The app store is a huge distribution channel for developers. Making a web app solves the technical aspects of distribution, but then it's up to you to put your app under the nose of several million people.
Fuck [iPhone developers] those condescending, ignorant, self-important, stupid, blind, fearful pricks. Fuck them real hard. Where it hurts.
And fucking them real hard where it hurts is exactly what Apple is doing right now.
We choose the world we want to live in, and I don't want to live in a world where writing like this is unremarkable. It adds nothing to the overall argument and coarsens us to no purpose.
I am sympathetic to the general gist of "developers would be better off working without a gatekeeper", and have said much the same myself this weekend, but those who Apple chooses to win do benefit enormously from a built-in, captive audience who is exposed to Apple's annointed developers. There is no comparable method of exposure for mobile web application developers.
There is also the non-trivial benefit of actually getting paid money to consider. You can certainly make money on the wide-open Internet, but the tactics you use for it and the apps you make are wholly different from what works on the iPhone. (What I wouldn't give for my customers being able to buy my software in two clicks, but alas...)
You can charge money for a webapp. You just have to use PayPal rather than Apple's built-in procedure. That's fair, right? It's just as fair as buying any other application would be.
I just installed two webapps on my iPod and they're quickly becoming my most-used icons.
He's not talking about iPhone developers, he's talking about the people in the sentence before it:
After ten years I am fucking tired of the “Web development is not real programming” bullshit that the arrogant bastards in “real programming” are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new.
Now, the Venn diagram may have some overlap, but still.
The author seems to be suffering from a lot of insecurity and anger issues - and I mean that in the most non-judgmental way possible. I think it's pretty clear that most of HN works on web technologies, and personally I haven't really seen this condescending divide between 'web programming' and 'real programming' - which at the end of the day seems to be about the same thing really.
I do however object to his calling the entire iPhone developer community out as stupid and arrogant. How arrogant is it to presume that everyone of the many iPhone developers who have complaints about the current approval system is, in his words, stupid? If anything the author is the arrogant, misinformed, and dare I say, stupid one here.
I'm torn about whether or not to flag this. While this has generated some good discussion on HN, I don't think we should really cater to troll material like this. If you cannot communicate your opinions in an intelligent, civil way, and cannot deal with your fellow developers with some decorum, then please don't say anything at all.
While 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.
Your first point is so valid. Having created a webapp for the iPhone myself there really are few places I can go to put my webapp on a stage that anyone cares about. If someone knows of any I honestly would love to know where they are.
Its hard to give examples of successful SEO, because you don't want extra competition in your niche. As a result, all we (SEOs) can offer for free is general advice on how to do it yourself.
That said, I've been wanting to write a free guide to SEO aimed at HN-like companies, because I think its important. However, the response from HackerNews to anything involving SEO is so harsh, I've felt it would be a waste of my time. If that's not the case, please let me know.
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.
Same restrictions apply: the web view has a limited set of functionality and there is no way to communicate between the native cocoa part of the app and the javascript part running in the web view.
Its my understanding that Apple would like require an "explicit" rating, since you could change your web page to have pictures of an "inappropriate" nature.
This is the problem though. The app store is like "American Idol". Singers see American Idol etc as a quick route to fame. Then they're "famous" for 30 minutes, then not.
It's far better to build up a real sustainable following yourself based on real merits. The app store is full of gimicky one time apps people will use once to show their friends, then never use again :/
And, the payment system you end up incorporating will not be as dead simple to use as iTunes.
As bad as Apple is at vetting and distributing software (when compared to the web they are bad a distributing software, at least in terms of speed), they are terrific, although expensive, payment processes.
The fact that every iPhone user necessarily has an iTunes account, and they are only one touch and a password away from paying you for your software, can't be overstated.
I don't know if this is already done. But the second point really begs for an entrepreneur to solve this. A simple model for payment for web apps, you could support one off sales, subscriptions models etc. Make an API for developers and handle all the credit-card processing stuff.
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 Javascript)
Here's the list...
Voices: Requires access to the mic
JellyCar: Requires native app for soundtrack (which is actually a big deal in the game)
RedLaser: Requires access to the camera
Call of Duty: Graphics require a native app
All in One Gamebox: Graphics require a native app
Alarm Clock Pro: Has to be able to play music library
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 buffer video to compensate for latency. Games couldn't be easily buffered as they require instant feedback between button-presses and what's seen on the screen.
*Streaming video does indeed exist for cell phones, but not on a mass-scale, at least in the United States.
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 wrote an iPhone browser that does just that. here it is: http://www.big5apps.com/
I can't really recommend that app, though. Most of it is open source, so you can go see for yourself that the code is terrible. The app is ugly, leaks abound, and so on. The guy really doesn't know objective-c. I became aware of it because I have a contracting client that wanted to use that app, discovered it was terrible, and paid me to write a better one.
I think this is an idea that is ripe for the picking, but I can't see how, really. I have most of such a browser written. Who can think of a way to monetize this?
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).
The demos look good, although I think the 12.99 price is going to rule it out, because at least initially its too much to pay in order to use one app.
For such a critical component, youd really want something open source [and free as in beer also]... after all it needs to keep pace rapidly, be rock solid, trusted by all developers, etc.
[EDIT : correction.. Big5Lite is free, not sure what non Lite has. Big5 project is opensource it seems - http://code.google.com/p/big5/]
App developers who use it can compete while adding to this common component - it plays the role of the browser. It just happens to be a browser which gives you access to nice hardware features such as geo location, media library, contacts etc [policed by os].
Here lies the solution for some percentage of apps, between 90.0 and 99.95.
Bingo. The big attraction is that developers can make a silly puzzle game that would have to be free on the web, but they can charge 99 cents for it in the app store. Plus, billing and credit card processing is just done for you. It makes me wonder if there is an opportunity for a startup to provide a web app store. Would be hard to pull off, and would likely really irritate Apple. But it might be possible.
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 over it and talk about the simplicity and openness of the system.
In other words: if writing a web app is sufficiently bad to not be worth the time on iPhone, why is it apparently generally held that it'll be sufficiently good to be worth the time on Chrome OS?
1) ChromeOS has Google's NaCL baked in -- you can still build native x86 or ARM code to blit to a framebuffer, just with a browser as the window decoration.
2) Your webapp for ChromeOS does not need to be specialized -- you don't have to account for fat-fingered multitouch on a small fixed screen.
Yep. And I don't have to bear the time cost of the interface downloading and rendering. As a user and not a developer I will take a native app over a web app any day.
But giving this article any credence is giving it too much credit. It's shock-blogging and nothing more.
Any reasonably interesting web app is going to do it's "work" on the server. A web app can run it's UI in offline mode but you've scooped it out's brains.
Impressively worthless comment. If MS Access apps were free to develop and worked on any platform in useful sandboxes, your sarcasm would be warranted. Instead you make yourself look like as idiot, suggesting that the Web is popular because people didn't know about Access.
Whoosh That's the sound of my comment going over your head.
If you think the web is popular because it's a cross platform sandboxed version of Access (which is essentially what you were suggesting) then you're the idiot. There's only so many useful applications you can make by simply storing and retrieving very simple data locally.
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.
"It also supports JavaScript geolocation, which is (I hope) only the first step towards true device APIs that will give JavaScript developers access to phone functionality such as the camera, text messaging, the address book, and more. I’m assuming Apple is working on all that because it’s the next logical step."
One could also argue that Apple benefits most in the short term by crippling web apps, since the App Store represents a revenue stream and is the main selling point of all their recent advertising.
I'm gonna call bullshit on the general conspiracy theory, here. Mobile Safari is the best mobile browser, period. And WebKit is the engine for the next best.
Adding camera, accelerometer, address-book integration etc. needs to wait for W3C standards to emerge and stabilize before they can be put into Mobile Safari.
What might prove interesting is if a standard for payment mechanisms emerges, so that a web app can take payments mediated through the iTMS.
The essence of the AppStore hovers around marketing & distribution, not technology. Apple set up a great distribution channel, making it super-easy for developers to get paid & they are throwing in some free promotion to boot. In the end, it's about money: can you afford the opportunity cost of not being present on the AppStore & make money right now? What's the cost of promoting your WebKit app going to be? Apple convinced people that it is ok to pay a little money for simple apps that run on their mobile phone. That was Apple's genius move, not the technology that makes iPhone apps tick. If you simply follow the money the whole AppStore debacle becomes a lot clearer.
I know this is really only applicable for a few cities, but speaking for myself: as a consumer, I don't want webapps right now. AT&T's network sucks hard in NYC, and even if it didn't, a very large portion of the time I spend with apps on my phone is when I'm killing time on the subway. Offline is important, and while we're starting to solve that with some of the browser tech he pointed to, it really isn't there yet in a form that's competitive with native apps.
I mean offline as an experience, not as a caching problem, which in my case means games and other apps that rely on the full capabilities of the hardware. I thought that would be obvious from the context as a native app that needs online access isn't much better on the subway than a webapp.
Worthless linkbait, and misses the point entirely. Namely: how many iPhone developers are making decent revenue from a web app?
Mobile Safari could be the most powerful web experience in the world, but without a simple, trusted payment mechanism, it'll be largely ignored by "stupid" iPhone developers.
iPhone developers are part of the problem: specifically the ones who create a zillion "shovelware" apps, some so pointless that Apple has got to the point of banning entire developers.
Apple intended the review process to be basic third-party QA--something that the commercial software industry needs in general--but the noisy, trivial slush like "Dial Girlfriend" and apps that show a few P.D. pictures lifted off Google Images are tying up Apple's resources and making it a chore for users to find anything good.
That's the inevitable result of the approval process. Make a sophisticated app with lots of functionality, and there's a greatly increased chance that Apple will find something wrong with it. On the other hand a one button fart app will go right through.
You don't need a native web app to present content without a network connection. You just need to use the HTML 5 offline application cache thats been in Mobile Safari since iPhone OS 2.1
But instead, iPhone developers are eagerly bending over begging Apple for more because of their myopic obsession with bad APIs, the twin geekgasms of both objecty stuff and C, bloated SDKs, impossible layout mechanisms, and all the rest of the archaic nonsense we’re going to have to rid the mobile Web of in the next few years.
It's pretty clear he's never developed with Objective-C, Cocoa/UIKit, etc. if he's calling it a bloated and bad API. UIKit in particular is fresh, clean, and very nice overall, IMO. (I spent years in Javascript/HTML/CSS, moved to the iPhone for awhile and worked on some major projects, and recently started developing an app on Cocoa for OSX - which is a lot more crusty than the iPhone.)
I also find it somewhat ironic that he talks about "impossible layout mechanisms" whereas almost every time I've been involved with a webapp I've hit upon some tricky layout requirement that is a pain in the ass because of CSS' builtin assumptions.
This article could be written much less offensively as, "The appcache in iPhone OS > 2.1 means web apps don't have to be second-class citizens." As it is, it makes some strong assertions but fails to actually educate developers.
That said, I agree with most of the points in this article, but I think the biggest reason why the App Store will continue to be the authority for iPhone apps is simple: it's a total pain to enter credit card payment information on your phone.
Until someone changes that, nobody will want to pay $0.99 for even a spectacularly good web app. Perhaps the solution is to use a more common payment system, like Amazon or Paypal credentials.
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 content for a fixed fee with some of the fee going to content developers) will replace the "free" web and app-store models. The web is close to this already but the fees aren't shunted quite enough to content developers.
It also supports JavaScript geolocation, which is (I hope) only the first step towards true device APIs that will give JavaScript developers access to phone functionality such as the camera, text messaging, the address book, and more. I’m assuming Apple is working on all that because it’s the next logical step.
I was sympathetic to Apple's original line about iPhone apps -- that web apps were iPhone apps -- under this same assumption, that over time MobileSafari would get all these capabilities and more.
But those have been slow to materialize, and now Apple is making a bunch of money via the App Store. Why add things to MobileSafari that remove Apple's cut of sales? Or otherwise splinter the billing/in-app-purchasing system? Or confusingly 'duplicate functionality'? The assumption that Apple is a "true believer" in web apps becoming as capable as App Store apps may no longer be safe.
Going strictly by Apple's self-interest, it would be equally valid to predict that Apple may, over time, add various kinds of policy or remote-driven cripple-switches to MobileSafari -- so the web isn't a back-door offering 'inappropriate content' or otherwise competing with the App Store.
Of course Google is a "true believer" in web apps. Any bets on when we'll see a Chrome browser for the iPhone?
Summary: "Webapps are almost as good as Native Apps in many ways."
The author reveals no advantages of webapps over a good AppStore that allows 3rd-party software sources. He is simply angry that he doesn't get enough attention as a web developer, not especially different from the complaint of a three year old child, though with the language of a nine year old.
We can criticize the delivery.. but given the popularity of the thread, I think the OP is making a valid point.
I have written location-aware iPhone native apps, and if I had an open-source alternative to Big5 then, I probably would have used that.
In my case it would have saved me quite a lot of overhead in terms of moving from Linux to a full mac development platform. Not having to learn a new syntax and api for iPhone might have been handy... and then I would have avoided having to jump through the code-signing hoops that tend to break when you upgrade software versions.
So.. that's quite a bit of overhead for an app which only uses the geo-location feature of the hardware.
I do enjoy the Mac platform, XCode etc. I'm not apple bashing here, but making a comparison.
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.
> After ten years I am f*ing tired of the "Web development is not real programming" bullshit that the arrogant bastards in "real programming" are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new.
As someone who tinkered with browser-specific Javascript in the ugly, pre-jQuery early days of DHTML and failed to see where Javascript and HTML and CSS were headed (retreating into the safe world of Java for years - completely missing the ascendance of XHTML/jQuery/CSS - rendering my web skills of the Netscape 4.x era), I agree.
We're almost there, one step removed and we'll have it.
Let's replace 'stupid' for 'greedy'.
Then --> more fool the iPhone users that are paying billions of dollars for average/poor applications that could be replaced by FREE, high quality web apps.
Apple have found a way to make a forture selling what is already freely available - a neat trick.
Isn't it incredible that anybody would pay for a 'dictionary application' these days - whatever the platform?
79 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadAnd fucking them real hard where it hurts is exactly what Apple is doing right now.
We choose the world we want to live in, and I don't want to live in a world where writing like this is unremarkable. It adds nothing to the overall argument and coarsens us to no purpose.
I am sympathetic to the general gist of "developers would be better off working without a gatekeeper", and have said much the same myself this weekend, but those who Apple chooses to win do benefit enormously from a built-in, captive audience who is exposed to Apple's annointed developers. There is no comparable method of exposure for mobile web application developers.
There is also the non-trivial benefit of actually getting paid money to consider. You can certainly make money on the wide-open Internet, but the tactics you use for it and the apps you make are wholly different from what works on the iPhone. (What I wouldn't give for my customers being able to buy my software in two clicks, but alas...)
I just installed two webapps on my iPod and they're quickly becoming my most-used icons.
He's not talking about iPhone developers, he's talking about the people in the sentence before it:
After ten years I am fucking tired of the “Web development is not real programming” bullshit that the arrogant bastards in “real programming” are spouting because they’re too frightened to learn something new.
Now, the Venn diagram may have some overlap, but still.
I do however object to his calling the entire iPhone developer community out as stupid and arrogant. How arrogant is it to presume that everyone of the many iPhone developers who have complaints about the current approval system is, in his words, stupid? If anything the author is the arrogant, misinformed, and dare I say, stupid one here.
I'm torn about whether or not to flag this. While this has generated some good discussion on HN, I don't think we should really cater to troll material like this. If you cannot communicate your opinions in an intelligent, civil way, and cannot deal with your fellow developers with some decorum, then please don't say anything at all.
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...
That said, I've been wanting to write a free guide to SEO aimed at HN-like companies, because I think its important. However, the response from HackerNews to anything involving SEO is so harsh, I've felt it would be a waste of my time. If that's not the case, please let me know.
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.
As a distribution outlet, nothing (yet) can compete with the app store.
The client see's it as a "iPhone app" you can host/sell it in the store, but it's really just a web app.
(Maybe there's a restriction on this, but I can't see why there would be...)
So this doesn't solve the problem.
It's far better to build up a real sustainable following yourself based on real merits. The app store is full of gimicky one time apps people will use once to show their friends, then never use again :/
As bad as Apple is at vetting and distributing software (when compared to the web they are bad a distributing software, at least in terms of speed), they are terrific, although expensive, payment processes.
The fact that every iPhone user necessarily has an iTunes account, and they are only one touch and a password away from paying you for your software, can't be overstated.
http://www.spreedly.com http://www.cheddargetter.com http://www.recurly.com
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 Javascript)
Here's the list...
Voices: Requires access to the mic
JellyCar: Requires native app for soundtrack (which is actually a big deal in the game)
RedLaser: Requires access to the camera
Call of Duty: Graphics require a native app
All in One Gamebox: Graphics require a native app
Alarm Clock Pro: Has to be able to play music library
Metal Gear: Graphics require a native app
Streaming live video en-masses would likely exist* far before streaming games, given you can buffer video to compensate for latency. Games couldn't be easily buffered as they require instant feedback between button-presses and what's seen on the screen.
*Streaming video does indeed exist for cell phones, but not on a mass-scale, at least in the United States.
Six months later they cut back the free channel lineup so there's nothing interesting to watch.
Admittedly not for 3D intensive games. But maybe flash+browser will catch up with 3D. Only a year ago RaphealJS was magic.
I can't really recommend that app, though. Most of it is open source, so you can go see for yourself that the code is terrible. The app is ugly, leaks abound, and so on. The guy really doesn't know objective-c. I became aware of it because I have a contracting client that wanted to use that app, discovered it was terrible, and paid me to write a better one.
I think this is an idea that is ripe for the picking, but I can't see how, really. I have most of such a browser written. Who can think of a way to monetize this?
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).
For such a critical component, youd really want something open source [and free as in beer also]... after all it needs to keep pace rapidly, be rock solid, trusted by all developers, etc.
[EDIT : correction.. Big5Lite is free, not sure what non Lite has. Big5 project is opensource it seems - http://code.google.com/p/big5/]
App developers who use it can compete while adding to this common component - it plays the role of the browser. It just happens to be a browser which gives you access to nice hardware features such as geo location, media library, contacts etc [policed by os].
Here lies the solution for some percentage of apps, between 90.0 and 99.95.
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 over it and talk about the simplicity and openness of the system.
In other words: if writing a web app is sufficiently bad to not be worth the time on iPhone, why is it apparently generally held that it'll be sufficiently good to be worth the time on Chrome OS?
2) Your webapp for ChromeOS does not need to be specialized -- you don't have to account for fat-fingered multitouch on a small fixed screen.
But giving this article any credence is giving it too much credit. It's shock-blogging and nothing more.
If you think the web is popular because it's a cross platform sandboxed version of Access (which is essentially what you were suggesting) then you're the idiot. There's only so many useful applications you can make by simply storing and retrieving very simple data locally.
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.
One could also argue that Apple benefits most in the short term by crippling web apps, since the App Store represents a revenue stream and is the main selling point of all their recent advertising.
Adding camera, accelerometer, address-book integration etc. needs to wait for W3C standards to emerge and stabilize before they can be put into Mobile Safari.
What might prove interesting is if a standard for payment mechanisms emerges, so that a web app can take payments mediated through the iTMS.
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...
Mobile Safari could be the most powerful web experience in the world, but without a simple, trusted payment mechanism, it'll be largely ignored by "stupid" iPhone developers.
Apple intended the review process to be basic third-party QA--something that the commercial software industry needs in general--but the noisy, trivial slush like "Dial Girlfriend" and apps that show a few P.D. pictures lifted off Google Images are tying up Apple's resources and making it a chore for users to find anything good.
Audio. QED
(Not to mention the iPod Touch, often used out of wireless range.)
My respect for quirksmode just fell, a lot. The willful ignorance he shows in his article is staggering.
And the rude delivery doesn't help either.
You don't need a native web app to present content without a network connection. You just need to use the HTML 5 offline application cache thats been in Mobile Safari since iPhone OS 2.1
It's pretty clear he's never developed with Objective-C, Cocoa/UIKit, etc. if he's calling it a bloated and bad API. UIKit in particular is fresh, clean, and very nice overall, IMO. (I spent years in Javascript/HTML/CSS, moved to the iPhone for awhile and worked on some major projects, and recently started developing an app on Cocoa for OSX - which is a lot more crusty than the iPhone.)
I also find it somewhat ironic that he talks about "impossible layout mechanisms" whereas almost every time I've been involved with a webapp I've hit upon some tricky layout requirement that is a pain in the ass because of CSS' builtin assumptions.
This part reads like satire...
That said, I agree with most of the points in this article, but I think the biggest reason why the App Store will continue to be the authority for iPhone apps is simple: it's a total pain to enter credit card payment information on your phone.
Until someone changes that, nobody will want to pay $0.99 for even a spectacularly good web app. Perhaps the solution is to use a more common payment system, like Amazon or Paypal credentials.
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 content for a fixed fee with some of the fee going to content developers) will replace the "free" web and app-store models. The web is close to this already but the fees aren't shunted quite enough to content developers.
I was sympathetic to Apple's original line about iPhone apps -- that web apps were iPhone apps -- under this same assumption, that over time MobileSafari would get all these capabilities and more.
But those have been slow to materialize, and now Apple is making a bunch of money via the App Store. Why add things to MobileSafari that remove Apple's cut of sales? Or otherwise splinter the billing/in-app-purchasing system? Or confusingly 'duplicate functionality'? The assumption that Apple is a "true believer" in web apps becoming as capable as App Store apps may no longer be safe.
Going strictly by Apple's self-interest, it would be equally valid to predict that Apple may, over time, add various kinds of policy or remote-driven cripple-switches to MobileSafari -- so the web isn't a back-door offering 'inappropriate content' or otherwise competing with the App Store.
Of course Google is a "true believer" in web apps. Any bets on when we'll see a Chrome browser for the iPhone?
The author reveals no advantages of webapps over a good AppStore that allows 3rd-party software sources. He is simply angry that he doesn't get enough attention as a web developer, not especially different from the complaint of a three year old child, though with the language of a nine year old.
I have written location-aware iPhone native apps, and if I had an open-source alternative to Big5 then, I probably would have used that.
In my case it would have saved me quite a lot of overhead in terms of moving from Linux to a full mac development platform. Not having to learn a new syntax and api for iPhone might have been handy... and then I would have avoided having to jump through the code-signing hoops that tend to break when you upgrade software versions.
So.. that's quite a bit of overhead for an app which only uses the geo-location feature of the hardware.
I do enjoy the Mac platform, XCode etc. I'm not apple bashing here, but making a comparison.
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.
As someone who tinkered with browser-specific Javascript in the ugly, pre-jQuery early days of DHTML and failed to see where Javascript and HTML and CSS were headed (retreating into the safe world of Java for years - completely missing the ascendance of XHTML/jQuery/CSS - rendering my web skills of the Netscape 4.x era), I agree.
Let's replace 'stupid' for 'greedy'.
Then --> more fool the iPhone users that are paying billions of dollars for average/poor applications that could be replaced by FREE, high quality web apps.
Apple have found a way to make a forture selling what is already freely available - a neat trick.
Isn't it incredible that anybody would pay for a 'dictionary application' these days - whatever the platform?