Monday, June 11, 2007

So that's what he meant by "opening" the iPhone?

Steve Jobs thinks that "inviting" third party developers to create web applications for the iPhone is "opening it up."

That's really too bad. I guess to be on the safe side I'm going to have to start interpreting everything else that comes out of his mouth as pure horseshit from here on out.

Sure the Safari engine is a great piece of technology. I've seen what it's done for the S60 browsing experience. But developers knew even before the iPhone was announced that you'd be able to browse to your GMail account from it. This announcement isn't some opening up to third parties: it's a definitive closing. No access to any device features except for dialing the phone (something you've been able to do from some of the first mobile phone browsers ever developed). Not the camera, not the microphone, not the accelerometer, not the proximity detection, not the multitouch events, really not the touchscreen at all except as mediated by HTML events. So basically no direct access to any form of user input. Not much output, either, unless you're posting character data to a server: no Bluetooth radio transmissions, no display or sharing of captured video, images or sounds, no 3D or even 2D graphics APIs. I guess we could play AJAX Sudoku games created with HTML table tags.

Oh yeah, and no access to local data stores. Of any kind. All your data has to be loaded down from a server over a slow EDGE network every time you want to access it. Hopefully that won't be while you're inside a large office building or riding the subway.

It's not just that users want more from their mobiles than web applications. It's that people want their mobile applications to "just work," not to work dependant on the presence of a service that the carriers themselves consider to be "best effort" in quality.

Posted by cervezas at 20:03:15. Filed under: Mobile Web

Comments

I pretty much agree with your assessment. The only difference is that this is pretty much the announcement that I expected after Steve's D5 comments, so it's not hitting me quite so hard.

There may be some hope of getting Google Gears <http://gears.google.com/> working on the iPhone, which would provide some kind of local persistent storage. Still, the entire app would then have to be written in JavaScript. I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to port a few hundred thousand lines of C++ code to JavaScript. :) Think I'll pass on this one.

Posted by samalone2 at Tuesday, June 12, 2007 05:20:48

I didn't hear what he said at D5 but I had low expectations after the iPhone announcement. What got my knickers all twisted up was him coming onto a stage and talking about web applications like they were this special thing that Apple had finally managed to work out for 3rd party developers. Does he think we didn't know we could do this? WebKit has been on the new Nokia phones for a while now. I guess maybe we were supposed to think he was kidding when he said it would be on the iPhone back in January and now supposed to be happy to realize he was serious. More likely he doesn't care *what* developers think.

I wonder how the carriers are going to take this news. Game download revenue for the US carriers grew 61% last year and downloads are expected to hit 134M a month by 2010. iPhone users are going to be a drag on that revenue stream unless someone figures out how to do fast 3D graphics in Javascript.

Gears is a possible solution for data-oriented apps on the iPhone, actually. I wonder if that will work. You could use it with Google Web Toolkit if you didn't want to mess with JavaScript. At least that would be Java--statically compiled, good tools, easy to debug. [shrug]

Posted by cervezas at Tuesday, June 12, 2007 07:10:53

How is the all this AJAX experience going to be when using the EDGE network? Would it be like using mail.yahoo on a modem line? If so, the iPhone experience will not be all that great....

On a different note, Palm with the VII series, had something similar running on a slow network. It worked amazingly well, although it was dropped soon after faster networks became widely available. Would it this be a similar attemp?

Posted by feranick at Friday, June 15, 2007 12:44:34

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