New firmware may allow users to share applications with each other?
Apple’s upcoming iPhone Software 3.0 may introduce features that let users share their purchased applications with family or friends, a move that would give iPhone and iPod touch owners a greater say over which apps deserve the spotlight in the overly-congested App Store.
Citing a “a person familiar with the technology,” BusinessWeek reports that the forthcoming software update “includes features that, if activated by Apple, may let users share software with one another.” The publication goes on to speculate that such a feature could even be expanded to allow iPhone users to generate a commission “when they’ve induced someone else to make a purchase.”
The ability to try applications before buying them has been a sore point with App Store shoppers. In an attempt to address this, some app developers have released “lite” versions of their apps that are free or close to free and include only a few levels or features of the full-fledged version.
This, however, adds a few more steps to the purchasing process for a potential buyer, since a second trip to the App Store must be made to purchase the full version. Additionally, the user will probably want to delete the lite version from the iPhone to free up memory and avoid confusing the two apps, which often have similar icons.
Apple has seeded five betas of iPhone Software 3.0 to date in which numerous discoveries pertaining to future software and hardware features have been made, but Wednesday’s claim is the first to suggest application sharing capabilities will be amongst the software’s highlights.
Apple reportedly declined to comment on the matter, which was not a shock really.
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This wouldn’t make any sense. Getting applications over Bluetooth would require communication between devices (likely using Game Kit, the new peer to peer APIs). But this API is really for small, limited packet sizes of data. An app is big.
Furthermore, 3G (with its average of 1.1MBps, but bursting to up around 2MBps, at least here in San Francisco), is actually faster than Bluetooth in many cases. Even if it turns out that Bluetooth is faster, it’s not so much faster that it makes much sense.
Perhaps there could be an extension of the “share this app with a friend” – where a link to the app on the App Store could be sent to another iPhone. But again, this would require using the Game Kit APIs, which actually require the same app to be running on two different iPhones. If it just “connected” (i.e. from the Home screen), then you’d break the model that Apple has outlined… you both need to be running the same app.
To see an example of how this works, you can try Beam It!, which is the first app based on 3.0 to use Game Kit. It let’s you share contacts between iPhones, and uses the new features. You can check it out at http://arctouch.com/beamit