John Stewart
Kony

Magnus Jern
CEO, Golden Gekko

Because Apple won’t implement it, because it wasn’t made or developed by apple. And Apple Fans don’t fucking care. These are the same people who will buy the iPhone 5, even though it would be on par with phones that have been released 6 months ago.

HTML5 was started in 2004 and adopted by W3C in January 2007, 6 months before the original iPhone shipped. A key feature of iPhone Web app development was you had the HTML5 canvas to draw an interface on.

HTML5 is just a description of modern HTML, it describes what the browsers do, not some lofty future academic goal that we may never achieve. It is not as new as you think, and what little is new is backwards-compatible. The fact that the original iPhone supported less of the HTML5 spec than today’s iPhone did not stop the apps from running or stop them from being HTML5.

The original iPhone had native apps built with the same tools Apple released a year later. Yes, definitely they were always going to do that. But they were always going to have HTML5 apps as well. They did not make WebKit for OS X so they could leave it out.

App Store is managed 1) as an anti-malware initiative, the only successful one ever, resulting in a 100% malware-free native app platform, and 2) as an alternative to the unmanaged Web, which all users already have access to. These are great reasons. Arguing with success is for losers.

It is fine to create an HTML5 app and deploy on the Web and the Java platforms. App Store, though, offers you native C/C++ and the opportunity to make a much richer app than HTML5. Since user’s baseline expectations are set by the Web, App Store enables you to wow them and that is what people are willing to pay for in an app. So if you give your HTML5 app to an Xcode coder and let him use it as a mock-up and then build on it from there, the money you pay that coder will come back to you 10 times over or more in increased sales because your app will be that much better.

In other words, native iOS app development pays for itself. No reason to avoid it if you want to be in App Store. If an app platform doesn’t pay for itself, then by all means, wrap a Web app.

iOS runs both native App Store apps and HTML5 Web apps. Both kinds of apps can be installed locally on an iOS device. Apple has no control over which HTML5 Web apps you choose to run, and you can install them from any server anywhere in the world. That is because Web apps run in a sandbox, they don’t have to touch the hardware. App Store apps are managed in order to provide an alternative to unmanaged Web apps, and also because they are native C/C++ apps which run “on the metal,” and therefore require auditing to run safely and 100% malware-free. Native apps have the key to your house, you can’t just let an unaudited app run on there.

Which do you think is the bigger evil: auditing native apps to make sure they are safe and achieving a 100% malware-free native application platform, or what Microsoft has on Windows, a plague of malware that has cost their users billions of dollars?

People who are buying iOS devices appreciate the features of one or the other app platform or both. You can use an iPad and never use App Store and still have access to hundreds of thousands of apps. Or you can use the hell out of App Store. Your choice. Same as the choice either to buy or not buy an iPad.

HTML5 apps were running on iOS 1 year before App Store even launched. The idea that you can’t run whatever you want on your iPhone is crazy. It comes with like 20 apps and then you are on your own. Nothing gets on there that you don’t put on there yourself. There are hundreds of thousands of either kind of app. Use what you like.

So what you have in iOS is just 2 kinds of local app: native App Store and HTML5 Web app. They are like a yin yang, the 2 together give you a complete universe of apps. The native apps are iOS only, while the Web apps are universal. Native apps are managed, Web apps are open. Native apps are controlled by Apple, Web apps by W3C. Native apps have a commercial installer (App Store) and Web apps have a non-commercial installer (World Wide Web.) Native apps have Mac-like features (animation, multichannel audio, video, ease of use, refinement) and Web apps have Web-like features (minimalist audio, video, animation.)

Whatever project a developer is working on, one or the other type of app will be ideal, either HTML5 Web app or native App Store. But in both cases, you are making a local app.

• Apple is the biggest promoter of HTML5 — they co-wrote the spec, they created the reference browser, they ported it to ARM and made HTML5 standard on mobiles by sharing that code with all mobile makers, so that if you run an HTML5 app today, you are likely to be running it in Apple’s HTML5 decoder, or that Apple was the first PC vendor to ship an HTML5 browser, and iOS is the best HTML5 app platform

• a key feature of App Store is that the apps do MORE than HTML5 apps — if they did not, App Store would have no reason to exist … but you can’t do iMovie on the Web, you can’t do music and audio

• that Apple only makes 1% on app sales — in other words, less than a penny on a 99 cent app, the other 29% they take is overhead?

The concern trolling for Apple lately is just sad. There is nothing bad that can be said about Apple’s position. They are in a completely unprecedented position of leadership in the industry even for them.

HTML5 is a level playing field. Apple has no problem competing on a level playing field.