Thoughts on One Trick Ponies

When your company is a one trick pony (Apple), that pony (the iPhone) better be a compelling trick.  ZDNet’s Ed Bott just wrote an article that shows where Apple, Google, and Microsoft gain their income from.  While Google predictably gets most of the money from advertising and Microsoft has pivoted from the Windows company to the Services company, Apple remains as the company that sells the iPhone with other things.

With 68% of Apple’s income coming from the iPhone, protecting that product line is a big deal for Apple.  With the relative maturity of the Android platform, it’s incumbent on Apple to keep the iPhone as the premium device.  It has to be different and it has to be better in order for Apple to keep that revenue stream high.

There’s an argument that I have had with a few other developers about mobile development tools that let you write once, deploy everywhere.  Tools like Cordova, where the screens are defined in HTML and the code in JavaScript.  I’ve been told that I should be using that instead of tools that let me write to the native platform.  Xamarin tools in my case.  The Cordova (and other web like development tools) are a threat to Apple.  If you can write an app with Cordova and it runs the same way on Android as it does on the iPhone, what is the point in paying a premium for Apple hardware?

That’s why Apple continues to add functionality and services that doesn’t exist on other platforms.  Features like 3D Touch or FaceTime.  Remember when FaceTime was announced?  Steven Jobs said it would be an open industry standard.  That was in 2010.  Six years later Facetime is still a closed platform.  If FaceTime ran on Android, customized Androids would be the rage at schools, not the iPhone.  Apple is never going to open up FaceTime.  But they will continue on enhancing that one trick.