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Ah yes, the old "web app so cool that Tim Cook decides to flush money down the toilet" strategy.

zzalpha 11y ago
Precisely. Unfortunately, there's a certain blindness to business realities among the tech community... a naive faith that the best, most open technology will obviously win, this despite copious evidence to the contrary. Flash had no chance against HTML5. Why? Because Adobe had no way to force it on users, and vendors had every reason to want to exclude it, from support/UX to battery life to security issues. The minute open standards reached a point where HTML5 can take over, it will. But high quality mobile web apps are a direct threat to Apple's and Google's business models for their respective platforms. The app stores are a primary way those organizations generate revenues with those platforms. They have precisely zero reason to move away from that model. And it's only with vendor support that mobile webapps have any chance at all. In both cases, the vendor is responsible for delivering the primary HTML renderer and JS engine. In both cases, the vendor is also responsible for exposing the APIs to the underlying OS that a webapp will rely upon for maximizing integration with the platform. Meanwhile, from the consumer's perspective, they're looking at apps, which have great OS integration, great performance, etc, versus a clunky webapp... the choice is obvious. So you have no consumer demand, due to vendor control ensuring webapps are inferior, and no vendor demand because apps are a direct source of revenue while the APIs encourage platform lock-in. It just ain't gonna happen.
- brlewis 11y ago
  Your comment about Google's business model is addressed at length in the article. Look for the section entitled "The difference with Google". If the web starts to work way better on Android than on iOS, Apple can still ignore it, but at least then consumers have options.
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    You (and the author) are presuming Google views mobile web apps as a competitive advantage, but we have no evidence for that. Moreover, the article clearly conflates the desire to make web sites perform well, with the desire to make mobile web applications perform well, with no basis for that assumption. Yes, lots and lots of Chrome users visit web sites. That doesn't mean Google feels a need to optimize Chrome to deliver mobile web apps (which requires things like richer, deeper integration with the OS).

Precisely. Unfortunately, there's a certain blindness to business realities among the tech community... a naive faith that the best, most open technology will obviously win, this despite copious evidence to the contrary. Flash had no chance against HTML5. Why? Because Adobe had no way to force it on users, and vendors had every reason to want to exclude it, from support/UX to battery life to security issues. The minute open standards reached a point where HTML5 can take over, it will. But high quality mobile web apps are a direct threat to Apple's and Google's business models for their respective platforms. The app stores are a primary way those organizations generate revenues with those platforms. They have precisely zero reason to move away from that model. And it's only with vendor support that mobile webapps have any chance at all. In both cases, the vendor is responsible for delivering the primary HTML renderer and JS engine. In both cases, the vendor is also responsible for exposing the APIs to the underlying OS that a webapp will rely upon for maximizing integration with the platform. Meanwhile, from the consumer's perspective, they're looking at apps, which have great OS integration, great performance, etc, versus a clunky webapp... the choice is obvious. So you have no consumer demand, due to vendor control ensuring webapps are inferior, and no vendor demand because apps are a direct source of revenue while the APIs encourage platform lock-in. It just ain't gonna happen.

brlewis 11y ago
Your comment about Google's business model is addressed at length in the article. Look for the section entitled "The difference with Google". If the web starts to work way better on Android than on iOS, Apple can still ignore it, but at least then consumers have options.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  You (and the author) are presuming Google views mobile web apps as a competitive advantage, but we have no evidence for that. Moreover, the article clearly conflates the desire to make web sites perform well, with the desire to make mobile web applications perform well, with no basis for that assumption. Yes, lots and lots of Chrome users visit web sites. That doesn't mean Google feels a need to optimize Chrome to deliver mobile web apps (which requires things like richer, deeper integration with the OS).