iOS 8

What Does It All Mean?

MACOSCOPE.COM

Hello reader! You’ve certainly noticed there’s been a lot of fuss regarding recent Apple’s announcements at the WWDC conference. There was a similar hubbub when Apple introduced iOS 7 last year and there were voices all over the Inter-net how you get a clean slate and how you can restart your app (or even business) because you can, and should, redesign your whole app? Or another version of it – now is a good time to get on the App Store, it’s a level-playing field, because new iOS is new for everyone. After this year’s WWDC it dawned on us that the iOS overhaul Apple started a year ago was at least a two-step process, and Ap-ple just made the second one. iOS 7 was all about look & feel refresh, iOS 8 is all about new features and capabilities. It feels like whole new landscape of possibilities. We think it’s a great time to start evaluating your new ideas and reevaluating old ones

– especially that there usually are publicity bonuses from Apple (like being featured on the App Store) for apps that make use of their new system features.

Why It Is Important?

Why It Is Important?

Read on. What we’re trying to say with this overview, is that whatever your business ideas are, whether you’re a CIO of a large company or a startup fellow, or whatever your presence in the App (Store) world is, you should find new things from Apple in-spiring.

Being a company that’s been creating soft-ware for Apple ecosystems (which is fancy way of saying that we make apps for iP-hones, iPads and Macs) since 2008, we’ve swiftly noticed that this year’s WWDC news are huge. Not only because we, de-velopers, have new toys to play with, but they also seem to create huge business op-portunities, if not whole markets – equal-ly, for existing businesses and totally new ventures.

How Does It Concern Me?

Big Things.Security.

Passwords in organizations were, are (and probably will) always a huge inconvenience, source of security problems and even breaches. Last year Apple introduced iP-hone 5S which includes fingerprint-based biometric authentication. With iOS 8 Ap-ple extends its usage to third-party apps.

What Does It Mean?What?

It means that you could get rid of all that inconveniences in an iPhone app. It can ask the user at any time to confirm iden-tity with a fingerprint and proceed ac-cordingly. Imagine an internal company app not asking for PIN or passcode input each time there’s a need to access confi-dential area or sensitive data. No risk of forgetting password, no risk of unautho-rized access by extracting passwords, no risk of password sharing between users, no additional overhead of implementing password change, resetting & no cumber-some typing of complex strings of char-acters on the touchscreen. Just a simple check the app could perform – “is this the device owner asking for access”? If that sounds too bold to consider, imagine an additional security layer of fingerprint au-thentication for your data on top of exist-ing infrastructure. * potentially password-less apps * thus, huge improvements in usability and overall user experience * improved/seamless device data migra-tion

Cloud.

Apple gives us a new framework called CloudKit. It allows for pretty much trans-parent way of storing and accessing data in the cloud. It means you can write apps that share the same set of data regard-less of which iOS device you’re launching them on (or Mac, for that matter). You can write your sync layer on top of it, to keep your app data up to date between devices. More importantly, the limits on the amount of information your app can store for free seem so liberal, that you’d really have to be a huge player (think Ins-tagram-big) to exceed them.

What Does It Mean?What?

Ever had ideas for some apps but they all were shelved because they required additional backend code running on a server? With CloudKit you can resurrect them. CloudKit significantly decreases development overhead, because if your idea does not require heavy lifting on the server-side, it means you don’t potentially have to deal with costs of separate back-end app development for your product (and often, dealing with separate devel-opment team responsible for server code

– and later maintenance costs). If you have an existing app and you were thinking of adding data sync capabilities or sharing your information across devices, it’s a good point in time to start reevaluating your assumptions and costs. Also, with Touch ID available for third-party apps, it means that your users won’t have to deal with the cumbersome authorization pro-tocols and immediately get access to their data via simple fingerprint scan.

• server-backed apps without actually developing backend code

• potentially none-to-low server-side

Cloud.Examples.

Mac/iPhone/iPad productivity app

Most obvious example – use CloudKit for syncing your tasks and projects between all your devices allowing for access when-ever you are and whatever the device you’re carrying with you at the moment.

How can I use that?