‘Find My Car Smart’ is the First Low Energy Bluetooth App for iPhone 4S
Earlier this year, Apple introduced a new version of Bluetooth in some of their products. This new version of Bluetooth is known as “Bluetooth Low Energy” or Bluetooth 4.0. The Mac mini and MacBook Air …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple spent 2011 seeding Bluetooth 4.0 — the Low Energy variant — into its hardware, shipping it in the Mac mini and MacBook Air before putting the radio in the iPhone 4S. Until now the chip has been a spec-sheet line item with no consumer software riding on it.
'Find My Car Smart' changes that: it is the first app to ship against the iPhone 4S's Low Energy radio, using a persistent, low-draw Bluetooth link to remember where a user parked. The significance is less the parking use case than the proof that third-party developers can build always-on accessories around Apple's new radio without killing the phone's battery.
First-order effects
- iPhone 4S owners get a working car-locator that runs over a Low Energy connection, the first tangible payoff of the Bluetooth 4.0 hardware Apple has been adding across its lineup.
- The developer behind Find My Car Smart claims the first-mover position in an app category — Low Energy utilities — that did not exist on iOS before the 4S.
Second-order effects
- Other iOS developers now have a shipped template to copy, and accessory makers gain a reason to build cheap BLE dongles and tags that pair to iPhone apps instead of relying on power-hungry classic Bluetooth or standalone GPS hardware.
- Apple's decision to put the radio in the Mac mini and MacBook Air as well as the iPhone points toward cross-device pairing scenarios between Macs and iOS accessories.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone absorbs functions previously sold as dedicated gadgets — trackers, proximity sensors, telemetry pucks — because a low-power radio plus an app replaces single-purpose hardware.
- Low Energy shifts the design constraint for mobile peripherals from battery life to software: whoever controls the phone-side API and app store gate controls the accessory market that grows up around the radio.
The trend: Smartphones are absorbing dedicated gadget categories by pairing low-power radios like Bluetooth 4.0 with third-party apps, turning the phone into the hub for a new class of battery-sipping accessories.