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Sarat Pediredla Jul 17

Apple, can I please have my walled-garden back?

Last Friday, both Mark Forster and I braved the (short) queue at our local O2 store to grab our new iPhone 3Gs.

I need to make it obvious now that I am an Apple fanboy. Given that I am impressed by everything Apple, I was pretty excited to grab hold of the iPhone 3G, especially for the ability to get to the App Store and download some applications.

The web is already abuzz with iPhone 3G reviews and opinion, so let's skip over that for a minute and concentrate on the new SDK and the applications.

There is absolutely no doubt that the SDK was a step forward and a chance for the iPhone community to develop interesting applications. However, after a week of trying out some popular applications, I must say that I am pretty disappointed with almost every one of them. This is down to 2 factors.

  1. Quality
    With the exception of Super Monkey Ball, every single application I have on the iPhone either fails to work (Last.fm, Twitterific), is very slow (Facebook), or is poorly designed (NetNewsWire).

    I agree that this has more to do with the developers than anything Apple and I agree that this will get better as time goes by.

  2. Suitability

    The bigger issue I have with a lot of the applications is the suitability. Do we really need 10 more native iPhone apps for a To-Do list? Do we really need native iPhone interface to Facebook (I get the point about location-aware data but it really doesn't matter when it comes to Facebook)?

    In fact, the best app I have come across on my iPhone (ok! It does still have some quirks), is Google Reader for the iPhone and it is a web application.

There are valid cases for using a native iPhone application, when you need access to native iPhone functionality, but let's not jump on the band-wagon and build iPhone apps just because we can and because it's cool.

This is precisely the reason (now we get to the interesting bit), our new iPhone interface to fixx will be entirely web-based, delivered from your fixx installation.

While we are working on this iPhone interface for fixx, we would love your ideas on what you would like to see in this interface in the long term.

posted by Sarat Pediredla on July 17, 2008 at 8:03 p.m.

Comments

Jul 17

You should still consider making it a webkit embedded in a native app. Like that you can have your own data store, use controls along the bottom, have better persistence, etc...

Eytan
Jul 17

iPhone app developers have had their applications in users' hands for all of about a week. Perhaps it's a little soon to complain too much about issues of quality control? There is still *no way* for developers to get the information they need to debug individual users' problems, nor is there a way for them to provide test builds without turning every single App Store user into a beta tester.

MT
Jul 18

@Eytan - If there is a need for own data store and better persistence, then it is valid to use that with webkit. It might be interesting to implement something like Fluid or Prism for iPhone web-apps, so it exposes these in a limited way.

@MT - I agree that it is too early to complain about quality. Which is why I conceded it will get better as the platform and developers mature. My bigger gripe is suitability.

Sarat Pediredla

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