A year ago at this time (March 17th to be exact), Apple was announcing iPhone 3.0, a release that I dubbed ‘Block the Kick,’ inasmuch as the depth of functionality incorporated into that release was indicative of a company (Apple) that had learned the lessons of the past, and wasn’t going to give the nascent competition any chance to catch their breadth, let alone make up ground on Apple's massive market lead.
Here we are a year later, and it should be clear to all, based upon today’s announcement, that the iPhone OS is rapidly reaching maturation; the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Ecosystem is thriving; and Apple is now looking to consolidate their position (which I believe will lead to more form-factor derivatives in the next 18 months).
In consolidation phase, you fill your remaining gaps and polish the diamonds in the rough, but generally speaking, slow down the pace of pure innovation.
First some numbers:
- Apple has now sold 450K iPads
- Apple has sold 50M iPhones and 35M iPod Touches
- 4B Apps have been downloaded from App Store
- 185K Total Apps in App Store
If you want the deep dive breakout of features in this release, Brad Stone of The New York Times has the consolidated version and gdgt has the verbose version, including the Q&A Session after the event with Steve Jobs.
My focus is on the standouts, of which there are a few. I divide these into 'Fill the Gaps' and 'Differentiators,' as the former are already incorporated on other mobile platforms, whereas the latter have the potential to push innovation in the mobile applications space.
Fill the Gaps:
- Multi-tasking: Apple’s approach here is to provide specific APIs for - A) Audio services to incorporate multi-tasking (think: Pandora playing music in the background while doing other things on your iPhone); B) Voice over IP (think: Skype receiving calls while in other apps); C) Background location (think: TomTom updating turn by turn directions even if you leave the app); D) Local Notifications, a server-less model that enables real-time location dependent social services (think: Loopt or Foursquare updating your location to tell you who’s nearby or to provide location-aware offers - In a nod to privacy concerns, a triangle-type of indicator in the iPhone’s status bar will notify users when this feature is being used by an app, and give granular controls to enable/disable on an app by app basis; E) Task completion allows tasks that take some time, such as uploading a photo to the Internet, to be pushed to the background when a user switches to another application; and finally, F) Fast App Switching, which enables users to leave or return to an app while preserving its last state.
- Folders: This is Apple’s solution to having page after page of scattered applications; pretty elegant and clean.
- Unified Mailbox: The current model is to have to toggle between multiple email accounts, which is especially heinous on the iPad. Now you can manage one in-box, toggle between accounts, between threads, handle attachments, etc.
- Corporate/Enterprise Features: Better encryption and mobile device management, as well as more tools to deploy custom applications to employees. More is good, but it's hard to get too excited until I see Apple making a concerted effort around verticals and specific corporate-focused applications.
- iBooks for iPhone: This is an extension of what was just added for iPad, and gains multi-device syncing capabilities, making it closer structurally to the Kindle application.
Differentiators:
- Game Center: With 50K games in the App Store, which Apple happily noted represents 10X the number of game and entertainment titles on rival mobile platforms from Sony and Nintendo, Apple is essentially co-opting the social gaming network platforms (think: OpenFeint and ngmoco’s Plus+) with this feature set, which enables creation of leaderboards, profiles, player-to-player challenges, cross-game discovery and the like. This is a smart move for Apple to add this to the platform, as it can also funnel Genius functions (and a social graph in general), and while Apple was scarce on the details, it falls into the same bucket as In-App Purchasing; yet another tool to enable developers to engage, cross-pollinate, and thereby, better monetize. Sidebar: the release of Game Center is slated “slightly behind" the overall rollout of OS 4.0.
- iAds: This is the mobile advertising system that is being built into the core OS as a result of their acquisition of Quattro Wireless, and was arguably the most provocative, compelling aspect of the whole event. Why? Well for one, with 185K apps out there, Apple has the kind of critical mass needed to affect a total reboot of the mobile advertising segment in the Apple image, and away from the Google search/display centric model (Sidebar: Apple estimates that they could serve up to 1B ad impressions a day under such a model). By that, I mean ads which are more deeply integrated within the application, enabling either rich media extensions to the application or non-disruptive paths in, out and back into the mobile applications itself (i.e., so clicking on the ad doesn’t effectively kick you out of the application, a huge disincentive to click in the first place). In the demo, Apple showcased three different types of mobile ads, all of which can be created using HTML5 (goodbye, Flash). The first example was an iAd for ‘Toy Story 3,’ which was an integrated media unit called a microsite, complete with a simple game, posters, video and audio clips from the movie. The second was a Nike ad that showcases the deep OS-level integration that enabled an ad to incorporate video and interactivity in the form of shaking the iPhone to switch to new video clips of basketball dunks over the years. The third and final ad was a Target ad of a dorm room, whereby a college student could accessorize the room by choosing different items. Left unspoken, unfortunately, was how exactly iAds are incorporated into the SDK. Is it a separate tool chain, part of the core toolset, or what? And Apple didn't say peep one about their plans relative to campaign management, analytics and ad inventory management, and the like. Of particular note, Apple is giving developers a 60-40 split, which is a noticeable departure from the 70-30 split within the App Store. That said, at least they are providing transparency. No one knows what cut Google shares with its publishers. The bottom line is that this represents yet another way for developers to monetize on the iPhone Platform, while giving Apple a feather in their quiver to approach Madison Avenue and cultivate iAd agency businesses in the same way that Google did with the Search and Display Ad Market.
The developer preview of iPhone OS 4.0 is available today but users won't get the new OS until summer, and iPhone 3G and first and second gen iPod Touches will NOT support multi-tasking. iPad will get OS 4.0 in the fall, which will invariably be the unification release for iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads.
Related Posts:
- ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
- iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet
- Check Mate: Understanding Apple's iPad
- Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix
