at
| night.
| troupo wrote:
| OpenAI is rapidly skating to where Apple should be, and isn't.
| johnzim wrote:
| Wow! I was wondering why they were so quiet! Great news
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Next step towards AGI?
| tartoran wrote:
| Perhaps Artificial General Illusion?
| luma wrote:
| I'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread
| I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which
| I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're
| trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS.
|
| Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic"
| does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?
| technocrat8080 wrote:
| Sky is macOS only. It essentially gives an LLM access to
| various system APIs coupled with a floating user interface that
| you can access on command.
| toephu2 wrote:
| "Software Applications Incorporated"... what a very generic
| company name
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I've been thinking more recently, do you think that an OpenAi-
| Apple merger will happen this cycle as it did with AOL-TimeWarner
| in the past? The thought being that an aging gatekeeper attempts
| to merge with an up-and-coming company when they feel it's too
| late to be relevant only for there to be another paradigm shift
| that obsoletes that decision. Though that is very much
| speculation.
| fourseventy wrote:
| I wonder how that would even work with OpenAI's weird 'non
| profit' shenanigans.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| MS was sizing them up a short time ago, I would imagine it'd
| be something strange like laying everyone off then hiring
| them again, or moving the IP to a child corporation Firefox-
| style
| rvz wrote:
| The AI grift must continue.
| technocrat8080 wrote:
| Seems pretty obvious Sky.app's functionality will land in the
| macOS ChatGPT app at some point. I wonder how Atlas fits into
| that story.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Maybe this is what smart actually useful Siri could become?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Congrats to the Sky app developers, so OpenAI believes that the
| future is in computer assistants?
|
| I don't buy this, it doesn't make sense to me that tools and
| interfaces made for human comfort and consumption is the right
| place to plug the AI to automate our lives.
|
| IMHO the computing is ripe for a re-do with everything already
| being enshitified and putting another lay to cover all the shit
| we are in isn't going to help anybody.
| jsheard wrote:
| > so OpenAI believes that the future is in computer assistants?
|
| Their acquisitions are all over the place, it's more that
| they're flinging everything they can think of at the wall to
| see what sticks. I don't get the impression they have any clear
| vision of the future beyond one where they are the biggest AI
| landlord collecting rent on whichever applications end up
| sticking the landing.
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(page generated 2025-10-23 23:00 UTC)