HTML5: An antidote for Apple App Store-itis
Imitation not the sincerest form of flattery — Open...and Shut To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or in the case of our idea-starved tech industry, an app store. — The tech world is increasingly awash in app stores.
Context & Ripple Effects
Matt Asay's 'Open...and Shut' column drops into a fight that has been building all year: whether mobile software ships through native, store-distributed binaries or through the browser. Fred Wilson framed the Flash-versus-HTML5 question back in February 2010 in his post on Flash, HTML5, and mobile apps, and Google answered Apple's HTML5 showcase with its own HTML5Rocks tutorial site that June — both sides treating the markup language as strategic ground rather than plumbing.
The Register's angle is distribution economics, not rendering: every platform vendor is cloning Apple's store because the iPhone channel demonstrably works — Robert Scoble wrote in November 2010 about how iPhone apps were taking off through it [[a:1189064]] — and the column reads the copycat wave as idea-starvation that an open HTML5 web could route around.
First-order effects
- Apple's cut of app distribution, and the review gate attached to it, comes under pressure from developers who can reach the same devices through standards-compliant browsers instead of store submissions.
- Every vendor running a me-too app store competes with all the others for a finite pool of developers, pushing up the cost of attracting quality software on every platform.
Second-order effects
- Google, already positioned by its HTML5Rocks counter-showcase, gains a ready-made identity as the open-web standard-bearer against Apple's closed distribution model — a competitive wedge that costs it nothing but standards advocacy.
- Browser vendors inherit new leverage in the contest: whoever drives HTML5 feature implementation fastest becomes the de facto arbiter of what mobile software can do, a role the stores hold today.
Third-order effects
- If HTML5 capability keeps narrowing the gap with native APIs, platform differentiation shifts from exclusive apps toward hardware and services, eroding the store tollbooth as a moat.
- A web-centric distribution model restores something closer to pre-App Store economics — publishing without gatekeepers — setting up a durable industry-wide fight over who taxes mobile software.
The trend: Mobile software distribution is splitting into two camps — platform-owned app stores versus an open HTML5 web — and each major vendor is being forced to pick a side.