vanfruniken

Talking about holdouts, in Belgium, only one major bank (Fortis), and a few small internet outfits, are NOT holdouts.
There is an abundance of individual bank apps for payments, as wel as a few dedicated apps that are pushed by the major debet card companies (payconiq, bancontact), but no general acceptance of Apple Pay whatsoever.

Apple is very slow on the draw for several of its technologies:
- Apple Pay (worldwide rollout)
- FaceTime (SJ: we will open it up for others, so it becomes a standard)
- HomeKit
- Apple TV,
even now Apple can't count on repeat performances of late entries in the market like when the iPod blew away the MP3-player scene.
A good thing that the appStore and Music are getting more worldwide exposure now.

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About the appStore:
  for international use, the appStore review system is still fatally flawed, because users can only see the user reviews from the LOCAL APPSTORE. How weird is this?

In smaller appStores, (EVEN OF SMALL ENGLISH-LANGUAGE COUNTRIES), users won't be able to access statistically relevant reviews that they can easily read and understand.

All it takes is a user preference for the AppStore.app where one can select the appStores/languages.

I for one am able to read Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish reviews. The most important community is the English language one.

After all, most apps are country and language-agnostic: Unless they are developed for local use, they remain relevant for a very large community, that we are now missing completely.

Just too bad Apple Pay isn't available for most cards in Belgium (even though some major stores already accept it).
In Apple's defense, it must be said that our banks are playing 'hard to get".
Maybe non-US Apple Pay is just a hobby, allowing other players to grab more and more market share, leaving much of the market to Android or a plethora of banking apps.
For Apple TV we're still waiting for a unified, channel-less, platform.

My biggest concern is: what does this all mean for in-house developed apps?
Our company's operation depends on in-house software.

So now Microsoft and Google are colluding in further moves to kill WebKit.
Google already moved away from WebKit a while ago, with Chrome quietly dominating browser market share, using its search engine and Google login to trick people into setting Chrome as the default browser.
Google does also understand and has been applying "embrace, extend and extinguish" tactics more fully than Microsoft could ever imagine.
Too bad Firefox hasn't reached that status, being the logical independent open source alternative of choice. IMHO they have made major unexplainable incompatibility choices and bugs in their product. The fact that Chromium constantly try to counteract other browsers by introducing covert and undocumented incompatibilities of its own, doesn't help either and is very reminiscent of another tactic used earlier by Microsoft for dominating the business computing world.

$30/mo for a "skinny bundle" won't be competitive in Europe. Maybe $15. One can get a skinny satellite bundle for €10/mo.

Why the heck are DECT phones still in the stone age? Shouldn't they sync with Apple's ecosystem and integrate in all possible ways?
I know, most people don't need landlines any longer, but it will be some time till these have disappeared, especially in business settings.

Concerning CarPlay: I am really upset that car brands charge additionally for CarPlay-capable electronics in their new cars, if they carry it at all (notwithstanding the extensive list of automakers which claim they have joined CarPlay). And Apple should be upset as well.
After all they have given the carmakers a proper standard, instead of leaving the car manufacturers creating a cacophony of system specs.
 (Similarly, Google should be upset as well, for similar reasons. Still 2 standards is better than every car maker inventing its own.)

Interestingly, it is Samsung who makes the GPS systems that support Apple's CarPlay and Android's whatever.