Selling flashlight apps was not a lasting business because Apple eventually added that function to its operating system.
Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
True: evidence shows that third-party flashlight apps were a real, popular category of app (on iOS) that declined as a business, and that Apple then added a built-in flashlight to iOS (Control Center flashlight in iOS 7, 2013), with that addition widely credited for removing demand. Mostly true: the general story holds, with a minor slip, e.g. the decline mainly reflected Android or both platforms, or there were other contributing causes. Mixed: Apple did add the feature, but the evidence shows flashlight apps had already faded mainly for other reasons, or remained substantially viable afterwards. Mostly false: the causal link is largely unsupported or distorted (e.g. Apple's addition came long after the market had already collapsed). False: Apple never added a flashlight function to its OS, or flashlight apps were never a meaningful business.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Apple's Flashlight Is Why We Can't Fund Nice Dumb Things | TechCrunch TechCrunch · 10 June 2013
“It will be adding its own Flashlight to iOS 7 Control Center, the feature accessible with a swipe and a tap.”
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E2 How Apple uses its App Store to copy the best ideas of others Alaska Dispatch News (syndicated from The Washington Post) · 5 September 2019
“In 2013, by which time myLite had more than 10 million people using it every month, DoApp sent a software engineer to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in Silicon Valley, as it did every year.”
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E3 How Apple uses its App Store to copy the best ideas of others Alaska Dispatch News (syndicated from The Washington Post) · 5 September 2019
“After that, income from myLite "fizzled down to essentially zero," over the course of several months, Beavers said.”
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E4 Apple's Flashlight Is Why We Can't Fund Nice Dumb Things | TechCrunch TechCrunch · 10 June 2013
“Flashlight apps, being utility apps, weren’t that big an opportunity to begin with — the only business model being paid ads or downloads.”
Reasoning
The evidence shows that Apple added a flashlight to iOS 7 Control Center [E1] and that one flashlight app, myLite, had more than 10 million monthly users in 2013 [E2]. E3 says myLite's income fell to essentially zero "after that" but does not name the event, and no item shows that Apple's addition was widely credited for removing demand, as the criteria require.
Cite this claim
Sam Altman, “Selling flashlight apps was not a lasting business because Apple eventually added that function to its operating system.” (said 15 August 2025). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_4f703b253909, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_4f703b253909
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Sam Altman
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Mostly true
“Absolutely. To go back to the analogy of electricity, there’s this amazing chart of what it cost to have an hour of light at night.”
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Mostly true
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Mostly true
“not until 2020 did we train GPT-3, which was the first model that I think actually was over some threshold of usability.”
OpenAI trained GPT-3 in 2020, which Altman considers the first model above a threshold of usability.
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Resolved true
“that it is so capable that it is discovering new knowledge, doing science, able to add huge economic value, create entire pieces of complex software.”
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Resolved true
“I was always an AI nerd. I was a real sci-fi nerd as a kid.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.