IPhone game developer redesigns app for Apple tablet with no assurance of its existence
The maker of Crosswords for the iPhone dropped a news release in our inbox this afternoon touting an in-development version of its popular game for the Apple tablet. — Apple's touch-screen tablet computer …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the rumor economy doing real work. Since [[a:1186237|Gizmodo reported in September that the Apple Tablet was aiming at newspapers, textbooks and magazines]], the device has been the most-covered unlaunched product in tech, and in December [[a:1186629|Silicon Alley Insider reported Apple had asked developers to get their apps ready for a January demo]]. Today the Crosswords maker made that ask concrete: a news release touting an in-development tablet version of its game for hardware Apple has never officially acknowledged.
What makes it more than a stunt is what sits underneath. McGraw-Hill's CEO has confirmed the tablet will run iPhone OS, so an iPhone shop like Crosswords is porting, not rewriting — and one bank's base case has it selling five million units in year one. For a small studio whose franchise took off after the LA Times documented how the iPhone changed game-software economics in April, being on the tablet's virtual shelf at launch may be worth the gamble on vaporware.
First-order effects
- If the tablet ships as rumored, Crosswords gets launch-window visibility in a thin app catalog; if it doesn't, the studio eats the development cost with nothing to sell against it.
- Apple gets a free signal boost — third parties confirming demand for an unannounced product — without spending a word of its own marketing.
Second-order effects
- Other iPhone developers face the same calculus and are likely to follow, meaning Apple could open the tablet with a stocked catalog built entirely on rumors rather than SDK access.
- Any rival tablet effort now competes against a pre-seeded iOS library, since developers' speculative bets concentrate on whichever unannounced platform they judge most likely to ship.
Third-order effects
- A pattern where studios commit engineering to hardware that exists only as leaks shifts platform power further toward Apple: the ecosystem fills itself in ahead of official announcements, raising the bar for any would-be tablet competitor.
- If the five-million-unit forecasts prove directionally right, 'iPhone developer' becomes a category spanning multiple screen sizes, with launch-day catalog depth becoming a competitive weapon in device markets.
The trend: Apple's developer ecosystem has grown large enough that third parties now build and market for its unannounced products, letting the company seed new device categories through rumor rather than announcement.