Fuck [iPhone developers] those condescending, ignorant, self-important, stupid, blind, fearful pricks. Fuck them real hard. Where it hurts.
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...)
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.
You can charge money for a webapp. You just have to use PayPal rather than Apple's built-in procedure. That's fair, right? It's just as fair as buying any other application would be.
I just installed two webapps on my iPod and they're quickly becoming my most-used icons.
While he basically raises some valid points, he ignores two critical ones:
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.
You left out one important point that he mentions but doesn't give enough credit to...
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
And, the payment system you end up incorporating will not be as dead simple to use as iTunes.
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.
Bingo. The big attraction is that developers can make a silly puzzle game that would have to be free on the web, but they can charge 99 cents for it in the app store. Plus, billing and credit card processing is just done for you. It makes me wonder if there is an opportunity for a startup to provide a web app store. Would be hard to pull off, and would likely really irritate Apple. But it might be possible.
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?
Your first point is so valid. Having created a webapp for the iPhone myself there really are few places I can go to put my webapp on a stage that anyone cares about. If someone knows of any I honestly would love to know where they are.
I don't know if this is already done. But the second point really begs for an entrepreneur to solve this. A simple model for payment for web apps, you could support one off sales, subscriptions models etc. Make an API for developers and handle all the credit-card processing stuff.
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.
I know this is really only applicable for a few cities, but speaking for myself: as a consumer, I don't want webapps right now. AT&T's network sucks hard in NYC, and even if it didn't, a very large portion of the time I spend with apps on my phone is when I'm killing time on the subway. Offline is important, and while we're starting to solve that with some of the browser tech he pointed to, it really isn't there yet in a form that's competitive with native apps.
The essence of the AppStore hovers around marketing & distribution, not technology. Apple set up a great distribution channel, making it super-easy for developers to get paid & they are throwing in some free promotion to boot. In the end, it's about money: can you afford the opportunity cost of not being present on the AppStore & make money right now? What's the cost of promoting your WebKit app going to be? Apple convinced people that it is ok to pay a little money for simple apps that run on their mobile phone. That was Apple's genius move, not the technology that makes iPhone apps tick. If you simply follow the money the whole AppStore debacle becomes a lot clearer.
But instead, iPhone developers are eagerly bending over begging Apple for more because of their myopic obsession with bad APIs, the twin geekgasms of both objecty stuff and C, bloated SDKs, impossible layout mechanisms, and all the rest of the archaic nonsense we’re going to have to rid the mobile Web of in the next few years.
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.
Worthless linkbait, and misses the point entirely. Namely: how many iPhone developers are making decent revenue from a web app?
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.
This article could be written much less offensively as, "The appcache in iPhone OS > 2.1 means web apps don't have to be second-class citizens." As it is, it makes some strong assertions but fails to actually educate developers.
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.
Summary: "Webapps are almost as good as Native Apps in many ways."
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.
We can criticize the delivery.. but given the popularity of the thread, I think the OP is making a valid point.
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.
What a ridiculous article. The downsides of web apps on the iPhone are painfully obvious and have been pointed out by the other commenters. Anyone who has tried to use web apps on the iPhone knows they are not ideal.
"It also supports JavaScript geolocation, which is (I hope) only the first step towards true device APIs that will give JavaScript developers access to phone functionality such as the camera, text messaging, the address book, and more. I’m assuming Apple is working on all that because it’s the next logical step."
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.
I'm gonna call bullshit on the general conspiracy theory, here. Mobile Safari is the best mobile browser, period. And WebKit is the engine for the next best.
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.
The app store is a huge distribution channel for developers. Making a web app solves the technical aspects of distribution, but then it's up to you to put your app under the nose of several million people.
iPhone developers are part of the problem: specifically the ones who create a zillion "shovelware" apps, some so pointless that Apple has got to the point of banning entire developers.
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.
That's the inevitable result of the approval process. Make a sophisticated app with lots of functionality, and there's a greatly increased chance that Apple will find something wrong with it. On the other hand a one button fart app will go right through.
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
> After ten years I am f*ing 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.
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.
We're almost there, one step removed and we'll have it.
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?
[+] [-] patio11|16 years ago|reply
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...)
[+] [-] steveklabnik|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] olifante|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unalone|16 years ago|reply
I just installed two webapps on my iPod and they're quickly becoming my most-used icons.
[+] [-] ulf|16 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] SamAtt|16 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rodyancy|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JunkDNA|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubernostrum|16 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] edd|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvaerle|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrandMasterBirt|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jfager|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Padraig|16 years ago|reply
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...
[+] [-] wouterinho|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c1sc0|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BigZaphod|16 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pc|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asciilifeform|16 years ago|reply
Audio. QED
(Not to mention the iPod Touch, often used out of wireless range.)
[+] [-] storborg|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pvandehaar|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gord|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jbc25|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjogin|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcl|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] clawrencewenham|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shykes|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clawrencewenham|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] orangecat|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tawheed|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natch|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Padraig|16 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] wallflower|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mitko|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tcarnell|16 years ago|reply
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?