My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

The iOS7 feature no one is talking about

tech
by Antonio on

When Microsoft shipped XmlHttpRequest and the web browser became a runtime for interactive apps the most wonderful thing about the whole thing was how quickly developers could iterate their entire applications and get new bits running in the hands of users. This more than "ubiquitous access" is what gave birth to agility that ushered in Web 2.0 with Google Maps and Flickr leading the way.

Imagine then how disappointing it was for developers to realize that the platform shift to mobile required putting a giant pause button in the middle of the iterative process— defined by days/weeks of AppStore review followed by the much more indeterminate amount of time required for a user to remember to open the AppStore app to the "updates" nav element to pull down 1-60 "updates" to apps developers wanted to have upgraded.

On new iOS 7 devices the default mode is to pull down app upgrades without user intervention which is a huge step forward in the iterative development process that came with the web. While it still leaves the huge speed bump that is app review process, automatic upgrades may be the most important thing to hit iOS since background processing.

Why no hoopla? Potentially because Android has had it for such a long time. Having said that, the fact that it has finally come to iOS is a big deal for every startup that I see as they all seem to start on iOS (still to this day) and move over to Android once they understand what it is that they are building.

Now if Apple would only fix the 1-2 weeks of sitting is a stupid review queue, we might actually be back to parity with what developers had back in 2005...