I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases
That’s obviously the people who are really using it, but I assumed you had to pay Apple to get it.
So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.
I assume there's NDAs in place with some vendors pre-release, since my understanding is some accessory vendors get the needed info before new models are released, so they can spin up their lines and have accessories ready to go when the new model hits the market.
(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)
A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.
The openness is easily worth it.
I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases
Commoditize your complements. Wide choice and availability of accessories benefits hardware sales.
That’s obviously the people who are really using it, but I assumed you had to pay Apple to get it.
So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.
I assume there's NDAs in place with some vendors pre-release, since my understanding is some accessory vendors get the needed info before new models are released, so they can spin up their lines and have accessories ready to go when the new model hits the market.
(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)
Commoditize Your Complement - Apple wants accessories to be cheap.
You might want to pay for the Made For iPhone certification for some things, but I doubt most cases have it.
Wouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.
No, this is to attract accessory manufacturers, and then trick them into buying an MFi/connector license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program
For accessory manufacturers?
Yes. These drawings are a companion to Apple's accessory design guidelines, which include a lot of other interesting design considerations:
https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...
It's so we can make cases.