Are iPhone Apps Junking up the Web?

All those cool iPhone apps that keep cropping up—including the slick Facebook app that I blogged about Wednesday—are, of course, actually just Web sites optimized for the red-hot handset. But while these "apps" are great for iPhone owners, are they cluttering the Web for everyone else? That's what one Wired blogger argues, and he's got a compelling point.

On Wired's Compiler blog, writer Scott Gilbertson likens the recent glut of just-for-iPhone Web sites to a debacle from way back in 1997: sites that were "optimized" for the special, non-HTML-compliant features of Internet Explorer 4, and therefore incompatible with Netscape (IE's nemesis during the bloody browser wars of the 90's).

So why can't iPhone developers just write programs that you could install directly onto the handset? Simple: Apple has yet to cough up a toolkit that would let coders to write software for the iPhone. "In essence," Gilbertson writes, "Apple has forced a third tier of websites [in addition to standard HTML and WAP] on the world by failing to provide developers with an alternative means of creating applications on the iPhone."

Gilbertson's post raises other interesting points: for example, why have these iPhone-optimized sites at all, when the iPhone's Safari browser promised us "the Internet in your pocket"? Yeah, the iPhone is EDGE-only, but the standard HTML Facebook loads almost perfectly (and in less than a minute) on my iPhone—way better (and faster) than it ever would on my 3G-enabled Treo 700p. And Gilbertson points out that most of these iPhone "apps" aren't really applications at all: "They just offer the same content as the normal sites, just optimized for the iPhone."

Of course, Apple could solve the problem in one fell swoop by simply releasing an iPhone SDK, which would allow developers to channel their energies into actual iPhone programs rather than on Web-based pseudo-applications. Unfortunately, we're still waiting for the promised toolkit to materialize.

So, iPhone users (and non-users, come to think of it)—what's your stand on this? Do you want the flood of Web-based iPhone apps to continue? Or would you rather keep the two-layer HTML/WAP system that's worked just fine in the past?

Related:
The IPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again [Wired Blogs]