What if You Forced Apple into the App Store?


The Architecture of Reassurance

If you’ll recall, back when the iPhone was first released, Steve Jobs declared the best way to build apps for it was to build websites.

To which John Gruber replied:

“If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious.”

Since then, Apple released the App Store, an iPhone Developers SDK, and has made “there’s an app for that” so popular it became its own meme.

And despite Apple’s restrictions – the $99 Developer registration fee, faxing your business incorporation agreements to sell as a business, only using Objective-C and Apple development tools, Apple needs to accept your app & subsequent updates – there’s huge demand for building native applications in the iPhone.

But there’s big money to be made selling native apps! Well, maybe [1].

All of Apple’s restrictions are disincentives to build native apps.

And I’m confident Apple knows it and is encouraging it.

If you’ve spent enough time within the iPhone (or iPad, iPod Touch) you’ll notice some very interesting inconsistencies between how native apps behave (especially Apple’s own) in contrast to Safari. Inconsistencies that make me think Apple would still prefer you just built web sites.

The biggest example:

  1. Load up a web page within Safari
  2. Click ‘+’
  3. Now click ‘Add to Home Screen’

You just put an item (a web page) that lives in Safari on your iPhone’s home screen.

If the web site publisher included <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> in the header of the web page, it will display full-screen when you click it. Just like a native app.

Now, load up Music, Videos, Photos, Mail, or Maps and figure out how to put one of the items on your home screen.

Yeah, weird, huh?

Makes complete makes sense if Steve Jobs is true to his word – the best app for the iPhone is web-based one rather than native.

There’s no downside to releasing an SDK with all its restrictions and taking developers’ money. At worst Objective-C receives more attention, few more Macs are sold as development boxes, and the membership fees pay to keep Apple’s crazy restrictions in place.

Notice as well, that Apple still permits Javascript-based apps in their App Store.

It’s like we can’t take a hint.


1. In a recent survey of 100 iPhone developers:


33% earned of less than $250
52% earned less than $15,000
2%, $15,001-$50,000
1%, $50,001-$100,000
1%, $100,001-$250,000
1%, $500,001-$2,000,000

“But app developers want to make money, and Apple benefits most when they don’t. – Andrew Benton”

“Half of all [iPhone] developers will earn less than $682 per year.” – Tomi T Ahonen

In fact – Apple benefits from little to no app sales in the same way Google benefits from little to no AdWords clicks – no need to pay out.

Elsewhere:

“Apple is trapped by their original decision to shoulder the cost of free apps. They encouraged free apps and now they’ve got one band-aid on top of another — advertisements, in-app purchase, subscriptions — all trying to make free apps work for the App Store bottom line. ” – Manton Reece

URL Shorteners Are So Last Year

URL shorteners were all the rage in 2008 and 2009 – primarily due to the character constraints within the short messages service that was all the rage in 2008 and 2009 – Twitter.

URL shorteners take a long url, for example, this Google Map url:


http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=the+red+pepper,+plymouth,+mn&fb=1&split=1&gl=us&cid=1854680882426337660&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A

and transform it into something like: http://tinyurl.com/y3lxdru

Every URL shortener uses their own magic sauce to create the short random string - i.e. the 'y3lxdru' part - and stores right next to the long URL. So if there's a tiny.cc/y3lxdru or a j.mp/y3lxdru - they probably don't point to the same Google Map. In fact, if I understand how bit.ly (aka j.mp) works - their shortened URLs only exist for a few months - and then are 'released' (that's how they're able to keep them short). I even created a automatically expiring URL shortener cause I thought it was funny.

When someone clicks on the short URL, the URL shortener (tinyurl.com in the example above) promises to look up the long URL stored next to the short random string - and promptly redirect you to the location of that Chinese restaurant for your lunch meeting. And not some place unseemly - which has happened, more than once.

There are lots of problems with URL shorteners. I feel qualified to say this because I build 3 of them in the past 2 years (Culld.us, RE07.US, and a native WordPress hack, none of which are currently active).

At best - they make less usable URLs - because both the URLs shorteners domain name and the random string are meaningless (not to mention hard to remember) to people.

At worst - this obfuscation means every short URL clicked is more of a potential computer security risk than normal clicking around the internet.

A 3rd party URL shortener shouldn't be necessary to make Google's Map URLs shareable. Same goes for any other website - URLs can and should be constructed to be reasonably short, human readable, guessable, and accountable. URL design is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of website usability (as is scrolling).

"URL shorteners are cheap hacks apologizing for poor content-management-systems"

For the past 6 months or so - Twitter has been the only real reason to use a URL shortener. Facebook and other services are now doing a better job of handling long URLs. Many people and companies use URL shorteners as hack for not having a good web site statistics package. Additionally, Twitter has made noises like they're going to default to their own URL shortener in the near future - a move which will promptly shorten the already tiny lifespan of other URL shortening services.

Find ‘Twitter’, Replace with ‘Second Life’

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In the past week both Apple and Twitter have carpet bombed on their respective development communities. As I’ve written about previously – I’ve been off Twitter now for nearly 2 months.

This week an interesting switch flipped in my head.

When I hear ‘Twitter’, my head replaces it with another corporate site I have little presence within. Most often it’s ‘World of Warcraft’ or ‘Second Life’. Sometimes it’s ‘MySpace’.

It gives whatever statement a quaint, historical tint to it. Rather than the blanket of pretension I’ve been feeling lately.

Elsewhere:

“Twitter vs Facebook battle he alludes to is already over, and Facebook wins….There’s just more value in being able to share anything.” – Fred Oliveira

“When [Twitter’s] conversion to OAuth is complete they will be in a position to instantly block any application they don’t like, which they have already started doing. “-Eric Woodward

Considering His Lyrics

For decades, I’ve been a fan of Tim Quirk’s lyrics. He has a way of expressing the melancholy of defeat with cutting brevity and a touch of wordplay.

‘Topless at the Arco Arena’ rolled through the iTunes this afternoon and I stopped to savor these three lines:

Some rise by sin,
Some by virtue fall,
We’re not getting anywhere at all.
– Wonderlicks’ ‘The CEO Considers His Holdings’

If you’d like to give it a listen, it’s the 12th song down in the little player. Along the way, I highly recommend ‘All Boys Want’, ‘Fear of Chicago’, ‘The King of Bad Decisions’, and ‘Everybody Loves Jenny’.

Safari is Apple’s Middleware

“And, obviously, such a meta-platform would be out of Apple’s control. Consider a world where some other company’s cross-platform toolkit proved wildly popular. Then Apple releases major new features to iPhone OS, and that other company’s toolkit is slow to adopt them.” – John Gruber

Substitute “toolkit” for “website”. Now, remember when Jobs proudly announced:

“you can write great apps for the iPhone: they’re called ‘web sites’”

Giles Bowkett sums the situation up nicely:

“Geeks control the Internet because geeks built the Internet. We earned the freedom we have here. We earned it by creating something incredibly valuable and sharing it with millions and millions of people. What did we earn with the App Store? Did we build the App Store? Did we write iPhone OS? Did we design the groundbreaking hardware? Or are we just customers?…If geeks want the power to make any kind of decision in this situation, they need to get off their lazy asses and stop imagining that the world owes them a favor” – Giles Bowkett

How do I make a contribution to the U.S. government?

“Citizens who wish to make a general donation to the U.S. government may send contributions to a specific account called ‘Gifts to the United States.’ This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States. Money deposited into this account is for general use by the federal government and can be available for budget needs. These contributions are considered an unconditional gift to the government. Financial gifts can be made by check or money order payable to the United States Treasury and mailed to the address below.”

Thanks to Mark Perry for the pointer.