Vying for the Hearts of Developers

[…] the mobile revolution is over, and the war is now between Apple and the Google / Samsung alliance for the hearts of developers.

That’s why Apple spent fully one-third of its presentation today on new developer features, including an entirely new programming language called Swift. That’s why iOS is opening up in entirely new ways, including previously-forbidden things like letting apps talk to each other and even share interface elements with the system. That’s why Apple is building out the foundations of both health-tracking and home-monitoring platforms that big companies like Nike and Honeywell can tap into alongside smaller players like the smart lock maker August and speaker company iHome. And that’s why Apple is adding all sorts of little features to its systems that only power users really want, like widgets in the notification shade and replacement software keyboards. Make the developers happy, and they’ll stick around to write great apps that rely on the iPhone as the center of the universe.

It’s been less than 24 hours since Apple’s WWDC 2014 keynote, but already there have been a wave of opinion pieces, criticisms, compliments and everything in between. But so far, my favorite article has come from Vox’s Nilay Patel (just ignore Vox’s weird, almost click-bait headline). Like every opinion, not everyone will agree with it, but Patel makes some strong arguments about how Apple has now laid a really solid foundation for its immediate future. Apple wants to sell consumers on their ecosystem and in order to make that appealing to consumers, Apple is making their platform as attractive as possible for developers and other third parties such as those which provide health-tracking and home-automation products.

If Apple succeeds at attracting the very best developers and third party products to the Apple ecosystem it will make it that much more appealing for new consumers to buy in (and as Tim Cook jokingly said, have “a better life”) and that much harder for existing customers to leave the ecosystem. As someone who has invested in the Apple ecosystem in recent years, yesterday’s announcements were very encouraging and restored my confidence that this ecosystem will continue to grow in convenience, utility and value. I for one can’t wait to see what the developers bring us later this fall with the public release of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.