The iPhone obsession
quirksmode.org
quirksmode.org
He seems to forget the fact that hardware sales doesn't translate into actual internet usage. The internet outside of iPhone, Android, and Palm is so terrible that barely anyone even bothers to use it. What do those three platforms have in common? Webkit!
Is there a WebKit-based browser that you can download where, if it looks good there, it should look ok on all these phones?
EDIT: Oops, I think edd's post below answers my question.
Emerging economies such as India have huge mobile Internet populations. In fact in India mobile Internet outnumbers PC based internet 3 to 1 with a mobile Internet use north of 37million users, very few of which are using iPhones.
http://research.nokia.com/files/MobileInternetUsageInIndia.p...
http://mobiforge.com/analysts/blog/mobile-internet-users-ind...
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?article...
There's a few differences though. IE6 did a few things better (their box-sizing model is still more sane than the standard, box heights were nicer if unpredictable). But many things it just did differently, for no very sensible reason.
Mobile Safari isn't like that -- it's pretty damn standards compliant (tried a second ago, it passes most but not all of ACID2). That means anything you write that is completely standards-compliant will work, without modification, on any other similarly compliant browser, mobile or otherwise.
What is does do is a bunch of mobile-specific enhancement -- the viewport sizing, css gradients, etc. are all highly useful for the unusual constraints of mobile web development.
So, as PPK suggests, build the website in another browser first. Then enhance it for Safari using their extensions -- not the other way around.
Already I have to worry about: * Firefox 3+ (all OSes) * Safari (OSX, Windows) * Opera 9+ * Chrome 3+ * IE7+ * iPhone
There are just so many browsers I have to worry about. And even though I code for standards, every browser still treats every little thing slightly differently. I realize making something work in Opera if it already works in FF/Chrome is probably not too difficult, but sometimes little things can take up hours. So sorry Quirksmode, despite your well-written article, I will not even bother with any other browsers just because you say so.
You know when I will bother? When my users tell me that my app doesn't work well in platform X, browser Y and they would really want it to. That's when I will go beyond my basic list of browsers. Otherwise I'm just wasting resources developing for yet another platform.
A lot of us don't really want Apple (or Google, or x, or y, or z) to be a monopoly though. And perhaps the people who do follow the advice to consider the other browsers and will help keep things on an even keel.
But in the end, the loser is you, the web developer, because you're pushing potential visitors away from your site.
Those users won't complain to you, they'll just switch.
Your loss.
That bit of snark ignores the reality that a developer has resource constraints, and they constantly have to decide how best to deploy their time, money and energy.
Failing to address some platforms might well be a big win. Claiming it's a definite loss is absurd.
In my particular case, I only make things that don't exist already i.e. I'm not making yet another twitter-posting app or social bookmarking app. So I highly doubt my target users will switch simply because my app doesn't work nicely on a browser I don't even know about.
Also the solution to this would be to show a small notification if my app is being run in an untested environment and let the user complain with a 1-click form if they wish. I think most people who have a bad experience will let me know that is the case.
You must not follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/ppk
A device has more than 3x its market-share in traffic-share and we are supposed to ignore that? That doesn't seem realistic. This gap between market-share and traffic-share speak volumes about how far behind the other platforms are in UX.
Maybe developers aren't just obsessed with the iPhone: maybe they just don't want to develop for something that makes thier work look like shit.
Oh you mean how people decided to develop for MSIE6 only because Netscape was kinda weak in comparison?
I think you missed the central point of this guy's rant.
* Those usage numbers (50% of mobile browser traffic)
could be a US-only statistic
* People on other browsers might not browse the web as much because
not enough effort is made to making web content usable on those
browsers.
People get their phone and try to use the mobile browser, but the experience sucks so they give up (or only use it whne they really need to get some info from the web).
Developers look at the usage statistics, see that no one is using the other browsers and proudly declare that the people whole own phones with those other browsers don't want to access the information that they are presenting to the world, so therefore there is no point in targeting them as an audience.
The problem is that this is the wrong conclusion to make. Just because people aren't accessing your content in a certain way does not mean that they don't want to.
http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2009/04/11/please-dont-mi...
Which browsers do that?
Having worked on mobile web applications that serve a wide range of devices, I can honestly say that this is not the case.
I would challange ppk to cite examples of this behaviour.
iPhone was the first mobile phone which made ordinary web usable on mobile device for me—and that's for sites without no optimization whatsoever. On the other hand most of optimization which makes web experience even more enjoyable on iPhone can be very simple (as simple as META element without any browser sniffing involved) and unobtrusive in the sense, that it does not affect other browsers.
If your mobile browser cannot render simple website no UA faking will help it. And I lay the blame solely on those browsers, not the webdevs who gave up trying to make sense of them.
What about calling mobile browser vendors to step up their game, instead of calling developers morons and wanting them to design to the lowest common denominator?
... while the rest of us did fine with Opera Mini on whatever "dumb phone" we owned. Try out Opera on one of Nokia's high-end Symbian phones one day (the N95 comes to mind). You'll be pleasantly surprised :)
- proportion of devices currently subscribed to a data plan;
- time spent online / number of pageviews per device;
- for businesses who don't plan to be profitable in the next couple of months, what OSes will be actually used for mobile web surfing in the future;
- which users have been trained by an AppStore-like system to easily spend money online.
Nobody in his right mind tries to surf with Windows Mobile if they can avoid it; the vast majority of Nokia or Sony-Ericcson phones, those which constitute the bulk of their sales, are barely usable surfing platforms, and are generally not sold with unlimited data plan; Spending money on Palm support supposes that you bet on their middle-term survival, a bet not everyone is willing to make; RIM is totally specialized into the corporate market, and is relevant if and only if you target this audience.
You're obviously new in town, so I'll point out the two flaws in your reasoning:
1) The vendors won't ship updated firmware for all the old devices they've already shipped to market. There are just too many different combinations of devices and firmware versions (each network typically gets a custom firmware build to include their links and logos), so the cost would be huge.
2) Even if they did ship updated firmware, most users won't bother installing it.
The mobile market just isn't like the desktop market - what you're effectively saying is that people can't use your web application until they upgrade to a new phone.
Anyone happen to have stats to support that, I find it very hard to believe based on (admittedly anecdotal) evidence.
Key reasons: receiving an SMS is free (I believe this to be true of most countries except the US).
Sending SMS as well as making calls is much much cheaper.
SMS are usually delivered the moment they are sent.
Er, what? Operators are expanding those flat rate plans to other phones (I have a unlimited everything month-to-month plan for $80 right now, on a non-AT&T operator).
- S60
- WinMo
- iPhone
- Android
- Blackberry
iPhone and Android are pretty much covered with good WebKit implementation. Check in one of those and most likely your page will work in the other.
PPK claims that S60 WebKit is much inferior, but there's Opera Mobile 10 for S60 and for WinMo.
Blackberry doesn't have a good browser at the moment (although they are likely to get one). Opera is making an optimized version of Mini for it, though.
Practically all other phones run Opera Mini too. Version 5 uses the same engine as Mobile but it has a much lesser JavaScript capabilities. Personally I prefer it to the default S60 Webkit on Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic.
At the moment it's all seem not that complicated to me: check in Apple WebKit (Android/iPhone), Opera Mobile and Mini, and hope that other browsers will catch up eventually.
Mini can be run in Java emulator, and desktop Opera browser has a "small-screen" rendering mode (should work like Opera Mobile). Same goes with desktop Safari and iPhone.
This is tangential. I would have thought you were right, but in my anecdotal experience, it's very much not the case. I have an Eris; wife has an iTouch. Our browsing experiences are night and day surprisingly often.
I'm picking this nit mostly because it surprised the hell out of me.
And yes, mobile phones come in different shapes and sizes, just like monitors come in different shapes and sizes. Design flexibly, so that your app is usable by people accessing it from anywhere.
We are sitting on the edge of a large explosion of smartphone devices and (potentially) users (with lots of Android handsets coming out this year). In the UK you can now get a Android powered device for £20 / month with a free handset. If you want a smartphone (and therefore probably interested in using the web), you will be able to afford one this year (at least in Europe!). This is going to be huge.
The iPhone is the standard they all will judge themselves against, and therefore the iPhone is the benchmark device.
I would suspect that the 50% smartphone / 50% other phone traffic statistic will be way higher towards smartphones in 12 months time.
I used to work in the windows mobile development team at Microsoft and at that time used to have a dismissive tone about iPhone and said it was just an expensive version of HTC Touch. But, once I started using it and downloading apps, I found the real difference. It is in a whole different league and engineers in other phone companies know that. (I can speak for atleast one of them)
Okay I have to turn the phone sideways to read Hacker News comfortably, but apart from that it generally just works. Mobile enhanced sites are nice but if we had to rely on them then we wouldn't be getting any mobile web at all.
If the other phones can't render that non-iPhone optimised sites then they've got bigger problems than not being able to see the iPhone version, because only some vanishingly tiny percentage of the web is available in that format.
(I believe Opera's command of the market on lower end phones was partly due to very smart reformatting of standard webpages (done both server- and client-side.)
Now, developers have iPhones and like iphones, developing for other devices isn't so personally pressing.
Perhaps this will force other manufacturers to improve in the way we always wanted to do to IE6 but couldn't?
I have never met one.
Here in Norway, Nokia has the largest share of the mobile phone market overall, and their smartphones are quite nice (and popular). At the moment, I'm trying to decide between buying an iPhone and a Nokia N97.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/technology/companies/19nok...
It's fairly easy to kick together a "mobile" version of a site. Just use these simple CSS rules:
img { display: none; }
body { hideous-eyebleach: true; }
Does the Nokia S60v3 have large market share worth targeting? The reason Android and iPhone markets have such gravity is that they're large and relatively homogenous consumers of rich web content from the mobile space; maximum bang for minimum buck.
I really think that this article is just wrong, and its willingness to confuse rich-web-enabled smartphones with phones that can barely display unstyled webpages is what drives me to that conclusion.
There are smartphones and then there are post-2006-smartphones, which actually do real web browsing. I strongly suspect that Nokias numbers here include many phones less capable than the one that was raised in objection previously. Is there independent evidence to the contrary?
The cheaper phone market in India is pretty fragmented.