If you're trying to drive the mobile strategy for a mid-sized company, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) may have just tried to grab the steering wheel from you. With the announcement of the next version of the iPhone OS, Apple also announced changes that will block developers from using a number of cross-platform tools to create apps for the iPhone.
Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) and others have been hard at work to make their tools compatible with the iPhone and other smartphone applications. But the terms of development for the iPhone OS 4.0 now ban the use of “cross-compilers,” mandating that iPhone applications must be coded and compiled with Apple-approved programming tools.
Adobe execs are obviously not happy. And if you've invested heavily in rich application development tools centered around Adobe Flash or Microsoft .NET (or its open-source Mono incarnation), you're probably not happy, either.
Part of this is wrapped in a battle over standards. Apple is encouraging developers to encode video and other rich content in HTML5, the new standard for Web content currently under development. HTML5 will in many ways be competitive with existing technologies -- like Adobe's Flash.
But the real issue is Apple's attitude toward developers, which has long been close to abusive. The iPhone is a walled garden for applications, and unless you “jailbreak” them, you're mostly at Apple's mercy when it comes to whether your app can be deployed or not.
Likewise, Apple's attitude toward enterprise users of the iPhone is equally dismissive. Apple has marketed the iPhone's improved enterprise features on one hand, while significantly limiting how enterprises can leverage the iPhone with the other. Apple has no enterprise strategy for mobile, other than as an extension of its consumer strategy: Generate user demand, and the enterprise will adopt the iPhone as a fait accompli.
For many small and medium businesses, Apple's walled garden may not end up being reason to detour, mostly because there's a large number of application developers building commercial apps that can handle many of the mobile needs of smaller businesses, and there are services available to take the pain out of mobile development that can leverage your current Web development efforts.
Salesforce.com Inc. offers an iPhone app for accessing CRM data, for example. And Motherapp
can take a Web application and convert it to an iPhone app, or one for the Android platform. Just build an application that outputs pure HTML, following the style guides provided by Motherapp, on any Web development platform -- PHP, Ruby on Rails, or .NET -- and you're all set for a mobile app for either platform. The company also provides a custom application development service for all the major mobile platforms.
But, on the other hand, if you're an information technology-driven company, or you want to deeply integrate mobile into your business's IT architecture, the iPhone looks less and less welcoming. Apple already places itself as the gatekeeper to app distribution, purportedly for the sake of insuring the quality and stability of applications -- but it also works hard to make sure to protect lines of business Apple is interested in entering into itself.
In the end, it comes down to your investment strategy for IT. If you're already outsourcing or using a software-as-a-service provider for your business processes internally, then the iPhone may be a little more welcoming. If you're comfortable with investing in development specifically for the iPhone platform, with tools that Apple approves of, then more power to you.
But if you fall in the middle, and have been counting on leveraging your existing developers to make your company a mobile player, the walls around Apple's iPhone garden may divert you to Google's Android, or to Palm, or to another more welcoming smartphone platform.
— Sean Gallagher is an award-winning IT journalist and the former head of InformationWeek Labs. Gallagher is now an independent journalist and technology consultant based in Baltimore. He can be reached at:gallagher.sean.m@gmail.com.
At one time I was part of the Aple Developer ecosphere, but quit when it seemed they wanted to change my code to one they liked more. Sometimes only small changes, granted some for the better, but mostly for their benefit and to say it was native to them.
AMEN! I've made a lot of money over my career fixing "creative" solutions (aka hacks that became production code) and vowed early on that I would avoid doing this in my career.
Happily, I've gotten the reputation of building rock-solid code and being a "go to" person fir fixing coding problems. And, frankly, there are standards I stick with that others don't. So I can understand how some folks would howl at Apple saying "do this" instead of "please do this," but the end result is that the customer gets something that works and often times is elegant and intuitively easy to use.
It will be interesting to see how far Android will progress in the next few years as an "open" platform. Google has a chicken-and-egg problem of building up an audience for its OS and building up a community of developers for it at the same time... Developers will go where consumers are... but consumer will go where developers are. So Google needs to seed its app ecosystem until the tipping point of "general utility" is met, and consumers AND developers are both attracted to use Android devices...
Apple receives a lot of flak for mandating all sorts of rules on its platforms... but platforms without any kind of organizing rules seem to not be as popular with end users. So where is the optimal balance? If developers were given totally free reign, the quality of apps and the user experience would presumably suffer as developers just "shipped" their apps without polishing the edges. But knowing that Apple is standing over the gate, ready to arbitrarily reject apps makes developers think twice about deploying a shoddy piece of software.
The interesting experiment will be seeing what happens to Android's platform in a few years. Will Google keep to its laissez faire app store? Or will it begin instituting quality checks in order to keep the riff-raff apps out of the system?
I agree that Apple's model is working for commercial app developers. It has a huge built-in audience, and a delivery model that works for mass-market apps. And because of the size of the market, if you're creating an app for a wide audience, you have to target iPhone as a platform.
The real problem is on the business app side. There are lots of business applications that would benefit from the iPhone platform's functionality. But if Apple makes it too difficult to build and deploy those apps--or only gives midmarket app developers the option of building them as mobile web apps--then those businesses are going to have to look elsewhere.
It's the same problem Apple had in the business desktop market in the 1990's. By keeping out dev tools that didn't meet a certain design aesthetic, or used APIs that weren't Apple's, Apple forfeited the whole corporate client-server and desktop application development market for small and midsized businesses to Windows and Visual Basic.
This reminds me of an article recently posted to IE regarding Twitter's buyout of a major app developer Atebits (one man band behind Tweetie and Tweetie 2). Perhaps this is apple's way of trying to retain some of the profit of developing apps for their own technology? Which, many would say is just a disastrous idea. Though, I'm not sure how exactly this will benefit apple- financially speaking. So I could be wrong…but I cant help but think theres a link between Apple's decision to ban the use of "cross-compilers" and Twitter's recouping profits from development companies by buying them out.
On the other hand, is Apple trying to raise the bar in terms of apps and weed out the "cheap" or "low end" ones, since if they want to keep their consumers happy they're going to have to get some damn good stuff on those new iphones coming out (i assume) later this year. They've also got a lot of competition from MotoBLUR, HTC and the Microsoft Kin. In particular, the Moto phones (i have the DEVOUR) are simply incredible. They can do pretty much everything an iphone can do and they have a pull out keyboard. Thats the only thing thats held me from getting an iphone before- im not into the touch screen keyboards. But point being, Apple's got some big competition there in smart phones.
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The Internet in all its forms has become a core part of how we communicate, socialize, and handle very personal business every day. But protection of individual privacy is spotty at best, and it seems to be getting worse every day. As we become an increasingly digital nation, do access to, and privacy on, the Internet become civil rights?
In July, American Eagle Outfitters -- which has a market capitalization of $2.52 billion -- had the sort of apocalyptic outage that many companies fear. Its e-commerce site was down for eight days. Both a primary and a secondary storage system failed, backups wouldn’t restore properly, and a disaster recovery site wasn’t provisioned properly.
Richard Whitt, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)’s Washington telecom and media counsel, issued a “Myths vs. Facts” talking points post on the company’s public policy blog today, on the heels of outcry over Google’s agreement in principle with Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) on ground rules for the net neutrality debate.
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Techies are going crazy over the possibility that Google might design and sell its own Android phone. Some writers say it's a very big deal. Reiter questions whether it will happen and, if it does, whether it even matters.
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Google's foray into pay-for-view movies may be an indicator that the days of free ad-sponsored content are numbered, or at least that ad sponsorship won't fund nearly enough content.
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Google's decision to link VoIP calling of PSTN numbers with Gmail, and to let Google Voice "call" Gmail VoIP clients, will devalue the PSTN and force telcos to fund unprofitable services or create their own VoIP transitions.
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