The Big Opportunities For Third-Party iPhone Apps
When Steve Jobs made his announcement about Apple’s strategy for third-party application development at the WWDC, it left a lot of developers cold. After all, if what Apple proposed is so great, how come Apple doesn’t use the same approach for its own apps? And let’s face it - you ‘re not going to be able to write a killer 3-D game using this approach. However, despite the very real and substantial limitations, Apple has actually created a massive amount of opportunity for developers to innovate on the iPhone platform. In fact, strange as it might seem, it might even be that the iPhone turns out to be one of the best platforms for third-party devs in the mobile space - both in technical and business terms…
The Big Technical Benefit
The main technical benefit of third-party iPhone applications is that they require zero installation, which means there will be a super-low barrier to adoption. Don’t under-estimate this - it’s perfect for free “software as a service” type offerings; so, just a few of the classes of third-party application that will work great on iPhone are:
- Mobile office document editing
- Mobile photo-sharing
- Mobile social-networking
You get the idea. There are many other types of application you could build.
The Big Business Benefit
How will you get paid for your work? Well - the key thing to remember here is that these are web applications, so you should be able to figure out how to include Google ads in your apps. That could be really huge; and it’s something that really hasn’t been available in the mobile space until now - at least not in any credible way.
Bottom line
For sure, there are major technical limitations with what Apple is currently offering in terms of support for third party application development on the iPhone. They may have to address these in the future. However, that doesn’t mean people should dismiss what Apple has done here - the opportunities are substantial. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone built a billion dollar company on the back of this opportunity. As Jobs himself said - sweet!
Asam Bashir wrote:
What I would like to see is a further extension of the kind of cloud computing Apple has already been working on with the sharing Mac feature of the new Finder. Instead of browsing your home/office computer using your dot mac account, I’d like someday to be able to browse those same files using Quicklook technology on my iPhone. Sure, we’ve been able to ftp to accounts for decades now, but what Apple is good at is the way it wraps the service with an easy to use and intuitive GUI. In this respect the Quicklook technology is a break through. It’s a system wide, deep technology that is being use for all kinds of purpose, from quick previews in Finder, to sharing documents during an iChat. It’s a way of combining the search and cataloguing features of Spotlight with the use of Core graphics and PDF technology. This is really great and is exactly what’s needed for near future devices. This not only includes the iPhone but also ultra-compact form factor laptops with SSD flash based storage. If the machine has only 64 GB storage in my view that’s perfect if it’s coupled to Mac sharing features in Leopard. I don’t really want all my files on my iPhone or laptop, I feel insecure when I have all my files in one place that could be easily lost. I’d much rather have them on my home or work computer where I know they are secure both virtually and physically. However, when I want to browse all those files from my converged device, then I don’t want to have to download each item one at a time just to be able to have a peek inside to view the contents. However, combine this with spotlight meta-tagging and the Quicklook technology, and theres an instant solution. Sure there are solutions already, old school FTP type browsing, or VNC type forwarding of screen, but none is elegant, fast or bandwidth friendly, but Quicklook and Spotlight together, think about it, it’s powerful……
Posted 13 Jun 2007 at 1:19 pm ¶
simon wrote:
That would be a nice app. I’d expect Apple to do something like that. It should be pretty easy for them to write too.
Posted 13 Jun 2007 at 2:53 pm ¶