The iPad and some thoughts on what this means for the web…
If you haven’t heard yet…via Letterman, Modern Family, major newspapers, tech blogs…the iPad is being released tomorrow. But, this is not a review. If you want one, check out Walt Mossberg’s piece. And, if that is too long, let me sum it up for…great for consuming content, not so great for creating content (well, text-based content). I think I read that somewhere before.
Regardless of the reviews, this device is going to be pretty big, because lets be honest…it is freakin’ cool. As a web developer, the question I have is—how is this going to affect the web? Is it going to be good for web development or bad for web development?
I see this from two perspectives. On the positive side, Apple has eschewed Flash and implemented standards-based HTML5 for video. If I was a flash developer, I would be concerned. But, as a web developer, I always saw flash as a necessary evil, and really am not too sad to see it go. The second positive thing about the iPad is that it is definitely going to make the web more accessible. Every iPad has a browser. I don’t think it is going to bring more people to the web, but the mobility of the device might just increase the frequency people hit sites (even just a little).
Now for the negatives…the iPad has essentially done what Microsoft has been trying to do for a couple years now…pull people off the web and put them into proprietary applications. Not only did Apple accomplish this, but they did it in a way that they now get 30% of the sales price of all applications sold on the platform. This is brilliant… a coup of epic proportions. But, this is also extremely troubling for web developers, as 70% or so of these new apps are really just websites wrapped in a touch friendly container. Is this a shift of the magnitude as what we saw in the 90s when all desktop apps began moving toward web apps? Probably not. But, it does mark an end of an era…where most new and innovative apps were web apps.