Chris Vander Mey
Chris Vander Mey is a former Google product manager, Amazon engineering manager, and has held multiple roles in small startups. He holds a Master of Engineering Management from Dartmouth College and a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia. He's shipped software to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses and started writing code two decades ago.
Mobile developers, integration, and discovery are what count now
Three new battles to watch as the mobile hardware gap closes.
The iPhone 5 may or may not be the most beautiful handheld device, but it barely matters anymore. Competitors have rendered its beauty and craftsmanship irrelevant. Amazon has received the message and responded with its latest set of tablets, and Google has responded with the Motorola Droids and the Nexus 7. These devices now have sufficient quality in their materials, specs, and base operating systems so that they can make any consumer happy. So if hardware is a toss up, where will the next battles be fought?
The answer: developers, integration, and discovery.
First, the very best developers will build apps that tap key trends: improved camera quality is making real-world text and face recognition more possible, geofencing data stores are making proximity–based apps more possible, and despite Steve Jobs’ assertion that God gave us 10 styli, there’s clearly a host of applications that are benefiting from pressure-sensitivity and pens. The level to which Apple and Google embrace these new technologies and extend the current state of the art in voice and gesture recognition will factor heavily into the quality and emergence of new applications. In addition, the extent to which Apple and Google can expose these new technologies — like NFC or always-on Glass cameras in Google’s case — will provide an advantage to developers.