On the surface, this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in California marks the launch of major changes to the tech giant’s iOS operating system.
Apple CEO Tim Cook waves during the keynote address at WWDC 2012. It was the first WWDC keynote since the death of Steve Jobs and the first with Cook at the helm.On Monday, amid whoops and yells from more than 1,000 Apple acolytes, the firm’s chief executive, Tim Cook, announced that the iPad and iPhone maker will now integrate Facebook for the first time. Users will be able to post photos, links and map locations directly to the social network from their Apple devices.
Meanwhile, iOS6 will jettison Google Maps, the navigation app that has been installed on the iPhone and iPad devices since their inception, and instead push users towards its own, new Maps app.
But the changes, which will have an impact on hundreds of millions of users around the world, represent more than just another gear shift in technological development. They mark a seismic shift in loyalties.
In “friending” Facebook, Apple has set aside its long-running feud with what is one of the few other technology firms big enough to take it on. The two businesses spent years locked in a tit-for-tat battle, where each one repeatedly failed to include the other into their latest product launches. It had been the corporate equivalent of two alpha males blanking each other.
Facebook refused to integrate Apple’s music-based networking app, Ping, into its website, prompting a public dressing down from Apple’s former chief executive and co-founder, Steve Jobs. Not long after, Facebook integrated Spotify, one of Ping’s biggest rivals, into its website instead.
Apple responded by integrating Twitter into its operating system, at a time when it was still studiously ignoring Facebook. Mr Cook’s decision a year later to cosy up to the social network marks a major shift. It highlights Apple’s “pragmatic approach to alliances”, said analysts at CCS Insight. It is also a “tacit admission of failure” for Ping.
Either way, it has also helped to push aside some investors’ concerns about Facebook.
The social network enjoyed some welcome respite from the downward movement in its shares. They rose 1.09pc to $27.30 in early trading in New York yesterday, even as evidence emerged of an acute slowdown in its growth in the US.
The number of unique visitors rose just 5pc in April – the slowest rate since Comscore started collecting the data in 2008. One of the persistent doubts dogging the social network is about its longevity. Even the cynics who have been forecasting the end of the Facebook “fad” for years admit that its integration into what are arguably the world’s most successful handsets will give it another few years.
But, if an Apple alliance can give a leg up to a business the size of Facebook, it can also put a severe dent in one such as Google and, for many analysts, this was the real motivation driving Apple’s redrawing of alliances.
There was a time when the web search giant used to feel like Apple’s natural ally. Its cleanly designed homepage was almost the website equivalent of a sleek Apple device. But as Google got bigger it began encroaching on Apple’s turf. Its free Android operating system has overtaken Apple’s iOS. It has launched a music service to rival iTunes. Both firms are battling for valuable consumer data.
While Apple’s shift in allegiance was perhaps inevitable, it could not come at a worse time for Google.
In Europe, Google has been given until early July to come up with proposals to address its dominance of the web search or face intervention and potentially heavy fines from Brussels.
Meanwhile, mobile companies, including Vodafone and France Telecom, have been lobbying the European Commission to impose new taxes on the company, so that they can share the burden of investing in the broadband and telecoms infrastructures they rely on.
Closer to home, there is increasing concern about Google’s approach to privacy. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office this week wrote to the company’s senior vice president, Alan Eustace, demanding information about how much personal information it has collected, and why it has not been more open about it.
The business’s emerging hostility with Apple is being echoed with Microsoft, Oracle and across the music, telecoms and publishing industries. It already has a lot of enemies at its door.
By cosying up to Facebook and unfriending Google, Apple has made its own position clear.
