Apple Calls Flipboard “iPad App Of The Year”
Apple just named Flipboard, the app that turns Twitter and Facebook into a magazine like experience, its “iPad App of the Year.” — This is huge news for the startup. It will likely see downloads explode in the next few days.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flipboard launched in 2010 on a single idea borrowed from print: rather than a feed reader, it lays out a user's Twitter and Facebook streams as a paginated, touch-navigable magazine on the iPad. The format caught on quickly enough that Apple's year-end App Store editorial picks — which TechCrunch published in full alongside this story — placed it above every other tablet title of 2010.
The significance runs through distribution, not design: Apple's App Store features list is the single largest discovery channel on iOS, and an 'App of the Year' badge is the top slot in it. For a young startup whose growth depended on organic downloads, Apple's editorial endorsement functions as free user acquisition at national scale.
First-order effects
- Flipboard should see a sharp spike in downloads and first-time users over the holiday week, as the badge drives casual iPad buyers browsing the store — the source itself flags explosive download growth as the likely near-term effect.
- Twitter and Facebook get a new high-engagement consumption surface for their content: every Flipboard session renders their firehoses as polished pages, deepening time spent with both platforms' data on Apple's device.
Second-order effects
- Rivals and imitators now have a validated template — social-graph-as-magazine — and Apple's endorsement signals the category is worth entering, so expect a wave of me-too social reading apps competing for the same featured slots.
- For publishers, Flipboard's rise raises the question of who captures value when their stories are re-rendered inside someone else's branded wrapper, setting up the ad-revenue and licensing negotiations that will define social reading apps' business models.
Third-order effects
- If Apple's year-end picks keep conferring breakout status, App Store curation hardens into a structural gatekeeper: platform-owner editorial judgment, not press coverage or paid marketing, becomes the decisive variable in which consumer startups scale.
The trend: Platform owners are becoming kingmakers in consumer software, using curated storefront awards to anoint winners in newly minted categories like social magazines.