Fri, Apr 9, 2010 11:00 AM
While the lay press has yet to find this interesting, the tech world has been alight with the change to Apple's iPhone SDK license.
If you've been out backpacking for the last couple days and managed to miss the most important smackdown in the tech industry in months, Daring Fireball summed it up well:
So from Apple's perspective, changing the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement to prohibit the use of things like Flash CS5 and MonoTouch to create iPhone apps makes complete sense. I'm not saying you have to like this. I'm not arguing that it's anything other than ruthless competitiveness. I'm not arguing (up to this point) that it benefits anyone other than Apple itself. I'm just arguing that it makes sense from Apple's perspective - and it was Apple's decision to make.
Flash CS5 and MonoTouch aren't so much cross-platform as meta-platforms. Adobe's goal isn't to help developers write iPhone apps. Adobe's goal is to encourage developers to write Flash apps that run on the iPhone (and elsewhere) instead of writing iPhone-specific apps. Apple isn't just ambivalent about Adobe's goals in this regard - it is in Apple's direct interest to thwart them.
This morning a lot of development shops are trying to figure out how to affordably deliver vertical-market apps for iPhone without using modern high-level languages (HLLs). And a lot of these shops are being advised by their legal departments to take a "wait and see" approach with their iPhone deployments.
Here, Apple's "think different" has prompted us to think really different:
What if we just deploy to the other 75% of the mobile market* until Apple sorts out these control issues?
RIM still owns 40% of the market, and over the the most recent period I could find stats for Android has more than doubled its share while iPhone's has gotten a bit smaller:
from TechCrunch
Here's what that look like as a pie:
And here's a plot of the rate of change over that period:
As an Apple shareholder I love Apple's margins and can appreciate their strategy here. But as a developer I have apps to deliver, and using single-platform APIs just to deliver to one minority OS is simply not viable for vertical-market apps such as those for which Rev and other HLLs are ideally suited.
Writing a highly-specialized app means you can completely nail a very specific problem, but it also means the number of customers is relatively small compared to a more general-purpose app. So for vertical markets return-on-investment is everything, and elsewhere across the software world such ROI is increasingly being delivered by HLLs.
Single-platform APIs simply won't deliver the ROI needed to make many specialized apps viable for iPhone.
The migration in the application development world to higher-level languages is nothing Apple can stop. It's been going on for more than two decades, has reached the tipping point over the last decade thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, and seems likely to only continue to expand in this 21st century.
Indeed, the only question for Apple is whether they want to be a part of it, or attempt to reverse history by limiting developers to using the Assembler replacement that is C.
Between Java, Flash, JavaScript, Python, Rev, and the rest, Apple's "130,000 apps" can be eclipsed in about two weeks once all those mobile toolkits hit the market.
I know a lot of people who bought PCs because there wasn't "an app for that" on the Mac. It'd be a shame to see Apple squander their iPhone success only to replicate the marginalization they experienced on the desktop.
Let's take another look at that pie chart, expressed in terms of language choices:
Apple's new SDK licensing terms don't prevent developers from using a single high-level language to deploy their apps to most mobile devices. It merely excludes iPhone customers from enjoying them.
Sure, iPhone users will still have access to the really popular apps like Pull My Finger, but it's the other 75% of the world who'll get specialized product inventory apps, field reporting apps, sales quoting apps, and a few hundred thousand other vertical-market apps that will require high-level languages deployed across the majority of devices to have a worthwhile ROI.
There are a million vertical-market opportunities waiting to be discovered and capitalized on in the mobile arena. Using HLLs developers can write a single code base to cover most mobile devices with a greater productivity than is possible with lower-level languages.
These opportunities represent nothing short of a revolution.
Let's hope Apple decides to be a part of it.
* UPDATE - 12 May: Since I first wrote this Apple has revised their market share numbers downward to 16.1%:
Apple instead cited numbers released last week that showed the iPhone with more than 16.1 percent market share of smartphones sold worldwide.
AppleInsider
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