Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 event summary


While I haven’t been lucky enough to get an invite to an Apple event (hey, I’m pretty small-time) I do spend a great deal of time poring over the wealth of information that comes in from those that are lucky enough to attend the event live. You’ll be able to find the sources of my information after the break, but enjoy the details first! I didn’t think the event was going to be as exciting and filled with information as it actually turned out to be, so there’s quite a bit of content here. I’ll do my best to summarize what’s not super important or interesting and spend some good time with what is. Apple generally releases video of their keynotes a number of hours after the event. I’ll download and watch this once it’s available and update this with things I may have missed.

Tidbits – Steve loves to throw stats around, and here they are:

  • 450,000 iPads sold since opening day (4/3)
  • 600,000 iBooks downloaded since then. 250k downloaded in first 24 hours. No word on how many were free Project Gutenberg titles
  • 3.5 million iPad apps sold/downloaded since opening day
  • App Store has served “well over” 4 billion downloads
  • Total of 185,000 apps in App Store
  • 3,500 iPad-specific Apps
  • iPhone won JD Power & Associates Customer Satisfaction award for 2008, 2009, and 2010
  • iPhone’s Mobile Safari accounts for 64% of mobile browser share. all others equal half of Safari’s share
  • over 50 million iPhones sold to date. 85 million if you count iPod Touch
  • iPhone OS 4.0 coming out this summer; developer preview available today
  • 1,500 new APIs available to developers in OS 4.0
  • Users can now customize their home screen wallpaper
  • Home screen and lock screen wallpaper can be different
  • New dock interface more closely mimics OS X’s default dock look. No more flat metallic carbon fiber-esque finish
  • Only iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPod Touche mentioned in 4.0 updated. Original iPhone finally cut off
  • iPhone 3GS and latest iPod Touch are only devices to receive multitasking. Original iPhone and iPhone 3G will not receive multitasking. Their tents sag a little bit, it seems
  • iPad receiving OS 4.0 update this Fall, not Summer like iPhone and iPod Touch devices
See what else Steve had to offer after the break!

You’re “on notice.” – Apple seems to have finally taken to direct feature competition within the mobile space.
Apple put a lot of companies “on notice” today. Targeted Amazon’s Kindle directly with WhisperSync-like wireless syncing between iBook-compatible devices. Directly compared game and entertainment categories to what Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP have to offer with Game Center. Poked back at Google with massive launch of iAds to make mobile ads better and more interactive. Seemingly replaced the need for Adobe’s Flash by finding a way to make iAds play audio, video, and offer interactive games… all with HTML5!
“Tentpoles” – Apple categorized the 7 major changes to the way iPhone OS works in version 4.0 by classifying them as tentpoles. Here they are in detail.Apple claims that these are only  7 of over 100 new features, but it seems like these extra features are inherited from each tentpole.
1. Multitasking
  • Multitasking is finally coming with iPhone OS 4.0
  • Steve says: “Now we weren’t the first to this party, but we’re gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste.”
  • Apple has found a way to make multitasking work great so that it doesn’t drain the battery or make the active App sluggish
  • Multitasking activated by double-clicking home button. Brings up small dock-like dashboard interface for switching between open Apps. Looks like a cross between the Option-Tab interface and the Dashboard
  • Each running App retains previous state when switching between Apps. Duh
  • Custom written services will distill what inactive Apps require to keep running in the background. Developers will have access to it
  • Example: Pandora can access only audio out instead of having to keep the full App running with full resources in the background
  • Performance of Safari during demo was not impacted w/ pandora running in the background
2. Folders
  • A better way to organize Apps on home screen
  • Regular sized App icon looks and acts like a folder, showing smaller thumbnails of Apps contained within. Very easy to organize games and other things which I currently use completely separate pages to organize for me. Will greatly reduce clutter
  • Drag one App on top of another to create folder automatically
  • Folders are named automatically based on the category Apps it contains are from
  • Unlimited number of folders
  • Folders can be placed on the dock
  • iPhone can now store up to 2,160 Apps compared to the 180 it can currently hold, if you place a folder in every App spot and fill every folder with Apps
3. Enhanced Mail
  • Unified inbox. Much requested, but I actually prefer separate inboxes for work and personal. I probably won’t use it
  • Fast inbox switching for users that want to use separate inboxes. It’s quite a pain to switch between work and Gmail now, especially with how buried in IMAP folders I get
  • Organize by thread (awesome for work)
  • Attachments can open in third party apps
4. iBooks
  • Wireless syncing between platforms. Directly competes with Amazon’s WhisperSync available on the Kindle. I was worried about not being able to read iBooks purchased on the iPad on an iPhone, but this solves the problem completely
  • You can read all of your books on iPad and on iPhone without buying them again. Location, bookmarks, notes, etc… synced wirelessly
  • It kind of feels like my Kindle just became outdated
5. Enterprise
  • Better data protection. Email and attachments encrypted
  • APIs to allow developers to implement encryption in their own apps
  • Multiple Exchange accounts
  • Exchange Server 2010 support
  • SSL VPN support
6. Game Center
  • 50,000 game and entertainment titles on app store compared to 4,321 games on Nintendo DS and 2,477 on Sony PSP
  • New social gaming network
  • Matchmaking, invite friends, leaderboards, achievements!
7. iAd
  • Mobile advertising, built right into os 4.0. Finally we know what they’re doing with that Quattro Wireless purchase earlier this year. Definitely more than what I expected them to offer
  • Apple feels the current way of implementing mobile ads in Apps “sucks”. They want to make it easier for developers to make money and keep Apps free. Funny how Nintendo recently criticized the App Store, iPhone, and iPad as not being viable gaming platforms because there’s too many free games.
  • Steve said: “Search is not happening on phones; people are using Apps.” Google burn.
  • Average person spends 30 minutes in an App all day. If you put one ad up every 3 minutes, that’s 10 ads per day. iAd will soon have access to 100 million devices, leading to 1 billion ad impressions per day. Very impressive. Sounds like a great competitor to Google’s massive ad network
  • Goal is to improve quality of advertising and increase interaction.
  • Steve said: “What we want to do with iAd is deliver interaction and emotion.”
  • Ads keep people in your app. Interactive and video content is available to users without taking you out of the App
  • iAds is part of iPhone OS itself, not each app
  • Apple will sell and host ads
  • Developers get 60% of revenue
  • Clicking a banner ad opens a pop-up ad interface that can play video or audio using HTML5. Toy Story 3 ad demo’d. Fully interactive
  • Can even have games in ads
That’s all of the big stuff. If you’re interested in some of the smaller (but still fun and interesting!) stuff that Apple mentioned, continue on.
Fun stuff! – This is the stuff that just didn’t belong anywhere else. It wasn’t a tentpole, but Steve and Co. spent a great deal of time talking about it. Here’s what they had to show us.
Pandora
  • Now runs in the background and only uses audio out. Y can control the App through the lock screen, similar to the current iPod controls
  • Adding 30,000 listeners a day on the iPhone alone
  • Took only 1 day for developers to make Pandora fully background-aware on iPhone
VOIP
  • Persistent state allows calls to be received while Skype runs in the background. Cell service replacement?
  • Skype can stay logged in with “online” status (as opposed to away) while running in the background. You can still receive calls, chats, etc… and reply while doing other things
  • Customize sounds so they sound just like native Skype rings
Background Location
  • Navigation apps can run in background and notify you turn-by-turn even when not actively in App. Slick! Apps like TomTom used to stop tracking location when they were closed
  • Demo’d audio notification of “after 300 yard, turn right” even while listening to music and TomTom was closed
  • Social Apps like Loopt can use cell tower triangulation to update location without having to use GPS persistently and drain battery while running in the background
  • This is not going to be good for Foursquare or Gowalla since it’s only accurate within 500-2000 meters
  • New location services menu shows which Apps are using location services at that time
  • New indicator on status bar also shows that location is being used by an App
Push Notifications
  • 10 billion notifications served in the 9 months they’ve been available.
  • New local notifications can be done right on phone without requiring online server access
  • Example: using TV Guide App to notify you when a show is going to be on. Seems kind of pointless if a schedule changes
Task Completion
  • Example: close Flickr while uploading and it’ll run in the background and notify you when uploads are complete
Fast App Switching
  • Provides a new way for developers to easily save state of an App so it’s returned quickly when running an App again
Sources:
General information compiled from multiple sources, but the commentary and other insight is my own.

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