Mobile Fix: WWDC14

In this week’s round-up of everything mobile, Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!, looks back at the key take-outs from the 2014 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

The Apple event this week did what it was meant to. Despite being a developers event the real audience was the rest of the industry, the press and Wall Street.

And it seemed to work. The coverage has been (mostly) favourable and the share price even went up a little. The general view is that – for the first time without Steve Jobs – Apple have momentum. Lots of ideas and incremental things that roll up into a big picture view of what Apple offers for the future.

Remember their business model is all about selling high end hardware – so the real test is when they unveil the iPhone 6

But in the meantime they are creating more synergies between Apple devices – so if you have a Mac then the iPhone is the natural companion. Content can now be shared between devices and you can even makes calls and get texts on your PC

As expected we saw new Anchors unveiled – HealthKit and HomeKit both have the promise of being incredibly useful and making your iPhone even more central to your life.

Not much on the other Anchor – the Passbook cum wallet – but at a developers event we weren’t expecting too much. The brief mention of TouchID does set up the wallet idea – what better to keep your money and financial info safe than your fingerprint? (83% of iPhone5 owners use the fingerprint scanning) When the iPhone 6 launches we’re sure Apple will leverage those billion credit card relationships to announce a wallet.

There is some gentle sniping that Apple iOS 8 has learnt a lot from Android and others pointing out that a number of apps look a little superfluous now that Apple has embraced their function. DropBox, WhatsApp and Skype all seem a little less essential than last week.

Of course, they are arguably better than the iOS8 version but Google maps is better than Apple maps but most iPhone users go with the default.

Another interesting move is the addition of privacy focused search engine Duck Duck Go as option in Safari. We have banged on about the fact the only Google left baked into the iPhone is as the default search. This doesn’t change that, but it’s another option. In Siri Bing has already replaced Google as the default search and we still expect further moves.

Apple is now allowing app extensions so apps can talk with each other – as on Android – and it will now be possible for any app to offer a Notification Centre widget, which look like they would work really well on a watch or other wearable. And a new coding language that will make it easier to build apps.

There is so much to digest here – and little things keep being spotted – like the ability to quick launch apps from the lock screen. This is a good attempt at a list of everything you need to know and if you want to dig deeper the Ben Evan post is worth reading as is the Fred Wilson one.

Beacons

Hardly mentioned at the last Apple event iBeacons and Low Energy Bluetooth (BLE) have proved to be big news. Much of the clever stuff in HomeKit and HealthKit relies on BLE

This is a good summary on just what a big deal it is. Yet few people have actually done much with the technology yet – lots of talk and little action. But a Fix friend has taken their beacons out of the box and started to experiment – read the learnings here.

Meeker backlash

There has been a bit of a backlash to the new Mary Meeker deck. One thing that welcome is an attempt to improve the charts themselves – as this example shows the data can be even more powerful when presented well.

Of course the money and time are never going to balance – we know that the analogue dollars of Print turn into digital pennies in mobile – but there is a lot of money in flux. Someone points out that chart overstates the case as some of the mobile time is spent on email etc but we think that is angels on pinheads stuff.

You can watch the full presentation video here – Meeker talks even faster than me.

One other piece caught our attention this week – Michael Wolff makes the point that even in decline print does generate a lot of cash. Clearly the smart Print people are using this cash to build a digital future, but some are just taking the money. We loved this quote;

“Print is the hopeless past, but one left with enough cash flow to be somebody’s excellent future.”

This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website

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