Apple today released its developer preview of iPhone OS 4.0 and took about 45 minutes to touch on seven key takeaways, including the highly anticipated multitasking, additional enterprise security features, and a large API addition, to name a few.
The most intriguing of Apple’s revelations, however, might be iAd. Apple now wants to take it upon itself to redesign mobile advertising, moving away from banner ads and into full-screen, interactive ads that play within the application you’re using instead of pulling you out of them. On its face, it’s kind of a nice sentiment. Coupled with some other information, it gets a little intimidating.
For one, Jobs pointed us toward some statistics during the presentation indicating that the average user spends 30 minutes per day in applications. This figure sounds a bit low, but Icrontic staff and readers can occasionally be called power users. What’s concerning is what Steve said afterwards.
If we said we were going to show an ad every three minutes, that would be ten per device per day, about the same as a TV show. That’s a billion ad opportunities a day on 100m devices….
Ads keep you in the app… because iAd is in the OS, we’ve worked out how to do interactive and video content without taking you out of the application.
Ol’ Jobsy’s floating the possibility of showing you an ad every three minutes. Two things are still in the users’ favors: There don’t appear to be popups in the near future, and it looks like you can leave the ad whenever you’re ready. Presumably, you even have the choice to never look at it in the first place.
On the other hand, hooking advertising directly into the OS can give some pause, and brings some not-so-ancient patent filings of Apple’s to mind, namely 20090265214:
Advertisement in Operating System
Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s). The advertisement can be visual or audible….
The patent’s claims include a method to disable a device’s function, including all methods of input and program output, until the ad runs to completion. The patent also includes that might require human interaction to move them along, and ways of determining whether or not the user is paying attention to the advertisement. There are many other interesting and bothersome claims in that patent, as well. The New York Times outlines several of them nicely:
What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.
These tests “can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test,” the application says. One option makes the response box smaller and smaller, requiring more concentration to find and banish. Or the system can require that the user press varying keyboard combinations, the current date, or the name of the advertiser upon command, again demonstrating “the presence of an attentive user.”
Now that Apple has cemented advertising directly into OS 4, is it any real stretch to consider that this possibility could come to fruition? If it did, would anybody spring for it? After all, the patent insinuates that the presence of the ads “can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at reduced cost.” That’s certainly not the only option, however.
What say you, Internet? Are you concerned about a greater number of ads in your future? Are you happy Apple wants to make ads suck less? Are you ignoring everything about the OS 4 update except for the multitasking aspect? Sound off!
Articles RSS