32 ms·

People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps

52 points by jancona 16y ago

JarekS 16y 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 16y 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
pg 16y 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 16y ago
  YCRFS 7? :)
- JarekS 16y 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-smartupz-mobile.html 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-predictions.html http://blog.smartupz.com/2009/12/islate-aka-apple-itablet-my...
- dustingetz 16y 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 16y 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 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 http://fortysquires.com ).
    - raganwald 16y ago
      Another example of multi-touch is Naughts and Crosses, one of the two demos I made for the iGesture jQuery plugin: http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture After drawing some naughts and crosses, you can rotate the board by placing two fingers on the screen and rotating them 45 degrees or more. It's all Javascript and jQuery.
    - mcav 16y ago
      Accelerometer would work just fine, if iPhone OS exposed a javascript event for it. (Not even all that CPU-intensive either.)
    - vorador 16y ago
      Ain't you afraid of running into legal trouble because of your startup's name ?
  - pg 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- metachor 16y 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 16y 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.
    - dmoney 16y ago
      There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach. Why wouldn't JavaScript and browsers continue to evolve until that isn't the case?
      - ajg1977 16y ago
        Clearly they will, assuming you are willing to wait a few generations of hardware for them to become powerful enough. I think there's now a Javascript port of Quake 2 that's just about playable on a modern PC. That game's 13 years old.
- joe_the_user 16y 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 16y ago
I love web apps, but... can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?
- abstractbill 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498
- fierarul 16y 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 16y 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.
    - fierarul 16y ago
      Not sure how complex it is, but combining HTML5 Offline Application support with an extension of the cache manifest to include signatures is what I have in mind. At this point Apple will have an exact version to review with their process and approve. I don't see how this is against their ecosystem. If you will use the same developer agreement, everything else will be the same: web-apps will still have to use StoreKit to sell stuff (so no Paypal, even if you are "on the web") and Apple gets their cut.
MWinther 16y 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 16y 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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

52 points by jancona 16y 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 16y 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

pg 16y 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 16y ago
YCRFS 7? :)
JarekS 16y 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-smartupz-mobile.html 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-predictions.html http://blog.smartupz.com/2009/12/islate-aka-apple-itablet-my...
dustingetz 16y 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 16y 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 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 http://fortysquires.com ).
  - raganwald 16y ago
    Another example of multi-touch is Naughts and Crosses, one of the two demos I made for the iGesture jQuery plugin: http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture After drawing some naughts and crosses, you can rotate the board by placing two fingers on the screen and rotating them 45 degrees or more. It's all Javascript and jQuery.
  - mcav 16y ago
    Accelerometer would work just fine, if iPhone OS exposed a javascript event for it. (Not even all that CPU-intensive either.)
  - vorador 16y ago
    Ain't you afraid of running into legal trouble because of your startup's name ?
- pg 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
metachor 16y 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 16y 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.
  - dmoney 16y ago
    There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach. Why wouldn't JavaScript and browsers continue to evolve until that isn't the case?
    - ajg1977 16y ago
      Clearly they will, assuming you are willing to wait a few generations of hardware for them to become powerful enough. I think there's now a Javascript port of Quake 2 that's just about playable on a modern PC. That game's 13 years old.
joe_the_user 16y 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 16y ago

I love web apps, but... can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?

abstractbill 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498

fierarul 16y 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 16y 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.
  - fierarul 16y ago
    Not sure how complex it is, but combining HTML5 Offline Application support with an extension of the cache manifest to include signatures is what I have in mind. At this point Apple will have an exact version to review with their process and approve. I don't see how this is against their ecosystem. If you will use the same developer agreement, everything else will be the same: web-apps will still have to use StoreKit to sell stuff (so no Paypal, even if you are "on the web") and Apple gets their cut.

MWinther 16y 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 16y 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.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]