John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers

I don't really like this attitude. It strikes me as a built-to-flip style of business. I'm personally not planning to get rich from one app, but rather I want to create a bunch of apps that serve various markets. Hopefully, at some point, I will capture enough market that I can quit my day job. But I don't expect any of my apps to ever be top 50 anything. Rather I'm hoping they're each one of 10 (first page) that come up when you search for a specific task.

Hewitt has doing some punditry himself lately. Interesting reads, he seems to believe that the open web doesn't have enough direction and will fall to apps unless somebody takes the reigns.

He developed much of Firebug and worked at Facebook in the mobile division (creating the Facebook iPhone app), for those who don't know him.

Here is how I see it:

The first wave are the tech enthusiasts, these people are not big app buyers but are interested in finding a good SSH tool, or an mail client that supports PGP. These were the main customers of the first iPhone.

I'd say we've been in the second wave for the last couple years. These people are seeing TV the ads and are curious. Their friends buy iPhones, it makes sense for them too as well. They're not "hackers", just people that are willing to try apps. These are your Angry Birds players, and where the main revenue comes from.

The third and final wave will be moms and general folk who will never sync with iTunes. It's those people that are never going to buy an app because they won't know what an app is. And that's fine, they'll like how their phone talks to them and how they can Facetime to their kids.

I don't mean to say that all iPhone 1 users are "hackers", just that a higher percentage of them were than are now iPhone 4S users. A lot of those people likely went off to Android in the recent years, anyhow.

Well, one coud argue that developing one web app for a selected browsers is faster than developing a few native apps, each for different OS. Especially when you consider the fact that on mobile devices Webkit is a de facto standard and that issues like Android fragmentation doesn't make developing native apps any easier.

In my opinion, the real issues about web apps are: performance, lack of the Device API and a lack of matured tools. Solving first two is, luckily, a question of "when", not "if". The latest phones are already fast enough to handle even the heaviest jQuery monsters; LTE and 4G are getting traction and Device API is a work in progress (eventually, there's a PhoneGap). Lack of tools is harder to solve though. JavaScript grew big lately, yet in this field it's still very far from being mature. If you are doing anything non-standard in JS (like Backbone.js classes) the best you can get from IDEs, etc. is syntax highlighting. Hopefully, with more and more big players (like Adobe) hopping onto HTML5 bandwagon things in this matter will soon improve too.

Not to disagree with you, but ...

It astounds me that there are still jobs for developers. I'm not talking about SV stars, I mean the hundreds of thousands of programmers writing CRUD apps around the country. That is eminently moveable, and if the stereotypical code quality of the stereotypical foreign outsourcing shop is sub par, it's not because they don't have the same brains as we do, it's merely because a) they haven't caught up with us yet (they will), and b) they haven't captured that work as primary developers yet, they're still learning to take that work by being (at the moment) sub contractors.

Japan after World War II, for example, broke into the market by making "cheap plastic crap" and motorcycles. Then better plastic crap and small cars (remember the Honda 600?). Then really good plastic crap and really good cars, and now that pie is divided among many more people around the world, including "our" pie.

Why will software be any different? It takes no resources except a brain, a computer and a connection. The whole world has the same quality of brains and computers as we, and their connection quality is often much better and cheaper than ours.