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Comment by mikecane | Hacker News Reader

I keep wondering why Jobs keeps pushing HTML5. He too must realize the unsustainability of it all. A collapse has to happen -- and then how many "real" apps will remain for sale? And how many devs will migrate to the web where they don't have to have the approval of Apple or Google or any other hardware maker in order to create and publicize/sell something?

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Jobs never liked the idea of Apps in the first place (probably because he knew it was unsustainable); he was fully prepared to go with a pure-webapp strategy until developers revolted. He's probably trying to get back out of that market as quickly as possible.

Unsustainable, but 30% of every sale probably makes it worthwhile.

Doubtful. That's not really making Apple any (significant) profit when you look at their overhead for that.

Is that the case? I thought it was more of an issue of the SDK and the APIs not being ready at the time that they wanted to launch.

I can't imagine that Jobs hates the notion of apps.

On the other hand, I don't understand why anyone involved with the Mac platform, where uniform interfaces are a big deal and microcriticism of widgets is so common, would ever champion the Web as a platform.

I don't see what this has to do with HTML5. Could you elaborate?

I think he means that HTML5 is a hedge against the coming collapse in the number and quality of native iOS apps from 3rd parties.

"Number and quality"

What are you talking about? There can possibly be few millions more of useless apps?

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