iOS 7: Catch me if you can

Ah, yes. Assume I'm ignorant about the technology you claim is superior (the exact same thing happened the last time I tried to point out that the web has advanced a bit in the last 10 years). I didn't even try to make any claim about the web being better than native, but for your own knowledge, I have experience with native SDKs from win32, to cocoa, to android and iOS.

>Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable

In what regard? Surely not in ease of development? Ease of learning? Ease/portability/availability of tools? Portability of the end app itself? Available developer pool? Open source code to look at and use? I can't imagine a way that any native platform beats the web in any of those categories.

Or just in terms of making a fancy animation and having reusable UI elements? You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.

Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps:

- Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development.

- More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls.

- More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language!

- More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort.

The common theme of these points being that Apple wants control over everything, and has control over everything. But that's a point for a separate rant. My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open.

Apple could still take control and sell web apps, but they seem to be very purposely not doing that, and pushing native as hard as they can while occasionally implementing a buggy web app feature here or there. It just makes me sad. We don't need parallax when we move our phones around. We don't need blur effects everywhere. We need an easy, clear, open, and accessible way to develop apps for mobile devices.

I think you meant 'performance' instead of 'capability'.

As far as 'performance', Apple has never been one to put performance numbers up as a selling point. Macs have never been marketed as an X (M|G)hz machine with Y (M|G)B RAM. Those were details Steve felt should be abstracted away from the user. So, I'd agree with you that the success of iPhone has never really been driven by 'hardware performance', as that is the popular habit of Apple.

That said, it remains that iPhone is still a fairly powerful smartphone, as they come, and the author seems to be arguing (rightfully so, IMO) that Apple is cashing in on that fact through leveraging that for the aesthetic design of their software.

Arguably, all mobile OSs have to be built with some amount of mindfulness to the performance of the lowest common denominator device. Android could be pretty low, whereas Apple's lowest common denominator device for iOS 7 still has moderately powerful specs.

> Surely not in ease of development?

Nope. Building a complex application in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking.

> Ease of learning?

Also nope. Complex applications are still complex.

> Ease/portability/availability of tools?

Compared to the development tools for other platforms (IDEs, profilers, etc), the web tools are far, far, far more limited.

> Portability of the end app itself?

Portability is a cost-cutting measure, but never a user-appreciated feature. The web would need to stand alone as a first-tier platform for this to be a net gain; as it is, web-only experience is subpar.

> Available developer pool?

Quality engineers capable of producing first-class applications for your users still cost a lot and are rare on the ground.

> Open source code to look at and use?

This is not even remotely unique to the web.

> You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.

Catching up to 1990s application architecture is not really a cause to celebrate. The technology stack that drives desktop and mobile devices is massive. We don't build custom interfaces directly on top of OpenGL and call it a day.

My impression was that the iPhone was fully thought out in advance so that everything would work together. Take away a major piece, and the whole thing stops making sense. It needed a touch screen so that it didn't need a keyboard. There couldn't be a keyboard, because it took space away from the display. Replacing a keyboard with a touch screen was radical at that time, and it had to work really well. People would need visual feedback to be able to interact with it effectively. The visual feedback couldn't lag, so that required fast graphics. And so on...