Forget emojis: Apple is going after PayPal and re-wiring your home
Amongst a raft of OS updates for TV, Watch and Mac, the big news out of WWDC 2016 was certainly the preview of iOS 10: one of the biggest updates to Apple’s mobile operating system in terms of new features for a very long time.
Updates to Music, Messages, Photos, Phone and Maps may look like big leaps, but most are just moving them to a point where they’re a credible alternative to existing third party apps — Spotify, various social messaging apps and Google Maps — rather than bringing much new stuff to the party.
Certainly, the Messages app update looks like fun, and it’s an ambitious play for attention against the big three (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SnapChat). It does have a few tricks up its sleeve though, even if the word to emoji transcription is surely doing things the wrong way around.
Despite the big splash made by the above (and the comparatively small splash made by a raft of updates to watchOS), the four most interesting announcements for me were:
Apple Pay on the web
Apple is already a massive player in payments, with four times the number of credit cards on file than Amazon and a robust, trusted and user-friendly authentication system in Touch ID. This makes them perfectly placed to offer other vendors a payment system: Apple Pay on the web could be a genuine threat to PayPal.
Siri gets a boost
Voice to search is a hot topic right now. Andrew Ng of Baidu predicts that by 2019, half of all searches will be voice or image based — and between Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, we’re seeing battle lines drawn up for what should be an interest scuffle.
The improvements announced to Siri — most significantly, giving developers access to it via an API — should hopefully help Apple’s digital assistant overcome some of the issues its faced over the last couple of years and drive innovation across the board.
HomeKit finally has a face
It feels like the concept of HomeKit has been around for a long time (in reality, it’s been around since the release of iOS 8 in September 2014) but despite lots of vendor integration, very little appears to have happened from a user point of view.
Unlike HealthKit — which has the Health app — it’s always lacked a user-facing proposition, but with the release of Home, there’s finally a reason for people to care that Apple is giving all your IoT devices a place to talk to each other.
When HomeKit was first announced, I was incredibly excited at what I saw as a long overdue play for standardisation of the IoT ecosystem for the home, but it felt a little like Apple had given up. I’m really glad to see that’s not the case.
Swift Playgrounds
I’m always very excited about anything involving innovation in computing education (if I could clone myself, I’d send my clone off to spend five years completely rewriting the curriculum) and Swift Playgrounds — an iPad app to encourage kids to learn to code in Apple’s Swift language — looks like a really great move.
Going all the way back to the 70s and early 80s, Apple have been at the forefront of promoting the importance of computers in education and in 2012 Phil Schiller reiterated that “Education is deep in Apple’s DNA”.
Swift Playgrounds is another step in a direction that Apple don’t — in my opinion — get enough credit for.
