People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps
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People who work on browsers and libraries for them are in a position to make this happen if they want-- to make the Web win as the platform even if the iPad wins as the device. All you have to do is make other browsers fabulously powerful for web apps. If there start to be a lot of things you can do on e.g. Chrome that you can't do on Safari, Safari will be pushed to follow suit.
In fact maybe it will be Chrome and not Android that saves us from Apple's locked-down future. It's certainly a more straightforward problem. Android can only win through partnerships with handset makers, while Chrome can evolve at its own rate.
I don't want to brag or anything but our app was designed to be touch friendly (the UI has big buttons etc.) and we made this decision before the iPad was announced :)
http://blog.smartupz.com/2009/12/islate-aka-apple-itablet-my...
in the meantime, my android browser doesn't seem to be caching websites aggressively enough, because it seems to take up to several seconds to load the (few) bookmarks i have. so native content-oriented apps are faster, for now.
Accelerometer, native graphics, etc are the key features I think about that are not well suited for web apps.
My startup, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), is a huge believer of mobile web apps, and we even have a private alpha going on for monetizing your mobile web app (check out an example like fortysquires: http://fortysquires.com ).
http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture
After drawing some naughts and crosses, you can rotate the board by placing two fingers on the screen and rotating them 45 degrees or more.
It's all Javascript and jQuery.
Thinking even more generally, what makes a mobile device so different than a PC? Why would the evolution we've seen on PCs play out any differently on handsets?
Flash-forward after a year of developers crying to write native apps, and the iPhone SDK and App Store were born, to give the developers what they asked for. It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.
I really don't see this "locked-down future" that people whinge about. Apple is still leading the open web app platform charge with WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, as well as their work evangelizing HTML5 technologies to the general public.
It wasn't, and still isn't. There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.
It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.
I think what Apple originally wanted was a pure console model. They and hand-picked partners would get to write native apps, and everybody else would make do with web apps.
Why wouldn't JavaScript and browsers continue to evolve until that isn't the case?
I think there's now a Javascript port of Quake 2 that's just about playable on a modern PC. That game's 13 years old.
My point is that for applications that requires any degree of processor power javascript will struggle to match native hardware that's many generations old.
It might not make the users happy but that hasn't bothered Jobs so far. With enough Apple fan boys, you can justify anything - flash would be just the start. It would be like the worst Microsoft behavior from the 90's but since Apple isn't a horizontal monopoly, it has fewer legal barriers to its behavior.
The only reason that media companies need fear cannibalizing app sales is that people have become accustomed to paying for Apps (even apps that are 99% content) but not paying for web sites.
Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store account?
Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some serious traction).
See also my previous comment on this topic:
I also believe this will happen quite soon. Developers will just digitally sign the web site resources and that will be enough to satisfy the review process, be secure enough and, most importantly, allow iTunes payment.
I don't see how this is against their ecosystem. If you will use the same developer agreement, everything else will be the same: web-apps will still have to use StoreKit to sell stuff (so no Paypal, even if you are "on the web") and Apple gets their cut.
First, payment should be easy. I want to click "Buy", then click "Okay", and that's it. But almost every time I make a purchase online I end up fumbling for my wallet, getting my debit card, and filling out a form.
Second, people have to get "used" to paying for something. Give something away for free long enough, and pretty soon everyone starts to believe they're entitled. If you're like me, you have to go through quite a bit of research, trial, and self-convincing to pay a few bucks for a web app. Compare that to how easy it is to make a purchase at a convenient store.
Amazon. I already have an Amazon account. Allow everyone else to tap into that for micropayments.
I'm not going to sign up for some new micropayment system unless I have to. And anything that resembles PayPal will send me running the other way.
...and yet, people don't run to it.
Then again, maybe they're paralyzed with fear and have reached the end of the creativity road... I just can't imagine there isn't innovation to be done in this area.
can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?