App developers are excited about the latest tablet release from Apple. We have created over two hundred thousand apps for the iPad which has proved to be an exceptional tool for entertainment, productivity, personal health, and early education. With 55 million iPads sold, and 25 billion iOS apps downloaded, it is a great platform for developers. Providing over $4 billion in revenues for developers, Apple’s continued development of hardware to support iOS is incredibly valuable to app makers.
Incorporating quad-core video processing combined with LTE connectivity will improve the speed at which users can consume video and other data-intensive content. The improved integration of cloud services makes productivity applications more useful. And the new retina display provides much improved resolution to deliver high definition entertainment and gaming content to consumers.
However, the new iPad’s retina display could pose serious challenges for app developers. To update existing apps for the new iPad, graphics must be upconverted to a much higher resolution. This will result in larger graphic files, nearly doubling the overall size of many apps. Apps over 20MB in size can only be purchased through a WiFi connection, not through 3G or LTE networks. The increased resolution will make it more difficult for developers of feature-rich or graphic-intensive apps to stay under the 20MB threshold. Studies have shown that eliminating consumers’ ability to buy apps over 3G or LTE networks depresses sales by 40%.
This is a problem that finds its root in the scarcity of available spectrum. A shortage of licensed spectrum is leading carriers to impose limits on user access in order to prevent their networks from being overwhelmed. Congress recently approved voluntary auctions to free up a limited amount of spectrum, but demand for wireless data four years from now is expected to be 18 times greater than it is today. We need to free up the huge swaths of spectrum held unused by government agencies and the old, over-the-air television system in order to avoid wireless gridlock. Only government action can ‘shake the tree’ and get this spectrum into the marketplace where it belongs to relieve the congestion.
We hope that the FCC and other agencies take a hard look at where the tablet and smartphone marketplace is heading. They must recognize that innovation, and U.S. leadership in the $68 billion mobile apps economy, will be imperiled by a failure to meet the huge spectrum demand we face.