
Apple's garden wall is cracking - Garbage
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/apples-garden-wall-is-cracking/1423
======
tiles
Very speculative article.

HTML5 is definitely becoming more capable, enough to rival some of the larger
players. Still, a cross-platform toolkit doesn't deprecate dedicated
frameworks. There's a reason why applications on my Macintosh are different
than Windows, have the same overall theme, and are better integrated with the
OS. It's the platform experience that makes a good user experience.

Since cross-platform toolkits haven't had much luck historically, the only
other benefit HTML5 has is its existence outside of App Stores-- which if
you're in the minority of apps to be rejected is a boon, but does not do many
favors to the thousands of developers making good money from their apps.

HTML5 is not a platform. Facebook's project Spartan, for example, is a
platform, and that might have some success rivaling iOS/Android/Kindle. But
that's the difference.

~~~
dfxm12
_It's the platform experience that makes a good user experience._

I largely agree with you (and there will be situations where you need native
apps), but to play devil's advocate, the differences between an iOS device and
an Android device are less noticeable than the differences between a Mac and a
PC. If a cross-platform toolkit is ever going to work, it will be where the
platforms are (relatively) similar.

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rjd
I'm sure I read a variation of this article every month or so. I'm sure Ive
even read it on ZD before as well.

But these analysts are too short sighted to remember than when Apple rolled
out the iPhone it was web apps only. That was there initial business model for
the device.

They adjusted and dominated the market because of public pressure to do so. I
think Apple probably have business models up there sleeve from years ago they
never implemented.

~~~
alwillis
Please don't perpetuate the myth that Apple wasn't going to provide a SDK and
only because of public pressure did they release one.

Just because there was no SDK when the iPhone shipped in June 2007 doesn't
mean they hadn't planned to release one all along, which of course they did.

And just for the record, Apple released the first version of the iPhone SDK in
March 2008, just 9 months after the iPhone shipped. That's an awfully quick
turnaround for a company that supposedly wasn't going to release a SDK at all
until there was _pressure_.

~~~
rjd
The public SDK could have been delivered easily in 9 months as the Apple devs
themselves had to be using something, so many of the decisions would have been
already hardened. Plus iOS wasn't a completely new system it shares core
components with OSX.

Id hazard a guess the 9 months was more than luckily 9 months security testing
than developing an API for the public.

~~~
alwillis
Except that it's not just delivering the SDK; it was also the App Store and
all of the infrastructure it requires.

As anyone else who's worked closely with Apple can confirm, they don't change
strategy based on public pressure.

The iPhone was in development 2.5 years prior to its introduction in 2007; the
decision to support native 3rd party apps was made long before any of us heard
of the iPhone.

~~~
rjd
iTunes was already in place, so the infrastructure and payment methods already
existed. TBH this is only something Apple can answer.

I think you're right that Apple don't change tack due to pressure. However the
iPhone was a volatile product, with a high risk of failure.

It also ran the risk of getting booted off carriers for abusing network, and
runs all sorts of security issues... remembering in an abstracted way its
hooked to your bank account.. to your personal finances. I mean the last thing
Apple needs is a porn dialer and malware problem like Android has got.

I would say they had plans to do the App store all along, you'd be foolish not
to at least explore the concept. They where already doing games and little
things for the iPod, so in a sense it already existed.

But I bet there hand was forced... or maybe the carriers hand was forced
letting Apple win the argument... by public pressure and hackers already
writing there own code.

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patrickaljord
There is still something HTML5 can't beat: games and heavily graphics apps in
general. That and C will always be faster than JS+html on heavy graphic.
Unless HTML5 finds a way to bridge that gap (maybe with dart?) but even then
it's not highly probable and not in the near future anyway. And if it happens,
Apple could still offer those HTML5 apps as stand alone apps in their app
market. Sure, people would be able to get them from the web, but the the
market exposure will still be a big boost for developers and so the wall
garden will still be there.

Look at the apps Google removed from the Android market, they got significant
less downloads as people had to visit the app site to get them.

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JohnTHaller
What will crack Apple's garden is a combination of things. First, HTML5 will
definitely help as iOS loses market share on both phones and tablets and
developers want to work with more people. Second, as other phones (Android)
and tablets (Amazon Fire) gain market share, working on iOS first becomes less
and less attractive. Third, as the suit over Apple's collusion with the big
publishers to price-fix the ebook market goes forward (you can thank Apple for
causing all the ebooks to go from $10 to $14/$15 on Kindle and other retailers
and being more expensive than actual books). Fourth, as more developers get
tired of Apple's childish behavior in their app store about who can and can't
play ball (Adobe and 3rd party toolkits for instance) and who can and can't
implement features (we'll take 30% of that nice web-based media serving
platform you have even though we had nothing to do with it, thank you).

~~~
gte910h
>(Adobe and 3rd party toolkits for instance)

Flash builder definitely builds for the iOS appstore now.

[http://www.webkitchen.be/2011/06/20/build-ios-
applications-w...](http://www.webkitchen.be/2011/06/20/build-ios-applications-
with-flex-and-flash-builder-4-5-1/)

Android has some major challenges. Android tablets haven't really "just
worked", and have had crippling return rates and price points that do not
truly reflect their quality relative to the iPad.

Non-standard android builds (aka, the Kindle Fire is a fork of an old, non-
tablet based android) are getting more prolific, and hopefully do not fully
fragment the market into two.

What $14 kindle books are you talking about btw? I've never paid more than $10
that I noticed.

Another issue is Android is becoming the gateway drug to smartphones, instead
of holding share, a huge number of people buy it for their first app wielding
smart phone, then step over to apple for the second. They need to become more
"the windows to mac"(works okay, but has hairs, standardized) instead of the
"Desktop linux to mac" (can customize anything, but all over the place and
confusing to non-technical people), and I feel they're still hovering much
closer to the second category there than the first.

Additionally, you should probably be classifying the 5" "tablets" such as the
Galaxy S into the same market as smartphones, as well as the iPodTouch, for
the purposes of looking at things like app sales. They are in some ways more
important, because their dominent purpose is consumption, instead of phone
calls.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Right, it does build for it now. But Apple excluded Adobe's Flash builder
specifically for quite some time and built in a "no 3rd party toolkits" clause
just to exclude it. Of course, they then realized that this would also kill
off many of the popular games on iOS, so they were forced to relent. They
still block flash and all alternative browsers (settling instead for just
pretty 'chrome' over Mobile Safari and calling them 'browsers' in their
store), so there's still that issue.

The ebook issue is well-known now and is the reason that many ebooks are more
expensive than their paper equivalents despite having near-zero transportation
costs, no warehousing costs, no storefront costs, no production costs after
the first one, no ability to resell so no used market, etc. Some details,
including Steve Jobs' quote showing he knew exactly what was happening, are
here:
[http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/891584-264/apple_and_b...](http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/891584-264/apple_and_big_publishers_conspired.html.csp)

Android tablets based on Honeycomb are quite good now and I have a couple
friends that are using them, one of whom ditched his top-model iPad for it
after ditching his iPhone for a Samsung Galaxy 2. Personally, I'd wait on Ice
Cream Sandwich - aka Android 4, due out next month - as that'll be the point
that both the tablet and phone versions of Android are in sync and open source
(Android 3.x isn't yet open source like Android 2.x is).

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wandermatt
I enjoyed the part where Phil provides us with the quote ("Some even say the
Web is ‘dead meat’.") even though Joe Hewitt never said that, and that wasn't
what he argued in his piece.

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jayfuerstenberg
Why is every ZDNet article so wrong about Apple?

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37prime
ZDNet is known for writing hit-pieces on Apple. ZDNet has not been relevant
for a long time.

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sliverstorm
If anything suggests a chink is developing in their armour, it is the lawsuits
against Samsung, which are sounding more and more childish and desparate. Plus
knowledge of the Kindle Fire on the horizon.

