Will there be an iPad App Gold Rush?

In the iPad promo video, Apple VP Scott Forstall predicts a whole new gold rush for iPad apps.

For games, this is true. People will buy and enjoy games on the big screen. But what about other apps?

Excluding reMail, the apps I use most on my iPhone are the New York Times app, Foursquare, Facebook, Tweetie, Yelp, Kayak, Skype, Snow Report, and AT&T myWireless. Almost all of these are there to display content and do social networking.

But why do I use the New York Times app instead of the website?

1. The NYT app lets me get to the news faster: On my iPhone 3G on Wifi, Safari loads nytimes.com in 55 seconds. The NYT starts up and shows me the latest news in 18 seconds.


2. The NYT app is optimized for the small screen - the web version isn't.

The iPad loads nytimes.com instantly. Daring Fireball says the iPad is "fast, fast, fast". That makes it much more attractive to skip writing an app and just use HTML 5:

1. Web apps are an order of magnitude easier to develop than iPad apps.


2. Apps are substantially slower to update given the iPhone approval process and waiting for users to get the update. [*]


3. It's easy to make a version of the page optimized for iPad's screen and the size of your finger.


4. HTML 5 will let you offer offline functionality.

Sounds familiar? Yes, Google's Vic Gundotra has been saying that web apps are the way:

"We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing."

For the iPhone, this hasn't come true yet. But the iPhone's browser are too slow. On the iPad this might change - instead of native apps, we might see a thousand web apps bloom.

[*] Thanks to commenter Tom Pickney for pointing this out.

More on iPad: What the iPad means for Developers

What the iPad means for developers: Spending quality time with UISplitViewController

"The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it." - Wall Street Journal.

In the days before the iPad release, a bunch of app developers will be rushing to make their apps iPad-compatible. In the iPad promo video, Scott Forstall predicts a whole new gold rush.

What do most non-game apps have in common? A main list view and a detail view. Whether it's the New York Times app, Facebook, Snow Report, they all follow the main view - detail view pattern.

This is the natural organization scheme for iPhone apps: UINavigationController and UITableViewController make this easy, and there is no shortage of documentation on how to build apps like this.



We've all seen the screenshots of the new iPad email app. List on side, main view on the other. Portrait mode switches the navigation view on the left to a button on the top left that pops over the content.



All those main view - detail view apps? They'll be redone in this style. It looks like we'll all be spending quality time with the new UISplitViewController, which manages the presentation of the side-by-side panes:



The NYT and Facebook apps should be available in this style on iPad launch day. But they might be separate from their respective iPhone apps: Apple has also announced support for "Universal Applications" that run on both iPhone and iPad, but this is not yet in the 3.2 SDK - I guess until then, there be a separate part of the App Store with "Made for iPad" applications.

Seven Qualities of Successful iPhone Apps

If you're a mobile developer, I highly recommend this blog post and video about the seven qualities of great iPhone apps: Delightful, innovative, well designed, integrated, optimized, connected, localized.

Most of these seem pretty obvious, and somewhat soft and mushy, but I think the video gives some good examples. Also, the lessons apply to non-iPhone platforms as well.

Unfortunately, you need an ADC login to get to the blog post, but that's free and you don't need to pay the $99 toll.

With reMail, we're aiming to check all the boxes. Our next stop is being localized (I'm still looking for volunteers to do our Spanish and Italian translations.)

An App Store for Google Wave

In the previous post, I evaluated business models for Google Wave. But there's a promising business model I forgot. It was suggested by Carl Putscher, one of the commenters.

Google Wave App Store

If Google Wave takes off, developers will many build useful additions and extensions using the API. I can imagine that some of these will be so useful that users would pay for them. A third party could then develop an App Store that sells themes, extensions, and subscriptions to extensions. They could then take a 30% cut, much like Apple does for the iPhone.

Verdict: Technically, I imagine that this would be pretty easy to implement for gadgets, and hard for things like themes or elaborate applications - I'd have to see the source code to really judge. The risk here is that Google could do this first. I'd expect they could do this better than any third party could.

Rating:

Random thought: It would be interesting to know how the Cydia Store is doing, which is a less restrictive, third party App Store for the iPhone.