Does Anti-Trust Pressure Force Apple, Palm To Play Nice?

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It’s going to be a very busy couple of weeks in mobile land. This week, Palm finally ships the Pre. We’ll finally see if it lives up to the hype. And then next week, Apple will have their World Wide Developer Conference, with many and varied rumors of new devices.

The most interesting news, though, going into this Mobile June Extravaganza is the announcement that the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes (it excludes DRM protected media and applications). The big question and speculation of course is: 1) Is Apple giving Palm permission? and 2) If  not, when will Apple shut down Palm’s media sync?

This “relationship” is only heightened by the two companies. Palm’s been poaching Apple developers, precipitated by former Apple and now Palm executive Jonathan Rubenstein, the brains behind the iPod and revitalized Mac. Apple’s Tim Cook, current COO, has publicly said, “We’re going to go after anybody” who rips off Apple’s technology. “We’ll use whatever weapons we have at our disposal.” (quote from Fortune Magazine, June 8, 2009, p88)

To say the least, the relationship is full of animosity.

Sure sounds like Palm is “hacking” Apple’s iTunes. After all, why would Apple help the company they are trying to simultaneously ignore/kill? If so, I would expect a “kill switch” built into an update of iTunes in the near future.

Given all this, though, I’d be surprised if Palm is doing this without permission. Palm’s making a big deal out of the iTunes media sync, as they should. And would you make a big deal out of a major feature that could be ended at any time? No way.

My guess is there’s a ghost in the room. With the Democrats in power, don’t be surprised if there’s more discussion of anti-trust issues. Apple, with close to 90% market share with iTunes and the iPod, has got to be thinking about protecting its back side. No better way to do that than let a competitor or two sync with your system.

And with Apple’s public comments about Palm, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is Apple’s hubris allowing this relationship to happen. After all, why should Apple worry about Palm syncing if, according to Apple, Palm will not be around to take advantage?

Testing to Beta Stinks

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I was ready to ship FastFigures Finance Calculator version 2.0 to Apple a week ago. The day before I submitted, Apple announced that all new submissions need to be compatible with their latest developments, but I knew we were not. I had a couple of customers report to me that the calculator and table editor weren’t operational any more.

I knew what the problem was. They were built using standard UI widgets from Apple, but they were standard widgets that were meant to do something else. In other words, I hacked them and just knew eventually Apple would break it. Thought I’d at least get more than three months out of it, though.

I didn’t have enough experience at the time to build my own. I do now. I re-built the text area, blinking blue cursor and was lucky enough to find some loupe (magnifier) code to use for enlarging the area where I’m selecting. It took me two weeks — including an intensive 40 hours over Friday and Saturday and a little of Sunday to get the cursor and loupe integrated and then we all spent countless hours testing.

I’m exhausted.

There are real benefits for writing our own. I can do text substitution now (i.e., insert thousand’s separators) and entry monitoring to make sure the user isn’t entering something incorrectly (neither of which will be in this release). But, to be honest, I’d rather not have done any of it.

I did come to a conclusion, though. If Apple wants us to be compatible with a new developments, they should at least have the courtesy of sending to us a final or near-final version first, either the version they think they are shipping or the one they will. First, my entire endeavor might have been avoided if they fixed the thing that broke my hack.

Second, I found countless bugs (and reported them to Apple) in the beta version — which is by definition full of bugs. How do I know which ones I need to hack around and which ones they will fix? With a final release (or close to it) I will know. I can do a much better job and waste a lot less time if Apple — and any other OS vendor — would help me out. I also have the twin worry of my app being rejected because of bugs in the new development. Do we wait? Do we ship? We opted for ship and pray.

We are all learning together. I hope this goes much smoother in the future.

Smart Thinking Destroyed By iPhone Gold Rush

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There are a couple of trends in mobile software development that I don’t understand: 1) the over-focus on iPhone and 2) the over-emphasis on locally-running (native) applications.

iPhone or Die
On point #1, don’t get me wrong. I use an iPhone, it’s a great product and platform and clearly has mental share in the market. But it’s 10% of the smartphone customers. RIM has twice the market share with BlackBerry; Symbian four times that sell in plus a large installed base.

Maybe Yahoo! isn’t the best example, as it’s a consumer-oriented service, but apparently they have stopped developing a BlackBerry app to focus on their iPhone app. Is that a reasonable decision? Maybe. If I’m deciding, though, I look at who my customers are first. Making an enterprise or government sale? Better focus on BlackBerry first. Apple’s App Store isn’t even set up to handle large corporate purchases. Are your customers mainly in Europe? Better focus on Symbian, which is dominating the EU.

What’s a Website?
The second trend that’s bothering me is the plethora of websites pretending to be applications. The most amazing thing about the iPhone is the web browser. And yet all these sites are making native applications that are nothing more than a web site. The data still has to be downloaded to make them work, so it’s not like “offline” has any meaning to them.

Do I really need a Wikipedia app? A Google app? A Netflix app? All they do is connect me back to the web site anyway. Heck, if Twitter had a half-decent interface then I’d use their website instead. I’d much rather see time spent on making these websites really mobile-enabled. For a great example, check out ESPN’s mobile site. They’ve done an incredible job of making it look-and-feel iPhone while keeping it on the web.

Building an iPhone Business

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Introduction

A week ago I was asked to give a presentation to a local meet-up mobile group called Mobile Portland about my 12 years in mobile and how that relates to the iPhone App Store. I decided to focus this on some conclusions I came to regarding building an iPhone business instead of being specific to Infinity Softworks.

I then gave the same presentation earlier this week at OTBC, a local tech incubator that I’ve been involved with the past few years, for a Lunch-and-Learn. In total over 100 saw my presentation in person or streamed across the web.

I’ve included both the slides and video here for your review. I think I’m taking a very realistic look at the challenges. Most of the popular press and blogs have been so overwhelmingly positive about the App Store and its impact for developers. But the make-up of the App Store is far more complicated than that for the vast majority of us, and the opportunities have morphed substantially over the last nine months.

I hope this helps you with your business decisions, giving you a little more insight into the opportunities and challenges with Apple’s App Store itself. My goal was to analyze this from a business perspective. Obviously my own experiences influence the slides but feel that the presentation is broader than any one company’s experience.

Video

This video was shot with the second presentation at OTBC. The first half, 27 minutes, is my presentation. The second half is Q&A.

You can see it here if you can’t see the embedded video:http://blip.tv/file/2080839/

Slides

If you’d prefer to peruse the slides instead, please keep in mind that the video tells a much fuller story than the slides do:

At Apple’s Mercy

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In 2003-4, at the peak of our move into math education, we were at the mercy of the College Board. Everyone was waiting on their decision. We had the states of Georgia and Michigan interested in putting us on approval lists. We had middle schools and high schools across the country ready to shift from traditional calculators to Palm devices. We knew at the time that if the College Board rejected us from trials for the AP Calculus exam, we were pretty much done in education.

Literally millions of dollars were riding on the College Board’s decision.

And we got in. The College Board agreed to do first year trials in a bunch of school districts across the country.

But then the unexpected happened. Palm fired their education team as they shifted focus from handheld computers to smartphones and the College Board decided to not do the trials.

We were done in education.

A similar, deja vu feeling crept over me in the past 48 hours as Apple changed some search criteria, we disappeared from a number of key searches, and our sales plummeted. We are once again beholden to a single company.

According to various reports I have found, Apple decided that there was too much cross-selling going on. For instance, if I wanted people who used iFart to find my application, all I had to do was add the text “iFart” into my application description and I’d show up in the searches for iFart. I completely understand why Apple would want to stop this behavior. It’s too easy to game the system by referencing a completely unrelated — but albeit highly popular — application to raise awareness for your own product.

But this change eliminated a lot of good uses of terms as well. For instance, FastFigures is a financial calculator with innovative template format to make calculation a lot faster, easier and accurate. We include the phrase “financial calculator” in our description so people searching on that term can find us. (We also include “Finance Calculator” in the title but words in the title are exempt from Apple’s new search criteria.)

What happened? Because someone named their application “Financial Calculator” we are now removed from every search that includes that phrase. We are also eliminated from every search that doesn’t include that phrase but where that application appears without using those terms. So we have also been removed from searches for “IRR” and “Time Value of Money”, for instance, because the application titled “Financial Calculator” is there as well.

The effect (and if you were wondering the impact of search), our sales plummeted 80%.

I’m hoping Apple will fix the problem. In the meantime I re-worked the description to make sure that the words “financial” and “calculator” never appear back-to-back, hoping this gets me back into the searches. (I’ll find out tomorrow.)

The queasy feeling in my gizzard, though, is still there. I’m completely beholden to Apple to make my business happen. I vowed I’d never get in a situation again where I am beholden to a single company for my success. It didn’t even take me five years to break that vow.

Update: It looks like Apple fixed the problem this afternoon. My fix didn’t work but that’s fine. Just want to be back in the searches!