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> There had been parallel tracks, and prototypes of a truly web-based OS, but they didn't launch. Cocoa was already Plan A when Jobs described the web as a "gre

> There had been parallel tracks, and prototypes of a truly web-based OS, but they didn't launch. Cocoa was already Plan A when Jobs described the web as a "great application platform" at Moscone. AFAIK, this is completely false. There was never a webOS-type proposal. Where do people come up with this stuff?

falcolas 4y ago
There's a lot of "here's the reasoning behind what they did" with nothing backing it up but their word. It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Digging in, it seems like they worked on Chrome for several years before moving over to Edge. That would give them at least some technical insight into what happened at Google, if not the reasons behind those decisions. Even so, it still feels like a lot more speculation than actual facts. But that's me.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  But it's not ONLY you. Several of the author's core assertions are demonstrably wrong.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Alex Russel, a developer, team lead and developer advocate for Google for 13 years from 2008 to 2021. He's one of the primary people responsible for the web components mess. He's quite well known in hte web/web-adjacent world. During his work at Google he would: - go out of his way to blame and gaslight Apple for everything - defend and any and all Chrome-only non-standards that Chrome was (and still is) churning out at ever-accelerating rate, completely ignoring any and all standards processes, or other browser vendors' input - be completely silent on "how Google killed mobile web" and only blaming Apple Once he went to work for Microsoft he started bashing Google, too. The amount of grains of salt tyou need to take to read anything he writes that is not strictly technnical would cause world-wide salt deficit for any forseeable future.
detourdog 4y ago
The Macs desktop widgets was considered as an alternative to an App Store. They would run on the existing iPhone.
- brookst 4y ago
  Sounds interesting. Source?
  - kefka_p 4y ago
    I don’t know anything about an AppStore alternative but I do seem to recall a presentation or two mentioning using Dashboard widgets as a route for development.
    - detourdog 4y ago
      Yes, App Store didn’t exist and that was the talk.
  - detourdog 4y ago
    After the iPhone but before the App Store I was at a developer event in NYC. If you comb the internet for the developer talk at that time you can see it alluded to. In fact Apple still insists that the web is a perfectly good place for these not App Store suitable. Source not really it was a vibe at the time.
  - bluk 4y ago
    Amongst others, probably referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64 and https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-dead-set-against-third-party-apps-for-the-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-d... Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).
manicennui 4y ago
I don't know what "truly web-based OS" means exactly, but Jobs was very resistant to third-party apps at first. "Initially, third-party native applications were not supported. Jobs' reasoning was that developers could build web applications through the Safari web browser that 'would behave like native apps on the iPhone'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#History
- toyg 4y ago
  Jobs' priority was to cut off the telcos. Carriers used to be in charge of phone OSes, preloading a lot of clunky bullshit that typically ruined the experience. He wanted to avoid that arrangement, because it would mean relinquishing control - commercial anathema for him. So he went with a setup where telcos couldn't screw up things even if they tried to: web-apps couldn't mess with the overall system stability. Once it became clear the phone was desirable enough for telcos to leave it alone, he pivoted to what would give him even more control.
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    This seems like the most likely scenariou
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Not really. The iPhone just barely shipped on time. It was a death march development up to FCS (first customer ship). Most of what were eventually released as public APIs didn't even exist in iOS 1.0. Hell most of the first party apps on the phone just barely ran. Web apps were the only practical way to get third party code running reliably on iOS 1.0. Even after the 1.0 release Apple went back into death march development mode to polish up a usable SDK. Even that first SDK had a tiny surface area compared all the frameworks available on the OS. It wasn't until iOS 3 that the SDK felt fully functional and not polished until iOS 4. Web apps were a stopgap. Early iOS was just barely above an advanced demo in terms of quality and functionality. A lot of frameworks didn't even have stable APIs to release for third party developers.
  - misnome 4y ago
xenadu02 4y ago
The situation was slightly more complicated. Half of the original launch apps on the phone were first built as JS web apps. Most were completely rewritten to be native apps before launch (and the rest after launch) because it was clear that the native experience was superior. Only later was the decision made to ship a public SDK. Web apps were announced because that's the only thing third parties could use. There was no public API to speak of, just a collection of internal APIs and one-offs in individual apps.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  You know what other phone OS ran exclusively web-based JS apps? Firefox OS. And it was a dismal failure. Pivoting to native apps on the early iPhone models was absolutely the right call.
  - afavour 4y ago
    I wouldn’t assume that Firefox OS failed where iOS succeeded just because of the use of web features. There were hundreds of other factors involved.
  - esprehn 4y ago
    As someone close to that situation, Firefox OS's failure had nothing to do with being web based beyond the fact that it was incompatible with the two dominant mobile platforms. Ex. If you can't run the Android or iOS YouTube app, what you have left is the web one... which could be amazing, but is hardly a fully functional PWA because Google would rather you used the native app. Firefox OS would have failed all the same had it been based on Qt, or even if it was based on Java without the Android runtime and SDK.
sergioramos 4y ago
IIRC Don Melton mentioned that.

falcolas 4y ago

There's a lot of "here's the reasoning behind what they did" with nothing backing it up but their word. It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Digging in, it seems like they worked on Chrome for several years before moving over to Edge. That would give them at least some technical insight into what happened at Google, if not the reasons behind those decisions. Even so, it still feels like a lot more speculation than actual facts. But that's me.

BuckyBeaver 4y ago
But it's not ONLY you. Several of the author's core assertions are demonstrably wrong.
dmitriid 4y ago
> It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Alex Russel, a developer, team lead and developer advocate for Google for 13 years from 2008 to 2021. He's one of the primary people responsible for the web components mess. He's quite well known in hte web/web-adjacent world. During his work at Google he would: - go out of his way to blame and gaslight Apple for everything - defend and any and all Chrome-only non-standards that Chrome was (and still is) churning out at ever-accelerating rate, completely ignoring any and all standards processes, or other browser vendors' input - be completely silent on "how Google killed mobile web" and only blaming Apple Once he went to work for Microsoft he started bashing Google, too. The amount of grains of salt tyou need to take to read anything he writes that is not strictly technnical would cause world-wide salt deficit for any forseeable future.

detourdog 4y ago

The Macs desktop widgets was considered as an alternative to an App Store. They would run on the existing iPhone.

brookst 4y ago
Sounds interesting. Source?
- kefka_p 4y ago
  I don’t know anything about an AppStore alternative but I do seem to recall a presentation or two mentioning using Dashboard widgets as a route for development.
  - detourdog 4y ago
    Yes, App Store didn’t exist and that was the talk.
- detourdog 4y ago
  After the iPhone but before the App Store I was at a developer event in NYC. If you comb the internet for the developer talk at that time you can see it alluded to. In fact Apple still insists that the web is a perfectly good place for these not App Store suitable. Source not really it was a vibe at the time.
- bluk 4y ago
  Amongst others, probably referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64 and https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-dead-set-against-third-party-apps-for-the-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-d... Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).

manicennui 4y ago

I don't know what "truly web-based OS" means exactly, but Jobs was very resistant to third-party apps at first. "Initially, third-party native applications were not supported. Jobs' reasoning was that developers could build web applications through the Safari web browser that 'would behave like native apps on the iPhone'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#History

toyg 4y ago
Jobs' priority was to cut off the telcos. Carriers used to be in charge of phone OSes, preloading a lot of clunky bullshit that typically ruined the experience. He wanted to avoid that arrangement, because it would mean relinquishing control - commercial anathema for him. So he went with a setup where telcos couldn't screw up things even if they tried to: web-apps couldn't mess with the overall system stability. Once it became clear the phone was desirable enough for telcos to leave it alone, he pivoted to what would give him even more control.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  This seems like the most likely scenariou
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Not really. The iPhone just barely shipped on time. It was a death march development up to FCS (first customer ship). Most of what were eventually released as public APIs didn't even exist in iOS 1.0. Hell most of the first party apps on the phone just barely ran. Web apps were the only practical way to get third party code running reliably on iOS 1.0. Even after the 1.0 release Apple went back into death march development mode to polish up a usable SDK. Even that first SDK had a tiny surface area compared all the frameworks available on the OS. It wasn't until iOS 3 that the SDK felt fully functional and not polished until iOS 4. Web apps were a stopgap. Early iOS was just barely above an advanced demo in terms of quality and functionality. A lot of frameworks didn't even have stable APIs to release for third party developers.
- misnome 4y ago

xenadu02 4y ago

The situation was slightly more complicated. Half of the original launch apps on the phone were first built as JS web apps. Most were completely rewritten to be native apps before launch (and the rest after launch) because it was clear that the native experience was superior. Only later was the decision made to ship a public SDK. Web apps were announced because that's the only thing third parties could use. There was no public API to speak of, just a collection of internal APIs and one-offs in individual apps.

zozbot234 4y ago
You know what other phone OS ran exclusively web-based JS apps? Firefox OS. And it was a dismal failure. Pivoting to native apps on the early iPhone models was absolutely the right call.
- afavour 4y ago
  I wouldn’t assume that Firefox OS failed where iOS succeeded just because of the use of web features. There were hundreds of other factors involved.
- esprehn 4y ago
  As someone close to that situation, Firefox OS's failure had nothing to do with being web based beyond the fact that it was incompatible with the two dominant mobile platforms. Ex. If you can't run the Android or iOS YouTube app, what you have left is the web one... which could be amazing, but is hardly a fully functional PWA because Google would rather you used the native app. Firefox OS would have failed all the same had it been based on Qt, or even if it was based on Java without the Android runtime and SDK.

sergioramos 4y ago

IIRC Don Melton mentioned that.