Apple’s iPhone dominance is going to be hard to topple

Interesting article today on Flurry (and also summarized on MacRumors.com)

We’ve been internally debating about Apple’s continued dominance in the smart-phone market. I’ve taken the position that Apple will be the leader for at least 4 years, it appears I may have been understating it bit.

Looking at the chart above, it becomes clear that Apple is leading the iPhone/Android usage metrics by 3 fold. But what what the report also goes on to suppose is that iPod touch users (assumed to be mostly kids that do not have a cell phone yet)  will eventually migrate to iPhone users. To me this seems like pretty sound logic.

The article also goes on to theorize that since most iPod touch users are also very heavy social networkers, they will help influence the entire market…

I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you think the mobile market is going… who do you think is going to be the dominant force in 2015 ?

Apple’s iPhone 3Gs will Change Your Life

It is quite nice working for a company that is constantly adopting new technologies. I can justify purchases of new gadgets to myself saying “its for research, after all I’m in the biz” :D One of my favorite gadgets of course is the iPhone.

I went out and bought a first gen iPhone 3 days after launch. I would not go so far as to say the first iPhone I bought changed my life, but it did considerably change how I used a device. Before the iPhone, I owned every other smart phone; Treo, Blackberry, Nokia 9100, Palm, sidekick. All of these devices just wound up being a big bulky phone. I never really used the “smart” features because they were inconvenient. But the iPhone was different. It had less features, but all of the things it could do I found extremely useful. Mail, TXT, Maps, Stocks, Camera, ipod, Calendar, Safari, Weather, and my favorite feature of all time, visual voicemail.

Then the 3G iPhone I bought last year made improvements, but they were honestly moderate at best. As a user, I could care less about the 2.0 SDK (but as a software services company, we LOVED the new busines opportunities the SDK brought us). The app store was introduced, but the applications offered were more novelty than really useful. Even today, I own probably 50 apps from the store and i still use the native applications 99% of the time on my device.

Yesterday, I bought the 3Gs (32gig, black). I instantly noticed that performance significantly improved. But my old iPhone’s performance was not half bad, so I really didn’t care about it. I played with voice control, I can see how useful it will become for me, but certainly not life changing. Then, I played with the camera. All I can say is WOW ! The quality of the 3 megapixel pictures and the video is jut awesome. Don’t get me wrong, my sony camcorder and canon camera produced MUCH better quality, but they mostly sit on a shelf at home. I don’t use them because they are inconvenient. (That’s the second time I said that, maybe I’m just really lazy).

I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself “I wish I had my video camera right now”; and I’ve thought that in my personal and professional life. Often times at work, something special is happening in a workshop or strategy session where I wished i could have captured the moment. And there are countless times that is true with my two daughters at home. This new device allows me to capture those moments ad-hoc. That is life changing for me. I have one device that will always be with me and it acts as my personal assistant, my communications device, my information portal, entertainment & content management hub, and now will serve as my documentarian. Best of all, the features and the software are all elegantly designed. Everything about the iPhone is engaging & useful.

It is VERY rare in life that I am satisfied with technology. My dissatisfaction is the primary reason why I started EffectiveUI in the first place, to help fill the gap I saw between what people wanted from technology and what businesses were actually building. The folks at Apple have done an amazing job at respecting all of our desires for technology that “just works” – I’m in awe Apple, well done…

[Minor Update and Rant]
Just found out that AT&T no longer includes SMS with the iPhone data plans- the folks at the AT&T store failed to tell me. SMS just was turned off on my account with no notice. I missed several important messages. AT&T’s lack of customer focus can damage consumers’ impressions of Apple…

Microsoft Mix Session – 10 Ways To Fail

Had a fun session last week at Mix in Vegas… Top 10- ways at fail at software development.  I had an hour and 15 minutes, but I talked really fast and got it done in 40 :) Microsoft filmed the session:

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C06F

 

Here is the list I go through …

• DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE END USER
• TRUST DEVELOPERS TO MAKE GOOD DESIGN DECISIONS
• HOPE FOR A SILVER BULLET DESIGN
• BUILD FOR EVERYONE
• LAUNCH & FORGET
• DO NOT DEFINE SUCCESS
• AVOID ALL CONFLICT
• BELIEVE YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SELL YOUR IDEAS
• PLAN FOR PERFECTION
• VALUE PROCESS OVER THE PRODUCT

How Webkit’s CSS Animation could kill Flash and Silverlight …. NOT

Recently, Webkit announced CSS Animation – There are several articles claiming that this new feature could hurt the plugin space for Adobe and Microsoft … One of the most commented articles was posted on MacRumors Yesterday…

CSS Animation Coming to Safari, Already in iPhone. Less Dependence on Flash? – Mac Rumors

The incorporation of animation into CSS could certainly threaten one of the major uses of Flash on the internet.

I really dislike the author’s positioning of Flash’s major use on the internet as an animation tool – that was 10 years ago. When was the last time you saw “skip intro” on a site (unless it was created with template monster)? Yes, it still is a great animation tool, but it has matured into a great development platform; one, that is bringing revolutionary changes to the web.

Some of the comments on the above post are so fun to read because that are so illogical … why does Flash cause such emotion from developers:

I HATE FLASH!!! —–

Flash is a thing of the past, people who have disabilities like to be able to view websites and websites composed entirely of flash are nearly impossible for them to navigate. By using CSS it allows them to view the site, and have descriptions of what is going on through their text reader etc. —–

Yay! I hope Flash catches a computer virus and dies. —–

Animation, flashing, blinking, page sounds ruin the web. They are distracting from real content and used as a substitute for quality design. I hope that Apple provide preferences for turning off this sort of junk in Safari on both the Macintosh and iPhone/iPod. —–

No one should ever be talking about “when will Flash be on the iPhone,”, but rather “When will Flash finally die its long overdue death and make way for lighter better web standards?” Screw Flash and the horse it rode in on. —–

and my favorite:

Flash is slow, bloated and adds little value to the ordinary web experience. It SUCKS… —–

Ug! I don’t want to re-hash an older blog post about flash, but these developers are just missing the point. Flash, Silverlight, AJAX, CSS – are all merely tools. All of them powerful in their own way – all of them appropriate for certain uses. At EffectiveUI, we leverage the more powerful browser plug-ins (Flash/Silverlight) to create web experiences that move away from the traditional page based metaphors… In other words, we are creating software, not ordinary web sites.

Of course we use the other, browser based platforms when and where appropriate. I’m actually very excited about CSS Animation – but we will wait a long time to see how the standard is implemented across all browsers before we begin to recommend the standard to our clients…

One last thing … A simple plea to the technology community : drop the religious fanaticism for or against any particular technology – it shows your inexperience and your unwillingness to do your homework. Focus on the end goal: creating better software for people…

Evidence that Apple’s got some things right

I keep hearing complaints that Apple’s restrictions on the App Store are too much – that Apple has not created a truly open marketplace.

As recently as last week, I heard a local iPhone developer here in Denver say, “Their restrictive SDK makes it harder to develop and their approval process requires developers to jump through way too many hoops”

He is right – and so what? Who really suffers in the end? Although Apple does not always get it right, they tend to think about the end user over the developer. A more restrictive platform creates obstacles for a reason. If the platform is totally open, developers will find it much easier to create applications that crash the phone, take up all the resources, forgo security best practices, or simply write software that malicious.

A great example of an open platform that developers love is Andriod. It is very open, and developer centric … and that also means it is easier to do very bad things. Case in point, recently Geek.com published a story on an Android App that was adding adware and destroying the memory on their G1 phone…

…[MemoryUp] destroyed my memory card/system delete. Then my email was spammed. TMobile can’t stop you from downloading this! So don’t!” In fact, many note that their SD cards were wiped totally clean.

The only way consumers of the open platforms can be sure the application is safe is to wait for the community to self police (in other words, wait for someone else to find out there’s an issue with the app and then complain about it) — in contrast, Apple reviews every single application submitted to help weed out the really bad ones (although I’ll admit, holding out for months on “Pull My Finger” was a bad move)

As developers, we may want to take a pause and contemplate if a more restrictive platform is actually better for the people we are developing for – even if we have to design and code with one hand tied behind our back…