The App Store is for Suckers (along with my comments on school implications) via @jonathanstark

The App Store is for Suckers

by Jonathan Stark

Submitting (pun intended) to the App Store is for suckers.

Do you really want to:
- Give up 30% of your profit?
- Learn Objective-C?
- Endure approval delays, rejections, and yanks?
- Navigate labyrinthian code signing issues?
- etc…

The cheapest, easiest, fastest way for folks to get in on the mobile gold rush is to build killer web apps. Web apps can access location data, utilize client-side SQL databases, and even run offline.

In addition to side-stepping the App Store minefield, web apps run on more than 100 mobile handsets with zero modification.

And on desktops.

And on the iPad.

And on anything else that has a reasonably modern web browser; which will likely include everything from sewing machines to cereal boxes in the next few years.

The App Store paradigm (Apple and others) is an out-dated business model based on scarcity, middlemen, and control. It is newspapers. It is travel agents. It is used car salesmen.

The world has moved on. Don’t get suckered.

via jonathanstark.com

I love this commentary by Jonathan Stark on developing iPhone apps. I've sort of known that I wanted a web app for our school for a while. Athletics schedules, blog posts, access to our Moodle server, etc. But then I couldn't figure out if we should develop for BlackBerry or iPhones (and what about the Palm Pre!), but then this post just made it all clear.

Closed models = bad. Didn't the Internet teach us anything?

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5 responses
I totally agree, however there is another option which gives you the best of both world. Going 100% web app makes you forfeit all native functionality like the use of the camera. For this reason I use www.phonegap.com It runs natively on about 4-5 different platforms, which include iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Pre, Symbian, and I believe WinMobile also.

There are some other options also, such as Appelerator and Rhodes Mobile.

— abritez
Oh by the way, PhoneGap and Appcelerator use HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Rhodes uses Ruby. So no need to go learn 5 separate coding languages.
— abritez
Hi guys! If you have to go native, I recommend PhoneGap because it allows you to write standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The others don't. IOW - an Appelerator app won't run at all as a web app.
— Jonathan Stark
Totally agree with your argument. What i tell my clients is simply, "What would you say if I made you a Internet Explorer site? Oh, by the way, Safari and Firefox will each cost you extra." Helps people to think of "Mobile Development" as apposed to "iPhone", "Android", "BlackBerry", etc...development.
— abritez
I actually like native apps, it's just frustrating to think about the design side. If you are Google, no big deal. But if you're a smaller organization or company, you're just trying to manage your own website! Perhaps apps will only remain helpful if we aren't deluged with them. I saw a student the other day who had pages upon pages of apps, and said she didn't use most of them. Odd, but true.

Thanks for the comments!
— arvind s grover
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