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How Apple gave up on web apps – to make more money with iCloud

You have to remember that iCloud isn’t Apple’s way of entering the web application market, but actually a measure of ensuring the future of their own ecosystem. Apple doesn’t want to make web apps, they want their developers to make more money creating apps for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

davidedicillo 15y ago
And what would be the problem with a business trying to be more profitable giving away something free (like iCloud)? I'm sure Google is offering all their services because they are very nice people, not to make more money off the ads.
- ivanbrezakbrkan 15y ago
  Well, giving something away for free is not a bad business move (Facebook's free ;)), but do you really think that Google just makes their services free because they're nice? A business like any other, they just make $$$ of us in a more indirect business model.
  - davidedicillo 15y ago
    Oh my god, did you really didn't understand that I was sarcastic? That was my point, I felt that in the article there was a negative angle about Apple trying to make more money and I just wanted to point out that the nemesis of Apple, Google, who is trying to bring everything online, does that for the same exact reason, to make more money.
    - ivanbrezakbrkan 15y ago
      Sorry. Hard to say without a smiley since it woudn't be the first time someone argue that Google is just good and nothing else
tpatke 15y ago
The author hints at good point - is the browser going to be around in 10 years? The trend definitely seems to be cloud + rich client. In that case, is the browser needed?
- Yhippa 15y ago
  I'm torn on this. On one hand I love the performance and look/feel of apps running natively. On the other hand I like the concept of getting access to my data or applications ubiquitously. On the other side of this I feel Google is working to make the browser more of it's centerpiece in the long run.
- hxa7241 15y ago
  Is the browser needed from a technical or usable perspective? I do not know, but it seems difficult to separate that from the economic-architectural aspect, which really seems important. The browser is 'needed', is valuable, because it is an independent, unowned 'medium' for other products and activity. It allows something more like real competition. That independence is part of the open architecture of the internet that is probably what makes it all so great. . . . and what would an independent rich-client look like? Would that not be a browser pretty much? . . .
  - sunchild 15y ago
    "Browser" itself is an inherently vague concept. Is iTunes as it exists today a browser? How about Twitter clients that render HTML/JS? When you isolate WebKit and the other rendering engines as OS-level services, it's even fuzzier.
- Hawramani 15y ago
  But doesn't a rich client need a platform, the browser being one of them? The rest are proprietary platforms like iOS. If the browser platform is not around in 10 years, I hope that means it has gotten superseded by a more powerful open platform that is not owned by anyone. But I do not see any potential for a revolutionary change in the way we consume the web. What I expect (or maybe hope for) is just browsers that keep getting more powerful, I expect evolutionary progress in the browser space. And I expect the browser model to remain the dominant web platform, because it is open and it is good enough--there are no other paradigms that blow it away; Adobe Air, Java, and iOS are just more of the same (whether it runs in a browser, on Air, JRE or iOS, it is still an app). Therefore since all of these platforms are based on the same principles and they all do the same thing, what we need is to improve the web platform to be the best one. If we find out that there are certain bottlenecks that will make it impossible for the web to be as fast and shiny as the others, we'll need to re-engineer the parts that are causing the bottleneck. What is it that makes iOS apps faster and shinier than web apps? Couldn't we add new technologies or improve the current ones to allow web apps to be just as good if not better?
Yhippa 15y ago
This makes sense. Give a huge incentive for users of Apple's products to continue to buy their devices and get further ingrained into their ecosystem while getting that desirable vendor lock-in.
PanMan 15y ago
Apple doesn't make that much money directly on the app ecosystem: If they paid 2.5 billion to developers (70%), their revenue is about 1 billion (the remaining 30%). For that billon they have to host all apps (also the free ones), manually check all submissions (400.000 apps Excluding upgrades!), and process payments. Apple is making more on iPad covers this year alone. However, the app ecosystem is a great lockin for users to keep using iOS instead of other mobile platforms. That's their biggest gain, and with iCloud they embiggen this platform lockin.
- watty 15y ago
  Do you have a source? I'm not saying you're wrong but it seems crazy that Apple makes more revenue off of iPad covers than all of the app market.
  - xuki 15y ago
    25 million iPad have been sold. Say 30% of them (with the iPad 2 I see more people bought the Smart Cover though) bought Apple's covers, that's about 8.5 million. Accessories' margin is high, let's assume they make $30 per cover. That's $255 million profit. I seriously doubt Apple could break even for the App Store alone (the huge review team and infrastructure cost).
  - PanMan 15y ago
    http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/13/the-billion-dollar-smart-cover/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/13/the-billion-dollar-smart-co... Estimates 1 billion revenue on smart covers this year alone.
bradleyland 15y ago
Apple's view of the web is a little different than most. When you think of today's internet, you think of web pages, but there's a whole other layer. If you look at web development trends, you'll see that the tools we have (like HTTP) are being pushed to do things they weren't originally designed to do. Starting with the first use of HttpRequestXmlResponse, web developers pushed HTTP down a conceptual layer. HTTP used to be the destination. Content was pushed, in whole, using HTTP. Javascript enabled web browsers give us the power to use HTTP as an underlying transport. With these tools, the balance of our app moved back in to the browser. This ideology is pretty well expressed in pieces espousing the virtues of the "Javascript Age". The browser, enabled by javascript, has become a platform in and of itself. This pushed the OS down a conceptual layer as well. Google is embracing this model because they live on the web. Apple is fighting this model, because they live in the hardware and OS market. Apple sees the internet as a ubiquitous transport. They're building an ecosystem of "things", just like Google, only Apple's "things" are iOS devices, where Google's "things" are websites. Android is Google's hedge against Apple's platform. It exists primarily as a countermeasure. If Google believed in Apple's view of the internet -- where devices are king -- they'd have much stronger ownership of the entire Android platform. In short, they'd go vertical as well. They've made some small plays in that direction (Nexus phones), but they're not seriously committed to it. The great part is, we get to watch this battle unfold. I don't particularly care which one wins. I think both perspectives have merit, because I don't buy in to the many "principle" arguments that push matters one way or the other. Never forget, there's money to be made on both sides of the table.
- gnaritas 15y ago
  Who says there has to be a winner? What's wrong with a world with both options?
  - bradleyland 15y ago
    That's definitely a possible outcome. That's not to say there won't be a battle though.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
YooLi 15y ago
Is Apple making MobileMe web mail look like the desktop app really an indication that it doesn't know how to make a web app? Where does the "Apple doesn't know the web" idea coming from? I've heard "Apple doesn't know social" because of their stumbles with social in the past, likewise with Google, but Apple not knowing the web makes no sense to me. The last place I saw it was saying Apple didn't know the web because their designs were "pixel-perfect" and beautiful. That's two people saying it because the web apps look nice?? What does it take to "know the web"? So iCloud doesnt have a web interface. Who says one still isnt coming. Judging by everything else in the keynote, it won't look like tradition cloud storage, a la Dropbox. Apple is abstracting away the filesystem. It will probably show you the apps you have that include iCloud support and the files each uses.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Apple doesn't have a single web service now that MobileMe is gone. Whether they don't "get" the web or they get it and just choose to ignore it is splitting hairs.
  - chc 15y ago
    The failure of MobileMe strongly suggests the former. If Apple didn't care about the Web, they could have not made a product in that area just like they do with all the other things they don't care about.
isleyaardvark 15y ago
> Just follow the money. Now lets remember where Apple makes their money and why they paid over $2.5 billion to developers… Revenue for mobile app markets is on the rise. Apple wants their users to buy apps that have the advantages of web apps If you follow the money you find $1.8 billion in revenue from the App Store (2010), which would be 2% of the $87 billion revenue Apple has earned in the past 12 months. Sources: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-mobile-app-store-revenues-but-its-share/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-m... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL This thesis pops up every couple of months, and it's always ridiculous.
- xuki 15y ago
  You're not getting his point. He's saying Apple wants customers to buy apps to be locked-in.
snissn 15y ago
This is why they acquired lala.com, right..? </cynicism>
zmitri 15y ago
One of the main differentiators of price for Apple products is the disk size -- in fact, for iPads and iPods, its the main differentiator. They want to push to all of your devices, because they want you to use up your storage and pay the $100 to $300 markup between model A and model B. If everything was accessible from the web and it used smart caching like spotify or google, there would be much less need for bigger hard drives.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Cloud storage makes hard drive size largely irrelevant.
  - glhaynes 15y ago
    Much moreso in a streaming model. In a "download at will" model like iCloud, having more storage certainly makes things more convenient. But, yes, still less relevant, for sure.
zipdog 15y ago
Apple understands that one of the core benefits that they give to consumers is consistency. The PC world is wildly inconsistent, while iOS provides enormous consistency - I can pick up any device and apps will function the same. This is really the goal of demoting the PC and the Mac. Its akin to Facebook's garden vs MySpace's wild forest. Web apps simply can't provide the kind of consistency that most users want. In the battle between Linux and Windows, the freedom of Linux to allow the user complete control has not been a selling point for most users. Apple knows this and knows that a controlled garden of iOS apps will be preferable for most people, compared to web apps (particularly with the browser standards starting to slip again)

davidedicillo 15y ago

And what would be the problem with a business trying to be more profitable giving away something free (like iCloud)? I'm sure Google is offering all their services because they are very nice people, not to make more money off the ads.

ivanbrezakbrkan 15y ago
Well, giving something away for free is not a bad business move (Facebook's free ;)), but do you really think that Google just makes their services free because they're nice? A business like any other, they just make $$$ of us in a more indirect business model.
- davidedicillo 15y ago
  Oh my god, did you really didn't understand that I was sarcastic? That was my point, I felt that in the article there was a negative angle about Apple trying to make more money and I just wanted to point out that the nemesis of Apple, Google, who is trying to bring everything online, does that for the same exact reason, to make more money.
  - ivanbrezakbrkan 15y ago
    Sorry. Hard to say without a smiley since it woudn't be the first time someone argue that Google is just good and nothing else

tpatke 15y ago

The author hints at good point - is the browser going to be around in 10 years? The trend definitely seems to be cloud + rich client. In that case, is the browser needed?

Yhippa 15y ago
I'm torn on this. On one hand I love the performance and look/feel of apps running natively. On the other hand I like the concept of getting access to my data or applications ubiquitously. On the other side of this I feel Google is working to make the browser more of it's centerpiece in the long run.
hxa7241 15y ago
Is the browser needed from a technical or usable perspective? I do not know, but it seems difficult to separate that from the economic-architectural aspect, which really seems important. The browser is 'needed', is valuable, because it is an independent, unowned 'medium' for other products and activity. It allows something more like real competition. That independence is part of the open architecture of the internet that is probably what makes it all so great. . . . and what would an independent rich-client look like? Would that not be a browser pretty much? . . .
- sunchild 15y ago
  "Browser" itself is an inherently vague concept. Is iTunes as it exists today a browser? How about Twitter clients that render HTML/JS? When you isolate WebKit and the other rendering engines as OS-level services, it's even fuzzier.
Hawramani 15y ago
But doesn't a rich client need a platform, the browser being one of them? The rest are proprietary platforms like iOS. If the browser platform is not around in 10 years, I hope that means it has gotten superseded by a more powerful open platform that is not owned by anyone. But I do not see any potential for a revolutionary change in the way we consume the web. What I expect (or maybe hope for) is just browsers that keep getting more powerful, I expect evolutionary progress in the browser space. And I expect the browser model to remain the dominant web platform, because it is open and it is good enough--there are no other paradigms that blow it away; Adobe Air, Java, and iOS are just more of the same (whether it runs in a browser, on Air, JRE or iOS, it is still an app). Therefore since all of these platforms are based on the same principles and they all do the same thing, what we need is to improve the web platform to be the best one. If we find out that there are certain bottlenecks that will make it impossible for the web to be as fast and shiny as the others, we'll need to re-engineer the parts that are causing the bottleneck. What is it that makes iOS apps faster and shinier than web apps? Couldn't we add new technologies or improve the current ones to allow web apps to be just as good if not better?

Yhippa 15y ago

This makes sense. Give a huge incentive for users of Apple's products to continue to buy their devices and get further ingrained into their ecosystem while getting that desirable vendor lock-in.

PanMan 15y ago

Apple doesn't make that much money directly on the app ecosystem: If they paid 2.5 billion to developers (70%), their revenue is about 1 billion (the remaining 30%). For that billon they have to host all apps (also the free ones), manually check all submissions (400.000 apps Excluding upgrades!), and process payments. Apple is making more on iPad covers this year alone. However, the app ecosystem is a great lockin for users to keep using iOS instead of other mobile platforms. That's their biggest gain, and with iCloud they embiggen this platform lockin.

watty 15y ago
Do you have a source? I'm not saying you're wrong but it seems crazy that Apple makes more revenue off of iPad covers than all of the app market.
- xuki 15y ago
  25 million iPad have been sold. Say 30% of them (with the iPad 2 I see more people bought the Smart Cover though) bought Apple's covers, that's about 8.5 million. Accessories' margin is high, let's assume they make $30 per cover. That's $255 million profit. I seriously doubt Apple could break even for the App Store alone (the huge review team and infrastructure cost).
- PanMan 15y ago
  http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/13/the-billion-dollar-smart-cover/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/13/the-billion-dollar-smart-co... Estimates 1 billion revenue on smart covers this year alone.

bradleyland 15y ago

Apple's view of the web is a little different than most. When you think of today's internet, you think of web pages, but there's a whole other layer. If you look at web development trends, you'll see that the tools we have (like HTTP) are being pushed to do things they weren't originally designed to do. Starting with the first use of HttpRequestXmlResponse, web developers pushed HTTP down a conceptual layer. HTTP used to be the destination. Content was pushed, in whole, using HTTP. Javascript enabled web browsers give us the power to use HTTP as an underlying transport. With these tools, the balance of our app moved back in to the browser. This ideology is pretty well expressed in pieces espousing the virtues of the "Javascript Age". The browser, enabled by javascript, has become a platform in and of itself. This pushed the OS down a conceptual layer as well. Google is embracing this model because they live on the web. Apple is fighting this model, because they live in the hardware and OS market. Apple sees the internet as a ubiquitous transport. They're building an ecosystem of "things", just like Google, only Apple's "things" are iOS devices, where Google's "things" are websites. Android is Google's hedge against Apple's platform. It exists primarily as a countermeasure. If Google believed in Apple's view of the internet -- where devices are king -- they'd have much stronger ownership of the entire Android platform. In short, they'd go vertical as well. They've made some small plays in that direction (Nexus phones), but they're not seriously committed to it. The great part is, we get to watch this battle unfold. I don't particularly care which one wins. I think both perspectives have merit, because I don't buy in to the many "principle" arguments that push matters one way or the other. Never forget, there's money to be made on both sides of the table.

gnaritas 15y ago
Who says there has to be a winner? What's wrong with a world with both options?
- bradleyland 15y ago
  That's definitely a possible outcome. That's not to say there won't be a battle though.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

YooLi 15y ago

Is Apple making MobileMe web mail look like the desktop app really an indication that it doesn't know how to make a web app? Where does the "Apple doesn't know the web" idea coming from? I've heard "Apple doesn't know social" because of their stumbles with social in the past, likewise with Google, but Apple not knowing the web makes no sense to me. The last place I saw it was saying Apple didn't know the web because their designs were "pixel-perfect" and beautiful. That's two people saying it because the web apps look nice?? What does it take to "know the web"? So iCloud doesnt have a web interface. Who says one still isnt coming. Judging by everything else in the keynote, it won't look like tradition cloud storage, a la Dropbox. Apple is abstracting away the filesystem. It will probably show you the apps you have that include iCloud support and the files each uses.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Apple doesn't have a single web service now that MobileMe is gone. Whether they don't "get" the web or they get it and just choose to ignore it is splitting hairs.
- chc 15y ago
  The failure of MobileMe strongly suggests the former. If Apple didn't care about the Web, they could have not made a product in that area just like they do with all the other things they don't care about.

isleyaardvark 15y ago

> Just follow the money. Now lets remember where Apple makes their money and why they paid over $2.5 billion to developers… Revenue for mobile app markets is on the rise. Apple wants their users to buy apps that have the advantages of web apps If you follow the money you find $1.8 billion in revenue from the App Store (2010), which would be 2% of the $87 billion revenue Apple has earned in the past 12 months. Sources: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-mobile-app-store-revenues-but-its-share/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-m... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL This thesis pops up every couple of months, and it's always ridiculous.

xuki 15y ago
You're not getting his point. He's saying Apple wants customers to buy apps to be locked-in.

snissn 15y ago

This is why they acquired lala.com, right..? </cynicism>

zmitri 15y ago

One of the main differentiators of price for Apple products is the disk size -- in fact, for iPads and iPods, its the main differentiator. They want to push to all of your devices, because they want you to use up your storage and pay the $100 to $300 markup between model A and model B. If everything was accessible from the web and it used smart caching like spotify or google, there would be much less need for bigger hard drives.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Cloud storage makes hard drive size largely irrelevant.
- glhaynes 15y ago
  Much moreso in a streaming model. In a "download at will" model like iCloud, having more storage certainly makes things more convenient. But, yes, still less relevant, for sure.

zipdog 15y ago

Apple understands that one of the core benefits that they give to consumers is consistency. The PC world is wildly inconsistent, while iOS provides enormous consistency - I can pick up any device and apps will function the same. This is really the goal of demoting the PC and the Mac. Its akin to Facebook's garden vs MySpace's wild forest. Web apps simply can't provide the kind of consistency that most users want. In the battle between Linux and Windows, the freedom of Linux to allow the user complete control has not been a selling point for most users. Apple knows this and knows that a controlled garden of iOS apps will be preferable for most people, compared to web apps (particularly with the browser standards starting to slip again)