With all the euphoria going on about apple new releases, why not join the massive rush of posts regarding yesterday's keynote. As we all had been waiting and keeping track of WWDC rumors, yesterday we finally got to have a close approach of what apple has been up to. We present you a part of the highlighted features that are now included within iOS 6, with the news that most of these features are being actually built by Apple, replacing those apps created by other developers...
- Turn-by-turn navigation apps
Apple refined and upgraded its Maps application, wiping out Google maps.
The most obvious app makers who will be affected are probably Garmin and TomTom, famous leaders in the space that sell GPS-based navigation apps at a premium. Both have USA navigation apps priced at around $50 on the Apple App store today. If once they felt threatened by smaller free apps, within iOS6 there will be an expected decrease when Apple’s Maps provides the same functionality for free.
On the side of free apps, there is the example of Waze, that offered a free, turn-by-turn navigation app that was powered by crowdsourced data. There might still be some users who find this functionality a differentiator, but it’s a harder sell when the Maps app comes free and pre-installed.
- Payments and loyalty program apps
The introduction of Apple’s PassBook could be great for consumers, as it has the potential to allow them to aggregate all sorts of “passes” all in one place: That includes stuff like boarding passes, store cards, and movie tickets to start, but there are all sorts of possibilities here to disrupt the larger mobile payments industry, as well as upend a whole bunch of smaller loyalty programs that are emerging on iOS.
- Offline reading and bookmarking apps
The new offline reading lists will allow users to cache entire websites rather than just individual links. For users who have to date relied on Instapaper, Pocket, Spool, or other apps to save content for reading during their commutes or when not connected to the Internet, having the same native capability built into iOS could obviate the need for those apps.
- Group and private photo-sharing apps
Apple’s revamped photo streams will allow users to create groups of photos and instantly share them with other users, as well as allowing those users to make comments on them. That could pose a threat to app makers like 1000Memories and others. It could also do away with the use case for online storage services like Dropbox where users upload groups of photos into folders and share them with others.
- Mobile video chat apps
Prior to iOS 6, FaceTime only worked on Apple devices, and it only worked on Wi-Fi. Those two factors have led to a proliferation of mobile chat apps that competed directly with the video chat functionality built directly into iOS, apps like Skype, Tango, and ooVoo, among others. Well, Apple worked to solve one of those issues, by allowing users to make FaceTime calls on cellular networks.
The addition of Wi-Fi calling is unlikely to make a huge dent in the video chat competition, in part because the main differentiator for those competitors is multiplatform capability — being able to make calls across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. But it might mean that users who would have switched to an app which does cellular video calling might use FaceTime when dialing another friend with an iPhone — or they might do video chat when they otherwise would have done voice.
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