People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps

http://techdirt.com/articles/20100513/1513039419.shtml

by jancona • 16 years ago

52 33 16 years ago

JarekS2• 16 years ago

Just wait for the latest version of jQTouch. It'll have iPad support so after few hours of hacking you can make your website look "native" on iPad. Can't wait!

potatolicious• 16 years ago

Off topic: I tried visiting the jQtouch site on the iPad - the demo video uses Flash ;) Found it at least a bit amusing :P

pg2• 16 years ago

Hmm. Wouldn't it be great if the whole nasty 3.3.1 business turned out to be a moot point, because web apps were what mattered?

People who work on browsers and libraries for them are in a position to make this happen if they want-- to make the Web win as the platform even if the iPad wins as the device. All you have to do is make other browsers fabulously powerful for web apps. If there start to be a lot of things you can do on e.g. Chrome that you can't do on Safari, Safari will be pushed to follow suit.

In fact maybe it will be Chrome and not Android that saves us from Apple's locked-down future. It's certainly a more straightforward problem. Android can only win through partnerships with handset makers, while Chrome can evolve at its own rate.

percept• 16 years ago

YCRFS 7? :)

JarekS2• 16 years ago

ChromeOS and recent acquisition of Palm will have a big impact on the web app ecosystem. Things like jQtouch ( checkout how our HTLM/jQtouch app looks on iPhone and Andorid HTC Desire http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/05/htc-desire-and-iphone-smart... ) will only speed up the process of turning web apps/web sites into fully touch enabled apps.

I don't want to brag or anything but our app was designed to be touch friendly (the UI has big buttons etc.) and we made this decision before the iPad was announced :)

http://blog.smartupz.com/2009/12/islate-aka-apple-itablet-my...

dustingetz3• 16 years ago

seems a pretty obvious outcome, but only for apps/webapps that are content-oriented, not for apps that actually use custom mobile device hardware. like gps, sms, multitouch.

in the meantime, my android browser doesn't seem to be caching websites aggressively enough, because it seems to take up to several seconds to load the (few) bookmarks i have. so native content-oriented apps are faster, for now.

iseff• 16 years ago

There are certainly features that are better suited for native apps, but the ones you stated aren't necessarily them. For example, GPS is doable on both Android and iPhone OS. Multitouch is also doable (check out Google Maps on the web on iPhone for an example here).

Accelerometer, native graphics, etc are the key features I think about that are not well suited for web apps.

My startup, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), is a huge believer of mobile web apps, and we even have a private alpha going on for monetizing your mobile web app (check out an example like fortysquires: http://fortysquires.com ).

pg2• 16 years ago

It will be in the interest of every other device manufacturer to expose such things to web apps, and that will pressure Apple to follow suit.

metachor• 16 years ago

When the iPhone came out, I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

Flash-forward after a year of developers crying to write native apps, and the iPhone SDK and App Store were born, to give the developers what they asked for. It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.

I really don't see this "locked-down future" that people whinge about. Apple is still leading the open web app platform charge with WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, as well as their work evangelizing HTML5 technologies to the general public.

orangecat• 16 years ago

I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

It wasn't, and still isn't. There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.

It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.

I think what Apple originally wanted was a pure console model. They and hand-picked partners would get to write native apps, and everybody else would make do with web apps.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Hey, I know a really "easy" solution to this "problem" for Steve Jobs: organize media sites to selectively block ipad users.

It might not make the users happy but that hasn't bothered Jobs so far. With enough Apple fan boys, you can justify anything - flash would be just the start. It would be like the worst Microsoft behavior from the 90's but since Apple isn't a horizontal monopoly, it has fewer legal barriers to its behavior.

Kilimanjaro• 16 years ago

I love web apps, but...

can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?

abstractbill• 16 years ago

Much more money is made on the web than in the app store in aggregate, and it's made by far more people (I would guess several orders of magnitude for both numbers), so I would say most definitely yes.

patio11• 16 years ago

I'm guessing there are not all that many applications on the AppStore that sold 3,000 copies at $30 each. That isn't really a stratospheric level of success on the open Internet. Trust me.

Maascamp• 16 years ago

Does it matter to the user? If user's are just using the web version then who cares how easy your app is to monetize.

joshwa• 16 years ago

This brings into focus one of the App Store's main advantages-- a micropayment platform that users have actually adopted in large numbers.

The only reason that media companies need fear cannibalizing app sales is that people have become accustomed to paying for Apps (even apps that are 99% content) but not paying for web sites.

Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store account?

Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some serious traction).

See also my previous comment on this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498

fierarul2• 16 years ago

>Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store account?

I also believe this will happen quite soon. Developers will just digitally sign the web site resources and that will be enough to satisfy the review process, be secure enough and, most importantly, allow iTunes payment.

boucher• 16 years ago

This is _extremely_ unlikely. Not only is it far more technically complex than you let on, it goes completely against the ecosystem Apple is building.

csallen• 16 years ago

I agree completely. When it comes to paying for things, there are two very important factors. I think the web as it exists todays fails at both.

First, payment should be easy. I want to click "Buy", then click "Okay", and that's it. But almost every time I make a purchase online I end up fumbling for my wallet, getting my debit card, and filling out a form.

Second, people have to get "used" to paying for something. Give something away for free long enough, and pretty soon everyone starts to believe they're entitled. If you're like me, you have to go through quite a bit of research, trial, and self-convincing to pay a few bucks for a web app. Compare that to how easy it is to make a purchase at a convenient store.

naner• 16 years ago

> Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some serious traction).

Amazon. I already have an Amazon account. Allow everyone else to tap into that for micropayments.

I'm not going to sign up for some new micropayment system unless I have to. And anything that resembles PayPal will send me running the other way.

dmv• 16 years ago

Checkout by Amazon, Amazon Simple Pay, Amazon Flexible Payments Service https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/index.htm

...and yet, people don't run to it.

MWinther• 16 years ago

Isn't this a bit of a complacency issue? To compete with the web, you're going to have to create an experience that's significantly better than the web. I get the feeling most content providers want to rehash the same thing in a different way, and hopefully be able to charge for it this time around.

Then again, maybe they're paralyzed with fear and have reached the end of the creativity road... I just can't imagine there isn't innovation to be done in this area.

westbywest• 16 years ago

Reminds me of when Sony Records sued the MP3 portal Launch.com earlier this decade, even though Sony had been a part owner of Launch.com for more than a year at that point. I wonder when a similar folding-onto-itself might occur here.

People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps

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