Apple Needs to Press Play on Game Center

Dan Moren on Game Center:

Online play is all about socializing, and that’s an area where Apple hasn’t exactly torn up the playing field. Adding friends on Game Center is easy enough, but what if some of my friends know other people I’d like to be friends with? Why can’t I browse their list of friends?

Agreed.

On this point, though:

Yet it’s frustrating to find that if I jump from playing The Incident on my iPad to playing it on my iPhone, I’m at a completely different place in the game. This is one place where Apple could jump ahead of its competition, by providing an API to allow games to sync their states wirelessly, tied to their Game Center login.

I’d argue (and have argued) that cloud storage and syncing for data ought to be something available to all iOS apps — not just games.

★ Thursday, 12 May 2011