Steve Jobs hates the App Store

Steve Jobs and his little friend by David GellerPhoto by David Geller, shared under Creative Commons

Ok, Steve Jobs doesn’t hate the App Store. 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!

<<Grumble>>

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? (Bear with me.)

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.

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).

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).

Oh, and the price of an app would be perpetually driven down towards zero as reuse trails off after mere days of use, while only a few breakthrough successes would make any money whatsoever (unless you’re in the gravity-defying games business).

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. 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. 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?)

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. 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.

So, in the biggest backpeddaling since David knocked Goliath on this ass, Apple launched a “proper” iPhone SDK in March of 2008.

And then a few months later Steve Jobs became ill. Ill with contempt!

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.

Now, of course I’m making all of this up. 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.

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! App Stores in general are a flash in the pan — hardly a competitor to the net. 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. We’re in the Yahoo! Directory phase of the application web — 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.

iPhoneDevCampI’m writing this post today because iPhoneDevCamp 3 is taking place in Sunnyvale this weekend. 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.

Steve Jobs hates the App Store for the same reasons I do: 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. 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 and moved to a world of ad-hoc connected identity agents living and feeding on a mesh of interwoven open data.

. . .

Parting thought: If the future is anything like the Matrix, Steve Jobs was Neo up until the App Store. Now he’s looking a lot more like Agent Smith, and I’m guessing that’s really, really depressing.

Steve Jobs having a Neo moment

This entry was written by Chris Messina and posted on Aug 1st at 7pm and filed under Ideas, Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

13 Comments 234 Tweets 11 Comments 24 Other Comments

96 Comments

  1. xtfer said
    at 8pm on Aug 1st # |

    You had me disagreeing with you right up to the end, when I realised you were spot on. Despite my current love of the iPhone App process, which has opened up mobile computing in a way not previously possible, it is still early days. I don’t believe it will be Apple which makes the next leap though…

  2. Mason Lee said
    at 8pm on Aug 1st # |

    Damn, dude. It’s a deep question.

    There’s no theoretical reason you couldn’t download a compiled binary on the fly, where the developer has tailored the app to your specific device. A lot of those iPhone apps are smaller than some webapp’s javascript. We already see webpages returning different HTML for different user-agents– why? Because one-size does not fit all. Different devices have different capabilities for doing different things. Input/Output devices will never be reducible to the lowest common denominator. For example, are webapps going to deliver augmented reality?

    Enjoyed the piece!

  3. David said
    at 9pm on Aug 1st # |

    It’s interesting thinking about this from the perspective of a Pre owner and developer. The entirety of developing for webOS involves knowing HTML5 and javascript. Graphics are all through the canvas tag, and it runs well (though it can’t draw the kind of stuff you could do natively). Once the next gen JS engines come out, I bet it’ll be even better. Want to invoke a Pre widget? Add x-mojo-element to an input tag. It isn’t to the point of just typing a URL to load our apps off the web (and having it scale nicely into a browser as a by-the-way), but it isn’t a hard thing to imagine. Maybe the iPhone will get passed by.

    I don’t think anybody really disagrees with Steve’s vision. I certainly don’t. The technology *just isn’t there yet*, and what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Tie our hands behind our backs while we wait for open standards to free us? Will that really speed up the revolution? Tell kids they can’t play Super Monkey Ball 3d on the iPhone until we figure out how to make javascript fast enough? It’s like saying we shouldn’t use Flash…just wait until markup evolves to encompass it (then again, maybe you would say that). =P

  4. Abhimanyu Chirimar said
    at 10pm on Aug 1st # |

    Chris
    Kudos for a very well-written article.

  5. James said
    at 1am on Aug 2nd # |

    I’ve never read such link bait bullshit before in my life. Stick to your day job.

  6. Ajit Jaokar said
    at 6am on Aug 2nd # |

    Interesting insights .. and much on the lines of some of my comments on the open web foundation ..

    I agree with the general theme of the article and the need for a viable web platform .. however .. the iPhone’s main business innovation is not the technology but the ecosystem(especially the revenue share and the on device discovery). That was the missing bit. Can the same be done based on the Web? yes. but there are gaps but these are being filled. Fred wison said on twitter .. if you lie with the dogs – you come up with fleas. Apple had no choice but to do what it did(and come up with fleas in the process!). The point here is: inspite of the limitations, the iPhone and appstore is still better than what we had before it. (70/30 rev split)

    The main problem with the iPhone is: it is not a generatibve device(see Jonathan Zittrain’s views on generative devices http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7364901.stm) – not just the iPhone but even in support of communication technologies like MMS which were absent initially

    So, in that sense it is a stepping stone (ie interim step) towards an inevitable direction led by the Web.

    As a final note, I may add that – it indicates the need for the web to also speed up especially in standards and in creating pragmatic/business driven open standards which are flexible considering the future complexity(offline browsing etc etc)

    Many thanks.
    kind rgds
    Ajit

  7. Constable Odo said
    at 7am on Aug 2nd # |

    I fail to understand the ire against the App Store and Apple.

    Apple has built one of the finest mobile platforms within a year. It bristles with enthusiasm from developers and users. Apple has tried to make submission to approval time relatively short considering the amount of developers there are. Nobody seems to consider the App store a relatively ground-breaking concept that needs to undergo maybe a couple of years of changes. To this date, there are over 65,000 apps that have been approved against maybe a 500 (my uninformed guess) or so that might have been temporarily pulled or totally rejected. Apple has pulled apps and then reinstated them. Maybe it takes time to look at the app in it’s entirety and impact on the platform.

    Why the heck are you people making such a stew about one or two pulled apps? First of all, Apple runs the show. Yes, they should in good faith talk with developers to clearly point out why an app is rejected. But clearly it is Apple’s App Store and they call the shots. Any developer knowing this beforehand should not get on the Apple platform knowing this risk. It seems as though users and developers have a better understanding of the iPhone platform than Apple, even though Apple seems to be winning the mobile platform wars and getting the most done in such a short period of time. Most of you people probably couldn’t even run a corner candy store without upsetting customers and vendors.

    You really should be thankful for what Apple’s iPhone has brought to users instead of harping over what Apple has taken away. Apple will certainly make plenty of mistakes, but they’re probably making less mistakes than most other mobile platforms. Cut Apple some slack if they blunder. This Google app problem will be resolved in time. You don’t know what Apple has planned possibly in place of the Google app or if this app affects some future development plans.

    That being said, developers and users can just as soon mosy on over to some other smartphone platform that allows the app if they’re so unhappy. Losing one app out of 65,000 seems relatively trifling to me. Time will tell if Android becomes a much better platform than Mobile OSX and never has any problems with apps that don’t work quite well with others. Good luck with that perfect dream.

  8. l.m.orchard said
    at 7am on Aug 2nd # |

    Seriously, if you haven’t already: Check out Palm’s webOS platform. It’s early days yet and things are a little rough around the edges, but it’s the closest to an open platform I’ve seen yet.

    True, the Mojo core and such are proprietary, but it’s an embedded Linux device – not some weird alien technology that happens to have Linux under it, but a real Linux OS with an ipkg package manager and a webkit-based UI on top.

    And, despite Mojo and such being proprietary – you get most of the source in the SDK. Not Free as in Speech or Beer, but that’s uncommonly open and standard as far as mobile devices go.

  9. Benjamin Hill said
    at 10am on Aug 2nd # |

    I almost believe EXCEPT for the huge gulf between what native can do vs. Web: things like camera access, motion access, etc. Fix that (window.camera.click()) and I’ll buy your rant whole hog

  10. Shawn said
    at 10am on Aug 2nd # |

    The concept of web-based applications is great in a Utopian society where everyone has easy / fast access to data. But when I need to access data in a rural area that has no broadband or “high speed” wireless, there’s nothing worse than having to download the data AND the mobile application GUI with all its bells and whistles.

  11. Jason Cochran said
    at 11am on Aug 2nd # |

    @l.m.orchard I totally agree with you about the WebOS. It is incredibly easy to develop for (which is good and bad). I developed my job search application in just two weeks. Granted I am a web developer by trade so I already knew JavaScript. To check out my app go to the PreCental forums or my website. http://forums.precentral.net/homebrew-apps/194863-jobr-job-search-v0-7-5-7-28-a.html or http://www.webfusion5.com

  12. andrew said
    at 11am on Aug 2nd # |

    Nice the way you got the life-threatening illness in there in a jokey way…stay classy

  13. Johan said
    at 11am on Aug 2nd # |

    As stated, Google has become part of the fabric, but is Google “Neo” or “Mr Smith”?

    I sometimes wonder when Google will fall under it’s own pressure…

  14. Povlhp said
    at 12pm on Aug 2nd # |

    Troll bait. Happy with the app store. 2 apps there. Afraid of rejection though.

  15. Ben Toth said
    at 2pm on Aug 2nd # |

    Well, SJ discussed the rise of web based agents in a Wired interview years ago … and then developed iTunes and the iPhone. I don’t think he’s frustrated with iPhone apps, he’s just a dreamer with a strong pragmatist streak, and an unusually good understanding of users.

  16. iphone app developer said
    at 5pm on Aug 2nd # |

    Steve probably does hate the app store because it wasnt his idea.

  17. Joe said
    at 10pm on Aug 2nd # |

    The 1990s called, it wants its delusions back.

    Seriously, this was a profoundly clueless article. I guess its good trolling though.

  18. ARJWright said
    at 5am on Aug 3rd # |

    You know, this is a pretty nice piece. And for the most part in makes sense and I agree with it. However, I don’t know if its “Steve” that’s the issue; remember, it was the blogging and developer universes which pined about “native” applications. And then, being slow to embrace the restrictions when native apps were allowed, they are now moving to the web as another platform. I would think its more or less that its “us” finally getting the point, not necessarly Apple.

    Funnily enough, I think carriers were in the same pot as developers/bloggers too. Only, they still deny the fun for them that web apps would cause on mobiles :)

    Do submit this to the Carnival of the Mobilits. This is a solid thinking piece for that colletion.

  19. Sander van der Wal said
    at 8am on Aug 3rd # |

    Web apps were possible since the very first iPhone, so, if they are such a good idea, why didn’t web apps take off the same way native apps did?

  20. Robert Scoble said
    at 8pm on Aug 1st # |

    This reminds me, I must get Chris on building43.

    This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed

  21. Kathy Fitch said
    at 9pm on Aug 1st # |

    Finding "We’re in the Yahoo! Directory phase of the application web — but rapidly entering the world of searchable, on-demand functionality" made my day.

    This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed

  22. stevejohnson said
    at 10pm on Aug 1st # |

    Title is completely misleading.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  23. jsz0 said
    at 10pm on Aug 1st # |

    I think we’ve officially crossed the point where the whining about the App Store is actually more annoying than Apple’s App Store policies.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  24. mitchellh said
    at 11pm on Aug 1st # |

    The amount of links in this blog post really frustrates me, as I can’t figure out whether or not it is worth my time to actually visit the link (95% of the time in this post, it is not).

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  25. boundlessdreamz said
    at 11pm on Aug 1st # |

    Yeah it is a linkbait. And the article seems to be devoid of any content

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  26. TomOfTTB said
    at 11pm on Aug 1st # |

    Sadly all the things listed are also what a complete control freak would do and that’s exactly what Jobs is (by his own admission). The truth about Steve Jobs, from someone whose read every book in existence about him, is that he’s a perfectionist who believes in his vision above all else. Most of the time that means great products. Some of the time that means dictatorial edicts that border on insanity.To give one example. People forget the original Macintosh was essentially a failure under Jobs. He refused to include an internal fan or a Hard Drive because he felt they were too loud. In fact, he wouldn’t even plan for the hard drive. So you got a machine that was prone to component failure (no fan) and whose first external hard drive had to connect over the slow serial port (intended for an additional floppy). Only after Jobs left Apple were both these things addressed (and the Mac was a huge success after that)

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  27. factoryjoe said
    at 11pm on Aug 1st # |

    While I’ll admit that the title is provocative on purpose, the whole post is a big What If? focused on explaining all the crap that’s going on around the App Store process — and suggesting that Jobs et al actually made it this way on purpose.If that’s not contentful, I’m curious what you think is?

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  28. factoryjoe said
    at 11pm on Aug 1st # |

    Who’s whining about the App Store? I’m simply channeling what I hear everywhere else and providing a made-up rationale to get people to rethink how it got to be this way (with a nudge towards looking at the broader context).

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  29. factoryjoe said
    at 11pm on Aug 1st # |

    The amount of links are intended to provide evidence of what I’m talking about — and yes, there’s a lot of them.The only link that I think adds an additional structuring of my overall point about the web and the iPhone is a post I wrote in 2007:

    http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/10/17/did-the-web-fail-the-i…;

    You can skip the rest if you’ve been paying attention.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  30. facebook-522876272 said
    at 4am on Aug 2nd # |

    Although the title is a bit provocative, the article is right. Apple, Google, etc do see the tectonic shift happening in application development, and more importantly, usage. People spend more and more of their time interacting with applications that do not entirely reside on their device. More often than not, none of the application resides on the device. The challenge will be developing frameworks to cope with the myriad of form factors and input methods.

    This comment was originally posted on Mobile Industry Review

  31. facebook-522876272 said
    at 4am on Aug 2nd # |

    Although the title is a bit provocative, the article is right. Apple, Google, etc do see the tectonic shift happening in application development, and more importantly, usage. People spend more and more of their time interacting with applications that do not entirely reside on their device. More often than not, none of the application resides on the device. The challenge will be developing frameworks to cope with the myriad of form factors and input methods.

    This comment was originally posted on Mobile Industry Review

  32. ollysk2 said
    at 7am on Aug 2nd # |

    All I have to say is that if Apple really feels this way, then put up or shut up; if they feel the browser is where it’s at then freaking he’ll just implement already! They just had one of their milestone moments with the release of 3.0 — so why not wow the world with your amazing new browser tech? Google will get gears for mobile perfected soon, and Apple needs to be right there competing, or Android will simply keep moving further ahead.

    My .02 cents (written on my iPhone)

    This comment was originally posted on Mobile Industry Review

  33. Wayne said
    at 8am on Aug 2nd # |

    Really, you sound a lot like the anti-iPod pundits of the early days: Apple’s iPod was overpriced and would soon be undercut by cheaper MP3 players that were cheaper, had greater capacity, FM tuners and all kinds of features that the iPod did not (and would never) have. Substitute “iPhone” for “iPod” and “Android” for “Rio” (or whatever player was going to eat the iPod’s lunch).

    Eventually, the iPod beat (crushed, actually) competitors based on price, as Apple smartly rode a sharp design down the economy-of-scale curve, yet kept introducing cool new things at the top of the line. We see that now, as the iPhone has gone from $500 to $200, with the previous generation dropping to $100 new.

    And they’re still way ahead. In big ways and in many small ways. (Have you seen the Take Back The Beep campaign and how it turns out Apple’s ahead of the curve on this, too?)

    I know that I do not get cellphone reception most of my business day, so I won’t be depending on network-dependent apps any time soon. And of course, these apps — if they actually live off-phone — will tend to be lowest-common-denominator-ugly, as they always have been.

    Not to mention that Safari/Webkit’s already ahead of the curve in terms of web animation, etc, if that does turn out to be a factor. Apple is learning lessons in the “Cloud computing” realm, and Android is all about development on the phone, not on the network/web.

    This comment was originally posted on Mobile Industry Review

  34. Logical Extremes said
    at 11am on Aug 2nd # |

    The web can take over as soon as multiple active pages with notifications are supported.

    This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed

  35. Facebook User said
    at 3pm on Aug 2nd # |

    Chris Messina sounds like a forgotten poet: "..the stale metaphor of applications…" or "…a world of ad-hoc connected identity agents living and feeding on a mesh of interwoven open data." Google isn’t going to rank him highly for his keywords.

    On the other hand, the iPhone is a bit-player, although owners will never admit it. Its market penetration is a drop in an ocean of increasingly complex mobile computing devices . (Aha! I can insert lots of adjectives like Messina; Nirvana is around the corner.)

    I agree there’s more "..whix-bang…" to the thing. The iPhone awakened a curiously lackadaisical mobile industry that measured its success on "buckets of minutes" and a mobile Web offering the local weather and sports scores.

    As LG, Samsung, Palm and, yes, Nokia finally get off their behinds and advance the state of mobile computing, the iPhone glitz will fade into oblivion. What Steve Jobs should worry over is the future of Apple’s laptops. There’s no reason why a netbook tethered to a more basic handset might be the next craze.

    This comment was originally posted on Mobile Industry Review

  36. felix said
    at 4am on Aug 3rd # |

    But then does he also hate OSX and OSX developers for the same reason? Is Safari OS around the corner?

    This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed

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