Following up on the PastryKit discussion, I was thinking about what phones will be like once the processing power, hardware hooks, and UI elements are in place to make HTML / JavaScript / CSS apps that are competitive with native apps.
I recall Steve Jobs saying that with iPhone Apple was moving the competition from a hardware feature comparison to a software comparison. (I'm paraphrasing and couldn't find a link to the actual quote - any help from out there would be appreciated). What is interesting is if all Webkit-based browsers can implement the same functionality, where will the distinction in phones come from?
Hardware features as before? Overall design? Software integration? App discovery and navigation? Multimedia playback, distribution, and discovery? Or will it remain specialized apps that work well on certain phones and not on others (for example, games that use intensive graphics)?
I think recent history has shown that hardware advantages are fleeting while true software integration takes longer to implement. Google has made impressive progress with Android and may be successful in getting hardware manufacturers to lower their margins and place Apple in the "premium price" category as they are with computers. Other phone manufacturers (Palm, RIM, Microsoft) have all faced delays workarounds to assemble the pieces needed for premium mobile ecosystems.
One significant difference between the smartphone market and the PC market that preceeded it is that the phones are primarily content consumers rather than content producers which makes interoperability much easier. This may lead to a marketplace that supports multiple OS and hardware platforms indefinately.
Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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?
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?
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