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> the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones As I heard, that was just the cover story to hide the fact that the original iPhone was too s

by teddyh 3y ago

> the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones As I heard, that was just the cover story to hide the fact that the original iPhone was too slow to properly run Flash (or native apps).

dijit 3y ago
too slow for native apps. Read that again to yourself, slowly.
- xnickb 3y ago
  A concept of thin clients is of course completely unthinkable in this context.
  - dijit 3y ago
    Thin clients with 2007-era javascript interpreters as the only code execution framework (vs local MACH-O binaries) does seem to be a bit of a weird choice if "slow" was the problem and you intended to have thin clients.
    - sznio 3y ago
      There's also a backend. Back in 2007 a web app was mostly backend code that would send you HTML to display, and at worst it would have some AJAX for a chatbox/autoreload.
kergonath 3y ago
Not really. I mean, iPhones were slower than laptops back then but that’s not saying much as all phones were in the same ballpark at best. The actual reasons are well documented: it was a ressource hog (on all platforms, not only phones; there were still netbooks around), sucked batteries dry (including on both Windows and Mac laptops with much better batteries than phones), and was unstable (being the leading cause of crashes on Macs at the time). Jobs even wrote an open letter about it. It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  Eh. Jobs was disingenuous at the best of times, I had Flash Lite running fine on Symbian a year or so before the iPhone hit the market. I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.) He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!

by teddyh 3y ago

dijit 3y ago

too slow for native apps. Read that again to yourself, slowly.

xnickb 3y ago
A concept of thin clients is of course completely unthinkable in this context.
- dijit 3y ago
  Thin clients with 2007-era javascript interpreters as the only code execution framework (vs local MACH-O binaries) does seem to be a bit of a weird choice if "slow" was the problem and you intended to have thin clients.
  - sznio 3y ago
    There's also a backend. Back in 2007 a web app was mostly backend code that would send you HTML to display, and at worst it would have some AJAX for a chatbox/autoreload.

kergonath 3y ago

Not really. I mean, iPhones were slower than laptops back then but that’s not saying much as all phones were in the same ballpark at best. The actual reasons are well documented: it was a ressource hog (on all platforms, not only phones; there were still netbooks around), sucked batteries dry (including on both Windows and Mac laptops with much better batteries than phones), and was unstable (being the leading cause of crashes on Macs at the time). Jobs even wrote an open letter about it. It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.

sanitycheck 3y ago
Eh. Jobs was disingenuous at the best of times, I had Flash Lite running fine on Symbian a year or so before the iPhone hit the market. I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.) He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!