Mobile Fix: Apple is losing its mojo
This week, Simon Andrews, founder of addictive!, takes a look at the key highlights from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and asks if all the criticism is starting to rattle the tech giant. Perhaps, Andrews argues – but we shouldn’t bet against them not claiming their mojo back in the longer term…
Apple WWDC
Back in the 1980s when Coca Cola launched New Coke then quickly withdrew it in the face of consumer reaction, Pepsi ran an ad in the New York Times showing this letter; saying “The other guy just blinked”
Hearing Tim Cook say “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” on stage at the Apple developer conference we thought of that line.
Clearly the criticism is getting to Apple. The Samsung ads seem to be working – in at least they are rattling the Apple team. And a lot of the new features for iOS7 seem to be inspired by other apps and by Android.
With iOS7 having little real substance we wonder if this is a similar moment for Apple? The redesign seems to be insufficient to appease the critics and perhaps enough to discomfort users.
The much trailed iTunes radio looks good and leverages the huge amount of data that iTunes gives Apple. With 8,000 tracks burned into in my iTunes, Apple are better able to serve up music I will like than Amazon Google or Pandora. But essentially it’s a version of Pandora.
Whilst there will clearly be a new device announced to coincide its the release of iOS7 in September, there seems to be a real loss of momentum at Apple. And with new Android devices due from Motorola and others (probably at a much lower price point) the new iPhone is going to have to be pretty special to regain momentum
The significant change in user experience will be a key issue. Years ago we worked with Motorola when their key problem was the fact most people were very familiar with how a Nokia worked, so were reluctant to start and earn a new operations system
Come September when your experience on your current iPhone changes, making the shift to a Samsung or other android may not seem such a leap.
(Of course we all know that Coke got their mojo back and we would not bet against Apple doing the same)
Search
We keep saying we expect Apple to switch search away from Google at some point. It’s the one piece of Google still baked into the iPhone (now that Google Maps and YouTube are no longer pre installed ) and we know Bing (and Yahoo) would love to get the search volume that the iPhone delivers
So we were fascinated to see that search in Siri now defaults to Bing. Will the default for Safari on iOS7 still be Google or will they switch the three choices (Bing, Google and Yahoo) to alphabetical order with Bing as the default?
Mapping
Apple maps didn’t get a mention at the WWDC event, but other news dealt a further blow. Google are to pay more than $1 billion for Waze who Apple were rumoured to be buying last year for $500 million. A key reason for Apples interest is that Waze supply data to Apple Maps – and that must be in some jeopardy now.
Money
Not everything at Google is going well. There some well documented problems with Google Wallet and this interview with a rival gets into some of the issues. His company Braintree is a big player in digital payments, handling money for Airbnb, Fab, Angry Birds and many more.
One technology in the money space that isn’t doing so well is NFC. For some time now the promise of iPhone support has kept NFC as the next big thing. But in talking about AirDrop the Apple team seemed very uninterested in NFC and it seems unlikely that it is going to feature in the next Apple device.
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