One of the innovative features of The Browser Company's mobile web browser, Arc Search, is the ability to search the web on your behalf and return a summary of what you find in your search, rather than a traditional set of search results. The “Browse for me” feature is one of several ways the company is leveraging AI to give you a new way to search the web. Another, “Pinch to Summary,” displays an AI summary of an individual web page. But these AI features could also be the target of Apple's latest “Sherlock” endeavor, a term that refers to how Apple has historically borrowed ideas from the developer community to flesh out its own apps and OS features.
The term originates from the late 1990s, when Apple released a finder app called Sherlock that offered similar functionality to the third-party finder app Watson. Since then, “Sherlock” has been the moniker used by Apple whenever they release a new feature or app that is supposedly “inspired” by another app.
In recent years, Apple has been accused of rigging products such as Camo, which allowed the iPhone to be used as a webcam, which became a built-in feature known as Continuity Camera. The release of Sidecar, a way to use an iPad as a second screen, rigged apps such as Duet Display and Luna. Apple's “buy now, pay later” service, Apple Pay Later, is said to have rigged other BNPL apps such as Klarna. Several features, including medication tracking, period tracking, mood logging, diary and sleep tracking features, were also first discovered by the third-party developer community.
With the release of iOS 18 later this year, Apple may again borrow ideas from the app developer community, this time potentially affecting Arc.
According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Apple will be adding AI-powered features to core apps like Photos, Notes, and Safari, as well as releasing a new technology called “Smart Recap.” As Bloomberg's Mark Gurman explains, Smart Recap will give users “summaries of missed notifications, individual text messages, web pages, news articles, documents, notes, and other media.” [emphasis ours].
Using AI to summarize the web is one of the things Arc is best known for today, and it's an area where the company continues to innovate. For example, last week Arc announced “Call Arc,” another new way to search the web with AI, by holding the phone to your ear and asking a question. Combined with the “browse for me” and “pinch to summary” search tools, Arc gives users another way to use AI as a partner in their search.
More broadly, AI-powered news summarization is also a hot topic at several startups, including ex-Twitter engineer Particle, smart RSS reader Bulletin, trend summarization tool Break the Web, and countless other iOS apps.
Apple's inclusion of AI summarization in its Safari browser could reduce demand for alternative browsers and apps that offer their own AI tools, but that alone is unlikely to be enough to impact Arc's growth. Beyond AI summarization, the web browser startup is experimenting with a variety of ideas, including new ways to minimize distractions, organize tabs, block ads, and an AI assistant called Max.