The iPhone obsession

It's not about the iPhone, it's about Webkit.<p>He seems to forget the fact that hardware sales doesn't translate into actual internet usage. The internet outside of iPhone, Android, and Palm is so terrible that barely anyone even bothers to use it. What do those three platforms have in common? Webkit!

So the IE6 comparison is <i>definitely</i> the right way to sting developers into action. Nobody wants to end up being That Guy from 2001 again.<p>There's a few differences though. IE6 did a few things better (their box-sizing model is still more sane than the standard, box heights were nicer if unpredictable). But many things it just did <i>differently</i>, for no very sensible reason.<p>Mobile Safari isn't like that -- it's pretty damn standards compliant (tried a second ago, it passes most but not all of ACID2). That means anything you write that is completely standards-compliant will work, without modification, on any other similarly compliant browser, mobile or otherwise.<p>What is does do is a bunch of mobile-specific enhancement -- the viewport sizing, css gradients, etc. are all highly useful for the unusual constraints of mobile web development.<p>So, as PPK suggests, build the website in another browser first. Then enhance it for Safari using their extensions -- not the other way around.

First time I heard Quirksmode curse like a sailor. Regardless, the reason I can't develop for a Nokia, Blackberry, or HTC is because I don't have a Nokia, Blackberry, or HTC. I have an iPhone. It's pretty easy to develop webapps for it because if it looks good in desktop Safari, it will probably look good in iPhone Safari. I don't even know the browsers that other phones have. I know Opera Mini is on many phones and Firefox too. I try to make my sites work well with desktop versions of these browsers. But there's no way I can guarantee that my sites will work well on all the browsers everywhere.<p>Already I have to worry about: * Firefox 3+ (all OSes) * Safari (OSX, Windows) * Opera 9+ * Chrome 3+ * IE7+ * iPhone<p>There are just so many browsers I have to worry about. And even though I code for standards, every browser still treats every little thing slightly differently. I realize making something work in Opera if it already works in FF/Chrome is probably not too difficult, but sometimes little things can take up hours. So sorry Quirksmode, despite your well-written article, I will not even bother with any other browsers just because you say so.<p>You know when I will bother? When my users tell me that my app doesn't work well in platform X, browser Y and they would really want it to. That's when I will go beyond my basic list of browsers. Otherwise I'm just wasting resources developing for yet another platform.

"First, so what? No, let me rephrase that: So fucking what? Since when does web development mean leaving 50% of your mobile users out in the cold? Since when is “I only support browsers with a large market share” a valid argument? (Answer: since we have an iPhone up our ass.)"<p>A device has more than 3x its market-share in traffic-share and we are supposed to ignore that? That doesn't seem realistic. This gap between market-share and traffic-share speak volumes about how far behind the other platforms are in UX.<p>Maybe developers aren't just obsessed with the iPhone: maybe they just don't want to develop for something that makes thier work look like shit.

Please Don't Mistake My Apathy For A Lack of Understanding:<p><a href="http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2009/04/11/please-dont-mistake-my-apathy-for-a-lack-of-understanding/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2009/04/11/please-dont-mi...</a>

<i>Lots of mobile browsers have iPhone in their UA strings to work around browser detects that obsessed web developers have set up. Do all traffic market share reporters work around that problem? Most probably do, but we can’t be sure.</i><p>Which browsers do that?

Sales figures are not relevant. What matter are:<p>- proportion of devices currently subscribed to a data plan;<p>- time spent online / number of pageviews per device;<p>- for businesses who don't plan to be profitable in the next couple of months, what OSes will be actually used for mobile web surfing in the future;<p>- which users have been trained by an AppStore-like system to easily spend money online.<p>Nobody in his right mind tries to surf with Windows Mobile if they can avoid it; the vast majority of Nokia or Sony-Ericcson phones, those which constitute the bulk of their sales, are barely usable surfing platforms, and are generally not sold with unlimited data plan; Spending money on Palm support supposes that you bet on their middle-term survival, a bet not everyone is willing to make; RIM is totally specialized into the corporate market, and is relevant if and only if you target this audience.

Here’s the thing: developing for the iPhone means that you are developing for any browser that supports web standards. Why bend over backwards for browsers on phones with archaic web browsing capabilities. If anything, it will force vendors to get with the HTML5 and CSS3 programs.

<i>For instance, SMS only really took off with the Obama campaign, while the rest of the world became addicted to it years ago.</i><p>Anyone happen to have stats to support that, I find it very hard to believe based on (admittedly anecdotal) evidence.

<i>Besides, what will happen when the operators abandon the economically untenable flat rate for iPhone data traffic?</i><p>Er, what? Operators are <i>expanding</i> those flat rate plans to other phones (I have a unlimited everything month-to-month plan for $80 right now, on a non-AT&#38;T operator).

While this article curses a lot to get attention, I think it will fall on deaf ears because I do not have other phones to test on. Unless a simulator or emulator is readily available for download on my platform of choice, I will not test against it.

Here's a list of popular smartphone OSes:<p>- S60<p>- WinMo<p>- iPhone<p>- Android<p>- Blackberry<p>iPhone and Android are pretty much covered with good WebKit implementation. Check in one of those and most likely your page will work in the other.<p>PPK claims that S60 WebKit is much inferior, but there's Opera Mobile 10 for S60 and for WinMo.<p>Blackberry doesn't have a good browser at the moment (although they are likely to get one). Opera is making an optimized version of Mini for it, though.<p>Practically all other phones run Opera Mini too. Version 5 uses the same engine as Mobile but it has a much lesser JavaScript capabilities. Personally I prefer it to the default S60 Webkit on Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic.<p>At the moment it's all seem not that complicated to me: check in Apple WebKit (Android/iPhone), Opera Mobile and Mini, and hope that other browsers will catch up eventually.<p>Mini can be run in Java emulator, and desktop Opera browser has a "small-screen" rendering mode (should work like Opera Mobile). Same goes with desktop Safari and iPhone.

Wouldn't it be hard to target Nokia/RIM/etc? They have dozens of handsets. Different screen resolutions and even different rendering engines. Apple just made it easier by keeping the render/resolution consistent for the last 3 years. The other factor is Nokia/RIM/Microsoft really lagged behind Apple, Palm and Android in offering a modern standards compliant browser on their handsets. I think the assumption is people buying a Windows Mobile phone for example don't really care much about the web. (or they would have bought a phone with a modern browser) Why go out of your way to please them? We know iPhone/Touch uses really like the mobile web.

All stats I see (and I looked at quite a bit of them) have iPhone traffic at 50% or more of mobile trafic. See e.g. Morgan Stanly: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/how-the-iphone-is-blowing-everyone-else-away-in-charts/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/how-the-iphone-is-blowing-e...</a> While I agree you shouldn't _exclude_ the smaller browsers, it's not strange to optimize for your largest market share. PPK is right Nokia sells a lot of phones. However, people who buy nokia's aren't _using_ them to browse the web: They use them for phonecalls. Iphone users do.

I'm not sure what he's talking about. I don't mean for that to sound snarky. I just feel like I'm being yelled at when I honestly don't know what I did wrong. When I start building a web app I start with standards, assuming that my early adopters will likely be using Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Mobile Safari usually Just Works(tm). Is he talking about custom iPhone stylesheets or what?

When you spend money developing a mobile app, you have to future proof it so that keeps up with the apps/sites of similar functionality, otherwise people will end going to your competitors (obviously that statement depends on your service, but its certainly the case in my sector). People with smartphones wont want to use a site that is so stripped down it would work well on a crappy handset.<p>We are sitting on the edge of a large explosion of smartphone devices and (potentially) users (with <i>lots</i> of Android handsets coming out this year). In the UK you can now get a Android powered device for £20 / month with a free handset. If you <i>want</i> a smartphone (and therefore probably interested in using the web), you will be able to afford one this year (at least in Europe!). This is going to be huge.<p>The iPhone is the standard they all will judge themselves against, and therefore the iPhone is the <i>benchmark</i> device.<p>I would suspect that the 50% smartphone / 50% other phone traffic statistic will be <i>way</i> higher towards smartphones in 12 months time.

I had a Nokia phone for years and then a Motorala phone and then a couple of windows mobile phones from HTC and others. But, in none of them I have ever downloaded an app, leave alone having the interest to code up an app. With my iPod touch however (don't want to deal with ATT) I have downloaded dozens of apps and feel good to code on it (though I had to buy my first Mac for this and had a hard time with Objective C's syntax).<p>I used to work in the windows mobile development team at Microsoft and at that time used to have a dismissive tone about iPhone and said it was just an expensive version of HTC Touch. But, once I started using it and downloading apps, I found the real difference. It is in a whole different league and engineers in other phone companies know that. (I can speak for atleast one of them)

Are people actually designing for Webkit mobile? I thought the big breakthrough with Mobile Safari was that basically every website on the web just works.<p>Okay I have to turn the phone sideways to read Hacker News comfortably, but apart from that it generally just works. Mobile enhanced sites are nice but if we had to rely on them then we wouldn't be getting any mobile web at all.<p>If the other phones can't render that non-iPhone optimised sites then they've got bigger problems than not being able to see the iPhone version, because only some vanishingly tiny percentage of the web is available in that format.<p>(I believe Opera's command of the market on lower end phones was partly due to very smart reformatting of standard webpages (done both server- and client-side.)

He is missing/ignoring the obvious. Although the iPhone may only be 15% of the smartphone market in terms of units shipped, it represents something on the order of 98% of the market in terms of user dollars spent on applications. This is the only number that matters if you are selling an app. The number of installed platforms is meaningless.

At least in the US, a <i>lot</i> of designers have an iPhone (and so do their friends). I think it's also likely that the iPhone was the first mobile device they have ever used the internet on. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that since me and all my friends only use the iPhone everyone else does to.

Dupe detection can be thrown off by just a # character!<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109637" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109637</a>

Even in 2000, developers had Netscape Navigator, so developing for IE because they had to and NN because they wanted to was the best option (unless distorted by being paid to meet other requirements).<p>Now, developers have iPhones and like iphones, developing for other devices isn't so personally pressing.<p>Perhaps this will force other manufacturers to improve in the way we always wanted to do to IE6 but couldn't?

Who are all these people with Nokia's?<p>I have never met one.

This guy is sounding more and more foolish, and pretty wacky. he used to be cool. What the heck happened to him I wonder? Maybe he can't get an iPhone where he lives.

message: don't forget to support the less fortunate phones while developing for the mobile web.

Screw this article, inaccurate and not true for other mobile platforms. They are over saturated with developers just as iTunes is. We do not need any more dev's.