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Comment by flyosity | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people in this thread are excited about Playboy bypassing the App Store but no one is talking about the huge user experience downsides that it brings up:

* Have to sign in every time you load the app.

* Herky jerky animations & orientation switching

* No offline access!

* Low-res images that are tough to read... in a magazine app

Granted these issues could be remedied in whole or in part if the web app was built with a little more thought & care, but the fact is that it wasn't: this is the user experience people will get when they view this web app.

I work on the web, and I build native apps for the iPhone & iPad. The reason I like building native apps is because the user experience is better. Everything's faster and smoother. If developers in here are putting technopolitics above the user actually using the app, then I think people need to re-evaluate why they build software in the first place.

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There is an underlying assumption here: that Apple and the AppStore have the user's best interest in mind. The assumption is that the developer and Apple are both working towards the same thing.

That's been proven untrue with walled garden providers over and over again. Ever see a commercial for an Apple product? Apple has one thing in mind: the farming out of development to tens of thousands of little starry-eyed developers scattered around the world. As long as those guys keep cranking out things that make Apple look good and advance corporate policy, they're there to help both you and the user.

If you want to write inside the walled garden, have fun with it. Providing value to the user is the goal, right? In some scenarios it probably makes sense to develop in that fashion.

But not in every scenario. Don't go into this thing either blinded against using an AppStore or blinded towards using one. The truth is a lot more complex. I could list a dozen scenarios that easily would lead me to choose a stand-alone web app. "Technopolitics" or my personal opinion of Apple has nothing to do with it.

I could list a dozen scenarios that easily would lead me to choose a stand-alone web app. "Technopolitics" or my personal opinion of Apple has nothing to do with it.

I'd be curious to know what those scenarios are, and whether your choice would actually be user-experience driven rather than based on developer preference or business constraints (such as insufficient resources).

If they could get equal adoption without the App Store, they'd be making a LOT more money on the same number of customers. That's the key advantage.

These app stores, the Mac App Store, Android Market, the App Store, they give you very little considering the gigantic margin they take from you. It's almost intolerable. It seems it is intolerable for at least one major enterprise, Playboy.

> If they could get equal adoption without the App Store, they'd be making a LOT more money on the same number of customers. That's the key advantage.

Apple started high at 30%. If competition dictates, they can lower that percentage at any time.

They're also free to renegotiate a lower rate with specific content producers.

What competition? Apple isn't going to let another app store on the iPhone so developers will continue to be forced to cough up 30% of their earnings. Even if the Android Marketplace fees went to 0%, consumers don't care. You may think developers will be more prone to writing apps for the Android exclusively but they won't because they would still be missing out on their 70% revenue from the iOS app store.

> What competition?

We were talking about the web. If there's a risk of webapps becoming competitive with native applications on the basis of that 30%, Apple is free to lower it.

Given that our clients have been discussing implementing webapps (in addition to their existing Android and iOS applications) entirely due to the 30% issue, this isn't that crazy.

> You may think developers will be more prone to writing apps for the Android exclusively but they won't because they would still be missing out on their 70% revenue from the iOS app store.

I'm not sure what you're basing this on; Android is a rapidly growing portion of our media clients' in-app purchase business.

> We were talking about the web. If there's a risk of webapps becoming competitive with native applications on the basis of that 30%, Apple is free to lower it.

How much you want to bet when that happens, Apple will release an update for iOS that cripples Safari and takes away some functionality in order to force developers to write native applications.

> I'm not sure what you're basing this on; Android is a rapidly growing portion of our media clients' in-app purchase business.

When you mentioned competition I just assumed you meant developers abandoning iOS and developing exclusively for Android (thus making customers want an Android device more and drive market share away from iPhone). I didn't think the competition you were thinking of was more and more web apps coming up to circumnavigate the 30% cut.

>It seems it is intolerable for at least one major enterprise, Playboy.

No, the real reason Playboy is going the webapp route is because Apple would never approve the content of the app. Apple knows that the web app experience is sucky compared to native apps regardless of the HTML5 hype. Even after a year passed after Jobs' pro-HTML5 and anti-Flash post, HTML5 still sucks, and Apple seems to be in no hurry except to pay lip service. After all, they have financial stake in native apps being better, especially for subscription based content,

Historic margin at stores: ~50% (varies widely) Apple's margin, described here as "gigantic" and "almost intolerable": 30%

I am admittedly entirely biased towards web apps, but please dont say that people arguing for the web are doing so from a "technopolitics" point of view.

My arguments for using open web technologies are purely based with the end users in mind, it may require some short term compromises in some areas of user experience (performance), but that doesnt mean we arent arguing for the best user experience possible.

It "compromises in some areas of the user experience" but you're saying open web technologies present the best user experience possible? How?

The App Store is one tap away. Hundreds of thousands of apps all neatly categorized and sorted a bunch of ways. User reviews right on each listing with an overall rating count that's impossible to miss. One-touch purchasing, or, if free, one-touch downloading. It downloads in the background and can be paused/resumed whenever you want.

So exactly how will open web technologies (existing now, or in the future) be a better experience for users than the App Store?

Web apps and the apple appstore are not mutually exclusive, you can have web apps in the appstore (or the google chrome / android market / amazon app store)

I am not arguing about the user experience involved in using the appstore

and to point out the advantages I see in web apps

- Consistent used experience, the same app can be built for every device, not duplicated (at least) 3 times which will lead to inconsistencies.

- Intercommunication, I can right now, open a web app on my mac, start using it, then send my current screen to my phone

- Availability, I have an app on my phone with my data that works offline, I still want to be able to access thing same thing using someone elses computer / phone.

Thats a few quick ones off the top of my head, we all know the common benefits of web applications, they dont need to be thrown out the window because of some low hanging fruit that can be fixed in the frontend, I mean not having offline access is not a fault of being a web app, it is purely a technical issue that can be fixed on playboys side.

> - Consistent used experience, the same app can be built for every device, not duplicated (at least) 3 times which will lead to inconsistencies.

Unfortunately, this also means that every application will offer an inconsistent UX to their users, as there is no adherence to any platform standard.

> - Intercommunication, I can right now, open a web app on my mac, start using it, then send my current screen to my phone

The ability to save state on a server is not constrained to applications running in a browser.

> - Availability, I have an app on my phone with my data that works offline, I still want to be able to access thing same thing using someone elses computer / phone.

You can do this with native applications as well, however, one of the significant market shifts that has occurred is that you don't have to.

Logging into websites from public computers was always a significant security risk and a trade-off between user experience and convenience; it was simply an inefficient solution to the problem of not having your own, locally trusted hardware.

With the introduction of lightweight, high-performance mobile computing devices using always-on internet access, the need to access your Yahoo mail from a 3rd party's computer has all but disappeared for a large (and growing) percentage of the population.

> It "compromises in some areas of the user experience" but you're saying open web technologies present the best user experience possible? How?

First, that's now what he said. "My arguments for using open web technologies are purely based with the end users in mind," and "but that doesnt mean we arent arguing for the best user experience possible."

Basically, you want to know this: "So exactly how will open web technologies (existing now, or in the future) be a better experience for users than the App Store?"

In context, it allows app makers to build the apps they want for their customers without requiring Apple approval that could/would prevent said app from being deployed.

Any discussion of iOS development and native v.s. web apps must include the app store and it's conditions. If your app cannot commit to those conditions, then you cannot release an app.

You could ignore the answer, but then you are faced with answering the question: How are native apps a better option for all cases? The answer, of course, is they aren't. Any argument otherwise is being dishonest.

I think the end user gets a lot more with a native app. However a company using a web app effectively gives apple the middle finger. It might be worth considering in the future as current web technologies such as local storage become more mainstream, at which stage it's plausible to say that apple's dominance may be overshadowed by the many vendors producing android devices.

I prefer web apps and open standards as well, but I think another "feature" in this case is that users don't have to have an app labelled "playboy" on their phone. My kid is always grabbing my phone to see pictures or play a game. I won't ever download a playboy app! Lots of guys have wives that would be offended as well.

The article emphasizes those drawbacks while seeming to imply it's an unavoidable result of their strategy. I don't see that they are; it sounds more like inadequate or poor development and product management.

For instance, why would you have to sign in every time? You can easily use cookies or HTML5 database to solve that in Mobile Safari.

Low Res images, too - since when is Mobile Safari constrained in that respect?

All those concerns are possible to remedy.

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