Developers Wary Of iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Developers Wary Of iPhone

forbes.com

7 pointsmarkbao8 comments

Steve Andler, vice president of marketing at Networks In Motion, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based firm that provides GPS services for Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ) Wireless, Sprint (nyse: S - news - people ) and Alltel (nyse: AT - news - people ), says the problem is that iTunes ties applications to a user's iTunes account, as opposed to a device. For instance, a customer could have "three iPhones synched to the same iTunes account, and thus would only be paying for one copy of the application, but using it on three devices," Andler says.

Regardless of the rest of the article, that is a ridiculous complaint. First of all, the number of users with multiple iPhones is probably very small, and second, even if someone had more than 1 iPhone, why should they have to pay multiple times?

It's this mentality of the wireless carriers (and related companies/services) that they should squeeze every last penny out of their customers that I hate. I can't think of any other industry quite as bad.

This mentality is very similar to that of the record industry, and look where it's got them!

Personally speaking, I can't wait to get my hands on one! I want to write an app that helps me record my food & exercise, I find it hard to remember later on, but the iPhone is a perfect device to help do it there and then.

Apple + Nike will no doubt provide this.

I agree, that argument didn't make a lot of sense.

If it's true that you can't really sell subscription-based services through iTunes, however, that's a much stronger argument.

What a biased article. It actually looks like a paid-for piece, paid-for by companies writing turn-by-turn navigation software, obviously. Most software houses are crazy happy about a way to easily sell to millions of users.

I disagreed with a significant portion of the article, but I did mod it up. While it's headline was unfortunate, there were a number of good quotes from the traditional GPS industry that the writer managed to track down. If the Editors had change the title to be: "Traditional Geomapping Industry threatened by iPhone", and dove in a bit deeper into which revenue streams would be threatened, then the value of the article would have been somewhat clearer.

Initially I though Andler's comment was silly, but then I though - How much of "Networks in Motions" revenue comes from selling multiple licenses to the same user? If greater than 15% of their revenue stream comes this class, then the iPhone does present a material risk to them.

Of course, the greater threat is more likely to be their existing revenue stream being reduced by iPhone/Google Maps, but that's a story for another day. July 11th, to be precise. :-)

Turn-by-turn navigation software is going to go away very soon anyway. ATT keeps trying to sell it to me, but I already have Google Maps, which is free. Sure, it doesn't talk... but it does show me where I am on a map and it tells me how to get where I'm going. (OK, actually I don't have a car... but I've tried it while riding in one and it works fine.)

Anyway, one update to Google Maps, and the entire business evaporates. That's what I'd worry about, not iTunes.

"Then there's the competition factor. Developers speculate Apple has plans to build its own navigation applications, so they're wary of investing in the iPhone despite the handset's popularity."

Aren't they just referring to no "real-time route guidance" to solidify their Google Maps (hence Tom-Tom & Garmin complaints in the article) or is this something else?

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