Get Ready For A Photo App Explosion With iOS 5
At this point, it's already clear that the iPhone has become the camera many people use on a daily basis. The iPhone 4 is now by far the most popular camera on Flickr (and that's true even though it's being undercounted — likely drastically).
Context & Ripple Effects
The iPhone's climb as a capture device has been building for years in this coverage: it first ranked highly among Flickr's cameras back in December 2008 (iPhone claims high-ranking spot on Flickr), and Flickr went native on the platform in 2009 with its own iPhone app. By mid-2011 the argument had shifted from hardware to software — a GigaOm analysis framed Instagram as a potential mobile social hub, and Chase Jarvis's 'Best Camera' app had already made the case that the phone's value lies in the filter-and-share layer, not the sensor.
Against that backdrop, TechCrunch's prediction that iOS 5 will trigger a photo-app explosion reads as a supply-side bet: with the iPhone 4 already the most popular camera on Flickr — undercounted, per the article, because third-party uploads bypass camera detection — any OS-level change to the camera stack multiplies an audience that has proven itself at scale.
First-order effects
- Developers get a fresh iOS 5 camera/API surface to build on, and they are aiming it at an installed base that already dominates Flickr's upload charts rather than a niche of early adopters.
- Incumbent photo services like Flickr face a sudden influx of competing front-ends — apps that capture on the iPhone and route sharing through their own networks instead of Flickr's.
Second-order effects
- Flickr, which per prior analysis missed the chance to build its own Instagram-style mobile-social product, is pushed toward defending its role as a storage destination while newer apps own the capture-and-share moment — a position complicated by its February 2011 accidental deletion of Mirco Wilhelm's 4,000 photos.
- App-store economics shift toward camera utilities and filtered-sharing clients as a crowded category, forcing differentiation on community and speed rather than image quality alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the phone consolidates the entire imaging pipeline — lens, darkroom, and distribution — into one device, making the OS vendor the gatekeeper for how photos get taken and shared.
- Photo platforms compete less on hosting capacity than on where the capture happens, tilting power toward whoever controls the mobile OS layer that apps must build through.
The trend: Mobile operating-system releases are becoming the pacing event for consumer photography, shifting the industry's center of gravity from cameras and web galleries toward OS-gated app ecosystems.