The Winners and Losers of Apple’s Big Product Announcement
(Associated Press)
Apple kicked off its weeklong developers conference Monday morning with a keynote presentation hosted by CEO Tim Cook. Products were announced, mediocre jokes were made, and good fun was had by all but Android.
Although the Worldwide Developers Conference is a show designed for software developers, not all emerged from the Monday morning keynote better off than they were before. Sometimes a new Apple update can spell doom for existing products that fill that niche, or even entire companies. Other times, one can vault a company to new heights.
Here’s Yahoo Tech’s complete list of winners and losers from today’s WWDC keynote.
Losers:
Dropbox/Carousel
(Apple)
Apple hit Dropbox with a one-two. First it announced an improved Photo viewing and editing app, stepping up to Dropbox’s relatively new image app Carousel and maybe even Google’s Picasa. Then Apple announced a new storage plan called iCloud Drive, which would update everything — even participating third-party apps — across all your devices in the cloud. It even works on Windows machines. That’s not good for either Dropbox or Google Drive, which are both vying to store your data way up in the sky.
New iCloud storage plans start at 5 GB for free, 20 GB for $1 a month, and 200 GB for $4 a month. By contrast, Dropbox will give you 2 GB a month for free, while its Pro option gives you 100 GB for $9.99 a month. You do the math.
With the OS X Yosemite update, Apple tacked on a a few new design-y features to the long-ignored Mail app. One of those additions includes a little something called “Markup,” which gives you the ability to scribble notes on email attachments. Add text annotations, or a signature — you don’t even need to be a talented artist, because the program recognizes hand-drawn shapes like arrows and changes them to cleaner, straighter versions.
This competes directly with one of the most useful features of Evernote’s Skitch tool: pointing something out in a photo. Why open a separate app when the tool is built right into your email?
Until today, this little-known free productivity app was a much better alternative to Spotlight, particularly for its more central design and well-sourced search databases. But with Apple’s announcement of OS X Yosemite comes a translucent and very capable new Spotlight search bar. It looks curiously like Alfred and pretty much consigns the independent app to a rapid decline in influence. Oh, Al, we hardly new ye.
Snapchat and WhatsApp
Apple has finally caught on to the fact that people don’t always like their communications to be so permanent or text heavy. That’s why, in its massive iMessage overhaul, it snuck in a feature that allows you to send voice recordings and videos that self-destruct. Previously, apps like WhatsApp and Voxer were the main proprietor of audio clips, and we all know that Snapchat and its slew of copycats are all about making your private communications disappear.
It’s doubtful that Apple will rattle these apps much, but it’s still not good news when a company with very popular phones decides to bake some of your main features right into its native messaging app. Personally, I’d be happy to phase myself out from WhatsApp or Snapchat out of sheer laziness.
One thing that got the crowd oohing and ahhing at WWDC: the very smooth continuity between your Mac computer and any of your iOS devices. Most notably, you can receive a phone call on your Mac, complete with caller ID display.
This is bad news for Skype and maybe even Google Voice, which were pretty much dominating the desktop phone call arena. Now that Apple’s computer-based communication isn’t limited to FaceTime (which requires WiFi), people might want to consolidate their communications to something more fully integrated with their desktops.
Winners:
App developers
Apple will now allow app developers to sell their creations in bundles. So anyone who enjoys one app by a certain developer can opt to buy all of her apps for a discounted price. Developers can still push in-app purchases through all the apps they distribute to customers. WWDC-ers rejoice!
As we reported earlier today, Siri will now be using Shazam’s technology to identify the artist and title of any song playing around you. This is pretty great news for Shazam, whose existence was somewhat threatened by the emergence of Facebook’s audio detection feature (which, by the way, can identify shows via about 15 seconds of audio as well). And other companies like the much less popular SoundHound or musiXmatch might as well just start packing up now.
Google Maps
It’s been a whole two years since Apple squashed its relationship with Google Maps and debuted its own disastrous excuse for a navigation system. It was rumored that Apple would finally come out with a legitimate product this year, offering — at the very least — public transit directions. But it seems Apple Maps will forever be that underachieving family member in iOS that never moves forward and no one really wants to talk about. That means big points for Google Maps, which recently announced a slew of shiny new features, including access to saved maps while offline, the ability to schedule a trip according to specific public transport arrival and departure times, and lane-specific driving instructions. There’s no question who wins this competition.
SwiftKey and Swype
Like Android, Apple will finally allow third-party keyboard apps to work systemwide on iOS. This means companies like SwiftKey and Swype, which have developed intelligent predictive technologies and gesture-based typing, will have a whole new group of customers to serve. SwiftKey, by the way, is already working on its iOS 8 app.
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