Dan Frommer posed the following question on an Apple Path acquisition:
Would Apple buy or go in-house here?
No, Apple will not buy Path. Apple is no longer in the niche game. It wants to be the dominant player in the mobile, tablet, and Smart TV market. And the last thing it wants to do is go in half ass. It doesn’t matter if Path is the best designed social app out there and shows flashes of scale.
Apple is actually doing “social” right. It’s taking popular apps and inherently mobile apps like Twitter and integrating them natively from the dashboard.
It’s only natural therefore that Apple do a similar deal with Instagram. Keep the social environment within the Instagram app but allow uploads and filtering directly from the iPhone camera itself.
Apple has to give users the fastest mobile checkout for sharing possible. And the best way to do that is white label the most useful mobile apps.
