San Francisco
One main theme of Apple’s first big launch event of 2014 was “continuity”: the ability to move content and activities seamlessly between Mac, iPhone and whatever iDevices might come next.
Updates to Apple’s iOS and OS X operating systems allow files to be shared between Apple’s desktop and mobile, synchronise text messages and half-written emails across devices, or make iPhone calls using a Mac as a speakerphone.
But the broader message of Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference was one of sharp discontinuity.
Apple has made a break with the past by opening up new elements of its iPhone operating system such as its keyboard and cloud storage systems. Now external developers can create tools to customise these basic functions of the iPhone, where before Apple insisted that only its own technology was good enough.
“It’s a big philosophical shift for Apple,” says Jan Dawson, analyst with Jackdaw Research. “They are opening the door to all sorts of developers to do lots of new things.”
Many of Apple’s changes in iOS 8 mimic what Google has been doing for years with its rival smartphone operating system, Android. For example, Android users have long been able to download alternative keyboards such as SwiftKey or Nuance’s Swype.
“Are we going to build SwiftKey Keyboard for iOS 8? Of course we are. We’ve already started,” says Jon Reynolds, chief executive of SwiftKey. “We’re delighted Apple has decided to embrace the importance of opening its platform to third-party keyboards.”
Introducing what he called one of the “most profound” changes amid 4,000 new capabilities for developers included in iOS 8, Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, showed off “extensions” that allow iPhone applications to share certain features and functions. That could mean users can download a “share on Pinterest” button to their Safari web browser or choose Bing translation services to read a foreign web page.
“With extensibility, applications from the App Store will be able to extend the system and offer services to other apps,” says Mr Federighi, stressing that Apple’s approach offers greater data protection than Android’s.
Apple opened up the iPhone to third-party apps back in 2008 after a reluctant Steve Jobs was convinced to do so by his colleagues. But so far only hand-picked companies such as Facebook and Twitter have been integrated into the basic functions of the iPhone’s core software.
This new ability to unbundle apps into specific utilities will allow more developers to follow the example set by Facebook, which is slowly replacing its single, all-encompassing app with stand-alone apps for messaging, photos and other strands of its social network.
“This is great because before you had to go do a deal with Apple,” says Mike McCue, chief executive of Flipboard, a popular newsreader app.
“I wish they’d done it years ago,” adds Nick D’Aloisio, creator of Summly, the automatic summarising app that he sold to Yahoo last year.
Apple is not only focusing on software as it looks to broaden its platform. For creators of Internet-connected door locks, thermostats, light bulbs and other domestic appliances, Apple is opening up Siri, its virtual assistant. Through HomeKit, developers will be able to make apps connecting to these “smart home” devices that will allow iPhone owners to use their voice to turn off the lights or turn up the heating.
And there is HealthKit, Apple’s new platform for uniting health and fitness data from a variety of apps and devices.
Apple is even opening up the programming language that developers use to write apps by introducing a new one. Swift, as its name suggests, is intended to be quicker and easier to learn than Objective-C, the coding language that iPhone app developers have used until now.
“We’ll be able to develop apps faster and it will become more accessible to become a developer,” says Mr McCue.
Byron Cortez, a developer with Voyager Innovations, a technology company based in the Philippines, says: “This is good because I’m a new developer on iOS — I started on Android. This evens the playing field a bit.”
Taken together, analysts say the new features for developers fulfil a promise by Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, that iOS 8 is the “biggest release of iOS since the introduction of the App Store”.
“I was surprised at the breadth of what they are trying to achieve,” says Geoff Blaber, mobile analyst at CCS Insight. “They are trying to attack multiple new segments. Apple has concluded it needs to open up its platform to a far greater extent.”
In the past, Apple might have tried to compete head-on with its own in-house technology rather than rely on others. But as last week’s $3bn purchase of Beats has shown, Mr Cook is willing to look outside Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to find the next big innovation.
That is in part a defence against Google, whose tools for developers — from Android for smartphones, Chrome web browser and growing portfolio of television services — are proving increasingly attractive, says Mr Blaber.
But the home, health care and other new markets such as automobiles, which Apple is targeting with its new CarPlay technology, are “huge domains” with relatively untapped opportunities, he says.
Encouraging developers to create apps in these areas will provide fertile ground for its own health-monitoring wearable device — the iWatch — and an upgraded TV box when they are released later this year, says Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
“Creating the ecosystem before you come out with the hardware gives people a reason to buy it beyond the hardware alone,” she says. That is a lesson Apple learnt with the iPad, which could run apps already made for the iPhone, helping make it an instant success.
That promise of delayed gratification should compensate for any disappointment that Apple did not reveal any new gadgets on Monday, says Horace Dediu, analyst with Asymco.
“Everyone wants to see a skyscraper but this is a cement conference,” he says. “In the summer they show you the new building material and in the fall they make something with it.”
— Financial Times
