OS Footprint Is Not a Proxy for Application Footprint

Greg Cox:

This analysis by Henry Blodget on Business Insider makes the classic (repeated ad-nauseam) mistake of putting Apple in a race they’re not in. Apple does not make a third party OS platform for phones. It makes phones and it makes an application platform for developers. What he is implicitly doing is using OS footprint as a proxy for app platform footprint, and at this point in the mobile market’s evolution, that is just wrong headed.

An older piece by Cox that’s also worth a read: “The Only App Phone” — a really good multivariate argument about why iOS has such a strong software market. Includes this observation:

Turn on the iPhone and the first, and only, thing you see is apps.

When the iPhone came out it was striking that everything, everything, was an app. Even the voice call functionality was encapsulated in an app. This was a massive departure from phones at the time, which all had send and end buttons. The mobile phone had been a physical thing and the iPhone made it a software app.

★ Wednesday, 6 April 2011