Will the Mobile Web Kill Off the App Store?
wired.com
wired.com
No one wants to make an app for the iPhone, Android, Palm, Blackberry, and WinMobil when then can just make 1 for the web which all of them can access.
1 Company will never and should never control the way people access information. App stores allow this while the web does not making it the only likely future.
Web billing systems have existed for ages, I don't see a reason why those shouldn't work on a phone.
I would be willing to bet very good money that if you took a best-selling app from the App Store and created a Web app clone that charged the same price to be able to use it, you'd see less than a quarter of the sales of the app — probably drastically less.
1. Click "Buy"
2. Enter your password
3. Click "Buy"
1. Click "Pay'
2. Enter your username
3. Enter your password
4. Click "Sign In"
5. Choose a payment method
6. Click "Pay"
There's also the fact that people are very unaccustomed to paying for access to Web sites (as opposed to buying things off of Web sites). Can you think of any paid site that's widely used by consumers? I can't. So you actually need to make it more painless than the App Store, because even if you have something extraordinarily compelling, you've already almost scared your customers off just by mentioning money.
There is no reason why the amazon workflow couldn't be made identical to the appstore flow.
All it takes is a cookie.
Sure, you will still have to go through the long route during your first purchase. But I really think you're blowing this problem out of proportion.
Apple will do their best to hinder progress as long as they can but I doubt they can delay the inevitable for very long.
The next gen of phones will likely already provide a near frictionless web performance. From there it's only a matter of being "allowed" to hook into phone APIs via javascript. Apple will naturally deny this while Android will embrace it aggressively.
From that point onwards Apple has a serious problem on their hands, as far as the iPhone platform is concerned.
There's a special Web app mode built into MobileSafari. Heck, MobileSafari itself is at the forefront of Web technology, supporting a lot more sophisticated stuff than any of the other mobile browsers and more than a lot of desktop browsers until recently.
On top of all that, Apple itself produces a very cool standards-based free Web application framework, SproutCore. How is that hindering progress?
But I'm far less ready to say that there should not be any phones on the market that have restrictions on them regarding what code is allowed to execute. It seems to me that this is a legitimate choice for consumers to make and it's OK for them to be allowed to make it as long as there are also non-restricted phones available.
Diversity here is good - it's not clear to me that the best user experience in practice always comes from systems that are unrestricted. I'm happy the experiment gets to compete in the free market and see how it goes as long as other options are available.
If people were free to sell their own iPhones with customized iPhone OSen and app stores, then it would be a fair competition in the free market. But as it is, it's not open versus closed — it's open versus cool.
Not that I'm saying that there being such systems in existence is a bad thing by any means: I'm very glad that Android and the like exist. They've got strong advantages because of their openness: if you want a hardware keyboard, you ain't ever getting one from Apple, and it'd be a poorer world if nobody could get a phone with a hardware keyboard. But disadvantages from that openness are unavoidable, too. So, to me, the optimal situation for customers is for there to be a mix of providers with varying degrees of openness. This increases choice and diversity: there aren't only different makers of phones, there are different whole models of what those devices should be like, with each model competing on its strengths, not just individual devices. If nobody in the "open" camp can produce something as cool as Apple (I'm not saying this is the case), then maybe we should reconsider whether open always leads to the best solutions.
And I didn't really mean "open up the iPhone OS." What I meant is that we don't have a fight between an open iPhone (even a relatively open one that just didn't arbitrarily ban political cartoons and anything not written in C) and a closed iPhone, so we can't say "Look at this — the closed system is winning. Closed must be better."
Everyone wants to get paid (already said) and not have to worry about managing payments and organizing distribution/discovery.
Java failed in this quest.
Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses, and each will continue to thrive and be used for its own purposes.
Also, the word "mobile" is overused and is pretty much BS. It's inexact and short sighted.
On the flip side, the web is the larger platform. HTML5 and the like are going to bring about a new class of applications. I think we'll look back and say holy shit, apple really kicked off a new way for app developers to think about how they make money on the web. I'm Long web.
The first web version was and is a lot better as you can create bookmarks to each contact on your iPhone's homescreen. Just click to load contact's page, click call and it rings you to connect call.
They went backwards with that one. Are there any web apps now that help this arguement; Google's latest attempt falls short.
This is what I'll be building my apps on.
(n.b. Confirmed by Apple to be in compliance with 3.3.1.)
I know we're talking about the web here but this seems like a really foolish attitude.