“The leaks from Facebook have been coming fast and furious in the last day or so,” Phil Hornshaw reports for Apppolocious.
“TechCrunch reported Wednesday that Facebook was working on a standalone iOS photo-sharing app for iOS that mixes elements of social networking apps like Instagram and Path, helping to mitigate some of the problems Facebook’s iOS app has with dealing with photos,” Hornshaw reports.
“Now it seems Facebook wants fight an app store war with Apple on Apple’s own devices,” Hornshaw reports. “TechCrunch is reporting they’ve seen another leak of a secret Facebook product called Project Spartan, a web app store that will use iOS devices’ on-board Mobile Safari browser to access apps made using HTML 5. All these Facebook apps would be available on the Internet and accessible through Safari, so they wouldn’t necessarily load onto the iPhone or iPad’s dashboard screens like native apps do.”
Read more in the full article here.
Not sure how I feel about not having an app on my device and only being able to access it from a web interface. Am I missing something here?
Web apps are better. They can change more flexibly. Many dedicated iOS apps are crappy. They also add to a cacaphony of useless items in the appStore.
And web apps are great in that you can do useful things with them even when you don’t have an Internet connection.
Oh wait. They’re actually completely useless without an Internet connection. My mistake. 😉
The existence of bad native apps does not magically make web apps better. Awesome native apps are still light years better than web apps, with the added benefit of being useful offline as well.
Actually, web apps don’t necessarily need a network connection to be useful. I’ve written a couple simple ones myself that work just fine when in Airplane Mode. There is a setting you can put in your web app that will allow the iPhone to cache the app locally on the device, when you do a “save to home screen.” It’s limited to 5 MB, but for simple things, it’s fine. Web apps can’t access the camera, accelerometer, and certain other features of the phone, but it could be useful for simple games. This isn’t really a threat to the native App Store, it’s just a way to make small, simple apps available another way. This isn’t as big a deal as certain people are making it out to be.
Right, this is why everyone screamed bloody murder when the original iPhone came out and Apple said you could only develop web apps for it. As I recall, very few if any apps were developed until the iOS SDK came out.
Well it’s a web-app, like the Chrome Store. They’re leveraging the only thing they have… a huge social website.. Hm.
PS. Thanks Zuck for helping sell more iOS devices.
I don’t give a sh*t. I just want the iPad app. Give it to me! Friendly en Pica both really suck.
I hate Facebook and other social media apps. I know I’m probably the only person on the face of the earth that does, but with Facebook’s policies, it makes it easier.
You are not alone about Facebook.
Ditto.
I guess they forgot that Apple had a kind of web app store even before they had a native AppStore. All they would have to do is flip the proverbial switch and web apps could become a part of the real AppStore.
If not for Microsoft, I’d bet the farm on HTML5-based Web apps. Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, and a few mobile browsers all support the OpenGL standard and are all developing web apps for future implementation. Even Microsoft has accepted HTML5 but have their own ideas about the future.
The key element to web app development we don’t often hear about is WebGL. This framework is vital to the Web’s 3D revolution and Apple Et. al., have all adopted it, except Microsoft. Because WebGL 1.0 is not yet part of the HTML5 specification Microsoft will use this as leverage to push their own 3D framework; DirectX 3D.
Those of you old enough to remember will recall, Microsoft undermined the adoption of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in 1998 by pushing for the adoption of Vector Markup Language (VML) along with Hewlett-Packard, Autodesk, Macromedia to the W3C. To date, the only one still supporting VML is Microsoft and is used in IE and Office.
Back then, much of the Mac community was heavily vested in Netscape, which provided a superior web experience compared to IE’s inferior and primitive interface and feature set. Then in 1997, Microsoft paid Apple 150 million dollars to make Internet Explorer the default browser on the Mac platform and gave us IE 3.0 (Windows users had IE 4.0) and so it began with the browser wars, which ultimately led to a felony conviction for M$.
Today, all major browsers support SVG, except any version of Internet Explorer, and has proven to be the best platform for delivering vector graphics, raster graphics, and text in a single container. Even Microsoft has since relented and stated IE9 will finally support SVG.
It took Microsoft twelve-years to admit they were motivated by profit by pushing for their proprietary platform instead of going with the more popular and open one.
Well, here we go again. OpenGL is the superior platform and once again Microsoft is going to oppose it and will instead push for DirectX 3D as the rendering standard for web browsers. It’s the SVG/VML war all over again. The same war that set the internet back 10-years by using misinformation and unethical practices to promote Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
OpenGL is an open standard and the API’s are freely available, and more importantly, it’s managed by the non-profit Kronos Group [Warning: Kronos page NSFW] Interestingly enough, OpenGL was developed by Silicon Graphics in 1992 and the founder of SG, Jim Clark, saw Mosaic had tremendous commercial possibilities and provided Marc Andreessen the seed money to launch Netscape, nee Mosaic.
WebGL, which is a Javascript binding to the OpenGL standard, is not part of the HTML5 specification, however it has been recognized as a superior platform and the catalyst to begin the 3D revolution using web apps as the conduit by everyone, except Microsoft.
It’s difficult to imagine what a 3D web browser experience has to offer, but trust me once you’ve experienced it, you won’t settle for less. Imagine being able to not only scroll up and down and back and forth, but how about scrolling in and out?
Add depth on the Z-axis to the web experience and we are talking about a truly revolutionary web experience. We’d be able to scroll down aisles in a store, look in every direction using 360-VR, and perhaps this could all take place in real-time while rubbing shoulders with real people perusing the aisles or standing online to pay for purchases.
But wait a minute! Microsoft has other plans. They have plans to push their own web 3D standard any day now. Watch them as they offer a feature set of DirectX 3D as an alternative to WebGL, which is not a standard yet, and because it isn’t, that gives Microsoft the latitude to reject WebGL and present their own proprietary option.
When they do it will be just like 1998 all over again; a divisive turf war over the superior standard; Microsoft on one side, Apple, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Opera on the other. Luckily, Microsoft’s presence on the web is non-existent and there’s no reason to believe that what they have to offer is grounded in reality. So it remains to be seen which platform will prevail. In other words, Microsoft shouldn’t be able to freeze the market on a promise.
However, don’t underestimate Microsoft’s ability to smear OpenGL or cloud the issues with misinformation campaigns designed to freeze WebGL’s adoption.
Web apps are in our future but that could be delayed for another ten-years.
Hello! These are only Web 2.0 apps! Nothing new here except added HTML5 code! They run ONLY over the Internet! Ding Dong! Anyone home?!
These ‘apps’ have no access to the iPhone hardware or file system. Only the web browser is ‘native’. There is nothing ‘native’ about Web 2.0 apps except that fact that they are ‘native’ to the Internet. That’s all.