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Contributed by Rich Mendis, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, AnyPresence
The Chicken & Egg of IoT Adoption in 2016: Good Apps or APIs?
The explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) continues at a stunning pace, with an estimated 5 billion devices connected to the Internet today and 30 billion expected by 2020. There’s no doubt that all those devices will produce a massive amount of data and present an entirely new set of challenges for both IoT vendors and enterprises looking to leverage IoT devices.
IoT hardware and connectivity revenues are growing at about 10-20 percent annually. Apps, analytics and services are growing even more rapidly at 40-50 percent. It is estimated that there will be 4.5 million IoT developers by 2020, reflecting a 57% annual growth rate and a massive opportunity.
In 2016 and beyond, we’ll see more businesses across various industries trying to capitalize on the IoT opportunity by brining solutions to market, and I believe we’ll start to see some best practices emerge. One of the debates we often hear when considering the launch of a new IoT device or solution, is which is more important for successful market adoption: a good app or a good API? It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg dilemma: one could argue that an app is critical to ensuring accessibility and usability of the IoT device by initial users. On the other hand, a good API provides a path for third party developers to build solutions that leverage cross-manufacturer IoT devices in unique and innovative ways, and help ensure an ecosystem built around the device as early as possible.
Let’s explore this further by taking a look at a couple recent smart home IoT offerings:
Take Nest 1.0, arguably one of the most well known consumer IoT devices to really gain widespread awareness and traction in the market. The Nest app was very well designed and easy to use. People enjoyed being able to control their thermostat settings from afar because of the convenience and flexibility. However, Nest didn’t provide APIs when it launched, and lacked a developer ecosystem around the device. Sure, the product had good reception among most early adopters but one could argue that if they had also encouraged and supported a 3rd party development community, new features and specs could have been added a lot sooner and growth may have been even stronger.
Consider, for instance, that many early Nest adopters are tech-savvy consumers, many of which may be hobbyist programmers or hardware hackers. That group could have easily extended Nest with additional temperature sensors that could be added to different rooms to further optimize temperature settings, which is Nest competitor Ecobee’s biggest differentiator.
In contrast, consider Phillips Hue, the wireless LED lighting system that allows users to control and set their lights on the web or via a mobile and tablet application. Phillips exposed its APIs early on to developers in an effort to spur third party innovation. The Philips hue API allows developers to access and integrate of Philips hue with other applications. Example API methods include managing lights and light attributes, managing light schedules, and configuring lights and accounts. There are dozens of fantastic hue apps made by 3rd party developers, some of which are arguably better than Phillip’s own default app. The SciFi channel launched an app that synchronizes your lighting colors with certain shows, extending the ambience from your TV into the room. By allowing developers to access to their APIs and SDKs early on, Phillips was able to leverage the innovation of a much broader developer ecosystem, and enable it’s products to be used in a solution of heterogeneous devices, which ultimately resulted in market share leadership in a crowded space with a premium product.
So, can you launch a solution with both a good app and good APIs simultaneously? Absolutely! By leveraging technology infrastructure solutions from software companies like AnyPresence, IoT solution vendors can accelerate both time to market for well-designed apps and provide a clean, scalable set of APIs to build a developer ecosystem. The most successful IoT organizations will be those who can both design a good solution while ensuring adoption among the broader IoT ecosystem.
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About the Author
Rich Mendis, co founder and chief product officer, AnyPresence
Richard Mendis has over 20 years in the software and information services industry. Most recently, Richard was Vice President of Solution Management at SAP, working in the CTO and sustainability offices. Richard joined SAP through the acquisition of his last startup Clear Standards, where he was co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer. Before that, he was Vice President of Marketing at Current Analysis, a technology research firm. Richard is a frequent speaker on a range of enterprise mobility topics across multiple industries, including healthcare and energy. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
