Yeah, it could be better.

One would imagine that this post should be wrapped into my multitasking post from the other day, but I felt it necessary for this point to stand on its own:

If, by some strange chance, Apple finally allows us to multitask in the next major release of iPhone OS, I urge every currently-published developer to really take a moment to assess what it will mean to their revenue stream as it currently exists.

As an example, let’s take Pandora. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just fire up Pandora, exit the app, and go browse through NetNewsWire? Well sure, it would be fantastic for the end user, but I can easily see how Pandora’s advertising revenue would go directly through the floor. Same thing with NetNewsWire: if you can leave it running all the time, downloading your feeds in the background, that will dramatically decrease the amount of face-time each user gets with those ads.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is a Bad Thing. Clearly, the platform needs to evolve enough to allow some form of multitasking, and I even think the “blessed apps” model could be the perfect solution. But the problem, really, is that there are several new types of “economies” that have sprung up from within the confines of this platform. And when you change a fundamental operating structure of said platform, it is bound to have consequences to those economies — some predictable, and others unpredictable.

We’ve seen this type of thing before, with the ongoing complications that arose from the initially-forbidden-and-later-granted ability for paid upgrades from within an app. Those problems were less about screwing up revenue streams for the developer, and more about maintaining a consistent business relationship with the end-user, but the basic problem is quite the same: when you fail to implement a certain facet of your OS in the most logical way, from the get-go, there will be consequences, either for the developer or the consumer.