As iOS 18 drops, Apple kills 1Password, Grammarly, and those small, growing AI apps

It’s harrowingly fast how things are moving in the AI industry, even OpenAI boss Sam Altman is scared about it. It wasn’t a while ago when OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 “older” model was the model that powers ChatGPT. And now, we even have the latest GPT-4o, its most capable model yet, for the free version of the AI chatbot.

That happened when Apple announced iOS 18, a version of its OS that, for the first time, brings OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to your iPhones and iPads. A lot of AI features will natively be planted in your Apple devices, which also means that some of these smaller, growing AI apps will likely go into oblivion.

Take a look at 1Password, for example. The password manager app was popular among iPhone users, but now, as Apple launches its very own native password manager, folks may be thinking, “Why use a third party app instead?”

The same goes for Grammarly. The popular typing assistant comes with both free and paid, premium plans that now offer AI features and better suggestions.

But even then, as ChatGPT is coming to iPhones, Grammarly likely joins the laundry list of AI startups’ graveyard, because iOS 18 has its own Writing Tools. It’s built-in natively, and you can do everything that Grammarly can on apps like Mail, Notes, Pages, and others.

And this list keeps on going, probably even longer. Remember the Bezel app that lets you “show your iPhone on your Mac”? Well, Apple just said that you’ll soon be able to use your iPhone apps on Mac, and it works well beyond a simple phone-mirroring process.

Maybe betting big on AI features as a small company is a bad business. Ouch.