Chris Messina Hates the App Store
Chris Messina wrote an article titled “Steve Jobs Hates the App Store”, which has been making the rounds. For context, it’s worth linking to Chris’s Wikipedia page.
On to the article…
Ok, Steve Jobs doesn’t hate the App Store.
Translation: “Now that my sensationalist, link-baiting headline has gotten your attention…”
It’s a friggin’ blockbuster success as far as the pundits can see. It’s everything and more than anyone ever thought it could be. It’s the salvation of weak business models. It preserves the patriarchic walled garden hierarchy of app-lockin and single-vendor-mediated consumer experience! Hooray!
“BY THE WAY I’M TOTALLY BEING SARCASTIC.”
For the sake of argument, and to make a point, let’s say for a moment that Steve Jobs really did hate the App Store — and everything that it stands for. What if deep in his gut he realized that he’d been wrong to give in to developer demand? What if his illness was caused by the guilt he felt over what he’d wrought by launching the App Store? What if every ounce of his gaunt figure yearned for the demise of the App Store?
Bringing Jobs’s illness into the equation is a low blow. How is this relevant? It detracts from your point and makes you look like a dick.
What would he do?
Well, I bet he’d start by capriciously and indiscriminately rejecting applications, raising the ire of developers (as well as famous rockstars) far and wide.
What would Chris Messina do if he hated his wife? Well, I bet he’d start by beating her.
Then he’d label any app that connected to third-party servers or the web with the equivalent of an NC-17 rating — cutting off anyone whose phone is locked down by parental controls. To make matters even more interesting, he’d put the entire control of the rating system in the hands of monkeys and people on Mechanical Turk (or at least make it seem that way).
The approval process for the App Store is flawed, to be sure. Why assume malice? We’re dealing with relatively uncharted territory here. There’s no reason to believe that these flaws are anything more than growing pains and bad decisions.
Then he’d go and introduce a new hardware device in response to years of speculation and change up the form-factor and screen real estate for apps, forcing developers to port their apps to this new resolution, resulting in even more headaches (ed: this hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a nice touch to top it all off).
A nice touch to top what off? There’s no proof that Apple has any plans to release new iPhone OS-based hardware. Your argument falls apart when you just start making shit up.
Oh, and the price of an app would be perpetually driven down towards zero [...]
Prices are determined by the developer, not by Apple.
[...] as reuse trails off after mere days of use [...]
Determined by the user, not by Apple.
[...]while only a few breakthrough successes would make any money whatsoever (unless you’re in the gravity-defying games business).
Blaming Apple for the success rate of third-party applications is misguided, at best. Apple’s business interests are in selling more applications, not fewer.
If all that didn’t succeed in killing off the App Store, well, he’d butter up a few tasty carrots to entice developers away from building native iPhone apps by making WebKit a formidable development and deployment framework for leveraging the web and web content.
You’ve got it backwards. The SDK lured away web developers.
He’d spin out an R&D lab of kids to push the boundaries of what’s possible when you embrace the browser as a development constraint.
Sure, there’s some really cool stuff you can do in MobileSafari. But it only really works in MobileSafari, and if you’re going to develop for a specific platform, why not write native apps and improve user experience?
Plus, and more to the point, users and developers demanded a real SDK because web apps suck.
He’d invest in the beginnings of Apple’s next generation cloud service (”MobileMe“) and plant the seeds of the greatest identity platform ever (I mean, “me.com“? Don’t you get it?)
The “beginnings”? .Mac has been around for years.
Of course, he spelled out this entire strategy in 2007 when the iPhone originally launched. Except the announcement went over like a lead balloon. He just couldn’t keep his loyal Mac developers happy because they were unwilling to see the future he saw.
Or the “web application” pseudo-SDK was a cop-out, and Apple was trying to buy time while they worked out a real SDK.
Just as Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “Web 2.0? to try to refocus Linux hardware hackers on the notion of the “network as platform”, Steve Jobs tried to kick-off a new revolution in web application development. But people weren’t ready for the revolution, and the familiarity of the desktop application metaphor proved too powerful.
Are we blaming Apple or the users? I’m losing track.
So, in the biggest backpeddaling [sic] since David knocked Goliath on this ass, Apple launched a “proper” iPhone SDK in March of 2008.
I agree with this sentence in spirit, despite the strange biblical comparison.
And then a few months later Steve Jobs became ill. Ill with contempt!
The fuck?
Ever since it launched, Jobs had to have wanted to drown the App Store in an aluminum-clad, precision engineered, unibody bathtub. He had to have intentionally set up the system to fail — to the point where other people would make the case for iPhone Web Apps — absolving him of convincing people to adopt his original vision.
If the system was designed (apparently by Jobs, single-handedly) to fail, it’s coming up remarkably short.
Now, of course I’m making all of this up.
No shit.
It’s wild conjecture. But I highly doubt that Steve Jobs is anti-internet. He’s pro-good-experience, but that doesn’t mean that he hates the web.
That last sentence is funny. It implies that “good experience” and “the web” are opposing ideas.
In 2007, in an interview with USA Today he made an interesting statement about the similarity between the iPhone and the iPod Touch:
If anybody is going to cannibalize us, I want it to be us. I don’t want it to be a competitor.
And so it goes with the web. Rather than let it cannibalize Apple, Apple will cannibalize the web by becoming it — as Google has — as Neo became part of the fabric of the Matrix!
You just lost me.
App Stores in general are a flash in the pan — hardly a competitor to the net.
Why would they be competing?
They’ll last a couple more years, but the web will win, if it hasn’t already — the missing piece is discovery — which is why iTunes is so critical to the iPhone’s success.
I’m being very serious when I ask why the App Store has to lose in order for the web to win.
We’re in the Yahoo! Directory phase of the application web [...]
Whatever the fuck that means.
[...] but rapidly entering the world of searchable, on-demand functionality. Are you really trying to tell me that I need to keep installing apps for the rest of my existence when I can just type URLs and pull down any app I want on the fly? Puh-lease.
Have you ever used a mobile network? Compare the mobile version of twitter.com to any Twitter app. Installed apps are faster, more reliable, and handle failure more gracefully. Maybe someday mobile networks will be fast enough that a full page of HTML, CSS, and Javascript can compete with JSON and XML, but that day is not today.
I’m writing this post today because iPhoneDevCamp 3 is taking place in Sunnyvalethis weekend.
Translation: “I’m an opportunist, mining for attention.”
As a co-organizer of the original iPhoneDevCamp, I wanted to reiterate the reason why I originally pitched in to an event that focused on a closed platform — that is, because I believe that the iPhone has always been about the web — even if few people see that yet — and even if the web isn’t the development panacea it is destined to become.
You think the web is the future of the iPhone, so you “pitch in to an event that focuses on a closed platform”. Fantastic strategy.
Steve Jobs hates the App Store [...]
The first sentence of your article disagrees.
[...] for the same reasons I do:
You hate the app store? That much I absolutely believe.
development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet.
Developers write software for users, and users want applications that don’t suck today. They aren’t interested in suffering through shitty UI and slow load times while a better alternative exists right now. This is, in many ways, the entire point of the iPhone.
We’ll look at this period as a great Dark Age that preceded the real next leap in computing — the age when we moved away from the stale metaphor of applications [...]
Explain how applications are a metaphor. Show your work.
[...] and moved to a world of ad-hoc connected identity agents living and feeding on a mesh of interwoven open data.
Buzzword Bingo is less challenging if you use all of them in a single sentence. These words are all fun to say, but they don’t mean anything. Where do ad-hoc connected identity agents sit on the OSI model? How do users access this mesh of interwoven open data?
Parting thought: If the future is anything like the Matrix, [...]
Why would it be? Why should it be? Does Steve Jobs hating the App Store depend on the future being like the Matrix? How does Steve feel if the future is more like Dark City?
[...] Steve Jobs was Neo up until the App Store.
Woah.
Now he’s looking a lot more like Agent Smith, and I’m guessing that’s really, really depressing.
Depressing for whom? Despite its flaws, the App Store is a fantastic success.
I think Chris needs a hug.