Good Day. The App Store opened this summer, and I have been turning it over ever since from my home studio. I happen to have every early iPhone, imported from the States back when getting one into Canada meant wrestling with SIM card access, so I have felt this shift in my hands before most people here have touched it.
It is a slightly anxious moment and an exciting one at once. In building for the web, security has always weighed on me, protecting data, guarding everything passing through the gateways, making sure a site cannot be turned to nefarious ends. So what strikes me about the App Store is that, for once, someone else is watching too. A large company is choosing to protect its audience rather than leave them to the wolves, and I find that genuinely cool. It has quietly deepened my evangelism for what Apple is doing.
I believe apps are the future. Everything will have one, and the businesses without one will be left in the dust. So I have thrown myself into the design of apps, because the building of them is still a mysterious black box of Apple code I cannot yet see into. If I am honest, I wish I were building some of my own ideas into apps right now. I suspect a few of them would do very well.
I also think the App Store is about to warp what clients expect. They see that anyone can charge ninety nine cents and sell a million copies and make a million dollars, and they conclude that this is cheap and easy and quick. They do not see the ten million in research and development behind the overnight success. So once again I find myself explaining that cheap, easy, and free are not the same as good.
Here is the doubt I will admit. I am betting heavily on native apps, and I am not sure I am right. A web app, in the end, may do the very same thing, and building everything several times over, once for one platform and then again for the next, starts to look like a great deal of redundancy for its own sake.
What I am coming to believe is simpler than app or website. The only thing that truly matters is whether the tool works, whether it genuinely helps and actually saves a person time. If it does not, it is not a tool at all, it is a distraction. So I am steering my clients away from the question of app versus site, and toward the only thing that counts, the touchpoint where a customer comes to trust the brand and do the thing they came to do.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · August 2008