If Apple insists on barring developers who overlap the “built-in functionality” of the iPhone, how is a developer to know what types of applications are a safe bet–in the long run? Since Apple recently banished Google Voice from the app store (which is an epic fail on Apple’s part, btw), one has to wonder, since all apps borrow some of Apple’s API functionality, just what they consider built-in and not.
The article, Apple Makes the Case for Web Apps concludes that developers will be more inclined to create web-based apps geared at the iPhone. While Apple’s recent actions may give developers pause to consider the web approach, I disagree that many will abandon their native app inclinations because of all that they lose in doing so. For one, you can’t create home screen shortcuts to web apps (that I know of). But the best reason not to develop web apps for the iPhone is their lack of support for front-end controls on the phone itself. That is, in a web app, you don’t have nearly the power to access the GPS location, the GUI controls, the iPod library, and so on. The new 3.0 iPhone browser is better at hooking into the phone’s local hardware, but is still quite hobbled compare to native apps, so geolocation and photos won’t have the pinache they would on a native app. Those are the content items that have made iPhone apps so much better than previous-generation mobile apps, and with the web approach, they’re more or less off limits.
How is it that YellowPages.com can offer a directory lookup app on the app store when it obviously overlaps Apple’s built-in Contacts and Maps functionality? Yet instead of picking on YellowPages.com, Apple is seen picking on Google, arguably their biggest and most powerful ally. Add to that the insult of Apple’s marketing of the iPhone and iPod Touch to developers as a platform for great apps, and it should make us all feel a bit used.
In the heady days of the computer revolution, Microsoft was forced to recognize that Windows (even MS-DOS) was a platform. Rather than stifling upstart competition by barring certain developers from the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft at least realized that it was developer embrace of the platform that would cause it to live or die in the long run. The result was that, through the early 2000’s, Windows was the go-to platform for the whole world, and everybody from Sun to IBM lost lengthy, futile, billion dollar battles trying to undo Microsoft’s early decision.
Apple is nearly past that point in their new platform’s life cycle. If it’s an app platform–let it be. Palm and Blackberry are still waiting in the wings, and Windows Mobile will be the centerpiece of Microsoft’s revenue strategy in the next ten years. And, like it or not, whatever else Microsoft did that was crummy and evil, they never told a developer he couldn’t distribute an app.
