Timur Vermes’ satirical novel Er ist wieder da, which sold a million copies in German, is now available in English as Look Who’s Back and it is brilliant. Its premise is that in 2011, Adolf Hitler gets resurrected and wakes up in Berlin to confront the modern world. Apart from all the political satire, one of the most interesting bits for geeks is the way he discovers the smartphone. It is as well that the novel is set in 2011. If it were set in 2014, Hitler would have found it necessary to call our phones the Überfon.
2014 is not just the year when our phones become super phones, it is also the year when both the phone platforms, iOS and Android, get feature parity. Even if there are smaller quibbles like ease of use which are highly subjective, it is safe to say that both Android and iOS have pretty much the same functionality, and pretty much same top apps.
Confronted with this reality that all Android premium phones from major companies come with good hardware and have pretty much the same capabilities software-wise, Apple is looking at ways to differentiate the iPhone. One of the ways it is doing that is by building a very beautiful ecosystem where all its devices work flawlessly together. Another is introducing technologies like the fingerprint scanner and 64-bit architecture that are hard to copy without the kind of hardware and software integration that Apple has. But the most important distinction that Apple wants to make with Android is the one that it wouldn’t shut up about at the WWDC this year, and the one that Google doesn’t seem to be very happy to mention at its own developers conference. Privacy.
With every new feature that Apple has announced at WWDC, it has tried to hammer home one single point. We value your privacy. The Touch ID fingerprint sensor will now be open to third party apps, BUT your fingerprint will never leave the device and those apps can never see any of your information stored in a secure enclave. iOS extensions let apps talk to each other and lets the users install third party keyboards, BUT everything works in a sandbox so all your data is secure and is not shared with anyone, particularly the keystrokes from the keyboards. Healthkit and Homekit will record all your data BUT will never share them with any service until you let it. It is all topped off by the company’s privacy policy which states, ‘Personal information will only be shared by Apple to provide or improve our products, services and advertising; it will not be shared with third parties for their marketing purposes’.
There is a reason why Apple thinks privacy, in these post-Snowden times, is such an advantage for itself. It is that the whole Google business model is dependent upon users not having any privacy. It is based upon using individual user’s data culled from web searches, Gmail, Android etcetera to generate advertising which makes up the bulk of the search giant’s revenues. As Jan Dawson at Jackdaw Research points out from the above chart, Apple is the only one of the major companies which gets its money directly from ordinary customers like you and me if you forget Microsoft which gets it from its customers like Dell and HP. This means Apple doesn’t have to sell user data to make money and so can offer its customers unparalleled amounts of privacy. Knowing that privacy is the one game that Google can never play, expect a lot more of the ‘P’ word from Apple in the coming years.
Matham is a tech geek. Follow him on Twitter@AdarshMatham