Is Apple Becoming The New AOL?

With the iPhone OS 4.0 event, Apple added some great user features like multitasking and folder organization for apps. And perhaps the most important non-user feature (maybe even an anti-user feature) is Apple's iAds system. Apple will be providing engaging (obtrusive?) ads at the OS level, and splitting the revenue with the app developers.

Here we are with a mobile ecosystem of over 185,000 apps, and now an integrated ad system to go with it. Probably half of the iPhone apps are specialized version of content otherwise available online: wikipedia, netflix, ABC, etc. Most sites present their information in a better layout in an iPhone-specific app. While Safari will probably stay on the iPhone, at some point, if Apple eliminated the browser, would you still be able to get to all the information you want on the iPhone? (Note: we are working on our own iPhone app.)

Apple, with the help of developers, is creating what amounts to an internet replacement: a secondary, walled garden of Apple-approved information. From the everything old is new again department, this all seems like AOL all over again: a corporate-approved, sanitized world of information, serving as a subset of the entire internet.

Sure many apps use the iPhone in novel ways, but do the app store offerings replace the internet for you on the go?

Comments

[Steve W]

A few points:

You ignore the fact that AOL predates Al Gore's public internet "Information Superhighway", and started out as a dial-up service. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and even Apple's own eWorld? AOL was the last one standing because it embraced the internet and granted its dial-up users access to the world wide web. The others didn't and died.

Asking what would happen if Apple eliminated Safari is liking asking what would happen if Apple fired Steve Jobs... d'oh, we already know the answer to that one.

Apple will not be providing ads at the OS level, obtrusive or otherwise. Apple will be providing click-able banners within Apps at the developers request.

Perhaps, as you say, "half of the iPhone apps are specialized version of content otherwise available online". It's the other half that make the App Store. The online information re-packagers that you refer to are only looking for a way to sell information through apps what they couldn't sell through the browser. People forget that Apple's biggest innovation of the iTunes store was figuring out a way to break even on $0.99 credit card transactions. You better believe Apple would be happier if all of the "specialized version of content otherwise available online" apps were free. The biggest part of the Apple approval process is winnowing out plagarism.

It was the content publishers that wanted to turn the iPhone into a walled garden, and demanded that Apple allow for "native" Apps. Just like with the iPod, where it was the music publishers that demanded Digital Rights Management (DRM). Apple does not produce or publish content; Apple is just the retailer. Maybe Apple played a little B'rer Rabbit in the early days, or maybe they just pulled a Toyota. "You asked for it, you got it."