Financial Times Won't Give Apple A Cut, Drops iOS for Web App
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Apple currently holds one trump card with Safari on IOS devices though. By restricting HTML5 Audio controls, and rendering engine speed, it prevents games and music web apps from being viable inside the browser.
Funny to see that your post has been grayed out, even though it's logical and makes a point. I would expect people who disagree to reply instead of downvoting. And yes, even though your topic is controversial, it passes the guidelines criteria.
People expect snappy as hell execution on the iOS, the actual flow of the app is often more important than the looks. And in my experience the web apps just aren't there yet.
Apple make no money on the app store it more or less goes to operations. You can call it a tax or you can be honest and call it what it is. The price of keeping a well structured market place.
Do people buy the iPad because of the magazines or the magazines because of the iPad?
In other words. Does it really make a difference if they leave? Is that really anything to worry about? Will that really mean the end of native apps?
Again apple is not depending on the subscription apps to make money. It's the other way around.
Won't their value diminish if there no apps and no content to subscribe to, except through Safari? Why do you think Jobs advertizes 400K apps with a tile of icons on screen?
What if Netflix and Kindle were yanked on June 30? Many people buy iDevices just to access those. Will be interesting June 30th
"if there no apps and no content to subscribe to"
What world do you live in where this is even remotely possible? By all means Go Galt, there are plenty of others willing to step in and make millions off iphone owners.
It's like the mafia expecting payments. The protection they offer is great if you're willing to pay the price. If you're not, you have to move out of town and offer your services remotely (or at least via a webapp instead).
And the notion that any old body is going to step in and "make millions off iphone owners" is really cute. I'm curious who produces the content like Financial Times that can just come in and supply a new native app for iOS...
That's precisely the point being discussed here. Apple is successful as long as people can access the apps and content they're looking for. Hell, Apple will still be successful even if Kindle and Netflix walk... but they won't be as successful as their competitors. There really is no doubt that Apple relies on media (itunes-music, movies, ebooks, etc) to sell the value of their platform. Will their greed hurt their access to that media? I think that's a big part of a big question.
"I'm curious who produces the content like Financial Times that can just come in and supply a new native app for iOS..." Is there no native app for WSJ, Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg, Businessweek, etc.? None of those are as good as the FT but that's irrelevant, the FT isn't an option for someone searching for a business news/analysis app.
How universal do you think that is? How well do you think that will work when WSJ, Economist, etc, realize that they can ship a "native" app that uses a WebView, that also looks native, and they don't have to give Apple 30%?
And I really don't know how you don't see this being like the mafia... I own my own device, I own my own developer's license. My users own their own devices, yet I'm forced to force them to use Apple's distribution/payment/subscription channels.
I own my own store, or I distribute drugs on my own. The mafia forces me to buy and sell through them. Apple doesn't own a "financial news store", so acting like they should be allowed to (exclusively, no less) broker ANY content to their device, is frankly absurd.
Your analogy would make sense, except it's like Wal-Mart holding you ransom, telling you you WILL pay 30% and that you can't go elsewhere or they'll kick you out of their (App)Store.
This seems like opinion presented as fact. I've used iOS and currently own an Android phone, and there's no doubt in my mind that the Android UX is miles ahead of the iOS UX. Of course, I include things like a browser with sync to desktop (Firefox) in my definition of UX, since things like that affect the experience I have while using the product quite a bit.
At one point in time, iOS was prettier than Android. Too few HNers have actually used Froyo or Gingerbread to understand the UI improvements that have occurred and too many use Android as a dev platform or played with a phone in a store to understand the power of actual multitasking or the power of the back button.
The bit about multitasking was merely a remark that everything Apple does is magic, even here on HN where I usually expect better. iMessage is magic (despite doing what Google Voice does with less features). iOS multitasking is magic (and a clone of Android's minus some features). Notifications are obvious in iOS 5. They even have the gall to intro notifications, a near exact clone of them in Android and then less than five minutes later, jeer that their competitors will steal from them. iCloud API? Oh cool, almost like the cloud backup feature offered in Froyo. Apple has great stuff, I'm just tired of everyone acting like Steve himself invented all of it. And I'm tired of the default assumption that iOS is easier to use than Android. (It's just like Windows/Mac. I took my mom to KC and to the Apple store and had her play with an iPhone. She had a very hard time using it, she was used to the Android way. Just like iOS users are confused by my phone.)
Truth be told, I don't have a problem with Apple's multitasking implementation. I think it's limited, some apps that I use daily don't and never will exist in iOS because APIs simply don't exist that would allow them to be functional. That's fine. I was talking from a UI/UX standpoint. I can switch between apps, or have an application launch another via Intent, and they work as a user would expect. And the back button and long-press-home work as users would expect them to. This is not the case with iOS, there is no parallel to Intents and going between applications to share data for any sort of "process" that a developer might want. That was more my indictment. I wasn't looking for the generic age-old Apple v Google v "stealing" debate. I can go have that anywhere with anyone.
And I'm sure that "most" of HN has experience with Froyo+, but my doubts come in about those that downvote those that like the Android UI or the ones that imply that Android looks bad or is unsuable. It's these people that either haven't actually used an Android device in the last year or longer, or didn't bother trying to use it for more than a minute. I've still yet to hear an actual indictment of the current Android UI/X or why iOS's is so vastly superior. (which is what we were actually talking about)
I read comments like this a lot, and I don't really understand them. There is no such thing as HN, just a bunch of people posting with differing opinions - including yourself. There are plenty of Android die hards here just as there are Apple/iOS ones.
Also, people who post on HN tend to be passionate consumers and producers of technology. It's silly to pretend they don't understand the trade offs of permitting preemptive multitasking on a mobile device or the use of a back button.
It amazes me that the current (iOS5 SDK Simulator) browser still is unable to do reflow of text.
At least it can open links in the background now. Thank god!
Let them go after Netflix and Kindle with the shakedown (June 30th is the deadline).
What happens to the big boys will be telling. I don't think 30% across the board is going to stay. For a small developer the 30% is probably worth it to get into the store, a small amount of visibility, payment processing, and quick customer access.
For the big content providers like NF, HBOGO, WSJ, NYT, Kindle, etc... who already spend huge amounts of money on payment systems, advertising and support the 30% is an additional middle man that provides little actual value. I think at least for the big content providers Apple will blink because at the end of the day Apple needs content more than the content needs them.
It doesn't seem to me like it's attrition-due-to-Microsoft's-practices that have led to their downfall ... it's because of the advantages of free / open-source on the back end and because of other-platform (web/mobile) disruption on the front end.
Isn't this pretty much what Apple wanted in the first place?
But my email was full of guidelines to create web apps for the phone. What I think happened is that (at that time) Apple wanted Mac developers to make iphone apps, badly. And mac dev's wanted to do it natively. A half a year later, I see the beta of the dev kit.
I doubt Apple imagined the app store market at that time. And like most grand success stories, there was a lot of luck involved.
Sure they didn't wanted to lose developer attention and had to keep them engaged with web apps etc. until they figured out the strategy on native development and the app store.
And I can't believe that Apple had totally closed the door or hadn't thought about native apps at all when they initially released the iPhone - there wasn't any sensible reason not to - it wasn't a new thing, at least some of the phone platforms had native apps and there were even App Stores before that. It was just a matter of time.
It must be frustrating for the WebKit team when their engineering advancements are taken for granted and attributed to Chrome — the perceived bastion of web freedom — while they themselves are simultaneously criticized for assisting in a conspiracy against "the web" whenever they fail to make enough cutting-edge performance improvements.
The chrome team makes more commits than the Apple webkit team. I know number of commits don't mean much but the chrome team is mostly reponsible for adding websocket, the file api, web workers and more. Also don't forget webkit itself is based on KDE's KHTML.
Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser and HTML5-compliant rendering engine then?
By your logic, Chrome is essentially KHTML + HTML5-fanboy-features. I guess that must mean Apple has been shipping a 2002-era build of Konquerer with each copy of Mac OS X then, huh? Because clearly WebKit itself is so minimal in comparison to the rest of Chrome as to be positively technologically inconsequential.
I hope you can see the irony of your remark in light of the original point I was making.
Didn't Apple take the KHTML (Konqueror was a full fledged browser) code and then had to release their code because it was GPL. I remember reading about a complaint from the KHTML that Apple was releasing the code as a big blob and this was hindering KHTML integration.
WebKit has vastly evolved from the original KHTML library, to the point of being almost an entirely different product. The KHTML team has been pulling changes from WebKit (http://trac.webkit.org/browser) for many years now.
Instructive link, Apple praising KHTML and reasoning why they used it http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&...
So, saying that Google took Apple's full browser is not really true, Chrome mostly took Webcore, they have their own JS engine and their own UI chrome(!), and WebCore has a lot of roots in KHTML
Your bias is showing. Hard.
Please tell me more, drivebyacct2.
Edit: Your homoeroticism is showing.
The point is, in three different places you shrugged off the Chrome team's contributions to WebKit, yet acted like Apple is the night in shining armor because they happen to "own" WebKit. Can't they both work on it, both receive credit and both be happy without fanboys needlessly going out of their way to argue about a competitor that competes in a nearly completely unrelated field?
Besides the original point has gone completely undiscussed. It might be shocking but I'm betting the WebKit, iOS and Apple's executive steering committee are all vastly decoupled. It is possible for the WebKit team to make advances and for the iOS team to not adopt them for, gasp, political purposes. For example, the accelerated javascript engine, additional HTML5 controls that have been simply and for reasons unknown not enabled in iOS.
That has nothing to do with my ability to be thankful for Apple's stewardship of WebKit. I'm quite thankful to be honest. I love that Google and Apple can both build a better web engine while competing with each other. I just hope that they both embrace that superior engine for the sake of the open web, and some of Apple's actions have called into question their intentions about the mobile web in iOS. That's all I'm saying.
edit: Uh, I generally try to keep my, yes, homo, eroticism off of the Internet. I apologize if you were exposed to any, that's probably not a pretty sight.
Yes, that my point, and it's in much the same way that you're questioning my motives (a form of argumentum ad hominem) instead of... actually participating in the conversation.
Strawman, I never said the Chrome team deserved all the credit, or that KHTML did for that matter. All I meant was that the WebKit team didn't deserve all the credit as it's clearly a shared effort between the three of them, not to mention Nokia and others. Also my initial comment was answering a post mentioning HTML5 features.
There are lots of people who dont believe this, but as a healthcare designer i really think that apples model is way too greedy and crippling.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/75-Percent-of-Physic...
There is a difference between physicians loving the DEVICE and it being the right platform for a hospital.
Trust me I know. I design hospitals and health systems.
I love the iPad - but if you think that giving 30% of your margin and 100% of control to apple is the right idea - then you're wrong.
Sure, there are a ton of one-off single use apps for iOS and most of them are fantastic - but there are inhernet flaws with the use of iOS as a platform in a facility.
For small practice, it totally makes sense - but not yet completely in a hospital.
Except, physicians dont care about where the money goes - thus, we will see a shift to apple - but I still maintain that it is wrong.
iOS will NOT lower costs in the broken US health system -- it will continue the greed and health costs will not come down.
It is a far more complex issue than measuring your fucking blood pressure or tracking how many times you worked out on your little iphone.
I doubt that would encourage more trust in you.
I'm also amazed at how often the myth that one day we'll all be using really crappy Html5 apps continues. Html5 compared to native apps done by an average developer just plain sucks, no amount of 'HTML5 web apps == AWESOME!' pretending and wishing will ever change that.
We'll have HTML6 in, what, 2025 maybe? So maybe all the wishes will come true then.
BUT for companies who don't have the resources (or don't want them) is a nice way to get into the ios market. Of course, if you serious you better roll out xcode.
But there are plenty of applications where the html5 wep app makes sense. Like a company hosting it on their intranet (we do.. marketing data mostly). FT (print media) is another. Actually, I bet FT they had an easier time writing the web app then they did their ios app (which sucked.. I had it). And I wonder why the NYT, WSJ (etc, etc) haven't dropped their ambitions and move to an html5 web app.
As a side note.. most of the print media company apps suck. I mean they are just terrible. I can think of only a few that are ok: USA Today, the Economist. I mean just look at the reviews of the NYT app. It's a joke. Want a bigger joke, go look at the Ars Technica app. My god.. a tech journal can't even get it right.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=iphone%20business%2...
Those are google searches but the same thing is undoutedly happening thousands of times a day in iTunes/App Store.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=iphone%20business%2...
Going to HTML as your presentation layer doesn't suddenly and magically increase (or decrease) the sucktitude factor of the developers involved.
The difference is that they suck fast, instead of sucking slow.
Relevant link: http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2011/01/ipad-is-the-new-ie6/
It's more than 14 months since Jobs wrote the blog blasting Flash and espousing HTML5 and Safari still has all these egregious issues. I think HTML5 is not a priority for Apple except to pay lip service to it when someone asks for Flash support. After all, it will threaten their lock-in with the App-store and the tithes on Apps and content and makes Apple the middleman. They have achieved what Comcast could only dream of, tax content sold over the internet.
If you bring up the fabled "linux desktop" I'm gonna start laughing. Though I am impressed at what the folks at Ubuntu are doing.
Also, when the iphone was first released Apple had no developer kit (API's). You could download guidelines on how to write a proper web app for the phone. But developers barked (and why not - look at the result) and here we are.
Actually Apple sort of fell into the app markets. They got damn lucky. Of if you want to believe that Steve Job's is divine, he's manipulated the whole transition from web app => dev kit => app store.
I'm glad to see us move fill circle. But you know we haven't. You could always design specific web apps for ios. Just log into the (free) Safari dev center and download the guild lines. How do you think smaller companies who can't afford a distribution agreement with Apple (did you know you can privately distribute your own apps? Of course you have to pay.. ;) ) did it? We wrote the apps in html5/js/css3 (based specifically on Safari) and host them on our own network (intranet & vpn).
Linux as Android is killing MS in mobile.
What it is, is a way to prevent developers trying to rort the system and doing an end run around their fee structure.
When this first came out, the ones screaming the loudest were the guys who had "free" apps ($0 to Apple) who then built into their apps an "okay, you've been using it for 5 minutes, now pay us $3 ($0 to Apple)" 'one-off subscription'.
E.g. you used to be able to get all the benefits of a paid app without paying Apple anything, simply by relabelling the "paid" app as an app with a "one-off subscription".
Apple closed that loop-hole. Hence one particular side of the screaming. You don't actually need to ascribe these actions to some kind of evil Microsoftian conspiracy, it's jsut closing a loophole that some people were using to cheat the system.
The other side of this coin is the arrangements between authors and publishers, where the authors have had a long time 70% of net agreement. If the author gets 70% and Apple gets 30%... this leaves 0% for the middle-man. So they weren't happy.
I would be completely fine with Apple's App Store restrictions if iOS devices weren't locked down like they are. Even Microsoft never dreamed of the kind of Orwellian nightmare that Apple is spinning around the computing industry.
If you want to reframe the debate in terms of Apple is evil, therefore everything they do, say or think is evil, by all means go and do that. (And they say the fanboys are the ones suffering from a reality distortion field...) But this isn't really the place. I'm sure you can find large numbers of people willing to agree with you though.
On the off chance that you can't find any thread on Hacker News or elsewhere on the Internet that fit that theme... perhaps you should start your own? You could write a blog post about how it is all part of some conspiracy. Or if you're really lazy you could write a top ten list... just pick any ten random Apple news items, there's bound to be someone slagging them off for each of them.
Then you just post that link to Hacker News, you'll get guaranteed upvotes, it will make the front page... and Ta Da!!! "Apple = evil conspiracy" comments will be on topic in that thread! Hooray!
What I think you mean is they lost a big portion of their early adopter community, and that's not the same thing as what sustains them.
The work to do a web app even barely comparable to a native app, in terms of responsiveness, is outrageously larger than just firing up Xcode.
I've only ever used two web apps that don't suck- Asana and Flowdock.
Meanwhile web browsing from iDevices surpassed that from Linux…
Any thoughts? Just curious what our chances of rejection are for something like this in the current "climate".
I know, the HN audience doesn't care. But amid all the discussion of platform strategy, the FT staff deserve a salute. There is a reason this paper doesn't need Apple.
but http://m.ft.com is clean, nice and fast. personally i often find the mobile version of sites nicer (in a similar way to the print view is often the best way to read a page)
edit: ugh you need to spoof your browser to access http://m.ft.com on the desktop.
It makes even more sense to focus on a web app when your company already has a web site. You likely already have the expertise on staff to create a good web app, and any new features or techniques you develop can be easily used in both places.
Think of the future, not the present.