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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Wouldn't it be great if the whole nasty 3.3.1 business turned out to be a moot point, because web apps were what mattered?

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.

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When the iPhone came out, I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

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.

I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

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.

There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.

Why wouldn't JavaScript and browsers continue to evolve until that isn't the case?

Clearly they will, assuming you are willing to wait a few generations of hardware for them to become powerful enough.

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.

i speculate this particular case is done entirely in software.

And when it launched, Quake 2 supported software rendering at fairly respectable framerates.

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.

processing power isn't the point; the browsers must/may evolve to expose hardware features.

seems a pretty obvious outcome, but only for apps/webapps that are content-oriented, not for apps that actually use custom mobile device hardware. like gps, sms, multitouch.

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.

There are certainly features that are better suited for native apps, but the ones you stated aren't necessarily them. For example, GPS is doable on both Android and iPhone OS. Multitouch is also doable (check out Google Maps on the web on iPhone for an example here).

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 ).

Another example of multi-touch is Naughts and Crosses, one of the two demos I made for the iGesture jQuery plugin:

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.

Accelerometer would work just fine, if iPhone OS exposed a javascript event for it. (Not even all that CPU-intensive either.)

Ain't you afraid of running into legal trouble because of your startup's name ?

It will be in the interest of every other device manufacturer to expose such things to web apps, and that will pressure Apple to follow suit.

Every time I propose that the web will win out on devices, the argument of inaccessible mobile hardware always comes up. The best counter argument is justin.tv - that runs in a browser, and clearly has no problem finding your camera. Why couldn't a solution arise on mobile devices too?

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?

ChromeOS and recent acquisition of Palm will have a big impact on the web app ecosystem. Things like jQtouch ( checkout how our HTLM/jQtouch app looks on iPhone and Andorid HTC Desire http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/05/htc-desire-and-iphone-smart... ) will only speed up the process of turning web apps/web sites into fully touch enabled apps.

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...

Hey, I know a really "easy" solution to this "problem" for Steve Jobs: organize media sites to selectively block ipad users.

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.

YCRFS 7? :)

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