the onda

Great companies polish their products until they are clear as glass, and great software companies do this despite the fact that it is often easier/more convenient/cooler to work on something completely new or to start over.

iPhone 3.0 is mostly polishing, with two game changers one one Achilles heel. And polishing is something Apple excels at. Sure, it is a little ridiculous to be heralding copy&paste but for the iPhone this feature, as well as universal search, MMS, multiple photo attachments, and landscape keyboard on all of the Apple apps, is a solid refinement of an already very polished user experience.

The first of the game changers is GameKit, a peer-to-peer library that works over the Bluetooth radio. Bonjour (mDNS) has always been on of the most exciting things about the iPhone platform but the 802.11 radio burns a lot of juice, and the need to have all of the peer devices on the same logical network (same SSID) has really held back the truly serendipitous mobile use cases. Get ready for all sorts of local social apps based on this feature. And to boot, GameKit also provides a set of objects for peer-to-peer voice chat— a great addition given how heinous the recording/playback sound APIs are and the fact that the device is optimized for this sort of stuff.

The micropayments system (StoreKit) is the second fantastic improvement. I can't believe that after 15 years of going at it, after Paypal and Amazon and Google Checkout— and even carrier billing— it's going to be Apple that is going to deliver us a truly flexible, ubiquitous, and affordable micropayment solution. While some developers for trial-to-pay capabilities, others for a "premium AppStore," and others still for subscription infrastructure, StoreKit seems like a great compromise that enables all of these modes of billing plus more. I'd expect to see that all of the real commercial efforts on the AppStore are soon going to move to a free download with all sorts of "pay up" toggles in-app that open more functionality.

Now for the ugly: no background processing? Seriously Apple WTF? For sure bad applications will trash the battery, but well behaved ones shouldn't and there is a well-known system of reviews and approval to police the overall ecosystem. What is even more ridiculous is that they are trying to pass off this XMPP push notification thing as a suitable substitute. Push notification is a nice thing and should be available on top of background processing, but it is not a good alternative.

Take the canonical example of an IM service app. With background notification, you need to establish a proxy process in the cloud that will log into your account and monitor it for incoming IMs, to then send a ping to Apple's notification router. Compare the moving pieces and overall complexity of this with a client on the device that stays connected while it can and falls off the network when it can thus terminating the session with the server. It seems much more prone to state errors to have that second proxy process in place. Now in the case of the big IM providers like AIM, this is already done for the IM-to-mobile gateway, but I fear that others may not have such an easy time wrapping network services in this two-tiered way, especially not ones which are built around a synchronous interaction model.

Overall, it looks like a solid incremental improvement though, and I expect that it will keep Apple firmly in the smartphone innovation lead.