Apple – The Next Big Thing in Salesforce’s® Strategic Partnerships

At Dreamforce 2018, one of the key announcements that attracted many eyes was the Apple and Salesforce strategic partnership. The industry expectations escalated with the two tech behemoths coming together.

Let’s take you through what followed next.

The announcement of Salesforce’s strategic partnership with Apple, Inc. was aimed at bringing together the world’s most advanced operating system and the #1 CRM platform. Salesforce always looks out for new ways to extend their CRM capabilities. Thus, Salesforce and Apple together create a highly effective mobile workforce with best-of-the-breed devices & apps to cater to the needs of small, medium, and large scale businesses.

Since everything nowadays is more connected and mobile, users expect to get access to their data and manage their day-to-day tasks from all of their devices. With this partnership, developers now have a chance to access tools and information to build custom apps with a new version of the Salesforce Mobile iOS Software Development Kit (SDK) optimized for Swift.

Swift is a modern programming language designed to develop mobile apps to deliver a fast and intuitive user experience.

What Salesforce and Apple are up to?

Following its partnership with Apple, Salesforce will be able to redefine its app to offer its customers with exclusive new features on iOS. Apple could help Salesforce offer good user experience and Salesforce adds another feather in Apple’s tech hat.

“With this partnership, we’re bringing together the world’s #1 CRM platform with iPhone and iPad, the world’s best devices for business,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman, and co-CEO, Salesforce. “Together, Salesforce and Apple are defining a new era of mobile innovation with native apps on iOS, and empowering millions of people with access to Trailhead and the skills they need for the jobs of the future.”

The new partners will focus on a few areas like developing native Salesforce iOS apps for businesses. These apps will articulate the most powerful features such as Face ID, Business Chat, Shortcuts, and more.

The native SDK will enable developers and businesses to build and deploy apps for iOS on the Salesforce Lightning platform. To get started with native iOS App Development Trail, visit here.

The iOS App Development Trail is made available via the Salesforce Trailhead site and consists of a series of informative resources. It can teach you developer skills like the basics of using Swift programming and a few essential Xcode skills. The trail also helps you to know how native iOS apps using the Salesforce Mobile SDK can be developed.

What’s new in the Salesforce Mobile SDK App for iOS?

For iOS 12.0 and above:

• Touch ID and Face ID are now available in the app.

• Path view for leads is now available and users can see which stage their leads are at.

• Adding partners to accounts and opportunities has become easier.

• Bugs are fixed and other performance improvements are updated.

For iOS 11.3 and above:

• Switching devices has become more convenient now. Your data will be “as left” with Apple’s Handoff.

• Direct navigation to a page in the Salesforce app is now easier with Siri.

• You can directly manage the team access from your Account and Opportunities.

• You now have more control of Chatter with features like edit, mute, and view.

According to Bloomberg, Salesforce is the global market leader with 19.6% of the market captured in 2017. This deal with Apple is an achievement to Salesforce because Apple still continues to dominate its rivals in the market.

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