Apple and RIM . Like Jr high sweethearts dancing a full arm’s lengths apart, but intent on trampling each other’s toes anyway, Apple announced today two kindof big things:
- The iPhone is getting a mess of new enterprise features. Despite the hype though, remember that none of these software updates will help your iPhone magically sprout a Querty keyboard (One point still for the kids from Waterloo).
- The apple software SDK
the crucial bit:
-The AppStore is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications
-Your app will be updated over the air automatically
-If an app gets updated, the AppStore will “otomatically” tell you it has been updated
-Also built into iPhones, you can download it on your computer and transfer it too if you want, but we think most people will do it from the iPhone
-Just tap on it and it’s wirelessly downloaded to the iPhone using a cell network or WiFi
-Top 50, top downloads
-Categories for games, business, finance, health, lifestyle, music, etc.
-AppStore, put it on every single iPhone that everyone will have access to with the next release of the software
-Jobs: “Your dream is to get your app in front of every iPhone user. You can’t do that today, but we’re gonna solve that”
-Scott is back. “Once you have all of these amazing applications, how do you get them on your phone?” Back to Steve Jobs.
This is significant because:
- By pushing software SDK updates to phone (post sale), Apple is effectively reinventing it’s mobile platform (It’s truly a platform not just a device) with every new release
- The total package of the iPhone looks a lot different than it did just a year ago, but running on the exact same hardware.
- This is hugely disintermediating to the carriers as substantial and potentially valuable new services and content is being pushed directly to the consumer without their involvement, buy-in or pre-loaded bundling agreement.
- The carrier has been made a dumb pipe.
- Apple is charging 30%(!) of revenues to content providers
- 30% leaves a lot of incentive for mobile content/app/service vendors to seek out other ways monetize their content. But you might imagine that being on the apple deck of the apple mobile ap store could be a powerful distribution channel.
- Everything will also be available on the wifi iPod touch – which further bends the definition of mobile, and even more so cuts out the carriers.
- Note that iphone store will be “exclusive” distribution channel but that jailbroken phone users will still have other options (as many iphone users already install 3rd party apps today without apples permission)
- Spore runs on it. That’s neat.
The Apple iPhone is not yet officially available in Canada.
This announcement adds more weight to “post-June” as the likely date.
Most Canadians already know what an iPhone is. A surprising number use one already.
