Sunday iPhone Blogging

By Ryan Powers

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Virgnia Heffernan laments the “death of the open web” which she thinks is being ushered in by the widescale adoption of the iPhone. She writes:

The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web. Apple rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store.

I think this is mistaken. First, every computer ever made — mobile or otherwise — has only really come to life after being “tricked out” with third party applications (the most useful applications on my MacBook are not made by Apple). That said, it is pretty clear that the App Store does change the way iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users exeperience the web. If anything, however, it seems to me that it makes these users interactions with the web more intimate. Indeed, most of the Apps that serve as website wrappers (eg: the Washington Post iPhone app) seem to bring users closer to the information they are trying to consume and give them new and interesting ways to interact with that information.

That aside, I think Heffernan is overlooking one of the most significant innovations of the iPhone: the Mobile Safari web browser. Before Mobile Safari’s release in 2007, no mobile phone platform allowed users to browser websites in true desktop-fidility. Even the BlackBerry’s browser only presented the user with poor approximation of how a given website was meant to be experienced. Simply put, browsing the web on an iPhone is like browsing the web on a computer. If anything, I think that has allowed iPhone owners to more readily experience the open web — on demand and wherever they are (or at least wherever AT&T has service, which incidentally is not in Williamsburg, VA).