Apple’s annual WWDC developer conference still has plenty of razzmatazz and media attention, but the staged set-pieces feel more forced and the tone is, overall more sober. This is not just because CEO Tim Cook lacks the grand ringmaster style of his inimitable predecessor Steve Jobs when it comes to spectacle. Less superficially, it is a sign of a new Apple.
An Apple whose share price has been under pressure for a year (though it is still the world’s most valuable company); whose recent products have been criticized for lack of innovation and magic (though they still sell in droves); whose core mobile business models, based around native apps and a tightly walled garden, are looking old-fashioned in a world of cloud services, streaming and openness.
Apple, then, has a big adjustment to make. It needs to make difficult decisions about how far it can embrace openness and the cloud, without losing its differentiation; how far to chase low cost volumes at the expense of premium brand value; whether it needs an Apple device for every purpose, or whether it should rely on partners to expand into new markets like the internet of things (IoT). The past few years, even when Jobs was still at the helm, have shown few signs of strong strategies being formulated, which has helped knock confidence in Apple.
But this WWDC was different. There were no new devices, but plenty of signs of significant changes to come, notably more openness in iOS, more convergence with OS X, and some indications of how Apple will handle the cloud and IoT. And it really did live up to its name ‘ as a developer conference, not a corporate marketing shindig. That was a sign, in itself, of Apple responding to the pressures it is under and acknowledging the need to listen to its developers and modernize its platform for a web-based age.
There is little innovation left to make in handset hardware design, and mobile device edge is becoming more about software and services than ever. That will be even more true in the IoT, where most connected devices will be cheap and unobtrusive, not high value and branded ‘ while others, like cars, will be firmly under another company’s brand. That means it is more important than ever to place the iPhone at the heart of a web of slave devices (from vehicles to thermostats), and place Apple at the heart of a modern developer ecosystem.
To do that, changes to iOS are far more important than those to the hardware, so despite the blogosphere’s disappointment, new devices ‘ a large-screened iPhone, an iWatch ‘ would have been distractions from the really important stuff. Apple, for our money, is still moving too slowly in the cloud (see below), but it is making progress in modernizing its platform.
The new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 8, is far more radical than its low key design changes would suggest. While iOS 7 made significant changes to the visual impact, iOS 8 is important for opening up new areas to third party developers. The new iOS 8 software developers’ kit (SDK) includes more than 4,000 new APIs to help services leverage iOS in new ways.
According to Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering: “This is the biggest iOS release since the launch of the App Store. The iOS 8 SDK delivers more than 4,000 new APIs including amazing new frameworks, greater extensibility and a revolutionary new programming language.”
Among the opened-up areas are the keyboard and TouchID. The former is a good example of the struggle between Apple’s desire to control all aspects of its experience – seen in a much enhanced native keyboard, featuring contextual word prediction ‘ while also being more open. So it opened up to third party keyboards for the first time, something Android has allowed for a long time. The same difficult balance was seen in other areas, most importantly iCloud. Previously an Apple-only environment, its back end has now been opened up to make it more competitive with Dropbox. Apple now needs to keep customers within its walls by offering a superior experience, not by locking the gates ‘ a profound transition which it will make only gradually, but which was evident at WWDC.
The company is gearing up for a world when its famous store may be less powerful, and it will need a fully open web apps platform to stay competitive with Google (the purchase of Beats and its music streaming service is another symptom of this reluctant long goodbye to the downloads model).
Not that Apple is letting go of its preference for native apps and content. One of the features of iOS 8 is to introduce web-like capabilities which will appeal to Android users, but take place in native apps. An example is Extensibility, which lets apps communicate and share data, but in a sandboxed way which maintains secure walls between them. For instance, a user could take a photo with iPhone Camera and add filters from another application, but without actually leaving Camera. That mimics the extensions which browser-based software uses to add features, but remains native.
Another area where Apple has removed an Android advantage of iOS is allowing developers to add new sharing options ‘ sharing images and web pages to any service the programmer chooses, as with Android’s ‘intents’ system, rather than just to Apple-designated apps such as Facebook.
And an important and radical (for Apple) departure was to break down some of the boundaries between iOS and OS X, in a way that Microsoft and Google have already been pursuing. This will be important as the differences between a PC and a mobile device also break down, and the ‘post-PC’ environment looks for a unified user experience to run across huge numbers of different form factors.
Apple demonstrated widgets running on both its operating systems ‘ in iOS 8, as part of the pulldown Notification Center. And users can now work across the two platforms far more seamlessly, an area where Apple has leapt ahead of Google ‘ for instance, a user could start a document on a Mac and edit it on an iPhone, helped by integrated storage in the updated iCloud Drive.
A more unexpected, but significant, announcement was that of Swift, a new programming language which promises a slimmed-down alternative to Objective-C, the complex if powerful language on which Apple has relied for decades. It aims to attract new developers by making it easier and quicker to write stable, secure apps, billing itself as ‘Objective-C without the C’. It is promising the world to coders ‘ greater power and performance than scripting languages like Python, but with the simplicity of those technologies. Apple claims it has run benchmarks which show Swift code executes more quickly than Python and even Objective-C.
The iOS 8 and Yosemite upgrades combined with Swift and new cloud features all show Apple getting some of its priorities straight and making a bold attempt to retain its control of its platform, while modernizing it and opening it up. Not an easy balance, but it can rely on the huge loyalty of its established developer and user base to help it transition to a fully open web world.
Of course, Apple will not be throwing its garden doors too wide open. It wants to keep developers happy and make them think they can tap its base of 9m iDevices without being locked in, or hampered from using up-to-date web techniques. But it needs to maintain unity and quality in its user experience, the source of its competitive edge; and it also wants to keep the most important areas of mobile usage, such as messaging and personal media, to itself.
It remains vital to Apple’s proposition that users largely live within an Apple environment and have little temptation to stray (hence the increasingly convergence with OS X, and hence the claim that it sells a complementary Mac or iPad with most iPhones). But while seamless working across iOS and OS X will be a great boon to Apple loyalists, Apple will have to face up to the fact of a multiplatform world, or risk making the same mistakes that BlackBerry did ‘ relying for too long on users’ past love for its hardware, while the next generation of users raced towards freedom from lock-in. It is certainly opening up to multiplatform developers, but it has difficult dilemmas over multiplatform consumers, and those showed in some of its presentations at the conference.
The desire to keep people in an Apple bubble was the reason its early and hesitant cloud initiatives were so limited, with iCloud being confined to its own platforms. And why its messaging announcements at WWDC sounded like something from another era. The theme was that iMessage was superior to any rival service such as Facebook’s WhatsApp, and was the most used iOS app, and therefore Apple was justified in keeping the walls around it. But just as the vendor has been forced to extend iCloud to those users who do not obediently buy every device from Apple, so it will have to do the same, eventually, with iMessage and other currently Apple-only offerings such as photos. Here, Apple has been under pressure from Instagram, Loom and many others, but its response was to enhance iOS Photos with a host of new features, in order to keep users loyal, rather than to open it up completely. So cross-device editing is attractive, but also means users do not have to leave Apple’s native gallery app, and the syncing with iCloud looks superior to Dropbox’s new Carousel, and also encourages consumers to stay within the walls.
This approach is vintage Apple ‘ ever since the early Macs, it has relied on creating something sufficiently appealing to make users unwilling ever to leave the platform. However, not only does that put strain on the company to come up with the design and usability goods every time ‘ hence the confidence failure when it does not seem to be innovating ‘ but it assumes user mentality does not change. Freedom to use any device and any app, and change them frequently, is a given in the mobile world now, in the enterprise as well as among consumers. BlackBerry misjudged the strength of BYOD (bring your own device) and Apple risks doing that too.
That it recognizes the risk, even if it is hesitant in addressing it, was seen in the changes to iCloud, whose previously closed platform was opened up to other offerings like Microsoft OneDrive. This will be important in the enterprise BYOD environment, but also for attracting new users to give iCloud a try. While Apple can still trade on considerable loyalty, it needs to bring new users on board too.
To achieve this, it must, of course, come up with the devices to run the new software, and with sufficient pzazz to placate those loyal gadget buyers, some of whom are getting bored with the same old screen size. Cook was teasing about new product categories, while SVP of software and services, Eddy Cue, said the firm has ‘the best product pipeline in 25 years’. Apple has made such promises before, and for the past couple of years, has not delivered on them. With iOS 8 commercial availability in the fall, that is presumably when the next iPhone will appear. It had better pack a punch, or the significant innovations in the software platform will not be enough to boost growth again.
Apple’s WiFi Calling double-edged sword for cellcos:
Apple has always been a double-edged sword for mobile operators. The iPhone lures users and encourages greater data usage, but its brand and user experience ‘ and much of its revenue generation ‘ is Apple’s, leaving the carrier as the bitpipe and retail channel.
The balance has become even difficult for the operator with the introduction of iOS 8, which features ‘WiFi calling’, allowing users to make a regular phone call over WiFi.
If firmly under a cellco’s control, that can be a handy way to encourage users to offload to WiFi, reducing strain on the cellular network while staying within the carrier’s domain.
But it can also be a powerful tool for WiFi-first providers ‘ the new breed of MVNOs which offer very low cost tariffs if users stay on the WLAN, only using 3G/4G when there is no WiFi coverage. That is a potentially disruptive tool in the hands of cablecos and other large providers which want to reduce their MVNO fees to cellular partners, while effectively stealing those cellcos’ subscribers and sidelining the mobile network.
Some regular cellcos are harnessing WiFi-first themselves, notably T-Mobile USA, which has always been a big user of WiFi to boost its indoor coverage and overall capacity. On the operator’s corporate blog, it welcomed Apple’s announcement of support for WiFi Calling, and said it would support it as soon as iOS 8 devices were available later this year. The second carrier to do the same was Rogers in Canada.