Apple has said a development kit is coming and the entire mobile industry is now waiting to find out what the terms are, which is a remarkable position for a company that has been selling phones for eight months to have manoeuvred everybody into.
I have been arguing since the launch that the no-software position could not hold, so I am not going to pretend surprise. What I did not anticipate is how completely the argument would be won by people voiding their own warranties to install chat clients. Apple spent the autumn losing a fight it started, and the sensible reading of the coming kit is that somebody senior looked at the jailbreak numbers and concluded the demand was not going away.
The terms are everything and almost nobody is discussing them. Three questions decide whether this matters.
Who approves an application, and on what basis? If Apple reviews everything before it reaches a customer, it has invented a gatekeeper role that no desktop platform has ever had, and every developer building for it accepts that a business can be ended by a decision it cannot appeal. If Apple does not review, it inherits the security and quality problems that come with an open platform on a device holding somebody’s email.
How does the money work? The App-buying customer already has a payment relationship with Apple through iTunes, which is an enormous advantage and also the mechanism by which Apple takes a cut of somebody else’s business. Whatever percentage gets announced will become the industry standard by default, because there is no competing channel.
And what can software actually reach? A kit that permits pretty applications with no access to the radio, the file system or background execution is a demonstration rather than a platform.
The reason this is the most consequential thing happening in mobile right now is what it does to everybody else. Nokia’s position is that the device with the most capabilities wins, and Symbian has had third-party software for years, distributed through a process so unpleasant that almost nobody uses it. Windows Mobile has had it for longer with the same result. The problem in both cases was never permission. It was that there is no shop, no payment mechanism, and no way for a small developer to reach a customer without a carrier’s blessing.
If Apple ships a kit with a store attached and a payment system already holding seventy million credit cards, it will have solved in one release the exact problem I described eighteen months ago as the thing nobody had fixed and that whoever fixed would take the category.
Google, meanwhile, announced an operating system in November that nobody has seen running on hardware, backed by an alliance of carriers and manufacturers. That is a completely different theory of how this gets won, and it is the only serious alternative on the table.
The next twelve months in this industry are going to be decided by distribution terms rather than by hardware, and I do not think the incumbents have understood that yet.