Appletell | Apple, Mac, iPhone, iPod | News, Rumors, Reviews, How-Tos

Back in the day (way back, when it was still Apple Computer, Inc.), Steve Jobs whipped a Macworld Keynote audience into a frenzy by announcing a revolutionary iPod, communication device, and cellular telephone: the iPhone. Removed from the reality distortion field, and a few thoughtful blog posts later, people began to wonder about the strategy that Apple was pursuing. Originally, apps on the iPhone were a no-no. Steve pontificated the wonder of web-based applications, like Facebook and Flickr; the iPhone’s killer apps were to be accessed via Safari. This was an interesting, and obviously ill-fated strategy, but several events lately set me to thinking:

1. A friend’s iPhone 3G started acting up so badly that the Genius Bar is replacing the phone and she is going to start over totally fresh. Restoring from backups wasn’t fixing the issue, which puzzled me and the Genius. Was there a misbehaving app on the phone? Or was some data (her contacts, iTunes library, etc.) to blame? It took me back to the days of OS 8 when your desktop would conk out and you had to either do the half-split troubleshooting routine or use Conflict Catcher to find the misbehaving OS extension. Ah, memories.
2. This cnet article about the impact of the iPhone on AT&T’s brand popped up in one of my RSS feeds. In it, author Marguerite Reardon lays out several interesting arguments about why iPhone users are peculiar compared to their smartphone peers and cell phone brethren. Fully half of iPhone users are in the unique conundrum of loving their device and hating the network (see the published CFI Group study).  Marguerite points out, quite rightly so, that many of us tend to be less-loyal from the start, due to the fact that we jumped ship from other carriers to get the iPhone in the first place.  More affluent users (one of Apple’s core markets) in urban areas tend to both a.) receive fairly abysmal 3G reception, and b.) share their experiences (blog about something and in less than 24 hours the whole world knows about it).
3. AT&T’s commercials of late have been upbeat, happy, look-at-us-investing-even-during-a-recession bits of kitschy drivel.  They contain talk of ushering in new technology and implementing more sustainable business practices, peppered liberally with messages of increased network capacity and a constant dedication to making the “nation’s fastest 3G network” faster, better, more reliable, able to slice, dice, even julienne potatoes…the only problem is, those of us who actually use this network don’t quite feel that it deserves such accolades.  At least once a week, many iPhone users in the Washington, DC metro area are forced to switch off 3G in order to carry on a conversation without the call dropping (even on major roads in the area).  I am one of them, and I have shared the disable-3G tip with my iPhone-using friends, to help save them the frustration of endless redialing when chatting.  Cognitive dissonance between happy commercial land and frustrating reality land causes me to curse AT&T at least weekly—not a good PR situation.

So, in light of the current state of the network, and having learned from past Mac OS lessons, I have a simple question to pose: Could Apple’s original web app strategy have worked?

That Would be a No

Remember, if you will, that the original iPhone was not even privy to the fledgling 3G network of AT&T (still in its merger period with Cingular).  Fire up the Flickr application on your phone today, and see how long it takes to load a picture from somebody’s photostream.  Or try to browse somebody’s facebook wall.  Multiply that time by about two and think about doing that all day long using the EDGE network.  Not to ding Mr. Jobs on his visionary credentials, but how would the iPhone, forced to load both application interfaces as web pages and their associated data, ever have been a success without 3G?  Let us not forget, in addition, that even after the advent of the 3G iPhone, it still took AT&T more than a year to roll out iPhone MMS.  Rather than provisioning both pictures and videos, would it not have been a better compromise to enable picture-only messaging for both 3G and 3GS users?

Facebook was one of the early adopters of the iPhone, providing a specialized site designed for the iPhone’s screen and relatively low bandwidth capabilities.  But how many non-startup, non geek-chic companies would have jumped on board?  Given this dearth of applications, would the iPhone ever have reached critical mass?  Any day now there will be a press release telling us that the App Store has hit the 100,000 mark, but under the former web-app strategy, it is doubtful the iPhone would have broken through as the “gotta have” mobile platform.  For 99 bucks a year, any creative developer can become the next hit app maker—there is a whole class of development that simply never would have happened if every developer had to set up his own cloud-enabled web app for iPhone users.  And the gauntlet Apple has thrown down to Nintendo and Sony?  Yeah, right.  Try playing a game when 20 frames per second are streaming over the EDGE network (go ahead, we’ll wait a couple years for you just to load level one).

But Then Again…

Apple is certainly no stranger to bleeding-edge innovative moves.  Look at the company’s history: the mouse, USB, WiFi…before they became stock standard, Apple had divined the future for us.  Not to say that Apple is always right on the money (NuBus, anyone?), but it is a pretty safe bet that Steve Jobs’ crystal ball is better than yours.  The competitive landscape of the PC industry is slightly different from the mobile phone industry, and these features were technological advances, rather than crippling Achilles’ heels to their devices.  Apple could have been on the cusp of the cloud computing wave just as they were ahead of the curve on WiFi with the original clamshell iBooks.  Unfortunately, that original AirPort card did not hurt the user experience if no WiFi was available; in the case of a web-app centric iPhone, the slowness and unreliable nature of AT&T’s network likely would have made the user experience unbearable.  On the plus side for Apple, there is evidence that the market would have waited long enough for AT&T’s network to catch up enough to make the iPhone a serious competitor.  Where is the real competition to the iPhone in terms of usability and interface design?  Steve Ballmer may have laughed off the iPhone in 2007, but even now near the end of 2009, Microsoft still has no clear challenger to rival it.  Android is creeping along, but Google is in a similar position of trying to build critical mass for an app store; had Apple not introduced the concept, the web-app centric model likely would have been copied on other devices.

In the end…

It all boils down to speed.  iPhone users approach their phones differently…Facebook, Twitter, sharing life and times, texting…these are what the iPhone is for.  Not making phone calls (though that is a big part of it).  Cell networks were not designed to be Internet-on-the-go providers, and yet. that is what they have become. Whether AT&T likes it or not, they are merely a conduit, rather than a provider of services like mobile TV or some half-baked music service.  Steve Jobs cited delays in releasing an iPhone SDK related to ensuring stability and security (like my friend’s misbehaving iPhone), but we, the iPhone using public, seem to care more about flexibility.  The AT&T exclusivity really does hold back the iPhone, in spite of the benefits of the full SDK.  Imagine how much worse it could be if you still needed to go through Safari to get to cool iPhone stuff!

The good news, and something that Marguerite points out astutely in her article, is that iPhone users tend to lay all the credit for the iPhone on Apple, and blame for the lousy service on AT&T:

“iPhone users love Apple,” Adler said. “They are loyal to the brand and they love the device and all the great applications. All they associate AT&T with is dropped calls, a hard-to-access 3G network, and high network fees. They even make iPhone users pay extra for SMS. It seems crazy to me that AT&T hasn’t done anything to throw customers a bone to say, ‘We love you as a customer.’”

iPhone users will blame AT&T every time a call gets dropped or an application fails to load data.  Had Apple enforced the web-apps only policy, the sheer breadth and quality of available apps would have been less, hurting the user experience (and reflecting poorly on Apple).  Smart move to whoever finally got the green light for the SDK and App Store.  Marguerite also includes a delightfully mindless quote from an AT&T exec, “The surest indication of customer satisfaction is churn,” AT&T’s Siegel said. “And ours is at record-low levels”.  Well churn (number of customers leaving) may indeed be low, but remember: you’ve got those users by the you-know-whats, in the form of a 2 year contract and pretty steep penalties for early termination.  So pick a number that isn’t artificially high—like how often your iPhone users see the words “Call Failed”—to measure satisfaction.

Apple may indeed have been able pull off the iPhone without the App Store, but it undoubtedly would not have been the runaway hit it is today.  Minor inconveniences can cause occasional headaches, like an app causing some random lockups of a phone or loading data too slowly, but the overall usability remains quite high.  It is tough to imagine an iPhone without native apps being quite as cool…quite as desireable…quite as usable!  So kudos to Apple for listening to customers, kudos to all the developers who feed us a steady stream of addictive games and pointless new ways to waste time, and some grudingly-given kudos to AT&T for continuing to invest in expanding its network.

Caveats abound, though. First and foremost among them? Stop advertising a better network, AT&T, and get on with building it!!!