The mobile platform battle reaches mature equilibrium between Apple and Google

In decades to come, 2015 will undoubtedly be considered as belonging to the early days of the "post-PC" era, but following Google's recent developer-focused I/O conference and last Monday's Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference keynote, it was hard not to think mobile computing is entering its late adolescent phase, shaking off youthful limitations and early missteps as Apple's iOS and Google's Android grow into fully fledged computing platforms.

Certainly, it’s clear that a certain maturity and stability has been reached - iOS and Android are the competing operating systems in a bipolar world, offering similar but distinct visions of mobile computing, with strengths and weaknesses on either side.

That rivalry between iOS and Android has been established for some time now, and yet it is fascinating to take an overview of how the platform game has changed in the years since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007.

For one thing, the battle for smartphone supremacy is asymmetric, with Apple and Google playing different games with different incentives. Fundamentally, Apple sells hardware differentiated from competitors by its tightly integrated software, whereas Google is first and foremost a services company – appreciating that distinction is critical when trying to understand the development of the mobile computing era.

Broad ambition

At Google I/O, the breadth of Google’s ambition in providing services across platforms was everywhere in evidence - as analyst Neil Cybart put it, “Google’s ambitions include connecting the next billion users and obtaining scale across its suite of services which requires supporting an iPhone user base quickly moving towards 500 million users.”

Here, it’s worth bearing in mind that Apple is far more in control of iOS than Google is of Android, though that is largely by design - the Android Open Source Project, or AOSP, means further splintering of Android versions in the wild, not all of them making use of Google services. It really cannot afford to ignore or deprioritise all those iOS users by offering a subpar experience on one platform over another.

But a larger pattern is also beginning to emerge – what few of us could have predicted in 2007 is how mobile computing would end up swallowing so many other businesses. Industries that might once have considered themselves “platforms” in their own right are now being relegated to icons on the homescreen.

That was never clearer than the moment during the WWDC keynote when the Apple's software chief Craig Federighi announced Apple News, a kind of Flipboard alternative for accessing news feeds from publishers. The likes of Quartz, ESPN and the New York Times are already on board, with the latter offering up to 30 free articles per day.

That illustrates one thing clearly – the tactic of media organisations betting everything on native smartphone and tablet apps suddenly seems quaint. Just as Facebook is attempting to intermediate the media business by hosting “Instant Articles” within Facebook’s app, Apple will similarly present all media sources in one app. Thus, the media industry’s loss of platform control continues apace – newspapers and magazines giving way to dedicated apps giving way to feeds in other companies’ apps.

The trend in music is not quite analogous to the news media, but music consumption is being revolutionised by streaming – where once we owned music that we listened to on dedicated devices, now we have just another icon on the homescreen for music that we rent.

The protracted introduction of Apple Music might have been uncharacteristically sloppy stagecraft from Apple, but the service is likely to greatly expand the number of people who pay for streaming music services, relegating the music industry to another small constituent piece of the larger mobile platform.

Internet of things

Over the next few years, mobile computing might even extend to making a platform of the home. The internet of things (IoT) has long been touted, but Google’s acquisition of smart appliance maker Nest and the launch of IoT operating system Brillo, a branch of Android for connected devices, as well as the evolution of Apple’s IoT platform HomeKit, positions us for the day when our homes become platform-specific extensions of our mobile devices.

In fact, it's hard to think of many areas that were once "platforms" in their own right that won't become subsidiary elements of the two dominant mobile platforms – even Microsoft under chief executive Satya Nadella has embraced the approach, forgoing their own mobile platform by offering key Microsoft services such as Office as apps on iOS and Android. Or think of how Uber is disrupting the taxi business.

Of course, nothing stays still for long in the technology industry, and what appears right now to be platform maturity might look like a fleeting moment of equilibrium in the evolution of mobile computing in just a few years.

However, if a business can be an app on a smartphone screen, it eventually will be.