Apple Is About To Open More Services On Android

A few months ago, Apple put out one of its flagship services, Apple Music, as an application on Google’s Play Store, which allowed Android users to enjoy Apple’s huge music library on their Android devices. While appearing innocuous, this is a big salvo.

Prior to that, the only Apple app that existed on the Android platform was “Move to iOS”, which was basically aimed at inducing Android users to move to Apple’s side of the smart devices field.
It enabled the user to move their contact, pictures etc. to an Apple device, with tremendous ease.

Well, since the launch of Apple Music on Android platform happened four months ago, it is old news. Why are we bringing it up now?

Because it seems that this is only the beginning of Apple’s traipse into other platforms. There seems to be a strategy at play here — at an ‘Apple Town Hall’ meeting that happened the day following Apple’s record Q1 earning announcement.

Tim Cook, along with the company’s top executives called for the company-wide meeting to make some announcements and to welcome attendee-opinions on certain ideas.

Discussions and announcements related to new employee benefits, future iPad growth, Apple Watch sales, future retail stores in China, Apple Campus 2, and the future product pipeline took place at the meeting. However the most significant of these announcements was regarding expanding Apple’s software to other platforms. Tim Cook, as per a report by the news portal 9to5Mac, said that the launch of Apple Music beta was basically to “test the waters for growing its services division through other platforms”.

Other than iOS, the major operating systems in the market are Android and Windows, and both use applications to make their services available to other platforms. Extending services to other platforms might not seem like a great idea on the face of it; it shatters your exclusivity. But is being exclusive, all there is to the politics of the market, and the market forces?

Google and Microsoft have been working on making their services available to operating systems beyond their own, via cross-platform sentinel apps for a while now. A recent example of this would be Microsoft’s intelligent personal assistant Cortana, that has been made available to certain Android and Cyanogen-powered mobile devices in the form of an app.

This has two advantages: the obvious one, being that of attracting people from other platforms to their own; second that of generating revenues from users across other platforms.

The question is — if Apple opens its services to other platforms, what would it be aiming for? Answer: both of the above!

The obvious things to start this expansion with, would be the iCloud and the iMessage services.

Imagine if the iOS users could include users across third party OS platforms into their secure messages, will Apple achieve what BlackBerry could not with their BBM?

Apple could even try bringing Apple Pay to other platforms, but that be trickier than it sounds. Apple Pay is their proprietary mobile and contactless payment system, which enables card-less transactions. Bringing Apple Pay to other platforms could be trickier because this requires a higher level of security and Apple would not have complete control over other devices to be able to assure that.

For Apple to compete in the software and service market, expanding beyond iOS is a great first move, and a necessary move at that.

Would that give Apple a greater share of the market?

Would people actually get out of their already established comfort zone and actually accept Apple apps of their operating systems?

If Apple goes ahead with this move then how much of Apple can it bring to other operating systems without while still holding the Apple exclusivity to some degree, and how smoothly will all of this run?

These questions, and more, cannot really be answered at this time, and can only be speculated upon. So we’ll have to wait and watch for how it unfolds.

One thing’s for certain though — if Apple does it, others will too. And that will churn up the waters some, across the industry.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.