Computers, be it as desktop, notebook, tablet or smartphone, are amazing devices that come to live thanks to the software supplied for it. As such we buy them for the apps we use on them.
Unless our needs are basic, and can be satisfied with the built-in apps, this means we want specialized software to buy and use. And because apps are the driver, we want a device that has long term app support. This is why the Apple strategy of reduced fragmentation and premium features is so useful in supporting the app market. Fewer variations to think about and to test against, software frameworks updated even in the installed base, leading to faster pickup of new features, and ensuring that everyone has hardware that supports great software.
And since the premium that one needs to pay to get the best app platform has come down a lot since in the last decades, from thousands to a couple hundred dollars at most, it means that now much more people valuing apps can easily afford to get the optimal platform as well.
This is the huge advantage Apple has in the mobile world, and it still gives them a considerable lead. But there are problems; Ben Thompson voices concerns about the App Store sustainability, and they are the big issue facing Apple today: With competing tablets and phones slowly becoming competent enough as an app platform, the quality of the apps we want is bound to become the deciding factor in which platform to choose.
This would suggest an opening for the competition: Offer better terms for developers to get sustaining app businesses and get users to follow the apps. But it is not really a threat, as Apple can easily counter these terms, they are not hard to implement, and it has the cash to buy out anyone really threatening.
On the other hand, AirDrop shows that Apple is willing to put in hardware that only gets used a year later. This was a brilliant move on Apple’s part: Since the feature requires two devices to work together, they have unveiled the feature only when there was already enough of an installed base for it to be useful. This means that new features already have enough hardware supporting it to make it worthwhile for developers to code for it.
The threat would come from online services. But all that shared data still needs apps to process and use them; and making a good app is an expensive process that you can only perform on multiple platforms for the most popular data. Performance will take awhile to improve enough to allow browser apps to become good enough, and once everything you want to do can easily be done in a browser app, only then will app platforms become irrelevant. We should not forget that one of the important characteristics of computers is their multi function character, this means that integrated platforms remain viable as long as they perform one important function significantly better than the competition, and relatively open services like Dropbox are actually a help for platforms because they enable you to pick and choose the best native apps for each device and data type you are using.
The question when browser apps will be fast enough is difficult to answer. The A7 chip provides, when normalized to the same frequency and core count, almost the same performance as the latest Intel Haswell chips, which means that Apple will slow down in its performance improvements. And since touch based input requires fast response times even more than a classical PC, the performance bar will actually be higher in mobile, especially when taken together with the limited power budgets of these devices. So I’d guess that there will remain enough cases needing native performance for the next decade.
