Beautiful designed apps should be conduits for web services. Or provide some form of “desktop” capability. Sync is important.
Brent Simmons recently wrote of Marco Arment:
You know him from Tumblr, Instapaper, The Magazine, and (coming soon) Overcast.
You may think of Marco as an iOS developer – but every single one of those apps is a web service.
This thought process works very well with a presentation John Gruber gave at Web 2.0 Expo NY – watch the 10 minute video on Apple and the Open Web. He describes Apple as a “ht” company: they’ve embraced HTML and HTTP.
I look at my iPhone and think to myself what apps I use (i.e. have an icon on my screen) that are web apps:
- Google Calendar (direct web app, opens a browser window)
- RunKeeper
- Fitbit
- Withings
- Cardiio
- MyFitnessPal
- Chrome
- Mail
- TripIt
- Evernote
- Instapaper
- Kindle
- NewsBlur
- Hello (by Evernote)
- Skype
- Instagram
- Vine
- Rdio
- Spotify
- Google
- Reminders (stock Apple app, wonderful sync at work)
- Safari
- Facebook
- Foursquare
- Twitter
- KakaoTalk
- Line
- Messenger
- Hangouts
- Telegram
- Tweetbot
- Google+
- Dropbox
- 1Password
- Expensify
- MyTeksi
- Uber
- YouTube
- Paper
- Bloomberg
What isn’t a web app? Photos (though there is an iCloud Sync that I don’t use – I prefer it going to Dropbox), Camera, most of Apple’s standard apps (of course, FaceTime, Notes, Calendar – they all sync), DocScanner (syncs to Dropbox, but has no web app behind it), Snapseed, Camera+, 360 (has a web component though I never use it). Music/Podcasts theoretically sync with the web, but again, not my use case. I don’t consider Google Authenticator a web app either though I use it in conjunction with the web. Messages has iMessage but there isn’t a web interface (yet?).
We can argue that the messaging apps aren’t really web services. KakaoTalk/Line have desktop clients. Whatsapp is notoriously mobile-only. Viber/WeChat seem to be mobile only for me. Telegram leads the way by having a nice Chrome browser plugin. Skype is a desktop app.
That makes the majority of my apps that I use, really, web apps. My phone is a conduit to the Internet. This is why I consume data and WiFi.
My iPad is not much different – I use it a lot more for reading, and that includes the FT (fully HTML5 web + mobile app), WSJ, NYTimes, New Yorker, The Economist. OK, there’s GoodReader, iBooks, Zinio for offline reading too, a lot more magazines, and some office software – the iWork suite (which syncs to iCloud). A cool app like Penultimate (now free after Evernote purchased them – again syncs online).
This is the success metric for an app. No point building an application to have a F1 racing timetable (I get that from F1.com or a simple Google search). No point building an application that collects Malay proverbs (I can search for that if I was interested; or if it was the English context, I’d just look up wikiquote).
Games seem to be an exception to this, but as I have never played games and don’t intend to start (I don’t grok the mind of a gamer, sorry), I’ll pass on overall commentary.