Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet, Internet Tools, iPhone
The strange case of 'Made for iPhone' websites
Apple trumpets the iPhone as bringing the 'real internet' to your pocket. This ain't no watered down Internet, says Apple (though Apple tends to avoid the use of double negatives). It is true that the iPhone version of Safari, dubbed MobileSafari by some, is a fully featured browser (with the exception of plugins, but who uses those anymore? Oh, right.) and can render lots and lots of the web just fine, thank you. Despite this fact, iPhonified websites are booming. Oddly, instead of using the iPhone to browse the 'real internet' users are pointing MobileSafari to more and more iPhone specific websites (which smack of the 'mobile web' to me). What's the deal with that?
Furthermore, I find it odd that many of these iPhone specific apps are not only being embraced by the Mac community, but being created by some heavyweights in the web design arena. Why do I find this odd? I seem to recall that for many years the Mac community bemoaned the practice of designing web apps that only worked in a particular web browser (like, say IE6 for Windows). This painful practice has found new life in the form of iPhone-only apps. Nothing irks me more than browsing to a site only to be greeted with a page that, based on the user agent my browser supplies, keeps me out. Try going to some of these new iPhone webapps in Safari 3 on a Mac or PC and that's just what you'll encounter. Why? These apps will run just fine on my desktop, and yet I am left out of the fun. (Why would anyone want to browse lightweight pages on their computer, you ask? Being a member of the AOL family, one reason springs to mind immediately: dial-up users).
Is this a double standard -- bad if it hurts Mac users, but just fine if it works on Apple's new gizmo? Do Mac users have short memories? I don't have the answers, but I think these are questions worthy of thought. Am I the only one?
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Charles Gaba said 7:25AM on 7-18-2007
I'm not going to completely defend this practice, but I will say that in my experience, the distinction has to do with screen resolution more than anything else. That is, many web developers designed their sites specifically for 800x600 screens for years, when that was the default resolution for most monitors (peaking at 56% in 2000). Then, as higher-res monitors started to take over, some developers abandoned the 800x600 "standard" and started coding for 1024x768 (which similarly reached a peak of around 57% in 2006, but has since started to drop):
http://www.brainwrap.com/faq/screen_resolution.html
Of course, many developers make their sites "stretchy", widening & narrowing to match the width of just about any browser window/screen resolution, but there are limits, and the 480/320 range of handhelds does generally call for a different layout.
Ironically, as you noted, the whole point of the iPhone's browser is that you don't have to worry about screen resolution, since you can pan & scan all over the place quickly, but it sounds like an awful lot of developers *want* to make iPhone sites that don't *require* horizontal scrolling (which is, after all, "taboo" on the general web--I guess old habits die hard is all...
My point is that coding for a particular screen resolution strikes me as being somewhat different than coding for a specific browser-type, which is what you usually think of when it comes to the old "best viewed with..." coding.
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Mikhail Wright said 7:26AM on 7-18-2007
Not to seem cynical but Yes.
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Ryan Schmidt said 7:57AM on 7-18-2007
I hate the idea of "iPhone-ified" sites. I bought the iPhone because my Blackberry didn't show me the real internet and now I am catching myself using just the iPhone version of the site. Half of my reasoning is that edge is so slow, the iPhone sites make it just bearable.
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Tony said 8:00AM on 7-18-2007
Dude, one word: EDGE. In Chicago, I get about 12-80 kilobits per second speed with full bars of reception...it's slow! If there were an option to turn off the downloading of images, I'd be a little less hesitant to go to the normal web when on EDGE network. Again, EDGE is a turtle, that's why. I even called AT&T to see why it's so slow, and I was punted back and forth between them and Apple...not good times.
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Ryan said 9:03AM on 7-18-2007
Are websites starting to catch the iPhone user agent string and forcing users onto the 'iPhone version' of the site? Like how the Weblogs, Inc. sites do (at least when I hit them on my blackberry)?
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Tad said 8:27AM on 7-18-2007
A lot of the sites popping up seem to be more like web apps than pure web pages. When that's the focus, I don't see any problem targeting the iPhone specifically. Ultimately, does it result in a better user experience? If it does and the iPhone becomes popular enough, perhaps we'll have a defacto standard for a higher quality mobile web application experience as other phone makers copy the features.
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Kelly said 8:31AM on 7-18-2007
I think the web 2.0 apps on the iphone is the best thing apple could've done - Why pay people to develop for your product when hundreds of thousands of developers will do it for free, and the apps will be better and more diverse :D
On that note, developers making aps for iphones please list your apps here.
http://www.innermindmedia.com/iphoneaps.php
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Jack Beckman said 8:48AM on 7-18-2007
Don't forget that Apple has made this the only way to write applications for the iPhone. Since everyone want's their apps to look like iPhone apps, they're coding these specific pages.
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Danny Espinoza said 8:40AM on 7-18-2007
If you want to run iPhone Applications on your Mac you can run them inside an iPhone spoofer like iPhoney.
Or (shameless plug follows) you can convert them into desktop widgets using our new widget platform, Amnesty Hypercube:
http://www.amnestywidgets.com/HypercubeMac.html
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Josh said 8:57AM on 7-18-2007
As both an iPhone user and an iPhone developer have to make a quick comment here. I personally test my App in IE, Firefox, Safari and of course Mobile Safari (the iPhone). Now I have 1 goal, make an App that works on an iPhone. BUT (and I stress BUT) I do not make design decisions that break the app on other platforms. I think that you may find other developers that feel the same way (then again maybe not, I mean iUI is platform specific).
The reason iPhone webapps are so specific to the iphone is because its the Apps Target market. for example my app, https://PassVault,ktomics.net, could easily have all of its forms & screens reformatted for a standard window. But I have tested that experience on an iPhone. Its functional but not pleasant. So because my target market is an iPhone user, I format my site to function in that smaller form factor. does that make it an iPhone webpage? maybe so. Taking this discussion a step further it is not uncommon for a web platform to render different content based on the browser anyways. ASP.NET renders different JavaScript based on the browser, heck even your browser can choose a specific CSS link based on attributes in the tag. What I am getting at is Browser specific formatting is not unique to the iPhone.; and its a far cry better than having to write an entirely separate presentation layer like you do with WML and WAP (mobile) sites!
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Jamie Phelps said 8:57AM on 7-18-2007
As a web designer, contending with the iPhone is just accounting for another browser. I still have to worry about IE 6 (God, help us!) even though it has been that special kid in the corner of the class eating paste since, uhm, forever. So, like #1 said above, it's just another part of designing. So, now when I design a site, I have to really consider, "Is there a way I can do this without Flash since iPhone doesn't support it?" and "Oh, yah, can't do a :hover based menu because it won't work with iPhone." I'd rather deal with those things than peek-a-boo bugs and wonky box model stuff.
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Josh said 9:00AM on 7-18-2007
correction - https://passvault.ktomics.net (fat-fingered a comma into the URL.)
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Charles Gaba said 9:15AM on 7-18-2007
#10--"Oh, yah, can't do a :hover based menu because it won't work with iPhone."
Oy, is that correct? Are you just talking about Flash-based drop-down menus, or *any* of them (ie, Javascript-based, for example)? I knew about the lack of Flash support, but didn't realize that rollover menus wouldn't work either...
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Ian said 9:25AM on 7-18-2007
Double-standards? Hell yes. Apple should be working towards and open and unified web consistently, not fragmenting it into little fiefdoms.
Apple has just ignored handheld stylesheet support specified by the W3C. Luckily they are using CSS3 media queries but then break it for other advanced mobile browsers by specifying it as screen only.
See this for more details:
http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/iphone-and-developing-for-mobile
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chuck wilrycx said 10:04AM on 7-18-2007
Uhm....maybe it's just me, but Made For iPhone is perfect for the utile needs we constantly use to get info. This should be distinct from browsing which I agree should try to be universal. But if I want to search for a movie, why shouldn't that be optimized for my device of choice? It's the real internet flavored, not restricted. Just me...
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TexRob said 9:36AM on 7-18-2007
So far things like Digg's iPhone version, and other things that are merely iPhone only apps have been great. When they start forcing them on me, I'll start complaining. Right now, the iPhone specific pages are awesome, and IMHO better than the regular counterparts (Digg for iPhone is awesome).
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Frank said 9:39AM on 7-18-2007
i just thought that the "made for iphone" sites were just designed to fit the iphone screen better, but i had forgotten about the lack of flash needed, etc. hmm, good points, all -- i'm being a hypocrite by supporting iphone optimized sites, and i didn't even know it!
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brian said 9:46AM on 7-18-2007
Charles G - yup, no hover. iPhone doesn't recognize mouseover.
See page 29 of the PDF here: http://barcamp.org/iPhoneDevCamp
And now for the main topic. First of all, no one is designing iPhone-only sites. (Except for a few people who are using it as a development platform to deliver iPhone apps because that's the only choice. But we didn't get mad when people started writing Widgets for Tiger, did we?) They are (mostly) iPhone-OPTIMIZED versions of EXISTING sites. Because of this, there is no double-standard with regard to our hate of IE-only sites. There's a BIG difference between (voluntarily) making ANOTHER version of a site that is OPTIMIZED for one platform or another versus writing a site that only FUNCTIONS with one non-standards-compliant browser.
Also, people aren't just optimizing the look, they're optimizing the load time due to EDGE slowness.
As for "But Steve said it's the REAL Internet!!!!11", there are several points here as well: 1) Yeah, but do you want to HAVE to zoom in and out and pan all around? Wouldn't it be nice to have sites that fit nicely onto such a tiny screen? 2) This is actually a Good Thing, because more and more people ARE using mobile devices to browse, but browsing with a tiny screen sucks. I think this will lead people to make not just iPhone-friendly sites, but more and more MOBILE-friendly sites. (Even if that just means simpler layouts, @mobile style sheets, etc.) I've got a Dell Axim with a 640x480 screen--twice that of the iPhone!--and mobile browsing still mostly sucks. What are the only sites that are good to visit on suck a device? A) Old-school, 1996-looking sites that just present lots and lots of content without ANY tables OR CSS columns of any kind, and B) sites designed to work on tiny screens, like the mobile versions of Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, etc. Also, TUAW looks great, though you can only read headlines and stories (not comments) in the mobile-optimized view.
Shrinking the whole Web to a blurry, unreadable size to fit onto a 3.5" screen and letting people zoom in is NOT the answer. It's a nice workaround but it is far from ideal. Also people browse differently on mobile devices. Do you need to see every single DIGG story when you're out and about? Are you going to spend hours on your phone, with dozens of windows and tabs open? No, you probably just want to kill a few minutes in line at the bank, so a few of the top stories will do.
The fact is, the Web will be seen on more and more tiny devices, and the Web would be GREAT if it didn't assume everyone had infinite screen real estate and bandwidth. For another example of an alternate delivery device, look at the Nintendo Wii--when hooked to an SD TV, you're working with roughly the equivalent of 640x480. Ideally, people would write to standards and not get worked up into a fervor over the design and would instead deliver sites that look great at 320 wide or 1680 wide or anything in between. Until that happens, I'll be grateful for every web developer who decides to offer a mobile-optimized version of their site.
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Shane Guymon said 9:48AM on 7-18-2007
Although I somewhat agree with what you are saying here, I do have to wonnder, it's 2007, why in the world would you still be in the "AOL" family, and why would you still be on dial up????
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B deR West said 10:03AM on 7-18-2007
Even Google's doing it! I had to retype google.com/calendar because when I went to google/calendar, it ported me to some weird made-for-mobile version of the calendar, which was uncool. I agree. One of the reasons I bought my iPhone was to browse the real Web.
But I think sometimes it's allowed, if for nothing more than Apple wants Web developers to make iPhone-specific sites, it's their claimed "SDK"
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