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Today’s iPhone software development kit (SDK) announcement from Apple Inc. – long anticipated and long overdue -- is huge news for iPhone (and iPod Touch) users. But just like last year, when Apple unveiled the iPhone in January then made us all wait six months to get our hands on it, we have to wait until June for all those promised applications and advances.
That means that on the one-year anniversary of iPhone 1.0, we’ll get version 2.0. What will that be like?
First, the upgrade to iPhone 2.0 means you can forget all of those beloved hacked applications you use (VNSea, the eBook reader, iRadio and that cool Guitar application) The iPhone 2.0 upgrade will kill the access to the iPhone that installer.app granted. Hopefully all of your favorite jailbroken applications will be ported to the Apple distribution system called App Store – and will be available for a reasonable price.
The advent of the App Store means a slew of jazzy new applications of the iPhone, further expanding its potential uses and it’s reach. Sure, it’s great that AOL instant messenger will be out; Who hasn’t to IM your friends from your iPhone without having to go through a complicated Web-based IM system? And who has wanted to watch a Slingbox on an iPhone or iPod Touch? With the SDK, all of that becomes possible.
The potentially bigger announcement today wasn’t the SDK – more about that and what it means for developers in a minute – it was the inclusion of support for Exchange. This could be a game-changer when it comes to corporate IT acceptance of the iPhone. No more tortured work-arounds trying to figure out to get company e-mail safely and securely on your iPhone.
Until now IT administrators have been able to fend off users hungry for iPhones with Gartner reports saying that the iPhone doesn’t work in the enterprise or that it lacks the safety features that enterprise users require.
As of the end of June, the iPhone’s first birthday, IT administrators will have a much harder time telling users that the iPhone no longer meets the company’s security policies or doesn’t work properly with their Exchange Messaging system.
Microsoft Exchange business users will be able to take full advantage of the ActiveSync functionality of the iPhone including push email, push calendars, push contacts, and global address lists (GAL) – they are all there.
In the presentation Phil Schiller alluded to the fact that ActiveSync interacts directly through the exchange server – instead of having middleware like the Blackberry Enterprise Servers (BES) uses. More time hops for email to travel, more to go wrong – which has been happening way too often with Blackberries recently. Microsoft has been trying to beat Blackberry with this strategy for awhile – but is obviously losing the client side battle with a more clunky Windows Mobile 6.
It isn’t just Exchange enterprise functionality that iPhone 2.0 will offer business users. The marketshare-leading Cisco IPSec VPN (remember the “iPhone” name trademark dispute resolution?) is also supported.
IT administrators can now also enforce security policies and device configurations and even do a remote wipe of iPhones, something many IT departments have said would need to be supported if they were going to even consider the iPhone.
In the Q/A after the presentation, Steve Jobs was asked if he thought RIM was worried now that the iPhone had a lot of the capabilities that the Blackberry had. While he deferred the question, there should be significant concern at the RIM camp.
Jobs showed a pie chart at the beginning of the presentation that illustrated that in the first 8 months of the iPhone’s existence, it had gained 28% of the Smartphone marketshare in the US. While RIM was still in the lead with 41%, it is almost exclusively with corporate customers. The very customers Apple is trying to woo with these impressive iPhone 2.0 updates and could make up that 13% lead in no time flat.
The iPhone doesn’t stop at messaging when it comes to business applications. Sales people and people in the medical profession will have even more reasons to get the iPhone.
Salesforce was a bit ironic because they are known for their Software as a Service (SaaS) or Web apps. They, like Apple, seem to still think there is a need for native applications on the platform. The Salesforce.com application looked great and might be even better than the full desktop client because you can call the customers by just clicking on their name in the database.
Sales people are also on the move much more. It will be great not to have to whip out their laptops to get a contact number when they can pull it up directly from their iPhone.
Epocrates, the medical software maker, might be the sleeper hit of this bunch. I am sure just about every iPod loving doctor and nurse in every hospital in the country is calling their IT people right now asking when they can get iPhones. From the demo, it looked like the client did just about everything a doctor would need to do to interact with a patient. I’m no doctor however, so we’ll let hospital IT people sort that out with their users.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Apple has incredible ambitious plans for 3rd party development on the iPhone platform – even for developers who have been making the unofficial jailbroken applications. In fact, they now have even more incentive to port their applications over to the legit SDK. Apple is offering a $100 million iFund in conjunction with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to help iPhone application startups. Like Jobs said in the presentation, this might help star the next Google.
Even without the iFund, Apple’s development environment offers plenty of incentives. With the new application distribution system called App Store, Apple takes care of everything (Credit card processing, hosting, marketing, etc.) and gives a developers 70% of the take. That is immensely significant if you figure the economics of scale of the platform.
For instance, if you are a small developer and you build an application (for example something that turns your iPhone into a efax machine) and sell it for $10 each. If that application attracts just 1% of the 10 million iPhone owners that Apple anticipates by the end of the year, You’ll have a cool $700,000 in your pocket – and that’s before the many more tens of millions of iPod Touch owners jump on it. That’s what I call motivation!
10 million users times 1% = 100,000 x $10 = $1,000,000 time 70% after Apple’s cut = $700,000
With that math, by summer there should be thousands of applications.
As functional as iPhones are, a big reason the IT department will be getting hammered for iPhones is because people love them. They are fun. They play music, TV shows and movies and now they have native games. The ones that Apple demonstrated today were very impressive in that the games used the accelerometers built into the iPhone to control the game. Very smart.
While Sega and EA demo’d their latest games on the iPhone, many more are set to hit the platform in no time flat. With Apple including the ability for developers to include accelerometer data, location data and web calls in their queries, we might start seeing some social networking and location based applications – not just games being built.
As the audience at the presentation today can attest, this is a very exciting time to be not only iPhone users, but also administrators and developers.
View the presentation video here.
Source: 9to5Mac