What this Year’s WWDC Reveals to Developers about Apple
Apple surpassed expectations with an insane list of software announcements at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) - there is literally something for every demographic. While Apple’s continued effort to push for simpler and more elegant software on both the consumer and developer fronts is to be expected, the biggest takeaway from WWDC is the message Apple delivered to developers. With an emphasis on crowdsourcing ideas, design, and development, I believe Apple is trying to make the learning curve easier for new developers.
One of the main reasons why the quality of apps on iOS is so much better than Windows, and sometimes even Android, is because Apple takes better care of its wannabe developers. With Apple, people who don’t really have development experience or a budget but have a great idea have a real chance at building something outstanding because Apple has made the on-boarding experience much easier. Concepts such as automatic reference counting and storyboards help first timers focus more on building their apps and less time on debugging them. This, in turn, attracts more innovation and pushes the quality of the iOS platform higher as a whole.
What this Year’s WWDC Reveals to Developers about Apple
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, really turned heads with the announcement of Swift, a new programming language that promises to perform miles better than other current programming languages. Swift is so mind blowing that my fellow nerds and I gave ourselves self-fives and cheered at our computer screens as though NASA just found life on Mars! This news coupled with the demo of Sprite Kit and Scene Kit made the iOS developments nothing short of magical.Swift and iOS 8 are currently in beta phase, but if they can deliver what Craig promised they will (and Apple has a great track record of delivering what is promised), then there will likely be some new part-time millionaires in the works.I think this illustrates how a market-leading company, no matter how great, can only do so much with its given bandwidth. This means that, by easing the on-boarding processes for developers, the volume of output and pace of innovations can be a formidable force. This is consistently true for all of the great companies that have been built on top of beautiful developer platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Facebook.Crowdsourcing has been proven to fuel better design, innovation, and development. And in a way, what Apple is doing is essentially crowdsourcing for their brand. So what can your company do? Take Apple’s lead and invest in an easy on-boarding process for developers. Provide public APIs and SDKs; the less friction your company has during this experience, the more likely that developers will work on innovating for you and less likely against you, with your competitors.*Steve Chen is the Mobile Product Manager at Egnyte. From running his indi-software company to packing parachutes at local airports, he’s been exercising his particular strain of unhealthy obsessive ADHD for as long as he can remember.
