"The actual MAS store app itself is a horrible piece of garbage wrapping a bunch of web views. Just make it a real native app and rewrite it."
Native app is not really a black and white concept when you're talking about an app that mainly just interprets and displays live data it receives. If it's not html, then it's going to be xml/json/some other markup with a custom presentation layer on top. Why would that be better? In this case I just don't think you can point the finger at webview vs native as a problem or a solution. Yes, the app may be crap, but that seems mostly unrelated to the technology used to build it. I'm guessing it's more a factor of lack of resources, team member quality, management, or inter-departmental communication issues in a large corporation.
You're probably right. I would still agree with the parent in that they feel like a badly done webview wrapper, because the symptoms are so similar.
iTunes Store, App Store, MAS, Apple Music — there is definitely a pattern there, at least on the desktop. I find them all similarly clunky, slow, ugly and unpleasant to use.
Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious as to why they have that organizational blindspot.
Most of the most visible features and improvements I've seen in iOS over the years were developed by the jailbreaking community and eventually apple incorporated into iOS.
Care to actually list that? I find that incredibly hard to believe. While there may be a list of 5-10 features that meet the criteria, seems like most OS releases have hundreds of improvements here & there.
All of Apple is just sitting around waiting for jail breakers to innovate for them, no one has any ideas about what to do with their time.
Don't even get me started on hardware! Incorporating all that stuff Samsung & Dell or whoever is doing.
Well Control Center came from SBSettings, for one. On a 3GS running iOS4, you could quick reply to texts, play background music, have a visual multitasking interface, etc.
This was years before iOS 7. Though most of the concepts seem to be taken from Android, which took most of the ideas from defunct WebOS. Well, mostly Apple and Google hired former Palm guys for their design teams.
Even if you believe that Apple as a whole doesn't have the drive to make stuff as good as they can (fair, although I believe otherwise), and even if you believe they have a captured audience (how?) — do you indeed believe that Apple is happy with 15% (US) market share for desktops and laptops?
Even accepting everything else, that seems like a huge incentive to me not to get complacent.
Not sure where you're getting 15% from: the vast majority of articles I read have Apple's app stores generating far more revenue than the competition's.
So yes, I believe Apple is probably perfectly happy (in an upper-echelon corporate strategy sense) sitting on their cash cow as opposed to fighting it out for less profitable market share.
I don't think that most web developers looking for a job think 'Apple'. Google and Facebook would likely be their top pick and not surprising since both of those companies are far more web centric - Apple has historically not been so.
It's almost a chicken and egg situation where unless Apple builds top tier web apps they won't attract top tier web devs. Without top tier web devs they of course will struggle to build scalable, fast and user friendly web apps.
I'd imagine inertia also plays a role. Apple clearly have a lot of talent who know Cocoa and Obj-C inside and out. Chances are their current devs prioritise those kinds of apps over the kinds you might see Google or FB prioritise. Heck look at how long it took FB to come out with a decent iOS app. Their first mobile version was HTML with a native wrapper. It took FB time to build the talent base to do a decent app (believe they even had to hire Loren Brichter to consult to help them with it!).
Every company has its specialities. Apple is getting better but as their data loss issues with Photos and Apple Music, as well as their problems with MobileMe show they are clearly finding it hard getting web devs who can build what they need fast enough. It'll take them time - they have enough cash to get there but they sure are alienating a lot of users and devs with these issues.
The pattern is because they're the exact same app. All of those are just the iTunes Store, which is a web page on every platform. The iTunes Store is a little clunky but it works fine.
Apple also have the Apple Store, which is a separate thing that's a website - I believe it's a WebObjects app and the iTunes Store is as well.
The saddest part about this is that using WebViews really doesn't have to mean that it's clunky and slow. Slack's interface is pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript and it works just fine.
xml/json as uses now is data transfer format, not some UI markup.
As for why would it be better — because Cocoa is light years ahead in UI libraries and optimizations compared to web mess.
Native app is not really a black and white concept when you're talking about an app that mainly just interprets and displays live data it receives. If it's not html, then it's going to be xml/json/some other markup with a custom presentation layer on top. Why would that be better? In this case I just don't think you can point the finger at webview vs native as a problem or a solution. Yes, the app may be crap, but that seems mostly unrelated to the technology used to build it. I'm guessing it's more a factor of lack of resources, team member quality, management, or inter-departmental communication issues in a large corporation.