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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone was even worse, it launched without support for third party apps. Steve Jobs said that web apps would take their place. The original iPhone was also overpriced and underspecced in some areas and forced you on a crappy phone provider, but it had a significant price drop shortly after release and the iPhone 3G fixed most of the performance issues (mostly around the slow cell modem). Plus Apple released the app store and it was an enormous success, far more than the existing app stores on the Symbian phones.

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It forced you in a crappy phone provider with unlimited data.

Having a better than average phone browser wasn’t such a big deal, having a browser you could use without thinking about it was huge.

> having a browser you could use without thinking about it was huge

This right here. People forget things like roaming and data charges. $500+ phone bills were not uncommon for business travelers. Data charges made smartphones almost a non-starter for the average person. Apple broke that logjam.

Hardly in Europe, the contracts with data plans were mostly the same for iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, Java feature phones, Windows CE/Pocket PC.

Worse even, as while the others had pre paid plans, iPhone required a 2 year contract.

and they weren't crappy everywhere, though admittedly they were extremely bad in Silicon Valley until iPhone opened up to other providers, so they get that reputation among tech enthusiasts from sites like HN that are SV-centric

It was 2G. It was crappy everywhere. My dumb phone on Sprint had faster internet speeds

They worked great in NYC.

It was Edge, ie 2.5g. It was very slow everywhere it worked at all. But, as the poster said, internet all the time with a flat rate plan was huge. For me, it really changed how I thought about the internet when I had it always with me with zero cost concerns.

The browser itself was ground breaking imho. Everything seemed to require a mobile specific browser and those versions of websites looked like garbage.

The iPhone was (as far as I know) the first device that really and truly let you have real websites on your phone (even if it was just a tiny version of it)

I had been waiting for such a device for a long time, and this was the thing that got me over to Apple in any real sense.

Yeah, the iPhone was the first phone where it felt like it was actually possible to browse the web on it. The Symbians I had previously didn't feel like usable browsers.

There was a wide range of mobile browsers. From what I recall Windows Mobile 5/6 smart phone’s browsers were arguably better than the 1st gen iPhone. Though the phones where overall worse.

Absolutely not. Even without App store iPhone was significantly better than Windows Mobile 5/6.

This is 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile?useskin=vector#...

this is 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0?useskin=vec...

Devices were much worse compared to even first gen iPhone. Ironically, it only for worse because the industry decided that using their shitty resistive touchscreen with UI even worse than previous models - menus had large buttons, but apps were built for stylus.

I agree the devices were worse overall, however IE on Windows Mobile in 07 could render more websites well at the time including Flash support etc.

The browser’s UI was also worse thus the ambiguity.

Oh, I remember what flash on a mobile looked like in 07. In fact, I remember how taxing flash was on PC in 07. I also remember how vulnerable flash was.

Yeah, it could render more, but it was unusable because no one designed for mobile back then. IMO mobile world was sad until Apple came in.

I had an HTC TyTN II windows mobile 6 CE mobile phone. Basically same year as original iPhone. IE was rapidly abandoned and unusable. But with Gmail + activesynch it was like a blackberry with instant email. Opera mobile worked as well as modern browsers, probably better than iPhone. 3G. GPS. Load a multitude of apps self contained onto the huge SD card. It was a much more powerful capable device than an iPhone almost even up to today's standards. But it was clunky as hell and setting up the mobile internet was an insanely complicated process. I'm not suprised the iPhone won out.

Symbian was quite good, the only thing was the strange Symbian C++ dialect, which wasn't something sorted out by iPhone until the store finally came to be.

Symbian the OS was solid. Symbian the devices were mediocre. iPhone was much more polished and consumer friendly. Touch screen, size, weight, iOS, the browser, data -- it's hard to attributes iPhone's success to a single thing, but the overall package was head and shoulder above anything else.

Funny how now the internet is now regressing itself to be "mobile-first" and almost all websites have become "websites that look like garbage". Even on my phone I still often switch to the desktop versions of websites as they're easier to use. Let alone trying to use a mobile website on a desktop.

Underspeced? What? Compared to what? This is not even remotely defensible.

In its spec it offered a full color multi-touch gesture display —instead of a 132x65 pixel black and white screen.

Like Steve Jobs said, products are a series of choices.

The original iPhone had 2G cellular connection which was slow for the time, and especially silly since, as you point out, it was well powered otherwise. The iPhone 3GS caught it up to other smart phones in the market.

It also launched without cut and paste available in the UI, which again, was silly given how it was otherwise an impressive mobile computer.

While there were obviously people who bought the iPhone as soon as it became available, it was probably the 3GS when it really took off. That's when I replaced my Treo. (I also think I was starting a new and more secure job by then.)

It was EDGE and didn't have enough memory to run the browser well, which caused significant slowdowns. Granted, it was still better than literally every other phone browser at the time, but that didn't mean it was a good as it could have been. The iPhone 3G was a significant upgrade.

> but that didn't mean it was a good as it could have been

Nothing is, and nothing can be. Not even if you eliminate cost from the equation. Not even if you eliminate manufacturability, or supply chain availability. You're holding the original iPhone to an impossible standard.

The iPhone was arguably the best product Apple could have made for that price, to be released on that date. Sure it could have been better and more expensive. It could have been better and further delayed. It could have been better and also worse in some other way.

Lots of Windows devices pre-dating the iPhone had comparable full colour touch screens. Its competition certainly wasn't the "132x65 pixel black and white screen".

Lots of Windows devices pre-dating the iPhone had similar sized full colour screens. None had comparable screens, and Windows certainly didn't have an interface worth touching with a finger.

The N95 outspecced it in essentially every way:

First available March 2007, three months before the iPhone was introduced. * Memory - 160MB, versus iPhone: 128MB.

* CPU - Dual CPU, 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 (ARM11-based), versus Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0 412 MHz

* Display - iPhone: 320x480 18-bit 3.5", versus N95: 240x320 24-bit, 2.6"

* Network ability: HSDPA 3.5G, versus iPhone: GSM/EDGE

* Camera: 5MP, versus iPhone 2MP

Doesn't mean iPhone was underspeced.

N95 was priced at $750 vs. $500 for iPhone.

N95 could have up to 4hrs talk time, 8hrs with WiFi turned off! iPhone could do 8hrs. iPhone could also browse the web for 6 hours, play videos for 7hrs, play audio for 24 hours.

N95 was more expensive, with worse software, worse screen, worse battery life.

> Steve Jobs said that web apps would take their place

Yes I remember this. But he must have known their plans and basically lied about it.

Sounds convenient, but I remember the backlash was so bad from this news, they rushed out a dev SDK to add that support in. Different time. "No Flash" sounded like a WTF, too.

Yeah, "webapps are all you need" is the one time I can recall Steve Jobs getting booed on stage.

And now developers (not end users) are whining about not being able to do good [sic] PWAs

Edit: Users may not know what a PWA is. But they do know what web apps based on Electron and I have never heard any user say that they love Electron apps and they would really love to have the same experience on mobile

I mean users do complain about not being able to sideload apps, which is an issue that is at least partially/minimally addressed through PWAs.

How many users outside of geeks complain about side loading?

Whenever a family member bitches to me about not being able to buy kindle books through the kindle app I count that as a non-geeky complaint about sideloading :)

I imagine users care far more about how bloated and slow Slack, Teams etc are.

Rather than whether they can side-load some apps that don't already exist on the App Store. Which apart from gambling, porn and crypto I can't exactly think what they are.

Porn is a significant share of device/internet usage though (not sure how big gambling is).

And plenty of people watch porn on iPhones today.

This is more about having specific apps for it.

This is about whether or not people might complain about not being able to side-load apps.

As a significant content category is excluded from the app store, it seems very likely that some people would like to side-load those apps and complain about not being able to do so.

[Edit] Another reason why people might want to side-load is to circumvent restrictions or censorship in authoritarian countries (e.g VPNs).

I really hate to ask this question because it may lead down a road that I don’t want to go.

But what could a porn app do that you can’t do by going on a website?

If you can answer this question for Youtube and TikTok, you have already answered it for porn tube sites as well. Other categories would probably be erotic themed chat apps, social networks and of course games. And the reasons are just as valid or invalid as for the respective non-porn equivalents.

As far as I'm concerned, almost all apps could be websites.

And what do you actually get from the YouTube app that you can’t do from the website especially now that Safari finally supports notifications from the web? The same with chat apps?

I prefer using the Facebook website over the native app because the in app webview doesn’t support ad block.

I often prefer webapps as well, for instance because I can open multiple pages to keep state I meant to come back to.

But all the same reasons why some apps need native features and why some people prefer native apps are just as valid for porn. It’s not my personal preference.

To be fair, they're only whining about PWAs, because Apple artificially locked down all native apps. Apple forced the developer shift, their own preferences didn't necessarily change.

If you could install + sell iPhone apps freely, like you can with OSX / macOS apps, 99% of developer complaints about PWAs would vanish.

No because the reason that developers want PWAs do that they can have the same shitty experience across all platforms - much like Electron apps

The developers on HN clamoring for PWA support are not the same devs making "one layout works fine on all screen sizes" webapps.

I'm sad you're equating the two groups.

Yes because the developers on HN can make good graphical apps using cross platform frameworks unlike the

- Java developers

- every mobile OS provider ever who said the same thing - Palm, Microsoft, Google (dart), RIM and even Apple at one point had the same “sweet solution”

- all Electron developers

You're equating webapps with cross-platform frameworks, so we'll just talk past each other.

None of what you mentioned is all of "what webapps are",

just a short list of shortcuts to the technical definition of one.

So exactly what is the difference between a “cross platform framework that runs on top of a VM that abstracts the difference in the underlying hardware” in this case of cross platform frameworks and a web app where it runs on a top of a browser that serves the same purpose and also abstracts the underlying hardware that has the same drawbacks?

Performance? UX? I mean, tons.

What drawbacks do webapps compiled to WASM have, for you today?

Let's make sure we're talking about the same thing.

> "No Flash" sounded like a WTF, too.

No Flash saved a lot of power worldwide.

Until people started to do javascript apps.

Hackers figured out how to put together a GCC toolchain and make their own apps, and that jumpstarted it.

I remember Cydia on the 2G iPhone.

I was living in Belgium at the time so had to jailbreak a UK O2 iPhone. Worked fine for the time.

The plan was always web apps, they're vastly more secure than any other option. That's a significant part of why safari for windows ever existed.

The problem was developers just wanted to write native apps, presumably believing that the only secure apple platform would be converted to the Mac-like experience, complete with malware, etc.

So with no one making actual web apps, in part because the web standards of 15+ years ago were not as powerful, and in part because developers all thought web apps were bad, and ongoing "we want real apps" noise, you got the initial UIKit APIs, which lacked _a lot_ of functionality, and made a lot of things very hard.

Or you can just go all conspiracy theory and say "they would never change their plans in response to market pressure, who would do such a thing?"

Also, although the original iPhone had a full browser, it was pretty slow. Not only was the data slow, but the phone itself was hamstrung by insufficient RAM which caused way too much swapping on complex webpages. Making a webapp that performed adequately was difficult to say the least.

Further evidence for this is that Apple ported their widgets, like stocks and weather, to native apps instead of using the web-based ones from OSX.

Apple used to push web apps pretty hard.

E.g. if I recall correctly, in the early days of the App Store, the guidelines were that if your app could easily be a web app, it should be, and you could have your app submission rejected for that reason.

I worked with a couple of people who worked on the original iPhone and they basically corroborated this: the writing was on the wall but the phone wasn't quite ready for it. They needed an out to ship the phone first and the SDK later.

Is that right? Man, did not recall that... funny how the state of apps today has colored my recollection.

> Is that right?

Absolutely! I also remember those chain of events exactly that way. They are also documented in Steve Jobs biography as well.

Matches my recollection of it. iOS 3.0, which launched alongside the iPhone 3GS, is when it got copy-paste functionality.

Apple has historically been very comfortable shipping devices without "table stakes" functionality - waiting until they have an implementation they like.

Or sometimes never shipping it, and leaving it to third parties. My iPads still don't have a calculator app.

It also kinda needs to be said that iPhone really took off after AppStore (and 3G and copy/paste and other stuff) became a thing. Before that the market share wasn't that great.

The market share wasn't great because it wasn't sold globally.

Once that happened market share really took off.

And in the markets it did exist, the carrier options were limited, usually to the worst carriers, because those were the carriers who were desperate enough to accept Apple's terms.

Even John Gruber (Daring Fireball) described it as a shit sandwich from Apple.

The original iPhone though did come with the YouTube app built in and it’s major use cases were according to Jobs were - a phone, an internet device and an iPod.

The day the iPhone was introduced, the CEO of Google was on stage.

One of the major use cases for the Vision Pro is video and there ars no native apps for the two most popular video sites.

The day that the iPad was introduced. The CEO of Netflix was on stage.

Wasn't the CEO of Disney on stage when the Vision Pro was introduced/announced? From an IP standpoint having Disney on stage over Netflix seems like the better choice...

I wish so much that YouTube would allow fully featured, non-hacky third party clients again, even if only for paid users (similar to how Spotify used to). The clean platform-convention-respecting straightforwardness of the Apple iOS YouTube app is missed.

Apple directly competes with Netflix, and to some extent Google, considerably more today than they did then.

And they compete with Disney in streaming.

The fact is, Google doesn’t really compete with Apple. The amount of money that Google makes from Android, pales in comparison to what they make from YouTube.

Sure, but that was at a time when there weren't really apps

There definitely were, but feature phone apps weren't great (for reasons involving hardware, app platforms, and carriers), and smartphone (Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian) app distribution was mostly decentralized. Apple's innovation in the mobile app space was the App Store ecosystem.

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