Apparently I Have Opinions About the iPad

Hyperbole is fun

At least five (5!) people have asked me what I think of the iPad, and—while I don’t want to be a tech pundit—it turns out that I think a lot of things about it. Here are some of them.

I will not buy an iPad when it comes out

I’d probably enjoy having an iPad, but I’m not planning on buying one any time soon. I’ll probably get a few chances to play with an iPad over the next year, and I’ll probably be blown away by it. I’ll then hold out until I can buy a 2nd generation and laugh at all the suckers with the far inferior 1st generation.

Plenty of people have complained that the iPad is missing some feature, but I’m confident that the overall experience of using it is compelling enough without whatever feature they’re talking about. People who complain about missing features are thinking in terms of products that already exist; I’m pretty sure that Apple designed the iPad to be unlike anything that already exists.

By many accounts, the iPad’s speed, touch navigation, and large screen create a truly novel computing experience. I think the iPad will be a big deal.

I’m most interested to see how easy it is to type on the iPad while in bed. If it’s easy, the iPad would probably help me blog more.

I’m not worried about the iPad

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably come across a few blog posts expressing dire concern about the iPad. Alex Payne worries that the iPad may spells an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Rafe Colburn wonders if the iPad is a harbinger of doom for software development as we know it.

I think Alex is wrong, and I think Rafe is probably right, although I think “doom” makes it sound like ending software development as we know it is a bad thing.

I think the iPad will successfully broaden the market for smallish devices optimized for a few common applications (Internet browsing, email, IM, music, photos, video, etc), and this will create an entirely new space developers to work in. It’s too early to tell if this is all bad or not. At the very least, it’s different, and that makes people uncomfortable.

That said…

I don’t like the App Store

Because the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, the only way to create a native iPad application is by submitting it to Apple for approval before they make it available through the iTunes App Store. This is a bad thing; I’ll try to explain why.

With the App Store, Apple has conjured a marketplace for 100,000 apps for the iPhone OS in a remarkably short period of time. 3 billion apps were downloaded from the App Store within its first 18 months. This happened because the iPhone is an extremely compelling product. People love it, and they love using it. They want things to do on it.

Developers love that the App Store makes it easy for them to charge for their software, and Apple shareholders are fine with the App Store because it makes enough money to pay for itself.

Consumers could not care less about how their software is made as long as it’s cheap and easy to get, and Apple deserves a lot of credit for training consumers to feel safe spending a few bucks on digital consumables. The iPad will likely add to the App Store’s success.

This success, however, is what has some developers so concerned. Alex Payne even claims that “[t]he tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people.”

I fail to see the tragedy in developing a better model of computing for the majority of people.

The concern shouldn’t come from the fact that Apple’s model is better, but that it has sucessfully compelled many developers to hand over a bit of creative freedom to Apple in exchange for distribution. They didn’t have to do this before, and it’s unclear why it’s necessary now. It certainly doesn’t prevent developers from selling terrible (albeit awesome) applications.

Requiring all iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch apps to pass through the App Store allows Apple to throttle—however gently—development of software for the platform; it hobbles the wild and organic innovation allowed by unrestricted software distribution.

Apple says the approval process is intended to ensure a better user experience by preventing bugs and protecting user privacy, but it’s not clear why Apple is better at doing this than the market. More concerning, it puts Apple in a position to stifle competition as it may have done when it blocked the Google Voice app.

Developers are afraid that the success of this model will embolden other organizations to get in their way and act as arbiters in the software distribution process. It looks like it’s already happening, although with varying degrees of control (see Apps.gov, Intel’s AppUp, Roku’s Channel Store, and Samsung’s pending HDTV App Store).

The Internet is an open App Store

Regardless of the App Store’s gentle throttling, the iPad isn’t going to kill software development for at least three reasons:

1. The iPad will probably be awesome and developers will want to build software for it
2. Apple does not have a monopoly on tablet computers or mobile devices
3. The Internet exists

Even if the iPad dominates its market, there are many other platforms open to developers. There will be plenty more netbook/tablet/whatever platforms as Apple’s competitors inevitably launch their iPad killers. And regardless of how many mobile platforms spring up, the Internet will still exist and developers will be able to develop for it.

As irritating as Apple can be, it is undoubtably a powerful champion for an open Internet—Webkit being one of the more obvious examples.

Perhaps one of the less obvious examples is Apple’s consistent refusal to support Flash on their mobile devices. I interpret this as a really gutsy kick in the pants for the web standards community make HTML5 video truly competitive. People (myself included) are constantly frustrated by the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash, but Apple keeps snubbing it because it’s a proprietary format and it should not be considered a standard component of the web alongside HTML, Javascript, or CSS.

This reminds me of their decision to release the first iMac without a floppy drive. Talk about gutsy!

Of course, this is assuming that I know what I’m talking about (highly unlikely) and that Apple’s motivations are so noble. If I’m right, Apple deserves some credit.

Don’t forget also that Apple was mocked for insisting that developers could use JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to develop applications for the first iPhone. Granted, web standards could not, and cannot, take full advantage of the iPhone/Pad OS, but there is plenty of evidence of convergence between web applications and desktop applications. This will continue.

Web developers can already access a device’s GPS, and I’m sure they’ll eventually be able to easily hook into microphones, speakers, cameras, accelerometers, compasses, and other features of mobile devices.

Developers who want to build for the iPad, but aren’t willing to deal with Apple’s approval process, should feel motivated to work on the vanguard of web apps. The web is where I think software is headed, and this, ultimately, is a very good thing.

One more note: It would be nice if Apple made it clearer to users that they can can add links to websites (or web apps) to their iPhone home screens. It’s a great feature, and putting icons for bookmarks alongside icons for apps helps drive home the fact that web apps are “real” apps.

Google has been really good about this. Adding a link to Google Reader to the iPhone home screen creates an icon that looks exactly like any other app. And now Google is making Google Voice available, not through the App Store, but as a web page optimized for the iPhone’s browser.

Behold! The Internet is a vast app store!

Many thanks to Ted for sharing many of the articles that inspired this piece and to Dave Dayton for spurring me to write it.

For more informed perspectives on the iPad, please read:

• Rafe Colburn’s Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?
• Yehuda Katz’s The Irony of the iPad: A GREAT Day for Open Technologies
  
• Alex Payne’s On the iPad
• Joe Hewitt’s iPad
• John Gruber’s The iPad Big Picture