David Emery OnlineWhat Apple Should (But Won't) Annouce At WWDC
6 June 2011
So, we all know what Apple is going to announce at their WWDC later today, right? iCloud – all sorts of cloud based syncing, including a music locker; iOS 5 – with iCloud syncing, notifications and other new nice bits and Mac OS X Li – again with iCloud syncing, and an all over iOS-inspired polish.
What I’d like to talk about is something I don’t think they will announce today, but something I think it would make a lot of sense for them to announce at some point in the not too distant future. Apple is sitting on a potential goldmine that could seriously shake up the web.
Facebook have had a great success with their Facebook Connect initiative – it’s rare now you visit a content-based site that doesn’t have some form of simple Facebook integration, whether it’s a Like button or full on login and comments integration. It’s been so successful because a publisher can be certain that the vast majority of their audience has a Facebook account; it’s become the defacto online identity.
Apple, however, have a much more powerful online identity database. Everyone that has ever bought anything from iTunes – including the App Store – has an Apple ID, which means that while it’s not quite as large a user base as Facebook it’s not that far off. The key difference, though, is that all of those people with Apple IDs have bought things – the Apple ID is not just an online identity, it’s an online retail identity.
Imagine a cross between a Facebook like button and PayPal.
That’s what Apple is sitting on – without a huge amount of work they could revolutionise payments on the web. One click ordering, like Amazon, but on any website. They already have the basic infrastructure in place for in-app purchases on iOS (in fact, this would just be taking that exact model onto the web), so technically it’s not much of a hurdle.
They could even go one extra step and build it into Mac OS X and iOS – imagine you click a ‘Buy’ button on a webpage and it brings up a system level dialog to purchase something – far more secure and potentially far easier for the user (and obviously falling back to something web based for PC/Android etc users).
I can’t see Apple doing something like this yet, but surely they’re thinking hard about it already.