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.
PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
All sufficiently popular platforms trend towards games. Graphics alone makes the app store a necessity.
When carrier bandwidth allows for it in ~5 or more years, streaming live content to cell phones might become an option (3D games over OnLive, etc). But it's likely going to be a while before carriers can support this, given the need for low latency and high-bandwidth for many games to provide a good end-user experience. Streaming live video en-masses would likely exist* far before streaming games, given you can buffe…
Unlimited live streaming television was one of the selling points of the Samsung Instinct from Sprint in the US.
Six months later they cut back the free channel lineup so there's nothing interesting to watch.
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
False. Please RTFM: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...
Well whaddyaknow. I wasn't aware of this. (I don't actually develop iPhone apps, I'm just a user.)
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#64While 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...
Maybe its a rephrase but:
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.
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Organic SEO. (Lots of work. Requires savvy. Not guaranteed. Stupendous ROI if you do it right.)
Example(s)?
I get about 60~70% of my new users from organic SEO. (I have not run that calculation in a while -- it may be higher now. It was certainly a lot higher in October.)
Almost every successful startup you've heard of which publishes lots of content has an SEO strategy. Slideshare, Scribd (good golly were they aggressive with it -- good thing they got big before they got smacked), Yelp, etc etc.
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#66Wow, It seems like everyone looks stupid now. Apple for the annoying process of the app store and developers for wanting 99 cents/each for a "silly puzzle game that would have to be free on the web". Now, what would happen if you had a big walled-garden where each user paid a fixed-fee for unlimited access to everything and each developer was paid per-use and by rating? Sooner or later, this model (all-you can eat co…
And this worked so well for music subscriptions too, didn't it?
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#67Payment should be easily taken care of, paypalx, etc...
The only shortcoming is just the speed compared to native apps and of course the missing features that you can't really access through safari.
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The fact that iPhone web apps can't access iPhone hardware comes up all the time here. It seems odd to me that nobody mentions the fact that, with not much work, it's possible to create an iPhone browser that can give a website access to most of the iPhone hardware through javascript: gps/location services, the camera, the photo library, the music library, the accelerometer, and so on. One enterprising developer wrot…
See also http://rhomobile.com/
Rhomobile has a Ruby-on-Rails inspired framework to run a scaled down Ruby 1.9 implementation that seems to act as an internal web server, allowing iPhone/Blackberry apps to be written in Ruby and HTML templates. The code you write seems to have access to native phone capabilities like GPS.
The main drawback of RhoMobile seems to be the lack of a polished feel, looking like the browser application it really is. (Wikimedia mobile uses RhoMobile for its iPhone app).
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Example(s)?
I get about 60~70% of my new users from organic SEO. (I have not run that calculation in a while -- it may be higher now. It was certainly a lot higher in October.) Almost every successful startup you've heard of which publishes lots of content has an SEO strategy. Slideshare, Scribd (good golly were they aggressive with it -- good thing they got big before they got smacked), Yelp, etc etc.
That applies to standalone websites, not webapps-as-an-appstore-alternative, which is what (I thought) the discussion was about.
As a distribution outlet, nothing (yet) can compete with the app store.
Re: PPK: "Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid."
#70While 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 o…
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