New Opportunities for Apple's 34 Million Developers Are Here

I believe that many users have already purchased the new iPhone 16, but it is a little regretful that they did not immediately get to try out the Apple Intelligence that Cook spent a lot of time introducing at the press conference. But fortunately, the promised deadline is approaching, and it will be available to everyone at the end of this month.

Apple Intelligence has always been hoped by Apple to become the "trump card" for sales recovery, and it is also the strongest selling point of iPhone 16.

But to truly achieve "recovery," Apple still needs to leverage a key and powerful advantage: its 34 million army of Apple developers.

1. Apple doesn’t need to catch up with model makers

You may have noticed that Apple's artificial intelligence does not pursue higher performance charts like the big models launched by other advanced "model labs" in Silicon Valley, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Llama.

Apple doesn’t use the biggest models, and can’t achieve some of the amazing tricks of cutting-edge speech models — for example, OpenAI’s latest model can sing, and Meta has also launched its own video generation model Movie Gen.

If a track is too competitive, there are only two outcomes: either you join the competition if you can’t beat it, or you switch to another track. From Apple’s perspective, it obviously chose the latter, as it hopes that its AI will be more unique.

Next, Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence, can perform some smooth operations on the phone - sending emails, reading calendars, and taking and editing photos. This is something that artificial intelligence chatbots from other model manufacturers cannot currently do.

Apple does have a strong trump card to lead this race. To achieve this, Apple is calling on its army of third-party developers to fine-tune their apps in the hope that Apple Intelligence can shine.

Back in June, Apple said that eventually, Siri would be able to trigger any action a user can perform in an app, as part of the company's long-term vision for Siri.

“Siri will be able to perform hundreds of new actions within and across apps,” Kelsey Peterson, Apple’s director of machine learning, said in the Apple Intelligence launch video.

2. Opportunities for third-party developers: Apple Intents

For Apple, of course, it is easy to implement this in its own apps, but it is not easy to make Apple Intelligence interact with millions of non-Apple apps. Relevant sources revealed that it requires developers to adopt a new way to write their apps. The key point of this new way is that developers need to create up to hundreds of additional code snippets called App Intents.

What are App Intents? This term is not something that Apple has just come up with. It can be simply understood as follows: a single application intent can define a single action. For example, in the Music app, Apple has built about 10 intents, including actions such as "Add to Playlist", "Play Music" or "Select Music".

“You should be able to connect all of these things together to achieve the future we’ve always envisioned where you can use Siri in a conversational way and do a lot of things at once,” said Jordan Morgan, an iOS developer who has written a tutorial on App Intents.

Morgan said that taking the "caffeine tracking" app as an example, one of its intents is to be able to show how much caffeine the user has consumed today.

Once the App Intent is completed, Apple's various "system experiences" such as widgets, live activities, control center, and shortcuts will be able to quickly display the currently running tracker, showing the recorded caffeine intake without the user having to open the tracking app.

In addition, system search is another major advantage that attracts some developers. App Intents allows apps to display specific emails or other more detailed data in Apple's system search Spotlight.

Developers say writing an App Intent doesn't take long and usually requires only a few lines of code. 

Michael Tigas, the developer of the productivity app Focused Work, said Apple recommended developers adopt App Intents for its most important features several years ago.

"Now, if there's a way to tweak your app to do any general action, then you should create an App Intent for it," Tigas said.

Fortunately, if developers haven’t taken App Intent seriously before, there’s still a window of time to get on board. While Apple Intelligence will begin rolling out next month, the biggest improvements to Siri won’t be released until next year.

3. Apple needs to incentivize developers, but the risks are high

Apple has a long history of getting developers behind new platform initiatives, and it’s using a proven strategy to get developers on board — personal attention from its developer relations department, a party-like atmosphere at the company’s annual developer conference, and most importantly, using App Store promotions to attract those developers who sign up, resulting in millions of downloads.

There’s no doubt that if third-party developers get on board and the Siri system works as advertised, it will become one of Apple’s biggest and most lasting advantages in the AI ​​race.

However, things may not be that simple. Apple's plan to attract developers is indeed very profitable, but the risks are also not small.

First of all, Apple currently has very few device models that can experience Apple Intelligence. This feature is only available for the iPhone 15 Pro launched last year and the iPhone 16 models launched this year, and there is no further sales accumulation.

Second, if Apple’s improved Siri doesn’t receive strong developer support or fails to impress, it could further reduce iPhone sales, and end users may choose to use competing voice assistants through apps instead of the built-in Siri.

4. Apple must pay attention to several issues that developers care about

First, Apple needs to perfect AI’s intent recognition.

Apple’s new Siri system is better able to understand questions even if users make mistakes. This is a direct result of Apple’s research in language models, which means Siri will be more flexible in understanding hundreds of different ways users can say something, such as “Apply photo filters to the images I took yesterday.”

Further, Apple must train and test its models to understand the most likely range of commands and questions for any given category of apps.

One downside to Apple's approach is that the new version of Siri will initially support only a few categories of apps, starting with photo and email apps. The company says that eventually Siri will support apps focused on books, journals, whiteboards, file management, word processing, browsers, cameras and photos.

But it’s clear that developers are already imagining how to let users interact with their apps via voice.

A representative for premium email app Superhuman told CNBC that the company plans to use Apple's AI system to ask questions about emails, such as "Hey Siri, when is my flight?" or "Hey Siri, when is my meeting with James to review his proposal?"

Secondly, there will be a problem of the usage time of third-party applications and Siri increasing while that of others decreasing. How to solve this problem?

Apple’s plan also has drawbacks from the perspective of some developers, who worry that users will spend less time in their own apps or confuse Apple Intelligence with AI features they build themselves.

“If this story was only about App Intents, developers would be concerned that their products could become conduits for Siri, and it would be unclear how to build a sustainable business around it,” Igor Zhadanov, CEO of Readdle, maker of the email app Spark, wrote in an email.

Finally, as mentioned above, Apple Intelligence features are only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and 16, which only account for a small fraction of the total iPhone user base. The limited market of iPhone users may discourage developers from investing time and effort in supporting the technology in the short term.

“Apple limits these kinds of Apple Intelligence features to new 2024 iPhones and last year’s high-priced models, so you can’t build something for the masses anyway,” Tigas noted.

5. Apple relies on AI to achieve growth revival, but it also needs developers to agree

Indeed, generative AI has brought new growth opportunities to all walks of life. Even Apple, the world's largest company by market value, has to join the race. Specifically for Apple, although its approach is different from that of Google and OpenAI, it also faces many risks. The concerns of developers from three parties about Apple AI, the degree of user recognition of Apple AI, and the rapid follow-up of competing products are all things that Apple needs to be prepared for.

But the only thing that is certain is that Apple will not miss this opportunity to develop AI in its own brand, and good news for developers will come soon.