Apple’s big keynote at WWDC 2011 in San Francisco went down last night, and while it was notable for the debut of iCloud, of most interest for me was how Apple appears to be systematically targeting BlackBerry loyalists with iOS 5, not Android fanatics.
Unless RIM ups its game immediately, it’ll find itself teetering on the edge of user base abyss.
Now plenty of features in iOS 5 will appeal to smartphone newcomers and Android die hards alike. But you’d expect Apple to go after its now biggest competitor – and lift ideas from it too. Apple’s new iOS Notification Centre draws heavily from the pull down notification window that has been in Android since 2008, but Apple’s copied it because it clearly works.
With hundreds of thousands of Android devices activated every day, Google’s got nothing to worry about. If there’s space for one, there’s always space for two, as they say. RIM, on the other hand, which has a declining global share of mobile internet usage (Not even worthy of a mention on Apple’s pie chart showing this yesterday), should be worried for two reasons: Apple’s just wave a big fat sign-on bonus in front of both its core customer types.
With iOS 5, businesses have more reason than ever to allow iPhones on their enterprise and secure networks. The iOS 5 Mail app supports encrypted S/MIME email, which will be a godsend to the IT bods with lame comedy ties running your enterprise server at work. Apple will be able to broker more big corporate deals to get iPhones in the hands of thousands of employees.
But more than fifty percent of BlackBerry users are your average Joe consumers, still sticking around because they love the keyboard and BlackBerry Messenger. Apple probably isn’t going to address the former anytime soon/ever, but it may not need to if iMessage makes converts of all the teens “chirpsing” their PINs to each other (Excuse us, we’re not good with the lingo).
Imagine BlackBerry messaging, complete with read receipts, usernames tied to phone numbers and encryption, on top of a platform which actually offer some decent apps and brilliant games – that’s what iOS 5 is promising to all those yoofs coming to the end of their contract.
Granted, this is already possible through apps like Kik Messenger and WhatsApp, but as good as they are, they’re simply not high profile enough to match the power of Apple’s marketing machine.
If RIM really is considering donating both its kidneys and serving up BBM Android and iPhone apps, it needs to do it fast, or BlackBerry is about to get squashed.
