An insightful post from Andrew Losowsky offers up 6 points on why sales of maglets (magazines on tablets – got it?) soured so quickly.
Most of his points are undoubtedly true — charging twice, not enough iPads, the medium is still new. A couple highlight bad business choices — selling the same content twice, content held outside of the digital conversation.
One, Separate App Syndrome, speaks more directly to the future evolution of the tablet platform:
Imagine if, instead of a series of RSS feeds and bookmarks on your browser, every single webpage was a separate application that had to be loaded. And then, when it had finally loaded, it took over your entire screen. How many webpages do you think you’d look at every day? The current trend is for everyone to make their own app – but this cannot last. On average, people only use a handful of apps regularly on their phones and tablets, no matter how many they might install.
These apps are either those that contain essential features – email, music, SMS, the weather – or those that compile multiple sources into one convenient, well-designed location, hence the success of Flipboard and Instapaper. The only current magazine newsstand apps are those that focus mainly on uninspiring PDF conversions of print titles. My guess? In three years, it’ll all be HTML5 and bookmarks, and the app rush will be thought of as yet another quaint bubble. Remember the CD-Rom publishing revolution? No, you probably don’t, but I remember a lot of money being put into it, for no real return. Here we go again.
This would seem to utterly contradict what I took to be the emergent truth on the native app v. html 5 debate:
Everyone seems to pay HTML5 plenty of lip-service. But look at their actions. Apple, Google, Facebook, and developers are all focusing on native apps, not HTML5 apps.
And look at the platform pipelines. Android is (finally) about to get in-app purchasing. iOS is likely to (finally) get a revamped Push Notification system with the next iteration of iOS. Android Honeycomb will offer developers a whole new set of tools and APIs. Both platforms are likely to expand quickly into NFC and everything that can offer.
All of that will be native app only. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It was actually Hewitt who said it best when he ripped the state of web development a new one last year with a series of tweets. The best was: “I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait.”
If HTML5 is an oncoming train, native app development is an oncoming rocket ship. And everyone seems to know that’s not going to change anytime soon. Even if they don’t want to admit it, their native apps speak for them.
So what I’m going to try is to split the difference. I’ve been in the camp that sees the native app as the clear future for computing, eliminating the desktop metaphor and removing the file folder structure navigation, enabling us to directly interact with content.
I imagine a cable-like business model emerging. The Web doesn’t die outright but it is, instead, relegated to a basic cable-like world, wherein much of the best content is siphoned off to paid apps.
In this scenario, three years down the line publishers would have established a platform (like the Kindle) and a business model (basic, plus and premium subscription levels) to support multiple titles. Instapaper is nicely situated to become that platform, if only the publishers would come around.
Cable finally becomes a dumb pipe bringing broadband to the home; telcos give up on the residential market and take full ownership of mobile broadband. Both get a cut from content, similar to the way cable networks pay a per-subscriber fee for carriage.