iPhone and the Future of Apps
When the iPhone was released, there was plenty of bellyaching about the lack of an SDK for third-party apps. Then Apple stepped up and announced that the “SDK” for the new device would be the Safari web browser, combined with Web 2.0 techniques (i.e. gobs of JavaScript on the client). Some hailed this as a visionary idea while others griped (somewhat paradoxically) that “web apps are not applications”. The situation became muddier when rogue developers quickly released a user interface toolkit and a package manager that makes it braindead simple to install native (albeit unauthorized) OS X apps designed for the iPhone.
I’ve been plugging the idea of web apps as the future of applications for a while, with a particular emphasis on WebRunner. So naturally I’ve been intrigued by Apple’s decision to make the web their official SDK. Having got my hot little hands on one, however, I’m disappointed by the current lack of features that would make this direction viable. As far as I can see, you can’t even add an app to the pretty grid of colorful icons that serves as the iPhone’s main menu. Besides integration with the underlying OS, there are many other gaps if the browser is to serve as an application platform: offline storage, Flash, more sophisticated web forms, etc. (Mike Shaver had a great overview of future web browser features at Mozilla 24.)
When Apple announced Safari for Windows I hypothesized that this would allow them to roll out exactly these kinds of proprietary browser-as-a-platform features. I still think that the use of web apps as the standard iPhone development paradigm is brilliant, but the current offering is totally inadequate. I predict that Apple will start to announce fancy new features for Safari or (hopefully) jump on board of existing efforts like XUL, Flex, Google Gears and the like.
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