I think he deserves a good degree of praise for having an amenable opinion.
PPK backs down: iPhone developers are not stupid
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Re: PPK backs down: iPhone developers are not stupid
#12YHBT. YHL. HAND.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ
"Whatever position I took originally, I would change the position to exactly the opposite and tell the Macintosh people that I was completely wrong and they were completely right all along, and the numbers would go through the ceiling!" -John Dvorak
Re: PPK backs down: iPhone developers are not stupid
#13I disagree, I still think the first article was spot on. If you don't want to play by Apple's crappy App Store rules then write a web app for the iPhone. Unless you're doing a 3D game you can accomplish the same result on the Web and you're free from their 'control'. iPhone devs who write native apps and then complain to Apple about the app store policies are stupid, because they are tilting at windmills when there i…
I couldn't disagree more. iPhone devs who write native apps are trying to get the best usability out of their products - have you played with an iPhone webapp recently? They approximate the native experience, poorly. The UI doesn't flow, it's not fast, it's not responsive - it's a pale shadow compared to a native app, even for mundane tasks like menus and buttons. There's "good enough" and "excellent" - these are not…
Another important argument in favor of a native app over a webapp is the iPod Touch - sales of the Touch are doubling year over year, getting pretty close to the iPhone, in terms of units sold.
Requiring iPod Touch owners to connect to wifi before they access your webapp just puts another hurdle between you and your users, one which they won't always be able to clear.
Re: PPK backs down: iPhone developers are not stupid
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't disagree more. iPhone devs who write native apps are trying to get the best usability out of their products - have you played with an iPhone webapp recently? They approximate the native experience, poorly. The UI doesn't flow, it's not fast, it's not responsive - it's a pale shadow compared to a native app, even for mundane tasks like menus and buttons. There's "good enough" and "excellent" - these are not…
Another important argument in favor of a native app over a webapp is the iPod Touch - sales of the Touch are doubling year over year, getting pretty close to the iPhone, in terms of units sold. Requiring iPod Touch owners to connect to wifi before they access your webapp just puts another hurdle between you and your users, one which they won't always be able to clear.
That is a great point, although there are some things you can do with local caching it's not really a solution in that instance.
My main argument is, as a developer you KNOW what the App store approval process is like, it's been beaten to death all over the Internet. So either accept that you're going to have to play by Apple's rules or make a web app and save yourself the trouble. It's Apple's garden and we all just play in it.
Re: PPK backs down: iPhone developers are not stupid
#15First, I would like to see an example of a rich iPhone webapp he has created (if any) to show off exactly how "native-like" it actually feels to use... As for me, I have written an iPhone webapp which is located at http://tweetgrid.com/iphone/ (it is a twitter search app). I used the http://iwebkit.net/ framework (which is brilliant), but overall it was an exercise in frustration. A few points: 1. You can create a we…
Isn't this (and many other similar points) just a generalisation of:
"Apple has spent time and effort making native apps work seamlessly, they haven't bothered for web apps"
This applies to missing APIs for photo upload, bugs or missing features in Webkit (even stuff that's there but not widely known), user "installation", even payment.
If that is the case then you can say "webapps are limited (currently (on the iPhone (compared with native Cocoa apps)))" but that's a completely different statement from "webapps suck".
What's odd is that Google isn't banging this drum hard for Android, but they are for ChromeOS.