After Apple’s widely publicized developer rules were updated for iOS, attention immediately returned to what appeared to be a retreat in Apple’s longstanding war with Adobe over Flash’s exclusion from the iOS platform. First attention turned to the threat of government action, then the press seemed to call in the techies to assess Apple’s A4 chip and its ability to crunch a lot more for a lot less juice, and then attention started to shift to an improvement in fortunes for Google Voice apps at the App Store ‘altar of acceptance’.
Amidst all this comes word that there will likely a be a newspaper store (and loads of newspapers hoping to jump on board to stop the red ink).
Standing alone or in broken choruses each of these developments doesn’t necessarily appear in concert. But we’re thinking they’re very much in line with Apple’s confidence in the maturity of its platform and logical next steps for it, rather than some whacky fear of legal reprisal. Considering Apple never backs down from anyone, we’d doubt they’d be scared of the government or anyone else this time either.
The real reasoning behind all these moves is logical: an airtight opportunity for continued dramatic platform revenue growth without some of the old risk.
Through the App Store, iBooks, and now Game Center, Apple has well-founded confidence that they can control the most important aspects of the iOS user experience, which virtually assures them consistently high profit lock-in of their native customer base. No, not the group of folks that buy their hip devices and use them quite functionally, buying some apps or media here and there. Rather, we’re talking about an extension of those same, loyal customers that helped Apple survive their near death experience a decade ago.
But this time that group is much larger in number despite having all the profit power of the smaller founding subset.
Apple didn’t protect its newest operating system for no reason. It kept the spector or Flash-like development platforms and third party voice apps off the air because this level of confusion, platform disintermediation, and lack of singular focus by their loyal base on Apple’s ‘it just works’ functionality would have been devastating. Imagine the truest of Apple enthusiasts having to choose between identically confusing phones with software developed by Apple and Google?
Despite iOS’s continued meteoric growth Apple knows the loyalists are now firmly on board. It’s time to take some of the low lying fruit from Android based phones while shoring up the base even further.
For Apple fans who love the iOS interface and the ability of Apple’s core apps to make our lives far more efficient this means two things: media stores for everything (newspapers are only the next step on the way to magazines, or maybe they’ll go down at the same time) and easy access to our own stuff.
That’s why Print Center shows up in iOS 4.2 and MobileMe has its own massive datacenter being prepped for the next phase of personal cloud computing. Can you imagine how many hard drives are getting dropped in that sucker right now?
And Mac OS X isn’t going anywhere, either. Neither is the ‘hub concept’. Home desktops and laptops will become a more tightly coupled, superpower version of iPad, iPhone, and touch. Think Dropbox – because frankly iDisk sucks compared to it – on steroids, with everything in your Mac OS X user profile completely mirrored in North Carolina (and maybe somewhere else) at all times and rapidly synched to every iDevice you use, wherever you go.
The next battle isn’t about Flash versus the core iOS, or even the web versus apps. It’s about how the cloud removes any need to understand where my stuff lives and how awesome my user experience is in the process of exploiting it.
(Meanwhile, in the background, let’s hope some really smart data elves are continuing to figure out how to make all these databases logically work together toward something smarter than storing and synching their contents.)
