“One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions,” Marco Arment blogs for Marco.org. “Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever had such an opportunity en masse on iOS,” Arment writes. “After what we saw of iOS 7… I believe this fall, we’ll get our chance… iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient.”
Arment writes, “Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.”
“This big of an opportunity doesn’t come often — we’re lucky to see one every 3–5 years,” Arment writes. “Anyone can march right into an established category with a huge advantage if they have the audacity to be exclusively modern.”
Read more in the full article here.