Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Software, WWDC, iPhone
Apple announces 3rd parties can write Web 2.0 apps for iPhone
Along with all the Mac OS X-related announcements at WWDC today, Apple also announced a solution, of sorts, to the 3rd party apps conundrum surrounding the iPhone.
Since the device's announcement at Macworld '07 earlier this year, one of the largest questions everyone had for Apple was whether the company would allow 3rd parties to develop applications for it. After all, with such a powerful device and what is likely to be a very, very broad user base, not allowing users extend the functionality of the iPhone could be a significant - if not mortal - roadblock for the device. At one point, Apple VPs confirmed there would be no 3rd party apps, and even Steve Jobs himself confirmed that the iPhone would be a closed platform in the name of security and making sure users didn't take down the West Coast AT&T network because "some application messed up." As you can imagine, this comment was widely slammed, largely because plenty of other mobile phone platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, etc.) allow for 3rd party apps, and to this day no phone has reportedly knocked out any portion of a coastal network.
Still, users and developers saw through this bizarre smoke screen and still requested a more relevant and definitive answer as to whether the iPhone will allow 3rd party apps. Eventually, Jobs began to hint at the possibility, telling the community that Apple was 'considering the possibility.' Today, finally, Steve Jobs revealed Apple's plan for allowing 3rd party apps on the iPhone, and it surprisingly involves Safari and web 2.0/AJAX technologies.
Both on stage during today's WWDC keynote and in a press release issued this afternoon, it was revealed that the iPhone will allows 3rd party apps which:
look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone's services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using Web 2.0 standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.
This is an interesting compromise for Apple, and one that has understandably been met with mixed fanfare. On the one hand, leveraging web technologies will allow both Mac OS X developers and web developers to easily get their apps onto the iPhone. This opens the door for a lot more people to get their apps and services on the iPhone since they won't have to learn the entirety of Mac OS X. Interestingly, this could have a serious effect on Safari's market share (or WebKit's share, depending on how you look at it), since Apple has now made their browser available for Windows and a hotly anticipated mobile device.
On the other hand, developers might understandably feel a bit constrained by the limitations of web technologies and not having full access to the iPhone's operating system like they do on a real Mac running Mac OS X. While Steve Jobs demonstrated some surprisingly powerful apps built to run in Safari on the iPhone, this doesn't mean every desktop app that users want a mobile counterpart for can sufficiently run in an environment that's limited by web 2.0 and AJAX.
Of course, it's still very early to tell; while the initial reaction to the iPhone 3rd party app compromise has been mixed, we'll all just have to wait and see what the 3rd parties can make of this system when the iPhone is released and the apps start (hopefully) rolling in.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Derek C said 4:21PM on 6-11-2007
I'd have to respectfully disagree. It's incredibly disappointing that the only functionality available to developers is via Safari. There are many applications which do not make sense as a web application, despite the advances in Ajax/Web 2.0. I'll concede that we may be surprised in how clever developers will be able to get around this barrier, but on the other hand, many of the great applications available to other platforms will likely not see the light of day for the iPhone.
One of the things I love about my Treo is that the open development platform has given a lot of neat apps for jotting notes, emulating other platforms, and of course, playing games. Perhaps the general public doesn't care about these things, but I can imagine that there was a somewhat collective groan among developers that the platform will be closed.
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Jonathan said 4:34PM on 6-11-2007
Ok sounds good...but where's the info? They're going to have to release some sort of documentation on how to integrate with contacts and the phone and gmaps...
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steve said 4:39PM on 6-11-2007
While I would have preferred something along the lines of J2ME extended to include iPhone extensions, I think this is a fair compromise for the time being. Considering how much people can do with simple Javascript in Dashboard, I think that developers will be able to create some pretty innovative products using the full suite of Web 2.0 toolkit combined with the iPhone interface. Add in theoretical support for Flash and you have huge range of possibilities including games & media.
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Michael said 4:42PM on 6-11-2007
The presentation today seemed to more insulting then not. Honestly, who are they trying to kid. Yes, sure, a Web 2.0 app can be created... but that is not a real solution.
It is my take that we will see rather specific partnering with Apple in developing a few apps. Just wish there was an iPhone API that offered more ability. Even Apple says themselves how much greater client apps are in reference to their Google Maps application and how it blew away the web version and the minds of Google themselves.
Head is still spinning.. need to rest again :-)
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Gwydion said 5:08PM on 6-11-2007
I can't imagine TomTom Navigator or Skype developed in AJAX
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jc said 5:09PM on 6-11-2007
This is the perfect solution provided the web api has enough ui features. As a Windows Mobile 5 user for some time, all the applications I install try to do everything local. Rarely do any of them have any synchronization, and if so its with Microsoft Office.
I really like the fact that on the iPhone, all the 3rd party apps will be accessible on the desktop (via a website) as well.
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Sam G. said 7:49PM on 6-11-2007
Mixed?
MIXED???!?!?!?!?
That's putting it VERY charitably. I haven't seen one positive comment about this plan.
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Gene Cowan said 5:09PM on 6-11-2007
I'm not a developer, but let me see if I've got this straight from a user's perspective: if I want to use a third party app, I'll have to go into Safari, then go to a website, then run an app from the page?
How does this jibe with Apple's concerns for ease of use by the end user? Sounds like an awful lot of extra steps. It also sounds like every time I go to use one of these apps living in the "cloud", I'm going to have to wait for it to download over the pokey EDGE network rather than just have the code stored on my iPhone as a regular app.
As an end user, this seems like a very half-assed way to do things.
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jeffiel said 5:12PM on 6-11-2007
Doesn't the success of this strategy depend largely on the iPhone API exposed via javascript? Stevie said that phone features are available, but to what extent is unknown. If you can access local storage, phone, ipod, address functionality, etc... then this is pretty powerful. On the other hand, if no local storage is available, if api access to iPhone features are limited, then it's less interesting.
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Todd said 5:16PM on 6-11-2007
> leveraging web technologies will allow both Mac OS X developers and web developers to easily get their apps onto the iPhone
No, this allows web developers to get their apps on the iPhone. It ignores Mac OS X developers completely. Even though they claim the iPhone runs "real Mac OS X" and uses Cocoa, developers can use none of it.
I really think WWDC was a poor place to announce that Apple will be allowing web development for the iPhone. Talking to a room full of Cocoa developers, I doubt they were all excited about this..
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steve said 5:15PM on 6-11-2007
Here are my thoughts on what it means to developers: http://www.last100.com/2007/06/11/iphones-support-for-3rd-party-apps-wont-please-everyone/#more-141
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Brady J. Frey said 5:26PM on 6-11-2007
What I find funny is that this is an announcement. With a full featured browser, web 2.0 apps would have been there regardless... is there something custom I'm missing? Are these widgets, which aren't full web code standardized and with some proprietary code from Apple, are are they just web apps that would have been there anyhow?
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Pete said 5:50PM on 6-11-2007
Well, it won't be interacting with my bluetooth GPS then. Damn.
But for business users, as with the app they demoed, it's probably all you need for third party support.
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dave said 5:58PM on 6-11-2007
But this means tens of thousands of existing apps - written in HTML, Javascript and Ruby on Rails - will work on the iPhone.
It's very forward-thinking of Jobs et. al. to acknowledge web apps in such a significant way. Countless developers already know these languages, so they can start writing apps immediately. This is a good thing.
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willh said 7:54PM on 6-11-2007
I think the "Web 2.0" meme for iPhones apps is a clever way of opening the closed platform that is the iPhone.
First, it's clear that Apple really never wanted an "open" iPhone, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly channel control.
But the Web 2.0 app mechanism need not be spectacularly limiting.
For example, all of the major browsers (including Safari, I think), now have a mechanism for persisting data on the client side from run to run. And there is a pending standard to support this persistence.
Google "Gears" is a more sophisticated client side persistence mechanism, which will obviously not be in the iPhone, but points in the direction of offline "web" apps.
Via Javascript, and its leveraging of the Ajax mechanism, the modern browser is become the rich client development platform of choice. While in the past we've had "some Javascript embedded in HTML pages", that tide is turning around toward "some HTML embedded in to Javascript programs".
The Safari 3 announcement for Windows is interesting for its 2x Javascript speed. In the past, that wouldn't have been that important. But today, it's getting more and more important.
If Apple provides hooks in to things like Core Animation, and other OS X services to Javascript via Safari, then that just empowers the developer even more.
The true key will simply be what Apple will allow the developers to download, and keep, on the phone. If they let them download and store most any kind of resource, the do not underestimate the power of a Javascript application with some nice backing utility functions. In essence, that's all Firefox is, and that's what many of the Dashboard widgets are as well.
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JeffDM said 8:05PM on 6-11-2007
I'm still thinking it's a cop-out. I mean, users EXPECT all their web sites to work properly under mini-Safari. So it's not developing for the iPhone, it's developing for the web. It's a good idea to actively support AJAX, but AJAX isn't a solution for everything.
I'll twist an adage, all you have here is a hammer, but not everything is a nail. If you are between WiFi APs, then you are stuck with a web app that loads like a turd over EDGE.
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JD said 11:11PM on 6-11-2007
So wait, if I'm a low-end freeware/shareware developer, I now need to pay for a server to host my little app? And if the app takes off in popularity, suddenly a) I go bust, b) the server host closes my account, and c) all the happy users suddenly have their little app die?
This decision seems terrible both for the high end (TomTom, Skype) and the low end (freeware/shareware). Yuck.
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Fabio P said 11:20PM on 6-11-2007
as far as i read, you can access the phones ability.
but only making calls, showing a point on a map and the basic things.
but what about accessing the adressbook? can an application access the adressbook? or can it only add a contact to the adressbook?
what about the camera? can an app access the camera? or do you have to take a picture and upload it then to the webapplication? is it even possible to upload files? that would need an access to the files, ergo a filemanager for the iPhone.
which leads to another question. can the app save something on the phone?
so, the whole applications runs on the server of the creator?
so after all, if you cant store the ressources often used, this means a lot of bandwith for the developers, which equals costs for their server.
therefore, i guess many applications are going to cost if they'll cause too much traffic.
another thing:
airplanes. looks like you cant use any "3rd party" application in an airplane.
is this 3rd pary support or "3rd party support"?
if you can save some applications on the phone itself, like say a flash game, whats the deal with it?
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st8ic said 12:11AM on 6-12-2007
to 18. No, you can't. Web 2.0 doesn't suppose an interaction with any kind of hardware.
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Scott Conklin said 3:15AM on 6-12-2007
This is a lame "solution". Even Steve Job's reality distortion field can't make this seem like a good thing and he never should have tried, given the silence of the keynote during the entire demo. It doesn't have the look and feel of all the other apps, you have to open Safari to use them. People don't think of bookmarks as applications no matter how robust they may be. I want to be able to add some icons to the home page of iPhone that launch apps that don't require a connection to the internet!
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