With the proliferation of so many new smartphones on the market, I’ve been thinking about why the iPhone is such an amazing success. Sure, when the iPhone was initially released, it was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. With it’s multi-touch feature, ease of use, wi-fi, visual voicemail, and cool apps, it was, as I’ve read in other places, much more than an evolution. It was a revolution in cellular phone technology.
The App Store Rules
Since that initial release, the subsequent releases of the iPhone have been improvements over the original, but nothing extraordinary. Today there are dozens of other smartphones on the market that, while not as good as the iPhone, are getting pretty close. I think this is especially the case once you factor AT&T into the equation. With exclusive rights to the iPhone, AT&T’s contracts are expensive and, as everyone with an iPhone knows, their service is not great. This last bit is probably not AT&T’s fault – I don’t know that any network could handle the kind of traffic that the iPhone generates – but it’s still a big problem.
So why, with AT&T as the only carrier and other smartphones catching up or even surpasing in hardware and software, is the iPhone still the best smartphone on the market?
The answer is it’s app store.
No other phone can even come close to competing with Apple in this arena. With over 100,000 apps of all sorts of variety – games, business, social media, etc – the iPhone App store is leaps and bounds ahead of all the other competitors combined! And this advantage is only going to continue.
Think about it. Google, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and every other provider with some kind of app store of their own have two major problems. First, if I’m a developer with limited time, why would I develop for any other platform when the iPhone App store is so much more profitable? It’s like expecting entrepreneurial developers of the late 90′s to develop programs for something other than Windows. It just doesn’t make sense from an effort vs. reward standpoint.
Secondly, the iPhone is only one platform. They all have the same screen size, multi-touch, touchscreen keyboard only layout. Compare this to Blackberry which has the large touchscreen Storm and then the non-touchscreen/qwerty keyboard/scroll wheel interface. How does a developer write an app that works seamlessly on both of those platforms? Google and Windows Mobile devices have just as much or even more variation.
In other words, the plethora of different phone formats that all the other providers are throwing out there are making it very difficult for app developers to play along with them. As such, Apple keeps getting more and more apps and keeps distancing itself farther and farther from the rest of the pack. Once again, the analogy to Windows in the 90′s should be clear to people. Once Microsoft reached a certain threshold, it just became silly for developers to spend any serious time (outside of research) developing for any other platform.
The only advantage the other players have left right now, is that little fact that the iPhone is stuck exclusively on the AT&T network. That’s not going to last for long, though. So if the other players don’t want to get absolutely shutout of the smartphone market within the next 3-4 years, they better figure out a way to start attracting more developers soon.