I hope people do not mistake the significance of the iPhone as its large touchscreen, its coolness, or even cause is is an Apple.
The real significance for the iphone is the liberation it delivers to the mobile web. The problem is that for traditional mobile apps is that due to the very limited web interface, the only way for it to be interesting is that you need to develop an application that goes across all the popular platforms, catering to multiple interface types. Following which, you need to provide a web interface as well. Furthermore, few consumers have unlimited data plan, so what for.
Hence, developing for the mobile phones used to be an ultra pain, and results ain’t pretty most of the time. Web developers typically turn away from developing from mobile phones, cause it just ain’t worth the time.
Apple has solved all these problems at one go with the iPhone.
And of course, they did it in a classical Steve Jobs style, by taking control over the whole experience. For the ipod, they integrated hardware, software, seamlessly, allowing users to have a great experience, expanded market share this way until a whole ecosystem grew around it. They could do that cause most consumers were sick of the lousy software-hardware integration offered by most vendors.
Similarly, for the mobile market, consumers are sick of using the web on the phone, due to screwed up solutions provided by the vendors and the OS providers.Here comes Apple again! Taking charge of the whole user experience chain, from your dataplan, to the web browser, to the user interface. An unlimited data plan is compulsory, the widgets are standard web widgets meant to look and behave a certain way, and of course there is only one UI.
But of course, in this battle, it is much more than just the user experience. By making all these things standard, Apple has taken out the pain for mobile developers, removing the pain points outlined earlier. More significantly, it has just turned the hordes of web developers out there into iPhone mobile developers as well. Now, they can develop a app for the iphone just like how they develop a widget for the web.
You can almost imagine SJ saying: “hey, it was a pain developing for mobile last time, that is why you guys did not do it. But now, iphone takes out the pain for you! Why not give it a shot, and hook it up to your existing web service?”
That is why it is so powerful, it turns ALL web developers into mobile developers. so while nokia, motorola, siemens etc were chasing the hardware functionality game, iphone was turning the game on its head.
Of course, this comes at a cost - the iphone market is of course peanuts compared to the overall market. If all goes perfect, and that is a big if, it will account for 10% of the US market of new phones by 2010. But this is is fine by apple, because they believe they will just keep growing it, just like how they grew the ipod. And for the web developers, they dun care the market is small
Why? 3 reasons:
- it is relatively small effort to develop for the iphone
- it is bound to be viral amongst the influential SV crowd who are already looking for apps on their iphone
- it preps them nicely for the future anyway, since they all expect iphone market to grow
These 3 add up to a very strong proposition for the developers. Check out the Iphone application list, which already has a large bunch, within one day of the iPhone release. This means that a lot of companies were already developing/releasing their apps without being able to test it. This shows the simplicity of developing for the iphone.
If you combine the user experience with the developer experience, this becomes a great combination as a platform which is of course, totally controlled by Apple. That is the significance of the iPhone.
That is the main significance of the iphone, kicking in the new era of the mobile web. I certainly hope the nokia folks get it, cause they did not seem to get it last time.
The iphone is not a converged multimedia device. It is the first device that marries the web to the phone. I hope Microsoft, Nokia, and the rest come together to offer something that has a semblance of the usability that the iphone offers. Time is on their side, since we do not expect the market to adopt 99 bucks unlimited data plans anytime soon.
But the cult of apple is the best marketer the world had ever seen, so time might be tighter than people realize before an ipod takeover happens.
Resources:
The revenue power of the iPhone by Jeremiah
Scoble’s twitter updates on iPhone
Microsoft response to the mobile web?
Nokia’s much much less hyped Internet Tablet
Great read by Ben in the same train of thought
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:06 am
opera mini is where its at.
making these standard - sure its a bit of a mess but apple is just adding to that. I for one dont program for safari.
N95 does a good job being all in one integrated phone.
I just dont understand how a horde of dev are going to head onto the iphone bandwagon?
Its quite a closed system the iphone? and its not even 3g compatible… yet but it is a start.
There are a lot of smartphones that allow for 3rd party apps. again, it all comes down to standards. If apple can pull this off then bravo but lets wait for the hype to come down and see where they go from here.
real significance? surely it was to be locked down to a crazy phone plan :P
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:24 am
first off, i am not a apple fanboy, i wanted to point out to our community the significance of such a move by apple.
and yeh, it is just like how they created a closed ecosystem for the ipod, and driving users frustrated with a screwed experience elsewhere to embrace the ipod.
now, they created a closed ecosystem for the iphone, and made it dead easy (relatively speaking) to develop for which means that developers know exactly the experience that the users will be getting.
Again, this example will be good - zoho apps is good for illustrating what i am talking about. They ported their popular office app to the iphone (with a widget as well), and it is kinda working even before they managed to test it. And they are super excited about it
Do the same for N95? It will take a lonnnggg time…
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:39 pm
IT is great to know that iphone liberates web developers into mobile developers. Innovations like these will power Apple into the next millenium
July 5th, 2007 at 9:37 am
iPhone makes me realise that 70% of what I do with a phone is SMS and email. So I prefer the full tactile keypad of devices like Palm Treo 680, thanks.
July 8th, 2007 at 8:08 am
With the rollout of iPhone into the market, it changes many things from the way marketings are being carried out over the internet to how developers have to evolve themselves to these drastic changes of development fitting into what Apple wants than the normal paths to take for any 3rd party developers.
Paddy
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