Apple's Twitter
I've been waiting a year for someone to write about this, but my laziness has not yet paid off, so here are a few things that we all know about everybody's favorite Cupertino fruit company: — Apple has client app software on hundreds of millions of devices in the form …
Context & Ripple Effects
Anil Dash's essay makes an argument he says he has been waiting a year to see written down: Apple is already one of the largest software distributors on earth, because its own client apps sit on hundreds of millions of devices. The January report that the App Store gained a Twitter gave that argument a concrete instance — a service reaching iPhone owners through Apple's own storefront rather than its own marketing.
First-order effects
- Twitter stands to gain reach across hundreds of millions of Apple-shipped devices without spending to acquire users itself, while Apple gets a live social graph wired into its platform without buying or building a network of its own.
- Third-party iOS clients that wrap Twitter face a new competitive floor: whatever Apple bundles at the system level, they must beat on features alone.
Second-order effects
- Rival mobile platform holders come under pressure to strike equivalent OS-level partnerships or ship their own native sharing layers, since a default-positioned network becomes table stakes rather than a differentiator.
- Twitter's product decisions tilt toward what an operating-system partner needs from it — clean identity and share endpoints over destination-site engagement — reshaping its roadmap around embeddability.
Third-order effects
- If OS vendors keep treating social services as pluggable providers, the industry's center of gravity shifts from owning the consumer client to owning the integration point — the platform holder decides which networks get distribution, and networks compete to be chosen.
- Identity and sharing become infrastructure negotiated between a handful of OS makers and a handful of social services, shrinking the space for independent social clients and raising the strategic value of any default slot.
The trend: Mobile operating systems are absorbing social networks as built-in identity and sharing layers, converting OS makers into the distributors that determine which social services get reach.