
People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps - jancona
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100513/1513039419.shtml
======
pg
Hmm. Wouldn't it be great if the whole nasty 3.3.1 business turned out to be a
moot point, because web apps were what mattered?

People who work on browsers and libraries for them are in a position to make
this happen if they want-- to make the Web win as the platform even if the
iPad wins as the device. All you have to do is make _other_ browsers
fabulously powerful for web apps. If there start to be a lot of things you can
do on e.g. Chrome that you can't do on Safari, Safari will be pushed to follow
suit.

In fact maybe it will be Chrome and not Android that saves us from Apple's
locked-down future. It's certainly a more straightforward problem. Android can
only win through partnerships with handset makers, while Chrome can evolve at
its own rate.

~~~
dustingetz
seems a pretty obvious outcome, but only for apps/webapps that are content-
oriented, not for apps that actually use custom mobile device hardware. like
gps, sms, multitouch.

in the meantime, my android browser doesn't seem to be caching websites
aggressively enough, because it seems to take up to several seconds to load
the (few) bookmarks i have. so native content-oriented apps are faster, for
now.

~~~
iseff
There are certainly features that are better suited for native apps, but the
ones you stated aren't necessarily them. For example, GPS is doable on both
Android and iPhone OS. Multitouch is also doable (check out Google Maps on the
web on iPhone for an example here).

Accelerometer, native graphics, etc are the key features I think about that
are not well suited for web apps.

My startup, AppStoreHQ (<http://www.appstorehq.com>), is a huge believer of
mobile web apps, and we even have a private alpha going on for monetizing your
mobile web app (check out an example like fortysquires:
<http://fortysquires.com> ).

~~~
raganwald
Another example of multi-touch is Naughts and Crosses, one of the two demos I
made for the iGesture jQuery plugin:

<http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture>

After drawing some naughts and crosses, you can rotate the board by placing
two fingers on the screen and rotating them 45 degrees or more.

It's all Javascript and jQuery.

------
joshwa
This brings into focus one of the App Store's main advantages-- a micropayment
platform that users have actually adopted in large numbers.

The only reason that media companies need fear cannibalizing app sales is that
people have become accustomed to paying for Apps (even apps that are 99%
content) but not paying for web sites.

Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on
the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store
account?

Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the
web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish
their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some
serious traction).

See also my previous comment on this topic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498>

~~~
naner
> Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the
> web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish
> their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some
> serious traction).

Amazon. I already have an Amazon account. Allow everyone else to tap into that
for micropayments.

I'm not going to sign up for some new micropayment system unless I have to.
And anything that resembles PayPal will send me running the other way.

~~~
dmv
Checkout by Amazon, Amazon Simple Pay, Amazon Flexible Payments Service
<https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/index.htm>

...and yet, people don't run to it.

------
MWinther
Isn't this a bit of a complacency issue? To compete with the web, you're going
to have to create an experience that's significantly better than the web. I
get the feeling most content providers want to rehash the same thing in a
different way, and hopefully be able to charge for it this time around.

Then again, maybe they're paralyzed with fear and have reached the end of the
creativity road... I just can't imagine there isn't innovation to be done in
this area.

------
JarekS
Just wait for the latest version of jQTouch. It'll have iPad support so after
few hours of hacking you can make your website look "native" on iPad. Can't
wait!

~~~
potatolicious
Off topic: I tried visiting the jQtouch site on the iPad - the demo video uses
Flash ;) Found it at least a bit amusing :P

------
westbywest
Reminds me of when Sony Records sued the MP3 portal Launch.com earlier this
decade, even though Sony had been a part owner of Launch.com for more than a
year at that point. I wonder when a similar folding-onto-itself might occur
here.

------
Kilimanjaro
I love web apps, but...

can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?

~~~
patio11
I'm guessing there are not all that many applications on the AppStore that
sold 3,000 copies at $30 each. That isn't really a stratospheric level of
success on the open Internet. Trust me.

