Craig Federighi revealed many interesting tidbits when you read the transcript–and read between the lines–of his talk with John Gruber of Daring Fireball on The Talk Show podcast.
First let me tie this into yesterday’s post by talking about the maturation of iOS by bringing in features from OS X, and then I’ll talk about the hugely ambitious plans to take Swift Everywhere.
Everybody thinks they love the web. How could you not? “Apps” run the same everywhere on any device.
Well, that’s the theory, anyway. But you typically watch a blank screen—or, at best, some colored boxes—while the UI takes time to refresh. Not just once, but over and over again.
Sure, they’re adding new functionality all the time, but web apps are severely limited in what they can do compared to a native app. Yes, there are JavaScript bridges, but that adds more time and complexity.
Even the last bastion of web popularity—news sites and blogs—are now being subsumed by native news outlets like Facebook instant articles and Apple News.
But, but… what about Deep Linking, you ask? Both iOS and Android have deep linking now, so it’s no longer a web-only concept.
But displaying formatted text in a web view is so much easier than creating it on native platforms, you say. Well, since at least version 8, iOS text views have the ability to display HTML-formatted text. This is true even on tvOS on Apple TV, which doesn’t have a web view at all. Problem solved.
And look how things are progressing. Apple Watch doesn’t have any web functionality—and neither does Apple TV. The push is on for native apps.
Surprisingly, it was Google who put the final nail in the coffin.
Google just announced (or, rather, leaked the news) that
Lou Miranda 