

IPhone Web Apps as an Alternative to the App Store - anderzole
http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/iphone_web_apps_alternative

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uuilly
I hate to say it but I would never use an iphone web app over a native one.
It's less about looks than it is about feel / responsiveness. You also will
always be stuck dealing with the forward button / back button structure.

~~~
storborg
You aren't "stuck dealing with the forward button / back button structure".
You can get rid of those with just:

    
    
        <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

~~~
einarvollset
There seems to be quite a few issues with this:

[http://nrbd.tumblr.com/post/55066018/apple-mobile-web-app-
ca...](http://nrbd.tumblr.com/post/55066018/apple-mobile-web-app-capable-is-
really-broken)

[http://lists.apple.com/archives/safari-iphone-web-
dev/2008/O...](http://lists.apple.com/archives/safari-iphone-web-
dev/2008/Oct/msg00004.html)

~~~
Padraig
These issues are from Oct 08. I don't know when they were fixed, but touch
events and orientation detection work fine in Hahlo (an iPhone web app).

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sunkencity
I think there's a need for a high end cross platform toolkit/framework for
developing web apps that provide some high-end stuff for iphone and android
but also can degrade gracefully for "phone" phones that have crappier
browsers. Ideally this would work like unobtrusive javascript, instead of
having to have two views.

I'm currently investigating building a better mobile web presence for an
application. The solution for us so far has been to mangle WURFL to a faster
format and use that to detect properties of the current device from the
UserAgent (width/height mainly). The WURFL way is to do a lehvenstein
calculation on the current user agent versus all the agents in the db, pretty
expensive computation.

This puts the crappiest phones first, because the web we build is very
restricted by the poor phones, but the truth is that iPhone/Android is rapidly
approaching 50%, because they are more likely to actually use the mobile
internet.

To build this could quite possibly be a javascript layer on top of a basic
REST structure.

~~~
mahmud
<http://cappuccino.org/> looks good, but requires javascript with a good VM.

~~~
sunkencity
Yep, something like cappuchino but that could scale down gracefully to really
crappy phones would be very useful.

~~~
mahmud
Cappuccino + regular html served on a dish of clean content negotiation with a
side-order of browser sniffing.

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neovive
With the success of the Appstore, Apple also has little incentive to invest
heavily in enhancing the web interface. In the long-term, web apps will likely
be better supported on Android, since the web browser is Google's major focus.

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jasongullickson
I think Web App is a viable option if:

1\. It's possible to write your app within the constraints of a Web App 2\.
You have hosting that can handle the potential load (how many million
potential users?) 3\. You plan on doing something that is likely to get
rejected by Apple 4\. You plan to give the app away for free

I think allot of people overlook #2. For me one of the nicest things about
writing native apps is the fact that I can focus on coding and not
infrastructure, and avoid the risk of having too much (wasting money) or too
little (can't service customer spikes) bandwidth, etc.

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wallflower
The demo of the jQuery-based jQTouch Beta shows how an iPhone web app could
have a visual look similar to that of a native app.

Yes, you'll never recreate Tweetie 2 with it, and it provides a lot of eye
candy. The animation demos (page flip) are impressive. Web apps aren't as sexy
as native apps, and they can allow you to "run" on multiple mobile devices,
with pretty much the same server-side code.

<http://www.jqtouch.com/preview/demos/main/#home>

~~~
cmelbye
Yeah, jQTouch is actually a really viable alternative to making a native app.
It makes use of the native animations and features for a really polished
interface.

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quizbiz
Why don't app developers just make versions with additional features for
purchase via Cydia?

~~~
ahlatimer
Because the market is much, much smaller. I don't know what percentage of
iPhone users actually jailbreak their phones, but looking at the iPhone users
I know, I can only think of one person that jailbreaks. It might not be worth
the effort of actually making a different version just for people who
jailbreak. If app developers really did embrace this, that might drive more
people to jailbreak, but I highly doubt your average Joe going through the
process of jailbreaking, even if it isn't particularly hard.

On top of that, there might be fears of piracy. I don't know how valid it
would be, but targeting users who jailbreak is also targeting the only people
that pirate since you have to have a jailbroken phone to pirate.

~~~
allenp
"...targeting users who jailbreak is also targeting the only people that
pirate since you have to have a jailbroken phone to pirate."

Bingo. You'll end up with your Cydia-enhanced version sitting next to your
pirated retail version side-by-side on the Cydia store. If you want to target
"pirates" you can't use traditional sales methods - they are a totally
different channel.

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blasdel
He somehow avoided the point in PPK's post about how Jobs wanted many of
Apple's bundled apps to be WebKit-based.

Originally Stocks, Weather, etc. were all intended to ship that way, but
obviously that didn't happen.

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ujjwalg
<http://www.apple.com/webapps/>

They have a separate store for iPhone webapps

~~~
tjogin
That's not a store, that's a catalogue.

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bumblebird
It's still pretty cool to get your webapp listed there :)

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ericb
Can an iphone web app be "sold" through the app store?

~~~
teej
The closest you can get is to package your iPhone web app as a native app
using Phonegap.

