If you look at moves made by Apple in the iPhone era it becomes quite clear and does not require bias.
- Ban flash. Biggest competition to native apps.
- Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle.
- Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now
they are trying this.
Apple's business model is pretty simple. Aquire a user through very aggressive marketing converted into a device purchase. Use that device purchase a an entry point to take over all points of monetary action of that user. That means nothing(web, flash, credit card) should go through anything but them. You don't need bias to see something as obvious as this now is.
That's not why that happened. Flash wasn't "banned," Apple chose not to allow support for it in Mobile Safari from the beginning. It was never removed or banned.
Flash was a dog. Power hungry, slow, inefficient. I recently had to touch the codebase for an Adobe Air iOS app and the runtime is pretty horrific. Adobe never got flash good enough for mobile, and Apple was right to call them out on it.
Flash was never any good on Android either. Otherwise it'd still be around.
> Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle.
Mobile Safari is a good browser. It's fast and is not crippled. It consistently beats browsers on other mobile platforms despite running on often slower hardware. A great mobile web browser is what made the iPhone a great product.
> Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now they are trying this.
This is because Apple's contract with Google expired and they had to renew on terms that they could not agree to. My recollection of this is that Google wanted a bigger branding presence on the iOS home screen and refused to license mapping data for turn-by-turn navigation (I believe they wanted the Apple-developed Google Maps application to be branded "Google Maps" rather than just "Maps"). Apple saw no way out aside from investing in their own mapping data and infrastructure.
Flash was not slow, it's just that flash ads were ahead of their time in abusing the system's resources. The supposed slowness of flash relative to browser api's was a myth, although flash content was bloated, in much the same way that modern web pages are bloated. When flash was killed by Jobs I knew it was just a matter of time until people did the same bad things with JavaScript and CSS as they did with flash, and lo it came to pass.
As much as I didn't like installing Adobe's plugin, I have to defend Flash. JavaScript is just recently getting to the speed Flash had years ago. Flash probably still does vector animations better [citation unavailable].
Apple wanted turn-by-turn, and Google wanted branding and some influence over the app in exchange. Apple wanted turn-by-turn, but apparently wasn't willing to give up much of anything to get it.
So Apple jettisoned Google to do it themselves. Then Apple discovered that mapping isn't nearly as easy as Google made it look when their users were unhappy with a decidedly inferior product.
It's worth noting what Steve Jobs said at the introduction of the iPhone:
"The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.
And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today."
There was no SDK initially. Webapps were the _only_ way to put your app on the iPhone. My understanding is that developers demanded an SDK, though.
It seems that part of the reason for not wanting native Apps is because Jobs felt that policing an app store would be too difficult. As to whether the current browser is purposely crippled for the sake of directing people to native apps, I think that might be a bit difficult to prove. Is it perhaps instead that native apps naturally provide better performance, developers demanded it, and so Apple focuses its resources there? Shrug.
> User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like it the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it.
My points were evidence to the contrary of that statement. I was not discussing the motivations of Google in regards to their users.
My point is that Apple's business model is about expansive control of a highly profitable user base. It uses an expensive device purchase(which increases the pain point of a user leaving) through aggressive marketing to attempt to be the primary source of as many monetary behaviors of that user as possible.
Flash(and upcoming AIR) was at the time a true contender for becoming the cross platform desktop/native type application interface. Once Apple banned Flash, companies moved away from the platform and it withered.
Since you brought up the Android browser, we can use it as an example of a company who would prefer to increase the use of the web. Google actively tries to increase adoption of the mobile Chrome browser as it cannot control the the updating schedules of phone vendors. Bases upon browser statistics it appears Google is having some success.
Google is not any better, but we can look at the difference in their behavior as an example of a difference in business model. Google and Facebook are somewhat dependent(at this time) on some attributes of the web. This difference in these companies(including Apple) can be shown in their support for deep linking.
And to prove I am not picking on Apple directly, part of Google's business model is to leverage their search results to expand into other monetary behaviors of their users as well.
Technology implementations by large tech companies are typically more indicative of their business intentions as opposed to their abilities. I'm not saying that Apple is any worse than any other company. Only that their particular business model at this time is, in my opinion, the most dangerous to the overall ecosystem and tech economy.
"Flash(and upcoming AIR) was at the time a true contender for becoming the cross platform desktop/native type application interface. Once Apple banned Flash, companies moved away from the platform and it withered."
Simply not true. Flash continued to be made available for Android, and Adobe boasted of the number of installs it would have (200m by the end of 2011, it claimed [1]). Apple had, and has, a small share of the mobile and desktop market. But nobody could get Flash to work well on mobile. That is why it died.
Because Flash was buggy as all hell, and ran like absolute shit on mobile. Remember the short time it was available for Android? Remember how no one really used it, because it was crap? Remember how Adobe gave up because they couldn't do it worth a damn?
"- Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle."
You're gonna need a citation for that one.
"Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now they are trying this."
Yeah, no. Apple and Google had a dispute over licensing. They were unable to resolve their differences, and so they parted ways amicably. Google Maps is still freely available for iOS, and developers are still able to use it in their apps.
"You don't need bias to see something as obvious as this now is."
- Ban flash. Biggest competition to native apps.
- Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle.
- Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now they are trying this.
Apple's business model is pretty simple. Aquire a user through very aggressive marketing converted into a device purchase. Use that device purchase a an entry point to take over all points of monetary action of that user. That means nothing(web, flash, credit card) should go through anything but them. You don't need bias to see something as obvious as this now is.