How Apple gave up on web apps – to make more money with iCloud | Hacker News Reader

How Apple gave up on web apps – to make more money with iCloud

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You have to remember that iCloud isn’t Apple’s way of entering the web application market, but actually a measure of ensuring the future of their own ecosystem. Apple doesn’t want to make web apps, they want their developers to make more money creating apps for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

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Apple's view of the web is a little different than most. When you think of today's internet, you think of web pages, but there's a whole other layer. If you look at web development trends, you'll see that the tools we have (like HTTP) are being pushed to do things they weren't originally designed to do. Starting with the first use of HttpRequestXmlResponse, web developers pushed HTTP down a conceptual layer. HTTP used to be the destination. Content was pushed, in whole, using HTTP. Javascript enabled web browsers give us the power to use HTTP as an underlying transport. With these tools, the balance of our app moved back in to the browser. This ideology is pretty well expressed in pieces espousing the virtues of the "Javascript Age".

The browser, enabled by javascript, has become a platform in and of itself. This pushed the OS down a conceptual layer as well. Google is embracing this model because they live on the web. Apple is fighting this model, because they live in the hardware and OS market.

Apple sees the internet as a ubiquitous transport. They're building an ecosystem of "things", just like Google, only Apple's "things" are iOS devices, where Google's "things" are websites.

Android is Google's hedge against Apple's platform. It exists primarily as a countermeasure. If Google believed in Apple's view of the internet -- where devices are king -- they'd have much stronger ownership of the entire Android platform. In short, they'd go vertical as well. They've made some small plays in that direction (Nexus phones), but they're not seriously committed to it.

The great part is, we get to watch this battle unfold. I don't particularly care which one wins. I think both perspectives have merit, because I don't buy in to the many "principle" arguments that push matters one way or the other. Never forget, there's money to be made on both sides of the table.

Who says there has to be a winner? What's wrong with a world with both options?

That's definitely a possible outcome. That's not to say there won't be a battle though.

Google can't go vertical no matter what because they are an advertising company. They need their ads in as many places as possible, and the only way to do that is to make sure others can use your platform pieces.

Google and Apple are not competing, especially to the degree that you imply.

You can use gmail on your Macbook, and many do. You can click on AdSense on your Macbook, and many do. Google doesn't need to compete with Apple directly, or even capture their market for hardware. As long as Apple users browse the web, Google is fine.

There is no "battle" unless Apple got into advertising.

Like iAd?

interestingly iAds have been a huge disapointment. they could not reach critical mass of advertisers. And by Job's comment yesterday against ads on iCloud, it looks like they gave up on it

They don't compete in every area, but make no mistake, they see each other as competitors. They have conflicting interests. Is Apple the same type of company as Google (and vice versa)? No, but that doesn't mean they're not competing for the same users who will consume like services.

There are parallels here to the old Apple vs WinTel battle. That history is easy to reflect on, because we have the benefit of hindsight. However, when those events were playing out, no one knew what the mature market definitions would be. They were defined as history was made.

We're in the same place today. We have clumsy, inane terms like "cloud" that we use to describe services that have indistinct boundaries (pun intended).

Obviously I'm not saying that history is about to repeat itself verbatim, but there are parallels.

Apple and Google have competing visions. In Google's vision, the operating system itself matters less and less, as functionality is pushed into the web browser and web pages. This is in contrast to Apple, which is pushing specialized native applications which do not rely on a web browser to access remote data.

Google is trying to remove the OS from the equation. Apple is trying to remove the web browser from the equation. I think those visions are clearly in competition.

They are competing to death.

Apple wants you to use very expensive gear you own yourself because it is more powerful and beautiful than any other gear. They make hardware.

Google wants you to use very cheap gear, make it a commodity even making it free if possible, so you expend money more on the web on services they own, or they sell your information without your even realizing about it. e.g Instead of having a powerful computer to do video, you connect to the powerful servers they have and you edit it on the web using a browser. Google is a service company.

Google has been winning from some time as people do not care if you sell their info to marketers as long as they do not see it(out of sight, out of mind) and is free like facebook.

So Apple is entering the "free" arena here. I expect them to put a price for premium services once people start liking it. Some people like me actually prefer to pay and not having someone spying at what I do.

I agree with what you say, except I would take it a step futher – both Apple and Google are moving toward the same place. For Apple, the "rich client" experience starts on the desktop, with cloud-based data stores. For Google, the "rich client" begins in the browser with HTML, then AJAX, then Gears, Android, etc.

Either way, they both end up with a rich client experience that assumes a remote master data store.

right. the only buggy piece is gears. it has been deprecated for html5 localstore. still buggy but is getting better

It's amusing how Microsoft doesn't even factor in this discussion. But surely there are other major players in this struggle aside from Apple and Google. What about Amazon? Facebook?

I don't understand the distinctions you're drawing at all. HTTP "used to be the destination"? What does that mean? It sounds false on its face. The page, image or other resource was always the destination — HTTP was just the protocol used for the transfer. And "content was pushed … using HTTP," but later HTTP was used "as an underlying transport"? Wouldn't the fact that content was pushed using HTTP make it the underlying transport for that content? This all sounds like "I used to have six, now I have half a dozen."

I'm speaking abstractly, not literally. HTTP is still the destination for anything sent from the server (unless you're using SPDY), but that's literally. Abstractly, I'm referring to the fact that we used to build web apps that output HTML web pages, which were streamed over HTTP. The "application" was entirely on the server. The browser was, in effect, a dumb terminal. Nothing "interesting" was happening on the browser. Heh, tell that to the early browser developers :)

When you get down in to the details, it all seems so obvious, but that's kind of the point. Step back and stop thinking about how all this stuff happens. Sometimes, a detailed understanding is a hindrance. There's a saying, "can't see the forest for the trees," that applies very well here. Step back, ignore the details for a moment, and look at things broadly.

Abstractly, I'm referring to the fact that we used to build web apps that output HTML web pages, which were streamed over HTTP. The "application" was entirely on the server. The browser was, in effect, a dumb terminal.

Then 1999 happened and we got true Web apps (smarts in the browser fetching data from the server) as well as the mixed-bag of XML-RPC and HTTP as a post-Web-page transport[0].

Not that I don't think that Apple is seeing the Internet as that thing that connect Apple products, just that this is not a rare or recent concept.

[0] Or earlier, depending on your view of Java applets.

Apple doesn't make that much money directly on the app ecosystem: If they paid 2.5 billion to developers (70%), their revenue is about 1 billion (the remaining 30%). For that billon they have to host all apps (also the free ones), manually check all submissions (400.000 apps Excluding upgrades!), and process payments.

Apple is making more on iPad covers this year alone.

However, the app ecosystem is a great lockin for users to keep using iOS instead of other mobile platforms. That's their biggest gain, and with iCloud they embiggen this platform lockin.

Do you have a source? I'm not saying you're wrong but it seems crazy that Apple makes more revenue off of iPad covers than all of the app market.

25 million iPad have been sold. Say 30% of them (with the iPad 2 I see more people bought the Smart Cover though) bought Apple's covers, that's about 8.5 million. Accessories' margin is high, let's assume they make $30 per cover. That's $255 million profit. I seriously doubt Apple could break even for the App Store alone (the huge review team and infrastructure cost).

http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/13/the-billion-dollar-smart-co... Estimates 1 billion revenue on smart covers this year alone.

> Just follow the money. Now lets remember where Apple makes their money and why they paid over $2.5 billion to developers… Revenue for mobile app markets is on the rise. Apple wants their users to buy apps that have the advantages of web apps

If you follow the money you find $1.8 billion in revenue from the App Store (2010), which would be 2% of the $87 billion revenue Apple has earned in the past 12 months.

Sources: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-m...

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL

This thesis pops up every couple of months, and it's always ridiculous.

You're not getting his point. He's saying Apple wants customers to buy apps to be locked-in.

Is Apple making MobileMe web mail look like the desktop app really an indication that it doesn't know how to make a web app?

Where does the "Apple doesn't know the web" idea coming from? I've heard "Apple doesn't know social" because of their stumbles with social in the past, likewise with Google, but Apple not knowing the web makes no sense to me. The last place I saw it was saying Apple didn't know the web because their designs were "pixel-perfect" and beautiful. That's two people saying it because the web apps look nice??

What does it take to "know the web"? So iCloud doesnt have a web interface. Who says one still isnt coming. Judging by everything else in the keynote, it won't look like tradition cloud storage, a la Dropbox. Apple is abstracting away the filesystem. It will probably show you the apps you have that include iCloud support and the files each uses.

Apple doesn't have a single web service now that MobileMe is gone. Whether they don't "get" the web or they get it and just choose to ignore it is splitting hairs.

The failure of MobileMe strongly suggests the former. If Apple didn't care about the Web, they could have not made a product in that area just like they do with all the other things they don't care about.

Apple understands that one of the core benefits that they give to consumers is consistency. The PC world is wildly inconsistent, while iOS provides enormous consistency - I can pick up any device and apps will function the same. This is really the goal of demoting the PC and the Mac.

Its akin to Facebook's garden vs MySpace's wild forest. Web apps simply can't provide the kind of consistency that most users want. In the battle between Linux and Windows, the freedom of Linux to allow the user complete control has not been a selling point for most users.

Apple knows this and knows that a controlled garden of iOS apps will be preferable for most people, compared to web apps (particularly with the browser standards starting to slip again)

The author hints at good point - is the browser going to be around in 10 years? The trend definitely seems to be cloud + rich client. In that case, is the browser needed?

I'm torn on this. On one hand I love the performance and look/feel of apps running natively. On the other hand I like the concept of getting access to my data or applications ubiquitously. On the other side of this I feel Google is working to make the browser more of it's centerpiece in the long run.

Is the browser needed from a technical or usable perspective? I do not know, but it seems difficult to separate that from the economic-architectural aspect, which really seems important.

The browser is 'needed', is valuable, because it is an independent, unowned 'medium' for other products and activity. It allows something more like real competition. That independence is part of the open architecture of the internet that is probably what makes it all so great.

. . . and what would an independent rich-client look like? Would that not be a browser pretty much? . . .

"Browser" itself is an inherently vague concept. Is iTunes as it exists today a browser? How about Twitter clients that render HTML/JS?

When you isolate WebKit and the other rendering engines as OS-level services, it's even fuzzier.

But doesn't a rich client need a platform, the browser being one of them? The rest are proprietary platforms like iOS.

If the browser platform is not around in 10 years, I hope that means it has gotten superseded by a more powerful open platform that is not owned by anyone.

But I do not see any potential for a revolutionary change in the way we consume the web. What I expect (or maybe hope for) is just browsers that keep getting more powerful, I expect evolutionary progress in the browser space. And I expect the browser model to remain the dominant web platform, because it is open and it is good enough--there are no other paradigms that blow it away; Adobe Air, Java, and iOS are just more of the same (whether it runs in a browser, on Air, JRE or iOS, it is still an app).

Therefore since all of these platforms are based on the same principles and they all do the same thing, what we need is to improve the web platform to be the best one.

If we find out that there are certain bottlenecks that will make it impossible for the web to be as fast and shiny as the others, we'll need to re-engineer the parts that are causing the bottleneck. What is it that makes iOS apps faster and shinier than web apps? Couldn't we add new technologies or improve the current ones to allow web apps to be just as good if not better?

One of the main differentiators of price for Apple products is the disk size -- in fact, for iPads and iPods, its the main differentiator. They want to push to all of your devices, because they want you to use up your storage and pay the $100 to $300 markup between model A and model B. If everything was accessible from the web and it used smart caching like spotify or google, there would be much less need for bigger hard drives.

Cloud storage makes hard drive size largely irrelevant.

Much moreso in a streaming model. In a "download at will" model like iCloud, having more storage certainly makes things more convenient. But, yes, still less relevant, for sure.

This makes sense. Give a huge incentive for users of Apple's products to continue to buy their devices and get further ingrained into their ecosystem while getting that desirable vendor lock-in.

This is why they acquired lala.com, right..? </cynicism>

And what would be the problem with a business trying to be more profitable giving away something free (like iCloud)?

I'm sure Google is offering all their services because they are very nice people, not to make more money off the ads.

Well, giving something away for free is not a bad business move (Facebook's free ;)), but do you really think that Google just makes their services free because they're nice? A business like any other, they just make $$$ of us in a more indirect business model.

Oh my god, did you really didn't understand that I was sarcastic? That was my point, I felt that in the article there was a negative angle about Apple trying to make more money and I just wanted to point out that the nemesis of Apple, Google, who is trying to bring everything online, does that for the same exact reason, to make more money.

Sorry. Hard to say without a smiley since it woudn't be the first time someone argue that Google is just good and nothing else

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