September 20th, 2012
After living with iOS 6 for a hot 24 hours, I’m struck by what this update tells us about APPL in its post-Steve Jobs phase.
The new OS is largely incremental in its changes, but it carries one gigantic feature that’s being weirdly overlooked in write-ups: Passbook.
If you haven’t tinkered in iOS 6, Passbook is a new permanent icon which APPL plants on your home screen when you boot up for the first time. And it’s function is amazing. The idea is that it mates all of your customer information from your dealings with various companies and brings it to the fore exactly when you need it.
So your customer loyalty card from Giant/Wegmans/Safeway you have on your keychain? When you get to the register, Passbook pulls it up automatically and lets you scan it from your iPhone. Bye-bye plastic. Ditto cards for Starbucks, Panera, REI, and what-have you. But wait! There’s more! If you travel, Passbook takes your flight information, your hotel information, your rental car information, puts it all in one place, and pulls it up as you need it. You get to the airport and it pulls up the barcode to scan at the check-in kiosk. Etc.
I love it. Passbook is the kind of routine-changing app that makes your life better and it shows APPL can still be really smart and creative post-Jobs.
But there’s a catch. APPL launched iOS 6, plunked Passbook on your home screen, and the app is basically just a cardboard placeholder. It doesn’t work yet. Hardly any Passbook-enabled apps exist. From the user-end, it’s like getting a totally non-functional beta design.
That’s insane. It would be like launching the iPhone 4S and enabling Siri–but not having her able to do anything. And then telling users, Don’t worry–this Siri thing is going to be awesome in a few months!
I suspect that this would never have happened under Jobs. You either make Passbook functional right out of the gate, or you roll it out when it’s ready as an update later on. You don’t include your most radical improvement in the OS before it’s usable.
More on iOS 6 — Jonathan Last Online September 24, 2012 at 2:16 pm
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