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PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

quirksmode.org

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Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#31

Post by mattmaroon »

SamAtt wrote: post #15
ulf wrote: post #6

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. Catch 22...

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 Java…

All sufficiently popular platforms trend towards games. Graphics alone makes the app store a necessity.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#32

Post by Padraig »

jfager wrote: post #18

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…

Offline works perfectly on Mobile Safari.

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#33

Post by Ionic_Walrus »

st3fan wrote: post #27
microkid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not create an iPhone app, which is simply a WebKit view dedicated to your web app? 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...)

Same restrictions apply: the web view has a limited set of functionality and there is no way to communicate between the native cocoa part of the app and the javascript part running in the web view.

simply untrue - its easy to communicate between javascript and native cocoa code. Take a look at the UIWebView and UIWebViewDelegate documentations here - http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKi... and here http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKi...

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#34

Post by ubernostrum »

ulf wrote: post #6

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. Catch 22...

Counterpoint:

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?

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#36

Post by Padraig »

natch wrote: post #35

A native app with a web UI can present content even when there is no network connection... 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.

Wilful ignorance indeed!

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

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#37

Post by jfager »

Padraig wrote: post #32
jfager wrote: post #18

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…

Offline works perfectly on Mobile Safari. http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...

I mean offline as an experience, not as a caching problem, which in my case means games and other apps that rely on the full capabilities of the hardware. I thought that would be obvious from the context as a native app that needs online access isn't much better on the subway than a webapp.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#38

Post by clawrencewenham »

jcl wrote: post #12

"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 Stor…

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.

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#39

Post by BigZaphod »

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.

This part reads like satire...

Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."

#40

Post by lisper »

ulf wrote: post #6

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. Catch 22...

3) An appstore app will (or at least could) continue to work even when I don't have network connectivity. A Web app won't.
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