PastryKit and the iPod

John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball about PastryKit which is apparently an Apple-developed framework for creating mobile web apps for iPhone and iPod touch. Gruber did a nice analysis of Pastry Kit and included a demonstration of a website (http://help.apple.com/iphone/3/mobile/) written using it. He also explained many of the advantages it offers versus other web development tools and how it compares to native app development. I highly recommend reading the post if you are at all interested in mobile app development, be it native or web-based.

While reading about PastryKit and the idea of web apps on the iPhone it reminded me of a strategy Apple used to achieve dominance with the early iPod incarnations.

The idea Apple used was to adopt a different technology for a key component of the product, only to then adopt the original technology after it had matured and other competitors had been forced into defensive "follower" positions.

When the iPod was introduced in October of 2001 there were a number of other mp3 players on the market. Most of them used flash memory to store data and had capacities in the 128 to 256 MByte range. Apple entered the scene with a radically different technology - a miniature hard drive that held 20 times more music than the flash players. Other manufacturers were seemingly caught off guard with inferior products. Now, the Nomad was famously introduced around the same time also with a hard drive but it failed in the marketplace for other reasons. Once the iPod caught on and, with iTunes began pulling away from other competitors, Apple then introduced the iPod nano - based on flash memory. By this time, 2005, flash had improved enough put up to 4 GB in a first generation nano. Once again Creative, Samsung, Toshiba, even Microsoft had channeled their energy towards battling Apple with hard-drive based players and were caught flat-footed without flash-based players to offer up. This was a great example of Apple "skating where the puck is going to be".


Now we have the iPhone and the Cocoa Touch development framework which has become the gold standard of native app development. When it was introduced the initial development platform (Steve Jobs' "sweet solution" for app development) was JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Soon after, though, the SDK and App Store were introduced, causing a seismic shift in mobile app development. Other companies spent the next year and a half developing their own SDKs, App stores, and developer incentives. Now it seems Apple is putting some weight behind web app development. Might we see another case of other companies following as Apple leads?