Beautiful designed apps should be conduits for web services. Or provide some form of \u201cdesktop\u201d capability. Sync is important.<\/p>\n
Brent Simmons<\/a> recently wrote<\/a> of Marco Arment<\/a>:\u00a0<\/p>\n You know him from Tumblr, Instapaper, The Magazine, and (coming soon) Overcast.<\/p>\n You may think of Marco as an iOS developer \u2013 but every single one of those apps is a web service.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This thought process works very well with a presentation John Gruber<\/a> gave at Web 2.0 Expo NY – watch the 10 minute video on Apple and the Open Web<\/a>. He describes Apple as a \u201cht\u201d company: they\u2019ve embraced HTML and HTTP.<\/p>\n I look at my iPhone and think to myself what apps I use (i.e. have an icon on my screen) that are web apps:<\/p>\n What isn\u2019t a web app? Photos (though there is an iCloud Sync that I don\u2019t use – I prefer it going to Dropbox), Camera, most of Apple\u2019s standard apps (of course, FaceTime, Notes, Calendar – they all sync), DocScanner (syncs to Dropbox, but has no web app behind it), Snapseed, Camera+, 360 (has a web component though I never use it). Music\/Podcasts theoretically sync with the web, but again, not my use case. I don\u2019t consider Google Authenticator a web app either though I use it in conjunction with the web. Messages has iMessage but there isn’t a web interface (yet?).<\/p>\n We can argue that the messaging apps aren\u2019t really web services. KakaoTalk\/Line have desktop clients. Whatsapp is notoriously mobile-only. Viber\/WeChat seem to be mobile only for me. Telegram leads the way by having a nice Chrome browser plugin. Skype is a desktop app.<\/p>\n That makes the majority of my apps that I use, really, web apps. My phone is a conduit to the Internet. This is why I consume data and WiFi.<\/p>\n My iPad is not much different – I use it a lot more for reading, and that includes the FT (fully HTML5 web + mobile app), WSJ, NYTimes, New Yorker, The Economist. OK, there\u2019s GoodReader, iBooks, Zinio for offline reading too, a lot more magazines, and some office software – the iWork suite (which syncs to iCloud). A cool app like Penultimate (now free after Evernote purchased them – again syncs online).<\/p>\n\n
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