Last week there was all kinds of news about getting Siri to work on jailbroken iphones. Well there is news today that Apple my be working on a version to run on older iOS devices. Most likely you will still need to update your phone to iOS5 if you have not already. I have held back since I do not want to bother rejailbreking my phone.
The obvious questions is; why would Apple want to support older devices? Does that not remove incentive for people to upgrade their phones? Given the great sales numbers Apple already has; I’m sure they are not worried about that. However, Siri has another value other then just trying to get people to buy a new phone. Siri is a great way to sell advertising.
Apple has its own advert service just like google adwords called iAd. When people ask Siri for directions, or a good place to eat, or something to do, place a highly relevant advert somewhere withing the answer is advertising gold. Thus, Apple will make more money by having as many people and devices using Siri as possible. So why didn’t Apple roll out Siri to everyone? Well as we say last week, Siri needs to shake a few bugs out before it scales up any further. imagine the nightmare of everyone iphone user suddenly hitting the Siri service. Crash city.
So although the work of iphone jailbreakers goes on, it may be for naught. Time will tell.