What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone.
As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML.
Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P
For many novice developers, web development imposes its own barriers to entry. First of all, you need some server somewhere, which means you need to know something about servers, maybe have some sysadmin skills, and likely that you'll have to make some sort of ongoing cash outlay for it. Secondly, if you want to get paid you need to figure out how to process payments, or at the very least what ad network you want to attempt to embed.
On the dead simple end where you just want essentially a blog with ads, it's easy. On the not-so-simple end, where you want to build an application you can charge money for, the app store model is very straightforward. You don't have to make any decisions about servers or hosts, do any sysadmin work, worry about traffic spikes and scalability, and your cash outlays (aside from development time) are all upfront and totally predictable. Similarly, payment processing is already there and handled for you. And lastly, you don't have to worry about SEO or distribution channels because you don't have a choice in the matter.
It's easier to put up a web page somewhere than to build an app for the app store . . . but for a large number of people building an app for the app store is much simpler than putting up a web application. And that, I think, is a big reason why the app store exploded.
oh for sure. I differ though in that that's not the comparison being drawn in the article. TFA compares iPhone apps to pimply kids making web pages for local businesses in < 2001, and not, as you suggest, to developing web apps.
I had a few friends in high school that made decent money making websites for eg a local car dealership. It was easy because it's just HTML.
iPhone programming (i.e. ObjC + optional C/C++) is harder than HTML+CSS+JS+(PHP/Python/Ruby/Java/whatever)?
Despite stuff what HTML is made for (like static websites), almost everything else is much easier to develop in ObjC with Cocoa (in some IDE like Xcode).
Let's take a simple 2D top-down game (like Legend of Zelda) as an example, with an inbuilt level editor and some way to save/load games on/from your local disk (or for the web equivalent: somewhere in some database).
That is quite easy to do with ObjC. I, for example, started to learn coding with Visual Basic many years ago, and that example was my second project (after a few weeks of coding -- never ever coded before). (Ofc VB is way different than ObjC but they are similarly easy to handle.) The point is, leave some newbie alone with Xcode and he will manage to implement something like this (without much extra documentation because most stuff is straight forward).
Now, let's leave some newbie alone to implement that in HTML + JS + whatever serverside language he prefers. He maybe will fail already to setup the web server.
I know how hard web apps are, but the article isn't about that. It's about kids making static HTML pages, pre CSS and JS for everything except rollovers, which they certainly succeeded at.
Please also include -
a) ~30 dollars to buy an objective c book
b) N hours to learn a new language when youre perfectly productive in another language.
This attitude is perplexing to me. a) If you have internet access, why would you need to buy a book? b) Unless you're a strict Prolog or ML enthusiast, Objective C is similar enough to what you already know that you could probably be productive inside a weekend or two.
Also, learning a new language or library that's different enough from what you know that it takes more than a few hours to be comfortable (generally) makes you a better programmer.
Sorry, I do realize you were mostly trying to pile onto the IPhone cost tally, but I'm always surprised to see other programmers imply that learning new things is inherently hard and undesirable.
a) Because I stare at a computer screen ~10 hours a day at work. When I am reading in the evening I prefer to have a book, which I can underline and scribble in.
b) Every programmer over time develops tiny helpful apps that make life bearable, having to rewrite all those apps / utilities in a fresh new language is a burden that I would like to avoid.
c) Admittedly I am a bit more aggrieved than most people because my languages of choice are lisp, scheme and python.
I prefer to read from books but the information in most programming books is out of date very fast. For this reason, I prefer learning languages from the web.
When I began programming in the late 1980s, we learned Turbo Pascal running on 80286s that cost around $2000. I'd call $2,000 worth of hardware in 1980s dollars a pretty high barrier to entry, wouldn't you?
Now your only barrier to entry is a Mac mini and an iPod touch. Both of which can be had for less than $1,000 in 2010 dollars. The real barrier of entry is about 25% of the price we paid in the 1980s.
As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML.
Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P