Despite all the buzz around the Palm Pre (if you haven’t heard, it’s finally come out), Apple is still sitting on top of the smartphone market with the iPhone. And we techies normally eat up all of those words about how it’s such a successful platform. Yet swimming against the tide was the mobile version of the Opera browser, which has now reached the top of the waterfall to become the most popular mobile browser around: out of all internet browsing done in May on a mobile device, around 24.6% was done with Opera. Apple fanboys might say that this isn’t a fair measurement as mobile Safari is only on the iPhone, whereas Opera is on lots of devices. But this is exactly the point.
The iPhone may have been among the first notable smartphones to market, but it is facing a whole mess of strong contenders, with the Palm Pre on one side and the ever-growing Android army on the other. We’re going to start seeing, for example, the same Twitter client start to appear on all three platforms as Apple loses ground to others. And yes, it does seem inevitable that Apple will have to give up some of the market share – not only is the competition getting better, but the competition is not a closed platform.
So one has to wonder at what point will Apple start developing for other platforms. Many of us still remember the old Apple website which announced “Hell has frozen over: iTunes is now on Windows.” And doing that made Apple a whole boatload of money as it got a bunch of users to start buying songs from the iTunes music store. Rather than stomping their feet at the rise of Android, Apple would be wise to make an iTunes music player app for Android that coupled with a music store. Of course, for this to make sense, Apple would have to let you at the very least back up the songs you bought on mobile to your computer. Which would be awesome.
We’ve already entered into mobile browser wars, so it seems that competition to make the best mobile apps should follow. Imagine if Apple throught this through and got a head start. I know that Apple history has taught us that Apple will always be last on this sort of bandwagon, which is ironic as they’re the best set to tackle developing applications for other mobile platforms.
