Apple Reiterates The Benefits Of Web Development For The iPhone

I’ll be really frank about this. The news last week surrounding the iPhone was…bad.

What was supposed to be one long stretch of public celebrations and glittering news, reviews, comments and the like, all heaping praise on a software update/upgrade that would install on the devices a mobile music store of quite elegant proportions, became a come-one-come-all slugfest against the purported miracle maker in the lovely land of Cupertino, California. And rightfully so.

It was to be an update/upgrade met with widespread applause. Apple had spent a great many weeks ensuring all t’s were crossed and i’s dotted, and it was certain to make a whole lotta people smile ear to ear, as children would on an abundantly materialistic, ideally snowy and candy-coated holiday morning. (Pop quiz: name that day!) Instead, there arose a clamor of very grand proportions because, simply put, the software dubbed the now infamous ‘1.1.1’ emerged a very dark horse, disabling a whole heckuva lot of phones – locked, unlocked, hacked, un-hacked, whathaveyou – of just about all functions.

Mind you, these are $300-600 handsets we speak of. Clearly, Apple has, for lack of a better phrase, screwed this thing up bad. Very bad. (Do note that some updaters made out okay, but all in all, a good number of innocents have been greatly inconvenienced by the anti-hacker crackdown, which more or less makes this software release a major error on Apple’s part.)

And now that the world has been “bricked” into seeing just how corporate the Jobs complex is, how has the company chosen to respond to the public discontent? By reiterating its support for Web development, of course.

You must now be wondering what the heck I’m talking about.

Well, if you remember the news surrounding Macworld ’07 in January and things said later by CEO Steve Jobs during Apple’s official debut of the iPhone in June, you’ll know that the team behind this new gadget made strong arguments for Web app development. When asked whether a software development kit would make it into the hands of third parties, they repeatedly pointed to advances in Web 2.0 technologies and told those concerned with producing software solutions that they should indeed focus on said advances, and work with those new toolsets.

And if you were a reader of this here publication at those moments, you’ll likely know of my personal support for such a strategy. It makes sense going forward. It’s better that one get comfortable now with the Web-based experience, because pretty soon we’ll be living Web-only lives – at least in the way of using productivity software and so forth – and it couldn’t hurt to familiarize oneself with such developments as much as possible.

Anywho, getting back to the point about Apple repeating its support for Web app development. The company has introduced a series of tips called the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, in which one can find described “in-depth documentation on the iPhone’s UI, how to design for it, and how to handle content passed through various technologies.” Whatever those last three or four words mean is anyone’s guess, but I think you get the gist. It’s another one of Apple’s friendly ways of saying, “here, folks, take a look at what you can do on the Web that’ll let you play freely in the land of iPhone.” And to be completely honest, it’s something worth looking into. Web apps are the future, after all. We should all start looking forward, no?

Look, I totally get why people are pissed at Apple for doing what it did last week. It didn’t have to. It could very well have avoided this mess. We know that. They know that. And the fact that people uninvolved with the hacking complex established around this device were affected negatively by the update is very unfortunate, no doubt. Shame on Jobs & Co, really.

Nonetheless, Apple can rightly do what it wishes with the device, whether it’s to the benefit or the detriment of its users. That’s Apple’s call. The company gets sales when it makes people happy, and it gets skewered if its customers are upset. That’s just the way things go, and Mr Jobs has the freedom to choose which path to take. And the thing is, I totally get why the guy is all for Web 2.0 development. He might have reasons different than mine for thinking in such a way (basically, the guy wants control), but in the end, if the path he and Apple have laid gets to be accepted by more and more people, it eventually becomes the default channel for future developments. And that’s a great thing. Because if the Web is where everything locally-based is headed, Apple might well be doing itself and its consumers a big favor by trying to force everyone, fanboys, fangirls and all, down the new path. It’ll be doing itself a favor by making itself increasingly more Web 2.0 friendly, and consumers will be fortunate to get an upper hand in the “new world” early on. A win-win, I think.

How about you?