PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
quirksmode.org
quirksmode.org
And fucking them real hard where it hurts is exactly what Apple is doing right now.
We choose the world we want to live in, and I don't want to live in a world where writing like this is unremarkable. It adds nothing to the overall argument and coarsens us to no purpose.
I am sympathetic to the general gist of "developers would be better off working without a gatekeeper", and have said much the same myself this weekend, but those who Apple chooses to win do benefit enormously from a built-in, captive audience who is exposed to Apple's annointed developers. There is no comparable method of exposure for mobile web application developers.
There is also the non-trivial benefit of actually getting paid money to consider. You can certainly make money on the wide-open Internet, but the tactics you use for it and the apps you make are wholly different from what works on the iPhone. (What I wouldn't give for my customers being able to buy my software in two clicks, but alas...)
I just installed two webapps on my iPod and they're quickly becoming my most-used icons.
He's not talking about iPhone developers, he's talking about the people in the sentence before it:
After ten years I am fucking tired of the “Web development is not real programming” bullshit that the arrogant bastards in “real programming” are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new.
Now, the Venn diagram may have some overlap, but still.
I do however object to his calling the entire iPhone developer community out as stupid and arrogant. How arrogant is it to presume that everyone of the many iPhone developers who have complaints about the current approval system is, in his words, stupid? If anything the author is the arrogant, misinformed, and dare I say, stupid one here.
I'm torn about whether or not to flag this. While this has generated some good discussion on HN, I don't think we should really cater to troll material like this. If you cannot communicate your opinions in an intelligent, civil way, and cannot deal with your fellow developers with some decorum, then please don't say anything at all.
1) With the appstore being the one authority to get apps on your iPhone, you will automatically get much less traction using the web
2) The appstore makes it VERY easy for the devs to actually get paid. If you launch your app web-only, you have to incorporate the whole payment process yourself, which sucks.
Catch 22...
That said, I've been wanting to write a free guide to SEO aimed at HN-like companies, because I think its important. However, the response from HackerNews to anything involving SEO is so harsh, I've felt it would be a waste of my time. If that's not the case, please let me know.
Almost every successful startup you've heard of which publishes lots of content has an SEO strategy. Slideshare, Scribd (good golly were they aggressive with it -- good thing they got big before they got smacked), Yelp, etc etc.
As a distribution outlet, nothing (yet) can compete with the app store.
The client see's it as a "iPhone app" you can host/sell it in the store, but it's really just a web app.
(Maybe there's a restriction on this, but I can't see why there would be...)
So this doesn't solve the problem.
It's far better to build up a real sustainable following yourself based on real merits. The app store is full of gimicky one time apps people will use once to show their friends, then never use again :/
As bad as Apple is at vetting and distributing software (when compared to the web they are bad a distributing software, at least in terms of speed), they are terrific, although expensive, payment processes.
The fact that every iPhone user necessarily has an iTunes account, and they are only one touch and a password away from paying you for your software, can't be overstated.
http://www.spreedly.com http://www.cheddargetter.com http://www.recurly.com
3) There's still a lot of features on the iPhone that you can only access through native apps.
He claims most of the apps he has could be web apps. But I just opened my iPhone to the Top 25 paid apps and 7 out of the top 10 could only exist as native apps (and the other three are debatable but in theory you could write them in Javascript)
Here's the list...
Voices: Requires access to the mic
JellyCar: Requires native app for soundtrack (which is actually a big deal in the game)
RedLaser: Requires access to the camera
Call of Duty: Graphics require a native app
All in One Gamebox: Graphics require a native app
Alarm Clock Pro: Has to be able to play music library
Metal Gear: Graphics require a native app
Streaming live video en-masses would likely exist* far before streaming games, given you can buffer video to compensate for latency. Games couldn't be easily buffered as they require instant feedback between button-presses and what's seen on the screen.
*Streaming video does indeed exist for cell phones, but not on a mass-scale, at least in the United States.
Six months later they cut back the free channel lineup so there's nothing interesting to watch.
Admittedly not for 3D intensive games. But maybe flash+browser will catch up with 3D. Only a year ago RaphealJS was magic.
I can't really recommend that app, though. Most of it is open source, so you can go see for yourself that the code is terrible. The app is ugly, leaks abound, and so on. The guy really doesn't know objective-c. I became aware of it because I have a contracting client that wanted to use that app, discovered it was terrible, and paid me to write a better one.
I think this is an idea that is ripe for the picking, but I can't see how, really. I have most of such a browser written. Who can think of a way to monetize this?
Rhomobile has a Ruby-on-Rails inspired framework to run a scaled down Ruby 1.9 implementation that seems to act as an internal web server, allowing iPhone/Blackberry apps to be written in Ruby and HTML templates. The code you write seems to have access to native phone capabilities like GPS.
The main drawback of RhoMobile seems to be the lack of a polished feel, looking like the browser application it really is. (Wikimedia mobile uses RhoMobile for its iPhone app).
For such a critical component, youd really want something open source [and free as in beer also]... after all it needs to keep pace rapidly, be rock solid, trusted by all developers, etc.
[EDIT : correction.. Big5Lite is free, not sure what non Lite has. Big5 project is opensource it seems - http://code.google.com/p/big5/]
App developers who use it can compete while adding to this common component - it plays the role of the browser. It just happens to be a browser which gives you access to nice hardware features such as geo location, media library, contacts etc [policed by os].
Here lies the solution for some percentage of apps, between 90.0 and 99.95.
Apple releases a highly-portable computing platform (iPhone) and initially says "if you want to develop for it, all you have to do is write web applications". Developers rage against the irrational locking down of the system.
Google releases a highly-portable computing platform (Chrome OS) and initially says "if you want to develop for it, all you have to do is write web applications". Developers fawn over it and talk about the simplicity and openness of the system.
In other words: if writing a web app is sufficiently bad to not be worth the time on iPhone, why is it apparently generally held that it'll be sufficiently good to be worth the time on Chrome OS?
2) Your webapp for ChromeOS does not need to be specialized -- you don't have to account for fat-fingered multitouch on a small fixed screen.
But giving this article any credence is giving it too much credit. It's shock-blogging and nothing more.
If you think the web is popular because it's a cross platform sandboxed version of Access (which is essentially what you were suggesting) then you're the idiot. There's only so many useful applications you can make by simply storing and retrieving very simple data locally.
Currently the App Store is a benevolent dictator. I don't care how much lipstick they put on the pig, I want free speach. I don't care if that means 10% of apps will have a flag "may be spyware or inappropriate" but I want those apps distributed! EVEN if those apps help violate apple's own license terms. I want the courts to decide who takes shit down, not apple. Apple is a company whereas the courts are government.
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...
It's pretty clear he's never developed with Objective-C, Cocoa/UIKit, etc. if he's calling it a bloated and bad API. UIKit in particular is fresh, clean, and very nice overall, IMO. (I spent years in Javascript/HTML/CSS, moved to the iPhone for awhile and worked on some major projects, and recently started developing an app on Cocoa for OSX - which is a lot more crusty than the iPhone.)
I also find it somewhat ironic that he talks about "impossible layout mechanisms" whereas almost every time I've been involved with a webapp I've hit upon some tricky layout requirement that is a pain in the ass because of CSS' builtin assumptions.
This part reads like satire...
Mobile Safari could be the most powerful web experience in the world, but without a simple, trusted payment mechanism, it'll be largely ignored by "stupid" iPhone developers.
Audio. QED
(Not to mention the iPod Touch, often used out of wireless range.)
That said, I agree with most of the points in this article, but I think the biggest reason why the App Store will continue to be the authority for iPhone apps is simple: it's a total pain to enter credit card payment information on your phone.
Until someone changes that, nobody will want to pay $0.99 for even a spectacularly good web app. Perhaps the solution is to use a more common payment system, like Amazon or Paypal credentials.
The author reveals no advantages of webapps over a good AppStore that allows 3rd-party software sources. He is simply angry that he doesn't get enough attention as a web developer, not especially different from the complaint of a three year old child, though with the language of a nine year old.
I have written location-aware iPhone native apps, and if I had an open-source alternative to Big5 then, I probably would have used that.
In my case it would have saved me quite a lot of overhead in terms of moving from Linux to a full mac development platform. Not having to learn a new syntax and api for iPhone might have been handy... and then I would have avoided having to jump through the code-signing hoops that tend to break when you upgrade software versions.
So.. that's quite a bit of overhead for an app which only uses the geo-location feature of the hardware.
I do enjoy the Mac platform, XCode etc. I'm not apple bashing here, but making a comparison.
One could also argue that Apple benefits most in the short term by crippling web apps, since the App Store represents a revenue stream and is the main selling point of all their recent advertising.
Adding camera, accelerometer, address-book integration etc. needs to wait for W3C standards to emerge and stabilize before they can be put into Mobile Safari.
What might prove interesting is if a standard for payment mechanisms emerges, so that a web app can take payments mediated through the iTMS.
Apple intended the review process to be basic third-party QA--something that the commercial software industry needs in general--but the noisy, trivial slush like "Dial Girlfriend" and apps that show a few P.D. pictures lifted off Google Images are tying up Apple's resources and making it a chore for users to find anything good.
My respect for quirksmode just fell, a lot. The willful ignorance he shows in his article is staggering.
And the rude delivery doesn't help either.
You don't need a native web app to present content without a network connection. You just need to use the HTML 5 offline application cache thats been in Mobile Safari since iPhone OS 2.1
As someone who tinkered with browser-specific Javascript in the ugly, pre-jQuery early days of DHTML and failed to see where Javascript and HTML and CSS were headed (retreating into the safe world of Java for years - completely missing the ascendance of XHTML/jQuery/CSS - rendering my web skills of the Netscape 4.x era), I agree.
Let's replace 'stupid' for 'greedy'.
Then --> more fool the iPhone users that are paying billions of dollars for average/poor applications that could be replaced by FREE, high quality web apps.
Apple have found a way to make a forture selling what is already freely available - a neat trick.
Isn't it incredible that anybody would pay for a 'dictionary application' these days - whatever the platform?
The only shortcoming is just the speed compared to native apps and of course the missing features that you can't really access through safari.
I was sympathetic to Apple's original line about iPhone apps -- that web apps were iPhone apps -- under this same assumption, that over time MobileSafari would get all these capabilities and more.
But those have been slow to materialize, and now Apple is making a bunch of money via the App Store. Why add things to MobileSafari that remove Apple's cut of sales? Or otherwise splinter the billing/in-app-purchasing system? Or confusingly 'duplicate functionality'? The assumption that Apple is a "true believer" in web apps becoming as capable as App Store apps may no longer be safe.
Going strictly by Apple's self-interest, it would be equally valid to predict that Apple may, over time, add various kinds of policy or remote-driven cripple-switches to MobileSafari -- so the web isn't a back-door offering 'inappropriate content' or otherwise competing with the App Store.
Of course Google is a "true believer" in web apps. Any bets on when we'll see a Chrome browser for the iPhone?
It seems like everyone looks stupid now. Apple for the annoying process of the app store and developers for wanting 99 cents/each for a "silly puzzle game that would have to be free on the web".
Now, what would happen if you had a big walled-garden where each user paid a fixed-fee for unlimited access to everything and each developer was paid per-use and by rating?
Sooner or later, this model (all-you can eat content for a fixed fee with some of the fee going to content developers) will replace the "free" web and app-store models. The web is close to this already but the fees aren't shunted quite enough to content developers.