Apple and Salesforce announce a strategic partnership

Apple today announced a major new global strategic partnership with Salesforce.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Salesforce produces customer relationship management (CRM) products and sells commercial social networking apps through acquisition and internal development.

The enterprise partnership will help Salesforce overhaul its app to embrace the native mobile platform with exclusive new features on iOS, including Siri Shortcuts integrated with Salesforce Einstein Voice. Salesforce developers will get to enjoy Apple’s developer tools and resources to help build their own native apps using a new Salesforce Mobile SDK for iOS.

A new iOS app development course on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free, web-based learning platform, will be available as well.

Tim Cook was quoted as saying:

We’re excited to work with Salesforce and that their industry-leading CRM will embrace native iOS and deliver exclusive new features on iPhone and iPad. With the powerful combination of iPhone, iPad and iOS — the best hardware and software for business—together with native Salesforce apps and the new Salesforce SDK, we can deliver great customer experiences for businesses around the world.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chairman and co-CEO, thinks native apps on iOS and their own Trailhead system will enable the jobs of the future.

The initial focus of the partnership will include:

  • Native Salesforce iOS apps for business: Salesforce, working with Apple, will redesign the Salesforce Mobile App to give customers rich experiences exclusively on iOS, with unique Apple capabilities such as Siri Shortcuts, Face ID, Business Chat and more. Salesforce will also introduce the first ever Trailhead Mobile App, first on iOS. The partners will also deliver powerful iOS apps for industries and small business that will serve their specific customer needs.
  • Empowering Salesforce developers on iOS: Apple and Salesforce are developing the first Salesforce Mobile SDK that is optimized for Swift, Apple’s powerful and intuitive modern programming language. The native SDK will enable businesses and developers to build and deploy apps for iPhone and iPad on the Salesforce Lightning Platform, adding to the hundreds of thousands of iOS apps for business in the App Store today.
  • Accelerating developer learning and career growth: Apple and Salesforce believe strongly in the democratization of technology and empowering developers—with any education level or background—to learn skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow. To support developer learning and career growth, Apple is launching a new Get Started with iOS App Development Trail that will teach anyone how to build native iOS apps in Xcode with Swift.

The new Salesforce Mobile SDK for iOS will be available by the end of 2018. The Get Started with iOS App Development Trail is available today at trailhead.com/apple.