Is the app store concept flawed?

Lately I have been reading more and more articles, tweets and blogposts stating their concerns about the fact that Apple almost randomly removes applications and that people for some reason have distorted views of the mobile application and app store reality.

I am not in favor of allowing any kind of application into an app store by default, there is no reason why you should have to do that (a bakery also selects which producs it wants to sell). The problem really is though, that Apple is running the only official app store for the iPhone. One app store controlling the entire market for a device is plainly wrong!

Not only does it cripple innovation but it also shows one major flaw of Apples strategy – the factor of competence. How on earth does Apple, a hardware and software manufacturer think it has the competence to judge whether an application should be admitted or not? Maybe in these days when mobile applications don’t go further than simple games or information display/exchange – but what if applications are starting to come with real security implications?

An example:
Imagine you are writing an application reading your heartrate and writing an ECG (This is not too far fetched, look at our research project HumanApi). Is Apple seriously trying to tell that they can judge whether such an app should make it into the app store or not? They by far don’t have the competence of the medical industry, no way!

A much more interesting app store concept would be to have certified stores by companies I trust (or community driven in other application use-cases). Looking at the medical example, wouldn’t it make much more sense if companies like Siemens, Phillips, and other medical device manufacturers start an alliance and run their own store, so I can trust the apps I am using, so that as a developer, I know that qualified people are judging my application? Not only would this guarantee much higher quality but it also would foster competition which we are lacking here.

Companies == lemmings?

Where does this “I need an app as well” come from? Why do people care so much when their application gets rejected by the Apple app store?

An example:
On february 23rd, large German online publisher Spiegel Online wrote an article about the fact that Apple might disapprove an application of the famous yellow press publisher “Bild“. On february 24th they posted another front-page article questioning whether legal means would be the only way to go?!?

Now that is insane, not only will it cost those folks a lot of money to run law suits against Apple, on top of that they are forcing their way into technology without future – already today, the Apple app store is not the only way to legally distribute your applications to the iPhone! Apple is a new player in the mobile industry and albeit its amazing achievements, never forget looking at marketshares.

To summarize: For whatever kind of reason, one of the biggest German online newspaper sees Apple rejecting applications as being threatening enough to write an article – how more blatantly can the reality be distorted?

What can and should we do?

Back to the surprising incident I was mentioning earlier: When the folks behind http://www.yourappshop.com showed me their application store – for the iPhone! – one thought came to my mind “Does the Adult Industry point the way (again)?” (whether you and I approve adult content or not is a different discussion, what we need to take out of this is the fact that they are showing a very viable way to go).

YourAppShop developed an app store entirely based on web technologies (lots of HTML5 which is supported by the iPhone browser and many many more devices) – which allows you to download web based applications to your homescreen, watch image slideshows, even videos. Everything works off- and online. To the well traveled mobile web developer all of this is nothing new, it is all part of HTML5. The folks of YourAppStore though were creative enough to build it so that the end-user does not feel the difference between a real native app (from the Apple store) and an application based on web technologies, payment for the service included!

Why don’t people (especially the folks in decision making positions) see that you can write amazing applications for the iPhone based on technology which also will work on other phones and which does not have to pass the QA of Apple?

If you are not too bothered about adult content (NSFW) take a look at http://www.yourappshop.com from within your iPhone browser and visit one of their stores – the way they have set up a viable ecosystem using web technologies will give you a new impression of what we actually are able to do today.

As much as people might have concerns with the adult industry, they are showing us how we can get out of the app store restrictions – technology of today can be used to write successful applications and you can be monetizing the potential (more than 8.000.000 downloads for YourAppShop should say enough), Now that sounds great doesn’t it @Bild.de and @Spiegel.de?

And as if its not enough, Apple itself is showing a great example of the potential of web applications running on the iPhone with their online help: http://help.apple.com/iphone – go visit their site, and add the application to your homescreen by clicking on the “+” button in the bottom toolbar (Not to mention the fact that iPhone applications where meant to be build using the web stack in the first place).

As an application developer/creator, your goal should not be to only run on one platform, unless you don’t care about having sustainable and solid business case or unless your target-group is only the group of iPhone users (which I can’t believe is ever true).

We showed that there is technology which allows you to write applications for more than one platform, technology which works whether there is an app store in between or not, technology which has a future, technology the web is built with – HTML/JavaScript/CSS or better, HTML5 apps. Use it and stop wasting time being afraid that Apple will ruin your business because they are rejecting an application – you shouldn’t have to care less!!

Conclusion

Jumping into the “We need to have an iPhone app” mantra without any second thought is very dangerous, its not good for your business. Analyze your requirements and check carefully if you can’t cover your needs with an application based on web technologies (which as we proved still can make it into the Apple store if they approve of your content). The advantage of applications based on web technology is overwhelming:

• Standardized technology stack (HTML5)
• HTML5 apps work in mobile browsers, can be distributed over app stores or even can be integrated into traditional websites.
• Much lower development costs.
• Huge amount of target platforms

Of course there are application cases where you need to access the devices hardware in ways the browser doesn’t yet allow you to (games or applications with extreme performance requirements for example) – but especially publishers and content driven apps should think twice.

If you are looking into building a mobile application and are not sure whether you should go for the native iPhone, native Android or any other native platform (and spend tons of money on it) or whether you should build on top of the much more open technology stack of the web, feel free to contact us and we can take a closer look at your requirements.

Back to the folks who are planning to sue Apple (VDZ) – start putting your apples into the right basket, build a web based application store as you can see with YourAppShop and you will have complete freedom over what you want to sell and what not. Your customers won’t feel the difference, they might even like it more because you can offer better prices (no profit sharing with Apple). Sueing Apple won’t help a thing, don’t waste your money and time.

What is EventNinja?

EventNinja is our little ninja that goes out and collects events :-). Seriously: we had started uxebu with the high goal of playing with the best and knew from the beginning that we can reach out to the interested and passionate crowd just by meeting up with them personally, at the various real-life events. So we just needed to show up at the WebMondays and BarCamps around us. We started keeping track of them in a Google Calendar, which is publicly shared (you can find it here http://bit.ly/webdev-events), because we know that we are not the only ones interested in upcoming developer events. During a very busy phase during the summer of 2009, where a lot of dojo.beers took place around the world, the calendar already was of big use. We started to write a small web site widget to embed the calendar in our site. We had a very focused and content-oriented use case and after coming across W3C Widgets, we quickly decided to port the web site widget over to a W3C widget – the same night we had it also running on an iPhone. This got the ball rolling and we realized that we should start porting this widget to even more platforms. From thereon we felt confident that we are on the right track. And we shall be proofen to be right.

The base of it all: HTML (and W3C Widgets)

The web stack is the widest spread and most widely used technology stack. The number of developers using the web stack is just unbeaten. Now that the mobile phones are coming around the corner, we see that the diversity (others call it fragmentation) is just huge. The iPhone proved, that even a good browser on mobile phones done right, can be fun. So the web stack is coming to our phones. Browsers are a standard on the phone. And the potential is gigantic. “The mobile industry has now 4.6 Billion active subscriptions.” and “71% of all phones have a modern xTML web browser.” says Tomi Ahonen in The Big Picture “All the Stats” Total View to Mobile Industry, 2010 Edition. Enough to justify HTML as the future standard for mobile apps!

So we can surf the web. But what about app development? The iPhone requires you to learn Objective C, Android wants Java, Nokia S60 a flavour of C++, and so on. This sounds no fun. So just sum up one and one. Let’s use the web stack (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) that all the platforms bring along – since they all have a browser – and reuse this stack to build your native apps. It’s not as much magic as it sounds. There is even a specification for it, the family of W3C Widgets. W3C Widgets are self-contained mini-apps, consisting of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Just as we know it from websites. If the widget requires no resources from the web it can even run offline. You have all the power at hand: JavaScript, AJAX, Canvas and depending on the platform you even get SVG.
But how many platforms do support W3C Widgets? In plain numbers: 4. But the number is growing. Vodafone360, Vodafone’s Nokia S60, the latest Blackberry and Windows Mobile. But that’s not all as I will explain later.
The biggest hype is made by Vodafone, definitely. They are also expressing strongly that they are supporting the open W3C Widgets standard. And it is true, take a real W3C Widget throw it on any of the newer Nokia S60 (Series 5) phones or the Vodafone360 phones and it just works. The next closest is Windows Mobile. For getting it onto a Blackberry you need to additionally sign the widget.

More devices: PhoneGap

Supporting just those four platforms would be a bit boring. But here comes the great open source project PhoneGap onto the stage. PhoneGap opens up all the other platforms. Among them, probably the one most people look for, is the iPhone. PhoneGap provides a web runtime which we just wrap around our widget and package it and we have a native app. PhoneGap even allows to access the native functionalities like Camera, Contacts, Acceleromter, GPS, etc. If there is something missing in the list, you are free to write the according adaptor. And the big advantage, since you are deploying the runtime with your app, you can even hook onto any kind of native interface available on the phone. This is very nicely shown in the ECG app @nonken has written in our uxebu labs. This app connects a heart rate monitoring device to your iPhone, all done through PhoneGap.

Porting EventNinja

So we ported EventNinja to the iPhone using PhoneGap. It was a pleasure to use all the features one of the most modern browsers support, stuff like CSS transitions and alike. And since a lot of people asked, I will answer the question before it comes up: “Yes, you need the iPhone SDK and therefore a Mac OS X machine”. But we will see what the future brings.

With EventNinja, we have also proven that such an app can be ported to the Android platform. We have tested it on Android version 1.6 through 2.1, among them HTC Magic, Motorola Droid, Nexus One. Android was the easiest platform to port it to, we “threw” the iPhone version onto an Android phone and it just worked, first as a simple website. Later, thanks to Manfred Weber as a native app and finally, as you can find it now in the Android Market, as a PhoneGap-based app.
For the Palm Pre we adjusted the style to look as native as possible. To our surprise Palm’s operating system WebOS, which itself is web technology based, has some very strange, proprietary touches which made it less fun than expected (read more in Mobile Cross-Platform Development: Palm Pre). From a bird eyes’ view it looks like porting to WebOS would not require anything, no PhoneGap, just wrapping the widget properly. Unfortunately it was more work than that. The proprietary concept of stages and scenes requires some workarounds to finally get the app running.

Cross Platform Advantages

Besides the simple obvious reasons, like easy porting, lower development costs, and that the web stack technologies are our core business at uxebu, there are other reasons that make cross platform attractive. Let me scratch the surface by mentioning some of them.

Easy prototyping. Using HTML, JavaScript and CSS a prototype can be created in no time, iterations, reconsidering various issues is way cheaper and quicker than doing it with other technologies. We can use the browser window, just size it down to match a phone’s screen size. We can debug and fix things without costly redeployment cycles and this entire process can happen remotely, it all works over the web. Not to mention that this is the easiest way to distribute your app, but that is a topic of it’s own.

Largest Reach, synchronously. We can reach multiple types of mobile handsets virtually at the same time. By reducing the need to redevelop the app for multiple devices, we can roll out to multiple stores and devices at the same time. We are basically limitted by the time that it takes the stores to run the app through their internal QA.
As the numbers in the December 2009 Mobile Metrics Report show we are covering the biggest smartphone platforms well. The iPhone is definitely the leading one (on admob) but we all know that Android is picking up speed, as shown in the Metrics Update: Android.

Multi Channel Distribution. A very interesting though still underestimated channel of distribution is what taptu called the mobile touch web. The app works natively in the browser, so there is no need to even install it locally (if no access to native phone ressources is required). This opens up the opportunity for other apps or (mobile) web sites to directly link to and still allow for a (close to) native experience for the user. If you have an iPhone, Android or just a WebKit-based browser (even on your desktop) you can try out the EventNinja web app at http://eventninja.net/webkit.

The App Store Experience

Above I listed some cross platform advantages. And I would like to pick yet another one and focus a bit on it. The various App Stores. They do not only bring the burden to have separate upload and QA processes for each (which to solve could imho serve as a business model itself) but they also allow the user on the various device to find the app. What do I mean by that? Well, simple: The app store is a very prominent way to find very focused, use-case-centered information, services, in short: apps, for your phone. It could also be seen as the pre-installed search engine and payment gateway on your phone. All the handset manufacturers, operators and a lot of service providers are setting up or already running their own App Store, their portal into the world of apps. And deploying your app to many of them, allows to create multiple ways to retreive your app, across multiple networks, stores and devices.

Sounds crazy? Yes, it is. I am not a fan of all the App Stores, but that is the current trend. Let’s ride the wave, and be prepared for the next one, which will hopefully be the pure web apps, running in the browser without the App Stores inbetween. We are prepared. And a little band aid, to make it easier to put up with the multiple stores: there are services that will leverage this problem and aggregate the statistics from the various stores.

Conclusion

With this article we are showing very important aspects of the mobile web and that all this is no dream but reality. Go to your store and download EventNinja to see it yourself!

If you want to bring your product or website to several mobile platforms to gain most possible reach, feel free to contact us to discuss your specific needs.

Disclaimer: We are working for Vodafone in their Widgets Department.

Following some more details for the event. You can find all info also at the DojoCampus.org event page and things are still subject to change.

Location:

IBM Haifa Research Lab
Haifa University Campus

Google map

Time:

09:30 – 15:00

Schedule

09:30 – 10:00 – Gathering

10:00 – 10:15 – Welcome and introduction

10:15 – 10:45 – Overview of Dojo Dijit and Dojox

11:00 – 12:00 – Dojo and Mobile

12:00 – 12:30 – Dojo based JavaScript API Docs generator

12:30 – 13:00 – Hacking mobile (this session might be extended)

13:00 – 14:00 – Lunch

14:10 – 14:30 – Support for bidirectional languages in Dojo

14:30 – 15:00 – Projects demonstration

If you want to give a talk about your experience with Dojo or anything Web related, leave a comment at the DojoCampus.org event page or send an email to nonken(_at_) dojotoolkit.org and we’ll make sure you get added to the schedule.

After the main event we will either continue hacking or go for food/drinks/dojo.beers() into town.

If you would like to attend, please add your name to the list below, so we can be sure that we will have enough space.

Looking forward to being in Haifa and meeting lots of Dojo, web, JavaScript folks.

The topics covered at those three conferences are not as bleeding-edge as we like them to be :-). But this is ok, since it is a more business-oriented conference. Though there are quite some old facts around and the mobile world just moves much faster than some of the talks at this conference do. It was also funny that relatively old facts e.g. about the features and some of the fun apps that exist for the iPhone still seemed to amuse the people.
But probably the worst fact about this conference is that there is no free WLAN, you have to pay 24€ for 8h, and that is the Internet World Congress? Hallo? Sorry, but this is really not state of the art, I hope the discuss&discover will do better there.

Rely on Cloud Service?

I just heard that google analytics was guilty for bringing down pages like bild.de for a day. Because the page relied on google analytics to be loaded fully, but due to the down time of this google service the page never loaded in the user’s browser. Sorry, but in this case the solution is not the SLA or kicking out the JavaScript, just look at the Dojo module dojox.analytics, which Pete Higgins wrote and which does what should be done in this case, load the script after the relevant content was loaded, asynchronously. So please make the developers responsible, not the service provider. If you are relying on this service, make sure that failure is a case you planned for. Don’t use the cloud if you don’t know what the implications are!

W3C widgets

Since Mobile Vision is one of the conferences and we are also active in the mobile space, I need to state that the W3C widgets, as e.g. Vodafone is already pushing them, had been very much ignored here. How much (mobile) vision do you get here?
Read the Introduction to W3C Widgets by PPK to get an overview of what these things are. So let me just summarize the advantages and differences of W3C widgets compared to the usual native apps.

• Allows deployment to multiple mobile platforms (and the browser of course too)
• Rapid prototyping is much faster and cheaper
• Uses the standard technologies HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Therefore a much larger potential developer base

Of course there are new things to consider. You need to learn about the distribution ways (AppStores, etc.), how to deploy and you mostly have to sign your apps. But all those things easily outweigh the pains you need to go through when learning all the native technologies.

Well, maybe we are too spoiled from conferences like Ajax Experience, Ajax in Action and Mobile2.0.

The conference day was just as interesting and though it was also a pretty cosy atmosphere (I would say about 250 people) one felt the difference to the day before, it was more on the business level but always mixed with the understanding for the young mobile industry it’s technical hurdles and the rough edges it still has, it was perfect too. Having tapas under the spanish sun was just as perfect as the content and the people there. The range of topics, no matter if in a panel or solo had been amazing and I am sure that everyone heard something interesting. For all the slides, and hopefully some videos watch the mobile2.0 site, pics are as usual on flickr.

The next mobile2.0 will probably be in San Francisco around October. See you there …

Enjoy the short video we prepared to give you an impression of what EventNinja can do

EventNinja in Action

The EventNinja widget contains multiple pages, as you are used to from mobile applications. The home page shows all the events, allows you to search and filter them. Along the top bar you have the search bar, the “Help” and the “About” pages linked.
Clicking on the icon to the right of each event takes you to the details page of the event, from where you can go to multiple other places, like the map, to see where it exactly takes place, the schedule of the event. If the event has twitter tags saved for it can go to a page which shows you all the latest twitter messages flying in. Try it on EventNinja.net and explore the features.

EventNinja Features

User Features

• List of web developer events
• Searchable and filterable by tags, location and full-text search
• Exact location of the event
• Watch all twitter messages for each event
• Find out about details of an event

Technology Features

• Events are stored, retrieved and filtered by a Google Calendar
• Everything built on top of the Dojo Toolkit
• pure HTML, CSS, JavaScript based widget
• using PhoneGap to run on iPhone, Android and Blackberry
• Plugin architecture, allows for a modular enhancement of the widget
• Fully customizable via client-side templates and CSS of course

As you figure right from the list of features and cleverly combining them we can hook this widget onto any calendar, customize the features (via plugins), style and brand it the way we like it and have your custom widget.

This gives customization a far broader meaning. Just imagine combining the two components 1) base of the widget and 2) the twitter plugin. You get a widget which shows you all tweets for a certain event -that’s just a new widget itself, without writing a line of new code. Which again is a very different use case, than the widget you get here. Just hook in another plugin which allows replying via twitter and you get a full blown twitter client in the context of events.
The limits of what is thinkable is just limited by the plugins you can write.

EventNinja for the mobile2.0 Conference

Mobile2.0 is the first conference where you can really use EventNinja to get all the info possible, the schedule, twitter messages, etc. There surely will follow many more conferences and events that EventNinja can and will be used at. See the screenshots below to get a feeling of what it looks like for this conference.

Are events missing?

EventNinja for webdevelopers is driven by the great amount of community events.
If you see that events are missing, please contact us and we will add them immediately. If you organize events yourself let us know as well. You can send any kind of info about the event, e.g. name, location, tags, speakers, twitter tags, schedule details, price, and much more.

You want an EventNinja?

Send an email to eventninja _ at _ uxebu.com if you are interested in a customized version of EventNinja, are interested in the technology or simply want to chat. At the mobile2.0 conference you will recognize us easily when you look for the guys with those caps, hurry, because we are spreading caps and maybe there will be many more wearing this cap :-).

Also I spent some time at the UXCamp in Berlin, this was another kind of BarCamp, topic-wise. Very interesting discussions about what front-end engineers and user interface designer see as their job description and area of work. It was really good to just get another view into the web world and step actually quite a bit away from programming, I can only recommend attending it.

Taking this as an opportunity we want to announce the next dojo.beer() in Barcelona on June 17th.
You can get all info about the event on the DojoCampus event site.

The day after, we are speaking at the Mobile2.0 developer day and will give a detailed introduction in how to write mobile applications using the Dojo Toolkit and making sure they are running on different platforms such as PhoneGap and the W3C widgets being supported by Vodafone.

If you are in Barcelona that week, feel free to get in touch and if you have time to join for drinks during the dojo.beer or the mobile 2.0 conference let us know. Please sign up using the poll below.

Para los españoles :-)

Como Wolfram ha escrito en su último artículo de blog, nosotros estamos muy involucrados en el mundo de los móviles y estamos especialmente investigando como desarollar de la mejor manera para dispositivos móviles con Dojo.

Aprovechamos esta oportunidad para anunciar el próximo dojo.beer() en Barcelona el 17 de junio de 2009.
Puedes encontrar toda la información en inglés sobre el evento en la página de eventos de DojoCampus.

Al día siguiente vamos a dar una ponencia en el Mobile2.0 developer day y vamos a explicar como escribir aplicaciones moviles usando el Dojo Toolit y como asegurarse de que funcionan en múltiples plataformas como PhoneGap y como W3C Widget apoyado por Vodafone entre otros.

Si estás en Barcelona durante esa semana y te apetece contactar con nosotros no dudes en venir a tomar una copa al dojo.beer o a la conferencia mobile2.0. Por favor participa en el poll abajo si quieres ir.

The Dresden Mobile BarCamp actually got us really rolling in the mobile space, especially the presentation by the Vodafone guys Daniel and Markus showed us how easy it is to write a mobile widget just using HTML+CSS+JavaScript. I hear you saying “What?”. Yes, you read it right, HTML+CSS+JavaScript. This is what the W3C Widget spec is describing, if you need a quick introduction to it make sure to read PPK’s Introduction to W3C Widgets.
Briefly we learned about PhoneGap but didn’t realize the power of it until about a week later.

The weekend after Dresden we attended the Mobile Widget Camp in Amsterdam, which was the next step even deeper into mobile land. And since we knew that you could present a widget there we chose our EventNinja (formerly known as EventList) widget and ported it to the W3C widget platform, which also turned out to make it pretty easy using the mentioned PhoneGap to run the widget on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Where the last two mentioned platforms are only theoretically platforms this widget runs on, because we simply didn’t have no chance to test the widget on them. *hint*

Using the Dojo Toolkit as the JavaScript toolset made the development simple, fast and flexible.

The widget itself didn’t initially start out to be mobile, it was rather the calendar we missed on our website. Look at it, on the right you see the “upcoming events” which are just a widget, we embedded into our site. It also runs (just differently styled) on the dojocampus.org site.

And the mentioned widget competition above actually ended on the 25th May, yesterday. So we put all our efforts into getting the EventNinja widget done. And needless to say, just like a good developer we turned in our work two hours before midnight. The screenshot taken of the widget is of course from it running inside the PhoneGap emulator. (The iPhone “hardware” is just to beautify the screenshot).
But the prelimanary end of the story came back in form of an email, that the widget competition had been extended, the new end is now the 19th June. Guys, what the heck are you doing to us? We fought so hard and love deadlines so much and you just move them away?
What a pity on the one hand but another chance on the other … so let’s see.

And what next? Well, we are looking forward to the mobile20.eu in Barcelona, we will bring the widget for sure and maybe even more cool stuff. See you in Barcelona …