I think we are close to the tipping point where a majority of developers begin to favor webapps to iOS native apps. I've seen this coming a mile away. Apple almost lost a big portion of its development community 2 years ago with that whole 3rd party development platform issue. Apple relented, and they are now turning a different crank with the big subscription tax. They are playing a game of monopoly here. It's the same kind of game Microsoft played in the 1990's and by attrition have lost to the Linux/OSS movement.
Apple currently holds one trump card with Safari on IOS devices though. By restricting HTML5 Audio controls, and rendering engine speed, it prevents games and music web apps from being viable inside the browser.
What? MS lost to linux? The server (enterprise) market is the ONLY area where linux competes head-to-head with MS (or anyone really). And even in Enterprise there are plenty of MS shops.
If you bring up the fabled "linux desktop" I'm gonna start laughing. Though I am impressed at what the folks at Ubuntu are doing.
Also, when the iphone was first released Apple had no developer kit (API's). You could download guidelines on how to write a proper web app for the phone. But developers barked (and why not - look at the result) and here we are.
Actually Apple sort of fell into the app markets. They got damn lucky. Of if you want to believe that Steve Job's is divine, he's manipulated the whole transition from web app => dev kit => app store.
I'm glad to see us move fill circle. But you know we haven't. You could always design specific web apps for ios. Just log into the (free) Safari dev center and download the guild lines. How do you think smaller companies who can't afford a distribution agreement with Apple (did you know you can privately distribute your own apps? Of course you have to pay.. ;) ) did it? We wrote the apps in html5/js/css3 (based specifically on Safari) and host them on our own network (intranet & vpn).
Microsoft long ago lost the mindset of developers. It's been a long time since I've met someone doing Windows-desktop software. All innovation appears to be happening outside of Microsoft technologies. MS fought for years (using IE) to make it as difficult as possible to build web applications and I'll spit up my milk if developers fall for it again by developing HTML/JS-based Windows 8 apps.
Ok I agree with that. Developers aren't doing any "new" development on Windows. It's all maintenance and release "upgrades" to generate revenue. And MS itself is doing this too (look at Office).
How did they lose a big portion of its development community? Attendance at WWDC was record-breaking, and that's a developer-focused conference. The number of apps is still growing. The sales of the devices are still growing.
What I think you mean is they lost a big portion of their early adopter community, and that's not the same thing as what sustains them.
We're really nowhere near it at all. The basic economics is that the app market and the exposure from actually being in the app market is just far too massive for that to happen.
I'm also amazed at how often the myth that one day we'll all be using really crappy Html5 apps continues. Html5 compared to native apps done by an average developer just plain sucks, no amount of 'HTML5 web apps == AWESOME!' pretending and wishing will ever change that.
We'll have HTML6 in, what, 2025 maybe? So maybe all the wishes will come true then.
You right. But you can't think of the html5 app as a device app. That's comparing apples to oranges. It's a web page, designed specify for IOS (Safari/Webkit).
BUT for companies who don't have the resources (or don't want them) is a nice way to get into the ios market. Of course, if you serious you better roll out xcode.
But there are plenty of applications where the html5 wep app makes sense. Like a company hosting it on their intranet (we do.. marketing data mostly). FT (print media) is another. Actually, I bet FT they had an easier time writing the web app then they did their ios app (which sucked.. I had it). And I wonder why the NYT, WSJ (etc, etc) haven't dropped their ambitions and move to an html5 web app.
As a side note.. most of the print media company apps suck. I mean they are just terrible. I can think of only a few that are ok: USA Today, the Economist. I mean just look at the reviews of the NYT app. It's a joke. Want a bigger joke, go look at the Ars Technica app. My god.. a tech journal can't even get it right.
It isn't a big tax that is suddenly something new.
What it is, is a way to prevent developers trying to rort the system and doing an end run around their fee structure.
When this first came out, the ones screaming the loudest were the guys who had "free" apps ($0 to Apple) who then built into their apps an "okay, you've been using it for 5 minutes, now pay us $3 ($0 to Apple)" 'one-off subscription'.
E.g. you used to be able to get all the benefits of a paid app without paying Apple anything, simply by relabelling the "paid" app as an app with a "one-off subscription".
Apple closed that loop-hole. Hence one particular side of the screaming. You don't actually need to ascribe these actions to some kind of evil Microsoftian conspiracy, it's jsut closing a loophole that some people were using to cheat the system.
The other side of this coin is the arrangements between authors and publishers, where the authors have had a long time 70% of net agreement. If the author gets 70% and Apple gets 30%... this leaves 0% for the middle-man. So they weren't happy.
You're forgetting that there is no other way to sell software or content on an iOS device. You can't circumvent the App Store unless you tell your customers to crack their devices and use Cydia.
I would be completely fine with Apple's App Store restrictions if iOS devices weren't locked down like they are. Even Microsoft never dreamed of the kind of Orwellian nightmare that Apple is spinning around the computing industry.
Did you even read the article? It contradicts your first sentence. Also, your initial premise that you are somehow more aware of my memory system than I am... is... deeply flawed.
If you want to reframe the debate in terms of Apple is evil, therefore everything they do, say or think is evil, by all means go and do that. (And they say the fanboys are the ones suffering from a reality distortion field...) But this isn't really the place. I'm sure you can find large numbers of people willing to agree with you though.
On the off chance that you can't find any thread on Hacker News or elsewhere on the Internet that fit that theme... perhaps you should start your own? You could write a blog post about how it is all part of some conspiracy. Or if you're really lazy you could write a top ten list... just pick any ten random Apple news items, there's bound to be someone slagging them off for each of them.
Then you just post that link to Hacker News, you'll get guaranteed upvotes, it will make the front page... and Ta Da!!! "Apple = evil conspiracy" comments will be on topic in that thread! Hooray!
It's the same kind of game Microsoft played in the 1990's and by attrition have lost to the Linux/OSS movement.
It doesn't seem to me like it's attrition-due-to-Microsoft's-practices that have led to their downfall ... it's because of the advantages of free / open-source on the back end and because of other-platform (web/mobile) disruption on the front end.
Funny to see that your post has been grayed out, even though it's logical and makes a point. I would expect people who disagree to reply instead of downvoting. And yes, even though your topic is controversial, it passes the guidelines criteria.
Because their platform is superior to everything else out there. Because mobile apps is not even close to providing proper user experience.
People expect snappy as hell execution on the iOS, the actual flow of the app is often more important than the looks. And in my experience the web apps just aren't there yet.
Apple make no money on the app store it more or less goes to operations. You can call it a tax or you can be honest and call it what it is. The price of keeping a well structured market place.
Valid points, but the subscription tax is on top of application delivery fees. That's going too far, and I think we're about to see a watershed event where nearly all publishers begin to flee the App Store. Watch it happen.
If FT fans expect snappy iOS apps and all they can get is a substandard HTML app don't you think they'll considering ditching iOS when their contract is up?
Because their platform is superior to everything else out there.
This seems like opinion presented as fact. I've used iOS and currently own an Android phone, and there's no doubt in my mind that the Android UX is miles ahead of the iOS UX. Of course, I include things like a browser with sync to desktop (Firefox) in my definition of UX, since things like that affect the experience I have while using the product quite a bit.
When I talk about the platform I am talking about the whole lot. The ecosystem that ties it all together. Surely you won't argue that Google makes more money on mobile ecosystem than apple does on theirs.
Sadly, you will find that HN tends to be very anti-Android from a UI perspective. Haven't you noticed the praise of the notification system and other changes to iOS that have existed in Android for ages. Or the obsession with iMessage despite the existence of Google Voice.
At one point in time, iOS was prettier than Android. Too few HNers have actually used Froyo or Gingerbread to understand the UI improvements that have occurred and too many use Android as a dev platform or played with a phone in a store to understand the power of actual multitasking or the power of the back button.
Consumers don't know and don't care about it until it affects them. Apple has been picking on the small guys like Readability and Flow reader. https://www.iflowreader.com/Closing.aspx while silently approving updates to Kindle and Netflix.
Let them go after Netflix and Kindle with the shakedown (June 30th is the deadline).
Let them go after Netflix and Kindle with the shakedown (June 30th is the deadline).
What happens to the big boys will be telling. I don't think 30% across the board is going to stay. For a small developer the 30% is probably worth it to get into the store, a small amount of visibility, payment processing, and quick customer access.
For the big content providers like NF, HBOGO, WSJ, NYT, Kindle, etc... who already spend huge amounts of money on payment systems, advertising and support the 30% is an additional middle man that provides little actual value. I think at least for the big content providers Apple will blink because at the end of the day Apple needs content more than the content needs them.
No. It just meant that they did not have the native application development SDK and the associated App Store infrastructure ready that time. Saying "who needs native apps when there is the Web" up until releasing the native App Store is typical of Apple - "who wants to watch video on small screen", "People don't read anymore" etc. come to mind.
Actually you have evidence of that? Cause I don't believe that for a second. I was a member of the ADC at that time. And I don't remember seeing ANYTHING about a iphone (this was before it was renamed to ios) dev kit.
But my email was full of guidelines to create web apps for the phone. What I think happened is that (at that time) Apple wanted Mac developers to make iphone apps, badly. And mac dev's wanted to do it natively. A half a year later, I see the beta of the dev kit.
I doubt Apple imagined the app store market at that time. And like most grand success stories, there was a lot of luck involved.
Evidence of what? You seem to concur that native sdk and app store did not exist at the time when Apple said Web Apps are good enough.
Sure they didn't wanted to lose developer attention and had to keep them engaged with web apps etc. until they figured out the strategy on native development and the app store.
And I can't believe that Apple had totally closed the door or hadn't thought about native apps at all when they initially released the iPhone - there wasn't any sensible reason not to - it wasn't a new thing, at least some of the phone platforms had native apps and there were even App Stores before that. It was just a matter of time.
Looking at the 2007 WWDC press release, it looks like Web apps was they way Apple seriously wanted to go: "Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps." If nothing else, it gave them a much larger potential developer base than relying on native development alone and by sticking to standards it insures that the iPhone would always have a place in the table.
>By restricting HTML5 Audio controls, and rendering engine speed, it prevents games and music web apps from being viable inside the browser.
It must be frustrating for the WebKit team when their engineering advancements are taken for granted and attributed to Chrome — the perceived bastion of web freedom — while they themselves are simultaneously criticized for assisting in a conspiracy against "the web" whenever they fail to make enough cutting-edge performance improvements.
> It must be frustrating for the WebKit team when their engineering advancements are taken for granted and attributed to Chrome
The chrome team makes more commits than the Apple webkit team. I know number of commits don't mean much but the chrome team is mostly reponsible for adding websocket, the file api, web workers and more. Also don't forget webkit itself is based on KDE's KHTML.
> but the chrome team is mostly reponsible for adding websocket, the file api, web workers...
Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser and HTML5-compliant rendering engine then?
By your logic, Chrome is essentially KHTML + HTML5-fanboy-features. I guess that must mean Apple has been shipping a 2002-era build of Konquerer with each copy of Mac OS X then, huh? Because clearly WebKit itself is so minimal in comparison to the rest of Chrome as to be positively technologically inconsequential.
I hope you can see the irony of your remark in light of the original point I was making.
> Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser and HTML5-compliant rendering engine then?
Strawman, I never said the Chrome team deserved all the credit, or that KHTML did for that matter. All I meant was that the WebKit team didn't deserve all the credit as it's clearly a shared effort between the three of them, not to mention Nokia and others. Also my initial comment was answering a post mentioning HTML5 features.
>Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser
Didn't Apple take the KHTML (Konqueror was a full fledged browser) code and then had to release their code because it was GPL. I remember reading about a complaint from the KHTML that Apple was releasing the code as a big blob and this was hindering KHTML integration.
> Didn't Apple take the KHTML (Konqueror was a full fledged browser) code...
WebKit has vastly evolved from the original KHTML library, to the point of being almost an entirely different product. The KHTML team has been pulling changes from WebKit (http://trac.webkit.org/browser) for many years now.
This is the reason why there will be major difficulty in iOS in medical. Apple has its hands around the neck of the platform too firmly to make it feasible for serious medical enterprise apps.
There are lots of people who dont believe this, but as a healthcare designer i really think that apples model is way too greedy and crippling.
There is a difference between physicians loving the DEVICE and it being the right platform for a hospital.
Trust me I know. I design hospitals and health systems.
I love the iPad - but if you think that giving 30% of your margin and 100% of control to apple is the right idea - then you're wrong.
Sure, there are a ton of one-off single use apps for iOS and most of them are fantastic - but there are inhernet flaws with the use of iOS as a platform in a facility.
For small practice, it totally makes sense - but not yet completely in a hospital.
Except, physicians dont care about where the money goes - thus, we will see a shift to apple - but I still maintain that it is wrong.
iOS will NOT lower costs in the broken US health system -- it will continue the greed and health costs will not come down.
It is a far more complex issue than measuring your fucking blood pressure or tracking how many times you worked out on your little iphone.
Why can't a hospital (a business) use enterprise deployment mechanisms for its core business deployments of iDevices? Rather than going through the "normal" AppStore?
>Apple currently holds one trump card with Safari on IOS devices though. By restricting HTML5 Audio controls, and rendering engine speed, it prevents games and music web apps from being viable inside the browser.
It's more than 14 months since Jobs wrote the blog blasting Flash and espousing HTML5 and Safari still has all these egregious issues. I think HTML5 is not a priority for Apple except to pay lip service to it when someone asks for Flash support. After all, it will threaten their lock-in with the App-store and the tithes on Apps and content and makes Apple the middleman. They have achieved what Comcast could only dream of, tax content sold over the internet.
A little OT, but I was actually thinking about the in-app subscriptions policy the other day as it applies to SaaS. I know that there was some email floating around that was supposedly from Steve Jobs saying it didn't apply, but I was curious if anyone out there has had an app rejected (or accepted, for that matter, since the policy took effect) for not accepting in-app purchases of subscriptions. We are thinking about beginning work on a companion app to a SaaS product. The app would be free, but step one is signing in to your account on the SaaS, which is not. There is also no free tier. We cannot afford to give Apple a 30% cut of our subscription price, so we are not planning on offering an in-app subscription purchase option. We would like to include a link that opens a page to the main site in a browser for those who don't already have accounts, although I know that is explicitly forbidden for apps that fall into the subscriptions category.
Any thoughts? Just curious what our chances of rejection are for something like this in the current "climate".
If you are't into first class economic writing, and I'm talking so good it almost explains the euro, pick up the FT Saturday edition. Tremendous coverage of books, arts, personalities, and occasionally some truly quirky stories. Also: A "How To Spend It" magazine that takes appalling up to the point of irony.
I know, the HN audience doesn't care. But amid all the discussion of platform strategy, the FT staff deserve a salute. There is a reason this paper doesn't need Apple.
We all know how this will go, apple waits six months until it's pissed off the maximum number of people and then it'll reverse its decision or make the terms much more acceptable.
If this is the best you can do with an HTML5 'app' then native apps have a long future. It's buggy, laggy, animations are wrong, graphics are low resolution in places, and user interface widgets are odd and non standard.
That's why I'd rather just have the regular old "Web" for stuff like this. There seem to be a lot of experiments to 'appize' Web sites for tablets and the like, and while most of them look better than typical Web pages at first glance, they're usually laggy and less immediate than if you'd just seen a regular web page in the first place (a common issue is scrolling.. if I get the dreaded 8 frames per second effect, I'm outta there).
but http://m.ft.com is clean, nice and fast. personally i often find the mobile version of sites nicer (in a similar way to the print view is often the best way to read a page)
edit: ugh you need to spoof your browser to access http://m.ft.com on the desktop.
Yep. After using the NY Times Chrome "app" for a while I've gone back to using the web page. I can take in more information at a glance and spend less time paging. It's profoundly ironic that progress in user interfaces in the 21st century is construed as making things look more like their real-world counterparts.
People like to talk about black and white, native versus web, etc, but this is simply a matter of finding the right fit for the Financial Times. Many of the newsy apps can be done very well with the latest browsers (and other kinds of apps, too!). It makes sense for subscriptions as well as for maintenance and tech investment, and they won't lose much (if any) functionality. Some apps will always be better suited for native, but as the browser technology grows, we'll move back to web apps more. It wasn't so long ago that touch gestures were pretty hard to do right in a web app, so the only way to do a mobile app right was to go native.
For straight content delivery companies, making a web app should be the first priority. A native app isn't going to offer much in the way of enhanced functionality, and your effort will likely be diluted while you chase multiple platforms.
It makes even more sense to focus on a web app when your company already has a web site. You likely already have the expertise on staff to create a good web app, and any new features or techniques you develop can be easily used in both places.
I think a lot of people are missing the bigger picture here, which is Apple is unwilling to just hand over user details, which the Financial Times and the likes want. The 30% cut "gripe" is just what they are telling the public to try to get you on "their" side. If I recall, Amazon actually had (has) a larger piece of the pie for subscriptions, but they are will to give out User Information.
The "HTML5 apps don't cut it compared to native" argument is incredibly short sighted. The pace of development in this area is staggering. Things are moving very quickly and in a short time, the days where HTML applications didn't perform as well will be long forgotten - as forgotten as the days when the internet ran at 2400 baud or when you needed a huge tape to record television.
Apple is playing with fire, they have built an incredible platform for others to build on top of, but a platform requires a level of trust from developers and businesses in order for them to invest in it. Apple seems to be doing their best to destroy that trust. What Apple's greed seems to blind them to is that while, yes, companies gain a lot by building on Apple's platform, Apple also accrues a lot of benefits just by those apps existing, without having to take a 30% cut.
Apple currently holds one trump card with Safari on IOS devices though. By restricting HTML5 Audio controls, and rendering engine speed, it prevents games and music web apps from being viable inside the browser.