There’s an App For That, But is it on iOS?

iOS is losing it shine when it comes to creativity.

Guess what? If you are in to a really cool app – one that changes the world – has some new interaction paradigm it plays with – requires access to some low level features – iOS probably isn't for you.

Once upon a time, some 4 years ago, Apple came up with the app. Or more accurately the app store. And the main concept? "there's an app for that":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg

But is there?

I think that a trend is brewing, where companies are trying to bank on their innovation elsewhere. And why shouldn't they when Apple just doesn't let you do some stuff on its phones?

The last example of it is Facebook Home:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lep_DSmSRwE

An app that replaces the home screen of your smartphone and centralizes your interactions on it around Facebook. On the announcement day, it already had AT&T as a first operator with hints of EE and Orange. On the devices front? There's HTC as a forerunner, with Samsung, Huawei and Sony next in line. All of this is Android based

Apple devices anyone? Highly unlikely

And Facebook isn't alone here: companies looking for Wi-Fi apps usually can't get to the same level of integration on iOS that they can on Apple. Remember the Instabridge post I published a while ago? They are Android only at the moment for that specific reason.

There are apps that can get the best results only on Android – iOS for them comes second (if at all).

WebRTC anyone? Now that Google has forked WebKit and moved to its own HTML visualization engine called Blink – where does that leave WebRTC on iOS? Not even the Chrome browser there will be able to support it – at least not the one using Blink as it isn't even allowed in the app store if it won't be using WebKit. You might think that this move from Google was to force that issue on Apple to begin with.

So there's an app for that, but it will probably be easier to find it on Android than on iOS in the near future.