More skilled and knowledgeable Apple pundits than I have already analyzed the March 17th preview of iPhone OS 3.0; its homeruns and strikeouts; and who really won this third round of major iPhone news—the developer or consumer. Instead of being repetitive, I’d like to use the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement to predict what we can expect from Apple next March. Yes, that’s right! I’m going to try and preview just a couple of features of iPhone OS 4.0 a whole year before Apple does.
Now I don’t claim to have any insider information but I think Apple has dropped some crumbs for us in OS 3.0. The time is the easiest to predict—I can say with fairly absolute certainty that March of each year will be devoted to iPhone news, followed by a hardware and software release in June/July. Apple did it in 2008 when they first previewed iPhone OS 2.0 and the SDK on March 6 and repeated that pattern this year on March 17, confirming the software upgrade for consumers “sometime this summer.” So we can check off our list that the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK will be released to developers in March 2010. The features are harder to predict, of course, but I believe that OS 3.0 actually gives us some clues of where Apple is headed. I’d like to highlight two of the biggest changes I think we’ll see next year.
First: I predict full background processing/multi-tasking with OS 4.0. You might object that this sounds contrary to the words coming out of Apple executives who are bashing background processing in Windows Mobile phones and others as the best way to slow down performance and reduce battery life. Actually, this kind of bashing-at-first and changing-their-tune-later is not atypical for Apple. Let me give you an example: when the iPhone was first released, Steve Jobs had touted web apps at WWDC 2007 as the best and most secure way to balance both consumers’ interests and developers’ calls for a native SDK. In a reversal on October 17, 2007, Jobs acknowledged in an open letter posted on Apple’s website that he wants third-party applications on the iPhone, and Apple will release the SDK in February 2008. I believe that Apple will do the same with background processing in OS 4.0. What are they waiting for? My guess is that Apple wants to take things slowly and preserve the user experience by controlling it along the way before introducing monumental changes that cannot be undone once released. The push-notification system is already a step forward towards full multi-tasking.
Second: UI changes to go along with the full background processes. I don’t know what this will look like, but the Palm Pre is a great example of a UI that takes advantage of the phone’s multi-tasking features. With the number of applications iPhone users are downloading on a daily basis (800 million downloaded in just nine months!), the current system of home pages is broken. Given the new stuff Apple is introducing in OS 3.0 (search, MMS, Bluetooth support, advanced connectivity features, and more access to Apple’s own built-in apps), the signs point to the need for a forthcoming UI change that organizes all the information better for developers and consumers alike. For a company that toots its own horn on usability, elegance, and simplicity, this change is necessary and certain with OS 4.0. None of the three qualities I mentioned are addressed, let alone fixed, in OS 3.0—a definite disappointment for many others and me. Multi-tasking in a multi-touch environment relies heavily on an intuitive and simple-to-understand UI. It just makes sense that Apple would need to tackle the iPhone UI if it’s going to do background processing.
Neither of these feature sets I predict for OS 4.0 are simple to grasp or develop (heck, it took them until the third revision of the OS to introduce cut, copy, and paste!), but both should make their way into OS 4.0 in some form in the first quarter of 2010. Here’s to looking really far ahead!
3/28/09: minor editorial changes made