Technology Blog

Apple's "evil/genius" plan to punk the Web and gild the iPad

There were two awkward moments yesterday at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference. A few sites have already made much of Steve Jobs' wireless networking difficulties during his demonstration. But the real awkward moment was when Jobs launched into his defense of Apple's app approval process, which was a kind of "take it or leave it" apologia that, for the most part, didn't answer any of the tough questions about why some apps get turned down.


Jobs' point was to say, in effect, that those who want on Apple's mobile devices can embrace the open world of HTML 5 on the Web, and/or play by Apple's rules to get on the App Store. If you're a company looking for revenue, you've got two options: the big open Web, and the App Store, with its own mysterious brand of capriciousness (and a ton of money exchanging hands).

You might think that Apple holds both in equal esteem, but its release of Safari 5 shows that Apple has less regard for publishers on the Web than it does for publishers (and developers) it wants to entice to come to the App Store.
And the App Store is becoming its own little mirror-reflection of the Web. You've got content from news providers, you've got social networking, you've got games, RSS readers—the list goes on and on. You've also got, courtesy of Apple, a 100 percent Apple-owned, Apple-powered advertising platform called iAds. Apple even called it a pillar of iOS. iAds is, in other words, no hobby project. Apple wants to help companies, developers, your grandma with coding skills—everybody—make money. Sell apps, run ads, do both! Developers make money! Meanwhile, Apple makes 40 cents on every advertising dollar, while developers are more enticed than ever to come to the iPad.
It's a profit cyclone for Apple: more apps mean more iPad sales. More iPad sales mean more eyeballs, and more eyeballs mean more lucrative ads. More lucrative ads mean more developers are enticed to write more apps that ultimately help sell more iPads. Genius. Ads make a lot of great stuff possible, and Apple knows it.
So how bizarre is it, then, when leaving Apple's rosy App Store garden and entering the public square of the Web to find the following phrase on Safari 5's "new features" page:

"Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles."

So the company that has made an advertising platform a major part of its iOS strategy is also hawking an ad-blocking technology for its Web browser, where it has no stake in ads. App Store: use our unblockable ads, developers! They help you get paid for your hard work! Web: hey, block some ads, readers! They're annoying!
Of course, Reader is not an all-out ad-blocker. It only blocks the presentation of ads on pages that are read in Reader mode, and Reader mode seems to only be available on pages that the browser thinks are articles and not indexes. If it's a one-page article, and the reader enters into Reader mode, publishers need not fret. Ads were (probably) loaded on the initial visit, and then blocked when the page was reloaded. There was an ad view for that page view.
Once you get to multipage articles though, Safari Reader could be pulling up 3, 5, 15 pages, all without ad presentation (right now the scripting does call the ads, but they aren't displayed and advertisers aren't going to pay for ads they can tell aren't displayed). I know of more than one editor out there that is currently worried about what this means for long-form, multipage publishing once this feature spreads. While Safari's market share is not particularly impressive on the desktop, the big browser makers all copy from one another sooner or later. This feature will likely spread to Chrome, Firefox and IE, in some form, if it proves popular at all. It could show up on Mobile Safari as well, which does have an impressive mobile market share.
There is something contradictory—some might say hypocritical—in Apple's actions. At the same time someone in Cupertino is building a completely unblockable ad platform for the iPhone and the iPad, someone else is working on ad supression tools for that big open Web that Apple supposedly loves so much. At the same time that Apple is touting HTML 5 as the best way to make "emotional" advertising on both the Web and in the App Store, it's calling Web advertising "annoying" and giving us tools to block it, but only when Apple isn't getting a cut. And something tells me that an iAds blocker is not going to be approved for the App Store any time soon.
So in the end we're left with a) an open platform where Apple is willing to toy with Web publishers, modify their content presentation, and suppress their ads, and b) Apple's curated, closed platform, where everything is done by Apple's rules or it's not done at all.
On its own, a) is understandable. On its own, b) is understandable. But a) + b) = hypocrisy, unless Apple is going to allow users to suppress iAds, for free, on Apps that use iAds in the app store.

Disclaimers, asides, etc:

An article with as many moving parts as this could probably use some straight-up disclaimers at the end to help discussion stay productive.

• Lots of confusion over what "hypocrisy" is. It's not a moral concept. It's an "expression of agreement that is not supported by real conviction."
• The point here is not that Safari Reader is evil. It's that there's ideological tension between the App Store philosophy, the iAds effort, and what Reader does on the open Web. 
• "Annoying" is in the eye of the beholder.
• This is not an article about Readability. It's an article about Apple. 
• While many people don't like multipage articles because of the necessity to click, many sites use them because they increase revenue potential for articles that cost more to produce. 
• "Evil/Genius" is a tip of the hat to this most excellent article of days past.
• I wrote this article on Windows 7, listening to streaming music from my Mac Pro.
• My home has two iPads. I have 77 apps for iPhone and iPad.
• I don't particularly care for Lady GaGa.