

Ask HN: Where are all the iPad apps? - famousactress

I'm glad Twitter finally released, but where's Facebook? Where's Skype? I expected more really amazing music and dj apps by now. I figured we'd see more innovative examples of new gesture-based interaction design.<p>Are iPad apps much more expensive to build than iPhone ones? Is there much less impetus to build an app for a platform that already provides a good browsing experience?
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gte910h
I do mobile development, mostly iPad/iPhone development full time for a
product development company (see profile if you want to email for a quote).

Facebook for iPhone was originally written by a non-facebook employee from
what I understand who's now left the iOS development environment over
philosophical differences with the app approval process. While facebook
publishes their own app now, again, they weren't exactly the first to hit the
platform in the first place.

What exactly are you expecting skype to do differently on the iPad than the
iPhone? What are you expecting the non-iPhone shaped UI to give you that the
iPhone shaped UI doesn't? The iPad isn't exactly a perfect platform for
videoconferencing (no camera), and the phone version works fine.

All that said, lets talk about technical/policy/business issues which cause
people to not specialize on the iPad.

First off: Business reasons.

Business wise, the iPad has _very few users_ compared to the iPhone/iPod Touch
formfactor. So when you write to that audience, you're paying for a generally
more expensive app, to reach fewer people. Is this a bad thing? For companies
that could grow too fast, it might be a positive thing, but on the whole a
smaller audience is bad. On the plus side however, those who own iPads tend to
be more affluent and are willing to buy more expensive applications, so you
can get higher unit prices to somewhat compensate for that, if your concept is
appealing to people.

Next up: Policy Issues

Apple is not the easiest of companies to "write software for". And while
you're not writing it "for" them per se, you have to jump through a series of
hoops they tell you to. And with the iPad, you have a list of guidelines to
follow which are quite a bit different than with the iPhone/iPodTouch sized
apps. Your apps need to handle all orientations for the most part, your apps
need to observe the more complex menu-ing paradigms, your apps need to usually
have more sophisticated art assets, and you also have a higher expectation of
not looking "cruddy" for lack of a better word.

While the enforcement of these "guidelines" are all over the map, people
routinely DO get rejected for violating some or all of them. This means the
cost of iPad development goes up.

Technical considerations:

Hybrid apps, those which work both on the phone and pad in the "native"
resolution of the platforms require you to either A> violate the assumptions
of one or both platforms or B> create completely different screen layouts for
each "mode" of the application. Those "modes" would be iPhone, iPad landscape,
iPad Portrait. Menuing is different in the two orientations on the iPad, and
expectations of pretty animations are much higher in general.

Until November or so, you'll see that additionally that iPad is on 3.2.1 of
iOS and iPhones are on 4.0.1. This means the iPad is missing many of the
cutting edge features that 4.x has. So if you're writing a hybrid app, you
have to work around sometimes having certain features, and sometimes not, and
additionally you have all the issue with different aspect ratios, etc.

Hopefully I've explained some of the issues. I've tried to be brief, this is a
complicated subject, but basically, this is it, and it's _also_ a huge barrier
to entry, which means many good business opportunities still exist on the
iPad.

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jefft
why is this upvoted so much? your points are all off base, and frankly sound
like they're coming from someone who doesn't care to do iPad development.

The real factor here is the iPad has only been on the market for 5 months.
We've had the iPhone SDK for over 2 years now. We just need more time to
figure things out.

to your point: what do we expect skype to do differently on iPad vs iPhone?
how about something creative?

it's embarrassing that Facebook doesn't have an iPad app by now. Kudos to
Twitter for trying (and shipping) something new and exciting.

~~~
konad
When "new and exciting" is all you got, what's the ROI ?

~~~
jefft
the ROI is people spending more time on Twitter. have you used the app?

it's set up for much more noodling/discovery of tweets and people, rather than
just looking over a timeline.

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frankus
There are two large categories of apps that don't have the same degree of
raison d'etre on the iPad. You've hit on one, which is that having a larger
browser and a faster processor makes having a "native interface for a web
app"-type app less important. There is no Facebook desktop app to the best of
my knowledge (one made by Facebook, anyway).

The other category of apps that don't make sense on the iPad are the "small
utility that you always want to have in your pocket" apps. The iPad isn't
small, and you don't carry it everywhere the way that you do an iPhone or iPod
Touch. Two examples that look a little ridiculous when scaled up to iPad size
are a compass and a calculator.

The situation isn't likely to get much better until a big chunk of laptop
users start adopting iPads as their primary portables. At that point I could
see a lot of web apps start to make native-code interfaces.

In fact it might get worse once iPhone-4-optimized apps can be run full screen
on the iPad complete with non-pixellated graphics and text.

So that leaves productivity apps, games, and a few miscellaneous categories.

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joeld42
Everyone ignored the "don't hard-code sizes" thing. Why not, when the only
devices that exist were 480x320.

I'm about to start porting my iPhone "Brainstormer" app to the iPad (along
with an overhaul of the editing UI). It doesn't seem like it's going to be
that much work but we'll see.

