5 ms·

Reminder that Jobs initially did not support having an app store at all for the original iPhone, IIRC for reasons of maintaining the bar on experience. His prop

by anxrn 5y ago

Reminder that Jobs initially did not support having an app store at all for the original iPhone, IIRC for reasons of maintaining the bar on experience. His proposal was to build "apps" for use in Safari. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
That was because their iOS API wasn't ready for public consumption. Web apps were a stopgap so they had something to ship.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  No, Jobs actually didn't want an App Store. He had to be convinced.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I'd really love to know his mindset, because it's completely unfathomable to me. The idea of applications on the phone was something blindingly obvious to me ever since my first Nokia 3410 I had as a kid. The phone had a bunch of distinct functionalities other than making calls, which you could invoke through a menu. Why shouldn't I be able to add new ones? Write new ones myself? Installing custom software was later normalized when phones gained ability to run J2ME applets. By the time iPhone was conceived, it was an expected feature.
    - hehetrthrthrjn 5y ago
      > I'd really love to know his mindset, because it's completely unfathomable to me. He was fixated on having complete control.
      - hbn 5y ago
        And why would webapps give Apple complete control? Someone develops a webapp, I can make my own phone and anyone who wants to continue using all the webapps they were using in Safari on their iPhone can come over and do that in the browser on my phone. People develop native apps for the iPhone, and suddenly leaving the iPhone means leaving behind all those apps.
        KingMachiavelli 5y ago
        It's the other way around. WebApps at the time would have been a complete joke since mobile browsers were so limited. At least that's how I understand it. He just didn't want any third party apps. He wanted to make every app in-house. (For example the original YouTube app was an in-house project.) It sounds crazy but at the time the wild west of apps on the desktop meant that the user experience was pretty poor and allowed malware to explode. It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. No one realized a viable alternative was to lock down the device to a single store/publisher and then take a 30% cut. Now that WebApps probably could replace nearly all native apps, it's in Apple's best interest to not fully support PWAs, WASM, etc. because the app store is so lucrative.
        toyg 5y ago
        > It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. Nah, what drove web development was 100% ease of deployment. No more dealing with installers that don't work and people who don't know how to use them, the browser is already there; no more dealing with the pain of rolling out updates, you push to your own server and it's done. And you don't have to care about Windows stack vs Mac stack with completely different teams, a few css/js tweaks and you're done. Sun understood the issue and tried to put up a fight with their Java Web Start, but in the end the JRE still required an installer, with all the related issues. MS eventually got something like that working seamlessly, but it was 15 years too late.
        5y ago
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Nobody can know what Jobs actually wanted and what is narrative-building because he was the best storyteller this industry has ever seen.
- mthoms 5y ago
  Citation? This contradicts everything I’ve seen on the matter.
  - finiteseries 5y ago
    The article linked in the comment they’re replying to. According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, the tech guru was opposed to allowing third-party to run natively on iPhone… …Others in the know disagree with Isaacson's story and contend third-party apps were always on the iPhone roadmap; Jobs and company were simply not comfortable with releasing an SDK at launch. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      Apple put a lot of effort into the UIKit API and fixing the deficiencies of AppKit, I'm not sure why they would have done this if they didn't intend to later release it.
    - mthoms 5y ago
      Sorry, what I meant was, who are the "others in the know"?
krferriter 5y ago
We're now at the point where writing web-first apps that can get optionally also get compiled into "native" apps that run in a js/wasm runtime on any platform and act like native apps might get popular again.
- deadmutex 5y ago
  Is this allowed under iOS?
  - yen223 5y ago
    Yes. Apps that are basically a webview over a site are pretty common.
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      It may be common but it's not technically allowed. Apple forbids apps that are mere duplicates of a website. As with most things App Store, the rules are enforced inconsistently.
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      Apple changed their policies to prohibit this
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - judge2020 5y ago
    PWAs have acceptable (but not full) support on iOS 14 and 15, you just are forced to ask customers to “press the share button then press add to Home Screen” for it to install to the Home Screen like a regular app.
    - paxys 5y ago
      "Acceptable" is a stretch. There is no way of discovery, say via the App Store. There is no "Add to Home Screen" button (apps can only tell users to open safari settings and do it themselves). There are no push notifications or background sync/fetch. No way to play background media. Full screen doesn't work for anything outside of video. Only a small part of the web manifest file is recognized. The cache limit is a tiny 50MB, which will be purged in 7 days. Here is a very detailed post on this – https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
RNCTX 5y ago
But Jobs didn't turn down the money, did he? Nor did his wife turn down her friendship with the Epsteins. There's no need to volunteer to write hagiographies for billionaires, they pay PR firms to do it for them.

by anxrn 5y ago

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

That was because their iOS API wasn't ready for public consumption. Web apps were a stopgap so they had something to ship.

marcellus23 5y ago
No, Jobs actually didn't want an App Store. He had to be convinced.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I'd really love to know his mindset, because it's completely unfathomable to me. The idea of applications on the phone was something blindingly obvious to me ever since my first Nokia 3410 I had as a kid. The phone had a bunch of distinct functionalities other than making calls, which you could invoke through a menu. Why shouldn't I be able to add new ones? Write new ones myself? Installing custom software was later normalized when phones gained ability to run J2ME applets. By the time iPhone was conceived, it was an expected feature.
  - hehetrthrthrjn 5y ago
    > I'd really love to know his mindset, because it's completely unfathomable to me. He was fixated on having complete control.
    - hbn 5y ago
      And why would webapps give Apple complete control? Someone develops a webapp, I can make my own phone and anyone who wants to continue using all the webapps they were using in Safari on their iPhone can come over and do that in the browser on my phone. People develop native apps for the iPhone, and suddenly leaving the iPhone means leaving behind all those apps.
      - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
        It's the other way around. WebApps at the time would have been a complete joke since mobile browsers were so limited. At least that's how I understand it. He just didn't want any third party apps. He wanted to make every app in-house. (For example the original YouTube app was an in-house project.) It sounds crazy but at the time the wild west of apps on the desktop meant that the user experience was pretty poor and allowed malware to explode. It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. No one realized a viable alternative was to lock down the device to a single store/publisher and then take a 30% cut. Now that WebApps probably could replace nearly all native apps, it's in Apple's best interest to not fully support PWAs, WASM, etc. because the app store is so lucrative.
        toyg 5y ago
        > It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. Nah, what drove web development was 100% ease of deployment. No more dealing with installers that don't work and people who don't know how to use them, the browser is already there; no more dealing with the pain of rolling out updates, you push to your own server and it's done. And you don't have to care about Windows stack vs Mac stack with completely different teams, a few css/js tweaks and you're done. Sun understood the issue and tried to put up a fight with their Java Web Start, but in the end the JRE still required an installer, with all the related issues. MS eventually got something like that working seamlessly, but it was 15 years too late.
        5y ago
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Nobody can know what Jobs actually wanted and what is narrative-building because he was the best storyteller this industry has ever seen.
mthoms 5y ago
Citation? This contradicts everything I’ve seen on the matter.
- finiteseries 5y ago
  The article linked in the comment they’re replying to. According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, the tech guru was opposed to allowing third-party to run natively on iPhone… …Others in the know disagree with Isaacson's story and contend third-party apps were always on the iPhone roadmap; Jobs and company were simply not comfortable with releasing an SDK at launch. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    Apple put a lot of effort into the UIKit API and fixing the deficiencies of AppKit, I'm not sure why they would have done this if they didn't intend to later release it.
  - mthoms 5y ago
    Sorry, what I meant was, who are the "others in the know"?

krferriter 5y ago

We're now at the point where writing web-first apps that can get optionally also get compiled into "native" apps that run in a js/wasm runtime on any platform and act like native apps might get popular again.

deadmutex 5y ago
Is this allowed under iOS?
- yen223 5y ago
  Yes. Apps that are basically a webview over a site are pretty common.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    It may be common but it's not technically allowed. Apple forbids apps that are mere duplicates of a website. As with most things App Store, the rules are enforced inconsistently.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Apple changed their policies to prohibit this
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- judge2020 5y ago
  PWAs have acceptable (but not full) support on iOS 14 and 15, you just are forced to ask customers to “press the share button then press add to Home Screen” for it to install to the Home Screen like a regular app.
  - paxys 5y ago
    "Acceptable" is a stretch. There is no way of discovery, say via the App Store. There is no "Add to Home Screen" button (apps can only tell users to open safari settings and do it themselves). There are no push notifications or background sync/fetch. No way to play background media. Full screen doesn't work for anything outside of video. Only a small part of the web manifest file is recognized. The cache limit is a tiny 50MB, which will be purged in 7 days. Here is a very detailed post on this – https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

RNCTX 5y ago

But Jobs didn't turn down the money, did he? Nor did his wife turn down her friendship with the Epsteins. There's no need to volunteer to write hagiographies for billionaires, they pay PR firms to do it for them.