Are iBooks the New Apps?
If the amount I’m paid as an iOS developer relative to what I was making as a web developer is anything to go by, Apple still has a serious problem that could be summed up as “Making apps is hard!”.
Apple has done a lot in iOS 5 to address some of the difficulty of app development, but it remains that much of the work of creating an app is dealing with leaks in the abstractions of Objective-C and Cocoa. What also remains—the reason we programmers still get paid the big bucks—is the conversion from the “do what I mean” mindset of humans to the “do what I say” reality of machines.
But I would like to explore the theory that Apple is chipping away at this difficulty by gradually creating higher-level authoring tools, one App Store category at a time.
Most recently, Apple introduced iBooks 2 along with a companion Mac app called iBooks Author. iBooks 2 introduces a much richer and more interactive set of technologies for ebook authors to use in their works. At the same time, iBooks Author is an easy-to-use graphical authoring tool for both traditional ebooks and those that use the new technologies in iBooks 2. The take-home lesson is that you no longer need a degree in Computer Science to author something along the lines of the erstwhile Push Pop Press’s Our Choice ebook app.
Apple’s App Store currently has an entire top-level category devoted to books. While many of the most popular apps in this category have a high level of interactivity, many others are basically single-serving apps that provide a reading interface for ebook content that ships with the app. Both those in the latter category and arguably a majority of those in the former could likely be supplanted by either an individual iBook or a series of them.
So a whole category of my customers no longer need my help to create beautiful interactive book-style content, unless they happen to have some kind of unusual requirement that can be met only by a native app.
But there is another top-level category that is vulnerable to this sort of Sherlocking: informational apps. Another way to think of these is “apps that could totally be websites”, which is what I currently make a living developing.
There are a few good reasons to make an app for something that could “totally be a website”, basically usability, responsiveness and API access. Ideally you want the system to ask you only once whether it should allow your app to access your current location, not every time you launch it. Secondly, even with all the scrolling and what not dialed in just so, web apps still don’t match up to native apps when it comes to teh snappy. And there are still devices and information whose APIs haven’t made it into WebKit yet, like the camera and address book.
While it seems as though the new capabilities of mobile devices are growing as quickly as the list of things that are no longer restricted to native apps, the use cases for most of these missing web technologies in an informational app are pretty thin.
(There is a fourth reason to make your website an app, which is the ease with which you can monetize it. By changing one select box you can change your app from free to US$1,000 a pop.)
But now Apple has introduced a technology to make an app-like product that is very (a) usable (b) responsive and (d) easy to monetize. If you’re willing to forego access to certain APIs, and your app content is mostly static, creating an informational iBook instead of an informational iOS app starts to look like a pretty compelling proposition.
There is, of course, some precedent for this sort of thing. A number of third parties have come out with products that promise an Instant App (“Just Add Content!”). And it has always been possible to create a piece of nibware that shoves some canned an HTML into a UIWebView. But the resulting apps (particularly in the latter case) usually feature a second-rate user experience, and the authoring experience was never anywhere near as slick as what iBooks Author provides.
We might start to see things that really should be apps showing up as iBooks. Many simple games that at one time might have used the single-UIWebView-app approach could now be a one-page iBook (plus a few pages of instructions) with an HTML widget containing the game.
What remains to be seen is whether Apple is eager to feature what might be seen as glorified advertising brochures in their iBookstore, much less things that really ought to be apps.
But because of the ability to distribute free, unreviewed iBooks outside of the iBookstore, we may start to see this sort of thing take off.
