or "Why John Gruber is a Snob, and how Apple did us all a Favor by Dragging their feet on iPhone Applications"...
I was using the mobile web before iPhone came out. That makes me some sort of pioneer! Or, at least I felt like one, since it was still a novel idea to people that you could look something up on your phone. Hell, I felt like a bad-ass just being able to pull up NextBus on my E61 and let people know when the N Judah was arriving. Magic!
I also felt like a bad-ass pioneer because the mobile web fucking sucked. With the exception of a small, self-selected group of clued-in companies, most people either pretended it didn't exist or, (worse in my opinion) provided some awful crippled mobile site. To the extent that anyone targeted a particular rendering engine, it was the abysmal OpenWave browser (hey guys, remember WAP?). Rich websites of any sort were out. The all-too-typical experience would be that I'd click a link to someone's site on my phone, and I'd get redirected based on my user agent and shunted to their mobile landing page, which had 10 links to yesterday's news and no way of actually finding the content I had a perfectly good link for.
When the first betas of Safari came out, I'd already been using Konqueror in X11 on my Mac since it was such a fast and capable browser (and everything else at the time pretty much sucked). That's phenomenally nerdy, and it also meant I was super-stoked when Apple announced they were using a modified version of KHTML in their WebKit rendering engine. It took them a little while to figure out how to actually work with the Free Software community, but that effort has finally paid dividends as KHTML and WebKit are unforked at last.
iPhone wasn't the first phone to have a WebKit-based browser that could capably render the web. Series 60 phones like mine were already doing so. The problem is that so few people actually had an even moderately useful browser on their phone that, like I said, nobody was bothering to make the mobile web experience nice. iPhone changed all of that, simply because it put a browser in tons of normal peoples' hands, and Apple's marketing gave them the expectation they would actually be able to use it. Rich experiences weren't new to the mobile world... those of us with smartphones already had the opportunity to use a wide variety of applications targeted to our devices. Rich web experiences, however, were new.
It was a quick and rude awakening, but content providers quickly figured out that if their site didn't present a good user experience to iPhone users, they would go and browse someone else's that did. Early adopters like myself are demanding, but we lack influence; nobody was going to fix their site's mobile experience to make me happy, but they happily did so when it meant the loss of a million eyeballs. The mobile web got better, fast, with the introduction of iPhone.
I shudder to think of what would have happened if Apple had allowed development on the iPhone platform right away. Development of applications for mobiles wasn't a new field at that point (though it's definitely exploded since), and I think the mobile web as a whole would be much shittier if people had had the opportunity to just make an iPhone app instead of having had to learn how to make their site actually look good in WebKit. Releasing Safari for Windows played right into this, too, as Windows-based web developers had no excuse not to test their site with WebKit, whether or not they had an iPhone. I don't think Apple ever intended for people to make Safari their primary browser on Windows, honestly. It's there to help people develop for iPhone.
iPhone has applications now. Yay, I guess. It has applications, and a crowd of people bitching about Apple's (admittedly heavy-handed) approval process. I still don't have an iPhone (instead, I upgraded to the E71 this year), so the debate over the app store doesn't really affect me. Apple aren't the first to be somewhat hamfisted with their walled garden, and they won't be the last. But thanks to iPhone, the opportunity exists to create a great mobile experience for your site right now, without anyone having to approve it, and the proliferation of WebKit means that your site will render well on more and more mobile platforms.
It's funny when I hear Gruber bitch about the web app experience on iPhone. Frankly, I think he's being a snob. There are other phones out there, and a developer who wants to create a fantastic experience on iPhone has an avenue to do so: he can create an application. He can also create a very rich web application which will render on tons of devices. I guess in Gruber's myopic world, people should only care about iPhone. Witness his recent kvetch about Twitter's new mobile site. There are plenty of native Twitter applications for iPhone already; perhaps, just perhaps, Twitter is thinking about everyone else. Frankly, Twitter mobile has always sucked ass and I'm excited about this change because it will benefit me on the device I'm using now. (Twitter also used to commit the cardinal sin of redirecting me based on not my user agent, but my fucking netblock... I would get their mobile site when my mac was tethered to my phone)
So basically Gruber is a snobbish dick, which everyone knows already, Apple did us all a favor by dragging their feet on the iPhone platform (which I think is a somewhat novel idea), and what's good for WebKit is good for everyone (I think everyone but MS can agree on that).
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