Special-Purpose iPhone Accessories: Where Are They?

Perhaps Apple is getting ahead of itself. Even as the company plans to announce its “latest creation” on Jan. 27, one of its last creation’s key features — the ability for special-purpose accessories to communicate with iPhone apps — remains largely unused.

Integration between hardware accessories and iPhone apps was one of the standout new features of iPhone OS 3.0. By enabling iPhone apps to communicate with accessories over Bluetooth or through the dock connector, manufacturers and developers could augment the iPhone’s powers. Wired liked the idea so much we even coined an admittedly awkward term, dongleware, to describe these hybrids. And you, our readers, came up with some great suggestions for iPhone hardware/software add-ons.

With the addition of an accessory, the iPhone could potentially transform into a versatile electric guitar pedal (which was actually demonstrated at an Apple event by Line 6 and still hasn’t seen the light of day) or maybe even a light-switch controller. Game developers could ship special joysticks for their games. At Apple’s press event in March 2009 we even saw a special accessory that turned the iPhone into an insulin meter for diabetes patients to monitor their glucose levels.

Alas, dongleware never took off, either as a term or as a concept. We scoured the web and the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show, and we even pitched a query through Help a Reporter Out begging for dongleware. All we found was a mere handful of app-powered iPhone accessories, most far less interesting than what Apple promised in its June 2009 keynote.

Mobile apps are a multi-billion-dollar industry, and the iPod and iPhone accessory market already surpass a billion dollars a year. We thought that by now dongleware would be a market overflowing with entrepreneurs eager to strike it rich in the App Store.

We’re not alone in wondering what happened.

“It’s been nine months since the 3.0 press event, plenty of time for hardware companies to get products out,” said Raven Zachary, president of Small Society, an iPhone app development house. “I think there are a handful, and only a handful. I’m surprised.”

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that creating new hardware products is harder than it looks, according to iPhone developers polled by Wired.com.

“When you talk about making a change for a hardware product, there’s a lot of planets to align,” said Matt Drance, Apple’s former iPhone evangelist who left the company to start his own iPhone app publishing company Bookhouse. “I think getting the planets to align has been a challenge for most people.”

To start with the obvious, creating and shipping hardware requires many more steps than coding a piece of software and submitting it to the App Store. You have to find manufacturing partners, perform product forecasting and plan inventory. And for the iPhone in particular, you must hire engineers who understand both hardware and coding for the iPhone OS.

A more arcane part of the dongleware-creation process involves gaining certification through Apple’s stringent “Made for iPod and Works With iPhone” licensing program. The purpose of the program is to ensure accessories meet certain technical standards, including FCC requirements.

For ThinkFlood founder Matthew Eagar, an independent entrepreneur who developed the RedEye universal remote app and accessory for iPhone, getting certified was his major challenge.

To gain certification, Eagar had to fly his staff to California to put his accessory through a cellphone testing lab at Cetecom. For his particular accessory, he had to ensure RedEye passed over-the-air testing to avoid interfering with the iPhone’s cell signal. The testing took many hours spread over several days.

“They had crazy requirements in terms of, you don’t want to interfere with the cell signal,” Eagar said. “It took us 10 weeks of back and forth and flying people around the country to spend time with these certification facilities.”

So naturally, it’s less likely we’ll see much dongleware from independent developers such as Eagar. Most of these products will likely come from larger companies who have been in the accessory industry for years.

Accessory maker Griffin, for example, in September 2009 released a piece of dongleware called the iTrip (above), a transmitter that broadcasts audio from an iPhone to an FM radio. On the iPhone, the iTrip app acts as the controller for setting the frequency. (With earlier iTrip models, you’d only be able to control the frequency with small plastic buttons on the transmitter.)

Griffin’s experience? Not even close to as difficult as it was for Eagar, thanks to an in-house staff of RF engineers who have been making gadget accessories for years.

“We always saw software as a way to get more value out of the hardware for us,” said Mark Rowan, president of Griffin. “Moving to iPhone integration was a very natural step for us because it met a business model we’ve been doing for 20 years.”

Rowan added that the size of the special-purpose iPhone accessory market is small, and perhaps that’s because we don’t need many. The iPhone, after all, strives to be an all-in-one device with the help of apps rather than physical hardware. With over 100,000 apps in the App Store and counting, it’s doing a pretty good job at that.

“I don’t think there will ever be the same kinds of numbers in hardware integration apps as the non, because I don’t think there needs to be,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities for games and information on the phone if all you need is the 3G access, to pull all kinds of data down. There are plenty of apps that work perfectly fine without any extra hardware.”

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