Google is slowly cracking "open" iOS

EDIT: Sorry about the long post, but I enjoyed being able to put some of my thoughts down onto paper. I won't be offended if you tl;dr it!

Apple is rounding a corner on it's iOS platform, growing from it's chaotic youth phase into a more conservative phase. We can reliably guess that we'll get a new iPad every April and a new iPhone every August. We'll get a new iPhone design every other year, and a hardware update every year. We'll get iOS beta in April and iOS release with in August.

I love that they've slowed down the rate of new feature implementation: watching the explosion of quickly unsupported Android devices all with one defining gimmick makes me very glad not to have picked a phone with a feature that didn't go mainstream.

To me, Apple is already looking 4+ years down the road with iOS. You can bet that major feature additions, while Google will often beat them to implementation, are already on Apple's multi-year plans. Sure, Apple may be a year late on a feature, or a year ahead, but in the grand scheme of my mobile life, one year is nothing (views like this, I believe, will be more common in the post-youth phase).

As we exit the phase, I'm glad to learn that Apple's support of it's devices these past five years has been consistent: devices getting day-one updates for over 3 years! An incredibly impressive free-replacement program turned decent warranty program. And of course, two years per physical design and only one model at a time means that there is both time and incentive for a huge third-party accessory market. (The incredible third-party support of Apple devices can only come from a conservative process -- predictable patterns that minimize potential risk and maximize market size for accessories like cases, docks and speakers).

When I look at the chaos of Android, I'm doubly impressed by not only how effective the iOS infrastructure is, but that Apple implemented a model infrastructure in the face of competition that absolutely and utterly dropped the ball (introducing version 4.1 while version 4.0 is at 7% marketshare is embarrassing... almost as if Google is abandoning anyone pre-4.0 and saying 'not our problem').

My impression? Apple now believes that mobile is no longer an arms race or a race at all -- it's a core business that will be around for decades in some form or another. In an industry where all of it's competitors are struggling and failing to even bridge the software-hardware gap, Apple has rounded that corner and set its eyes on bigger targets.

So when I say I'm excited by Apple, I mean that I'm excited that I no longer have to play the new-tech-game. I'm excited that my iPhone lasted over 3 years and got day-one updates the entire time. I'm excited to own a new iPhone in the fall, trusting that I'll get day-one updates for years, enjoy a mature support process at a brick and mortar store and a solid feature-set that works across hundreds of millions of devices. I don't have to play the custom-firmware-my-carrier-is-shit game. I don't have to wonder if I'll get the update that Google put out today, or last year(!!!). This is exciting to me: they've made a mobile infrastructure all the way from them as coders to me as a consumer (and every step in between) that actually works.

As far as outside of mobile? Apple will be unifying their product lines around cloud services and introducing their attempt to invade the living room. (Their chief competition there, I think, will be Microsoft, and I believe that both Apple and Microsoft will have offerings that REPLACE a cable box / DVR entirely, not complement it).