Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch.

Apple is <em>still</em> pulling this crap? Give an explanation at the very minimum.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

Keep this in mind for a little lower down. Read Bray's post first, though.

“The thing that made Apple successful was betting against the web,” [venture capital investor Roger McNamee] said on stage at Mashable Connect Friday.</p><p>

While Google adopted the cultural norms of open source software by making its mobile operating system free and commoditizing content, Apple changed the game by keeping a closed system, focusing on brands and enabling paid apps.</p><p>

Apple differentiated web content for a price. By doing so, McNamee believes, it created a fundamentally different model than succeeded on the wired web.</p><p>

“Most of all what Apple did was they charged $400 to $1,000 for the hardware that was necessary to get a differentiated user experience on data that 100% of their customers could get for free off a desktop device,” he said. “Every Apple customer has consciously voted with $400 to $1,000 against the world wide web.”

McNamee argues that people will start using apps rather than the mobile web as such on mobile, because they can get to niche users more easily.

Marco Arment:

Mobile ads pay very poorly. In my case, ads didn’t even come close to delivering similar value as the $4.99 paid-app sale — I was lucky to get even $1 of value out of an Instapaper Free user. What I’ve heard from other developers and other ad networks suggests that this is pretty close to the industry average.</p><p>

I decided to yield the free market to my competitors and discontinue Instapaper Free over a year ago, and my sales have remained healthy. (In fact, they’ve increased, but it’s difficult to know whether that was the cause.)…</p><p>

This definitely isn’t an Android problem: it’s a user problem. Maybe a significantly larger percentage of Android users insist on free apps than iOS users (it certainly seems that way). But both platforms have much larger demand for free apps than paid apps.

Want to use Google Voice on your mobile phone? Google has apps for Android, the iPhone, and BlackBerry. But a year-and-a-half after Windows Phone launched, Google still has no plans to support Microsoft's mobile platform.</p><p>
"We're focusing our Google Voice efforts on Android & iOS and don't have a plan to extend this to the Windows Phone," Google told me via e-mail, when I asked recently about the lack of support. "This may change if we start to see greater demand from Windows Phone users for Google Voice."

Given how tiny a portion of the US market (where Google Voice has the most traction) Windows Phone presently is, that would be a long wait. Danny Sullivan also makes the point that it forces people to use unofficial apps - whose security isn't certain.

This was highlighted by the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/27/hugely-popular-ios-game-temple-run-is-now-available-for-android/">recent release of Temple Run</a> on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/temple-run-gets-a-lot-of-google-play-1-million-android-app-downloads-in-3-days/">1 million downloads</a> in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

Read the comments too, though: plenty of Android developers saying they don't have any problem. Seems like it's more of a problem for games developers.

This is big.

The hacker discovered a way to log in as another user, impersonate that user, chat and send photos on their behalf.

The vulnerabilities are also present in Blendr, the straight version of the app, according to a security expert who said both apps had "no real security" and were "poorly designed".

"Native apps have the advantage of a richer experience right now.  But the water level is rising and every time I think I've seen it all on the open web someone goes and ports freaking DOOM to HTML. Yes, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is a mess and it's hard, but it won't always be. As browsers get smarter native apps will introduce new interaction models, hardware accesses and new features. Those will get folded into HTML 9, then HTML 10 and the cycle will continue. I agree with Dave Winer that the real win is linking. That's the one thing that the Web brings that apps have yet to replicate."

This, after he describes how he's addicted to a game app that requires no linking nor connects to the web. Not sure that really helps his argument.

IFTT - If This Then That - is a Yahoo Pipes-like project for sticking together web apps into ad-hoc programs. What's popular? Facebook, weather alerts and Twitter, just now.

"BlackBerry App World"Get apps designed for your smartphone<br />
"Notice: This web page uses ActiveX controls that work only in Microsoft Internet Explorer. To ensure that BlackBerry App World is correctly downloaded to your BlackBerry, this site is not designed to work with any other Internet browsers. If you cannot use Internet Explorer, you may be able to download the software directly to your BlackBerry smartphone."<br />
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Obviously, you won't see that if you go to it with Internet Explorer.

Frank Shaw, Microsoft's head of PR: "over the years some of the great experiences first delivered on a PC have been extended to smartphones, internet companions, tablets and, yes, even our cars. Today, the PC and these companion devices are all nodes on the network, connecting to cloud-based services to deliver real-time stock quotes, sports scores, and other updates we can’t imagine living without.<br />
"I’ll be the first to admit that these new “non-PC” objects do a great job at enabling people to communicate and consume in innovative and interesting ways. That’s not surprising, because they were expressly designed for that purpose. But even their most ardent admirers will not assert that they are as good as PCs at the first two verbs, <strong>create and collaborate</strong>.  And that’s why one should take any reports of the death of the PC with a rather large grain of salt."<br />
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We think there's a syllogism in that last bit.

This is a big problem for Amazon: "Amazon’s biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money. But here’s the dirty secret Amazon don’t want you to know, they don’t pay developers a single cent."

"The FDA recently cleared a radiology app for the iPhone and iPad that will let physicians view medical images including MRI, CT and PET scans.<br />
<br />
"While the agency says the app — called Mobile MIM, made by MIM Software — has been approved for making medical diagnoses, it says it 'is not intended to replace full workstations and is indicated for use only when there is no access to a workstation.'"<br />
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We've heard that in the US, salespeople in the health business meeting doctors take iPads because it's a good bet the doctor will have one.

Iconfactory (which makes Twitterrific) already has an extension. This is all going to play out forever.

"The projection that Android Market is going to surpass the App Store (now over 425,000 available apps) in size in late summer is wrong, or at least misleading. As is a separate data point by Distimo that there were more free apps on the Android Market than the App Store as of March 2011, though that will happen soon. The Market, although growing at a faster rate than the App Store, is still far behind in the number of available apps and will need more time to catch up."

"Apple's App Store is generating billions for developers, while hardly anybody is getting rich in the Android Market.In a new report issued Friday, Distimo looks at why that might be. One obvious factor -- not highlighted in April -- is that there are nearly three times as many paid apps on Apple's App Store (211,369, by Distimo's count) as on Google's (71,801).<br />
"What Distimo discovered this time is that, for a variety of reasons, Android generates far fewer runaway hits. The most successful app in the Android Market, with more than 50 million downloads, is a Google freebie: Google Maps. Nothing else comes close."

"Anthony Wieser, who runs Wieser Software LTD, told WinRumors that Microsoft has simply strung developers along. 'The most irritating thing about the whole ordeal is the way they just drop customers who have bought the software,' said Wieser. 'I can’t imagine why anyone should wish to purchase anything now from the 6.5 marketplace, if they knew what was going on.'"

"In its FAQ, Lodsys points out that these patents were temporarily owned by Intellectual Ventures, which according to Lodsys "then licensed these patents to additional companies."<br />
"In all likelihood, that's how Apple, Google and Microsoft were licensed. They are all investors in Intellectual Ventures and licensees of IV's patents. IV owns about 30,000 patents, and those companies pay for access to the entire portfolio. I doubt that they evaluate each and every one of those patents: they just get a license to the whole package. Most probably, that's how they were licensed, and those licenses are still valid if IV limited the right of later acquirers to assert those patents against IV's licensees."<br />
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The stakes, as this blog post explains clearly, are very high on all three sides - Apple, indie developers on all platforms, and Lodsys.

"Last night and into today, Facebook has been sending out notices to developers they believe have apps in violation of their policy against sending authentication data to third parties. Those developers have 48 hours to fix their apps or they risk being “subject to one of the enforcement actions” — read: being booted."

"The idea is simple. Deliver a location based service to information savvy iPhone users that wish to receive temporary retail and service-based applications. Imagine standing at the entrance of a restaurant and viewing their menu on your iPhone or entering a public library and being able to access their database. The minute you leave the library or the front of that restaurant, the app disappears so that you don't clog up your iPhone with hundreds of local business apps. I don't know if Apple will tackle this at their upcoming developer conference, but this is a phenomenal opportunity for hungry developers and/or Business Form companies looking for a new avenue for revenue. There are millions of non-geek business owners who are going to want in on this service so as to attract new tech savvy iPhone using clients. Snooze on this opportunity and you'll Lose."<br />
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Intriguing.

"The tough part about focusing on the first-run user experience is that, as a developer, you never see it. You start up your app, start adding data and using it, develop, test, develop, test, debug, use it some more, then launch it. Unless you're consciously thinking about it, you'll probably never see a bunch of blank screens. This is incredibly dangerous because all your users will see a blank screen in the first 10 seconds, and you may not have seen it in weeks, months, or ever."

"On Google’s earnings call today, Jeff Huber, Senior VP Commerce and Local, revealed that there have been over 3bn Android apps installed. And downloads of Android apps are up 50% from Q4 2010.<br />
"Huber also mentioned that 350,000 Android devices are being activated per day, a data point which was revealed this past week. In terms of breaking out share by device and market, Huber said the company doesn’t reveal these numbers. But he did say that with device partners, there is strength in US, Japan, Korea, and Europe specifically. He added that international is growing as a whole in terms of Android usage.<br />
"To put the 3bn stat in perspective, Apple just passed 10bn app downloads in January. But thanks to the fast growth of the sale of Android phones, Google’s app downloads are growing fast. The first billion installs took 20 months, the second billion installs took another 5 months, and the third billion took only 2 months. I’m guessing the 4bn mark will take less".

"[Fred] Wilson, a venture capitalist, has been advising developers to write first for Android, predicting that the iPhone vs. Android battle will turn out to be a replay of Windows vs. Macintosh.<br />
"Arment, a developer, thinks that's bad advice. He believes Android's market share gains may be illusory -- especially when the rise of the iPad is taken into account -- and that as a development environment, Google's OS has serious shortcomings.<br />
"Baird's survey suggests that developers have taken Wilson's advice. 71% of respondents said they were writing apps for Android vs. 62% for iOS. (None of the other platforms drew more than 27%.)<br />
"But the survey also suggests that programmers writing for Android are finding the ecosystem to be every bit as perilous as Arment predicted."<br />
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We've heard recently from a large organisation developing an Android app which ran into a big roadblock because of fragmentation. It's a real problem.

"Evangelists say the HTML5 movement has so much momentum that it could defeat the native app — an application that is designed to run on a single platform — in as little as two years.<br />
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"Sundar Pichai, who leads Google’s HTML5-happy Chrome OS initiative,  agrees that the 'incredible advantages of the Web will prevail' over the dominant native app model. Another mobile developer expert Mike Rowehl adds: 'We’ll forget that we even passed through another era of native apps on the way to the mobile web.'"<br />
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This is tantamount to saying that games companies will never want to write to device-specific code, or that developers will never want to use platform-specific interface tricks or APIs. In other words: overblown. What's clear is that the balance will shift. But how far, and how quickly?