A Diverging Line

One of the truly great things about the App Store is that one can go through the entire catalogue of applications and know, when they download an app that it will run on their iPhone, whatever the model. This is a breakthrough in mobile applications that no one seems to have picked up on. No worrying about getting the same application to work on varying pieces of hardware. You can install an app on your iPhone and know that it will operate perfectly as there have been no other models to ‘distract’ the development of the application.

However, with the release of the iPhone 3GS, I think that Apple are making the first steps to diverging the iPhone line, in terms of different hardware functionality. And this will be a problem in the future.

Right now, we’ve got two models of iPhone on sale. The 3G and the 3GS. Both these phones, on the whole are very similar, with the 3GS only having a handful of features, such as video capabilities, voice control, a magnetometer and a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus differentiating it from the previous model.

This leaves very few extra requirements that an iPhone application may have for added functionality or a certain feature to operate at its best. And yes, a lot of the time, we’re only seeing quality improvements. For instance, a barcode reader, to be effective might require the autofocus lens of the 3GS. As with the 3G, the application would struggle to get an accurate image of the barcode. But the app would still be able to function, it’s just that a lot more care would have to be taken in scanning the iPhone. Be it, making sure the lighting conditions are okay and keeping a steady hand.

Now imagine the iPhone landscape a few years down the line. A couple regular iPhones? Plus an iPhone Nano with a smaller screen? This leaves Apple with a very large problem. With there being different capabilities and physical limitations on the iPhone product line – we’re going to see several versions of a single application; first changed depending on physical capabilities, and secondly, games may be changed depending on the speed of the hardware that they run on.

The irony of this of course, is that at WWDC 09 Phil Schiller called out Nokia for this exact issue:

Not all the apps run on all the phones. It’s really complicated so we took a lot of the phones and added them together to make a bigger number [to give a number of apps on the store].

In this scenario, we’d be stuck with possibly hundreds of thousands of apps on the store, some that can run on your specific iPhone model, but other versions that may not. My feelings are that, for Apple to solve this problem they’re going to have to take a tough stance.

Imagine, you bring your shiny new iPhone home after picking it up from the store. Once you’ve plugged it in, the iTunes Store would detect which model you were using and only display the relevant apps that operate on the model you own. So when you go searching for that game that requires a certain CPU speed to run, you won’t purchase the version that doesn’t operate well on your iPhone. In fact, you won’t even know the other version of the app exists. In turn making the browsing experience of the App Store (which right now is pretty poor) a lot more tolerable.

I favour this idea because it hits two birds with one stone; it simply cuts down on the amount of apps in the store and allows you to not have to worry about getting the optimum experience from applications from your iPhone. Not being a developer however, I’m unsure how they’d react to such a system. I’d envision a series of boxes for the developer to tick, suggesting which iPhone models the app will run on.

The other option, of course, is to go to the simple, and effective method of stating ’system requirements’ in the app info section on the store, requiring the purchaser to check if the application is compatible with their model of iPhone. I just feel that the afore mentioned solution is a more elegant way of handling this inherent issue with the current way the App Store functions.

PS: My bud, Chris Gilbert, has written a piece on this very same topic, it’s worth a read.