Apple unveiled 3 new products in its software line yesterday. The following are the services that are threatened by Apple’s announcements.
1. Instapaper: “Shit”, was what Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) posted on Twitter after Apple announced “Reading Lists”, a seamless way to save articles for reading later and seamlessly syncing them with other iOS devices and Safari on the Mac and PC. Marco went on to post an interesting in depth thought about the future of Instapaper on his blog.
2. Readibility: “Phenomenal”, as described by Scott Forestell, VP of iOS at Apple on the new Reader mode in Apple’s Safari browser. A feature copied from the current desktop Safari version. Reader will strip down distractions and show only the article’s content. Readibility did just that, until Reader came along to probably kill it.
3. Dropbox: iCloud, Apple’s biggest announcement of this years WWDC is a free solution offering 5 GB of free storage to seamlessly sync and store documents, mail, iTunes, etc on the cloud. Dropbox provided that and offered cross platform sync. Its future is definitely in question. [The only thing keeping it alive would be the ability to sync cross platform, with a PC and Android]
4. Remember the Milk, Wunderlist, (and other to-do app makers): The crowd Ooohed, when Forestell announced “Reminders”, a nifty to-do application with the ability of creating location based reminders.
5. Camera+: The app solved Apple’s own cameras flaws. But now Apple has added all of the most promising features of Camera+. And has even got in some photo editing API’s that opens the floor completely.
6. Zinio: “The worlds biggest newsstand”, as Zinio would call themselves until yesterday. That will change dramatically with the advent of Newsstand. Search, discover, subscribe, background downloads, single & easy place to get it all- just sounds so much better than scanned PDF files.
7. GroupMe: Described by Engadget and Techcrunch editors as a must have and even a productivity tool back in the day. No more. Apple announced iMessage, a way to text, share photos, etc all for free with iOS devices. The BBM killer even.
8. Blackberry Messenger: And although BBM is a Blackberry exclusive feature, its implications are vast. It was the single most prominent feature of the Blackberry smartphone. Similar to the fate of GroupMe, BBM is in jeopardy. And so is RIM.
9. Mobile Browsers: With Reader, full tabbed browsing and reading lists (with automatic syncing) will cause tremendous heat to other browser competitions in the mobile space. Such as- Opera mobile, Mercury, etc.
The gaping holes of iOS were ways of income to several developers until today. That may change dramatically once iOS 5 releases.
Authored by Zaid Rahman on June 7, 2011 under Editorial §
Tweet •
Like •
Mountain Lion is not like iOS
Spotify Repeat
“Against Samsung”
9 problems with iOS