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Comment by exit | Hacker News Reader

at some point powerful webapps disrupt the app store market

I'm missing the conclusion to that sentence. During 2011, the app store generated $3.4bn in revenue. Given Apples 30% cut, they'd see about $1bn revenue there, out of a total revenue of $108bn in fiscal 2011 [2]. That makes the app store about ~0.95% of Apples total revenue, compared to iPhone hardware sales, generating $47bn or 43% of Apples total revenue [3]. Now, you might argue that the app store accounts for some percent in that in that people buy iPhones to be able to play Angry Birds and whatnot, but from what I can tell, the most popular apps on iPhone are equally available on Android [4]. Pair this with the fact that iOS Safari seems to be the most capable mobile browser out there (or at the very least, in the top 2) [5] and I'm saying there's no published reason Apple would fight web intents or more powerful web apps in general.

Of course, I'm open to other interpretations.

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs-andro...

[2] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Four...

[3] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/1856667914x0xS11...

[4] http://www.pcworld.com/article/226531/apples_popular_apps_no...

[5] http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/

There are two big obstacles I see for web apps to take over:

* Poor interoperability between apps (solved by WebIntents)

* Monetization (though services like GitHub and Flickr do this well, and there are providers like http://chargify.com/ to make it easy for developers)

App store apps give Apple lock-in to the iOS platform. Even if an app is available for Android, I would need to buy it again, which means I have friction to switch platforms. If everything is a web app, I can switch at will.

It's not the app revenue, it's the locked content stream. Open web apps would be able to sell content directly, as they never signed the app store contract. Long term Apple's growth model requires content sales. Hardware sales only grew 7% over last year if I remember their filing correctly.

Actually I think you're about a factor 10 off there, hardware sales FY11 was $99bn, compared to $57bn in FY10, which is a growth year over year of about 72%, while content saw growth of about 28% from $4.9bn to $6.3bn. As for total impact on revenue, hardware sales made up 91% of total revenue in '11, compared to 88% in '10.

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