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In the beginning, there was the web and you accessed it though the browser and all was good. Stuff didn’t download until you clicked on something; you expected cookies to be tracking you and you always knew if HTTPS was being used. In general, the casual observer had a pretty good idea of what was going on between the client and the server.

Not so in the mobile app world of today. These days, there’s this great big fat abstraction layer on top of everything that keeps you pretty well disconnected from what’s actually going on. Thing is, it’s a trivial task to see what’s going on underneath, you just fire up an HTTP proxy like Fiddler, sit back and watch the show.

Let me introduce you to the seedy underbelly of the iPhone, a world where not all is as it seems and certainly not all is as it should be.

There’s no such thing as too much information – or is there?

Here’s a good place to start: conventional wisdom says that network efficiency is always a good thing. Content downloads faster, content renders more quickly and site owners minimise their bandwidth footprint. But even more importantly in the mobile world, consumers are frequently limited to fairly meagre download limits, at least by today’s broadband standards. Bottom line: bandwidth optimisation in mobile apps is very important, far more so than in your browser-based web apps of today.

Let me give you an example of where this all starts to go wrong with mobile apps. Take the Triple M app, designed to give you a bunch of info about one of Australia’s premier radio stations and play it over 3G for you. Here’s how it looks:

I think this is my fault... for the first time I thought Microsoft was doing something right with its mobile platform, and was ready to fight its opponents only based on technical merits. But clearly I was wrong. And here it comes the typical FUD from them.

Come on Troy, at least you should have published this under some alias, so we wouldn't have known you are a Microsoft MVP.

Let's take a look at this article:

First of all we have a rant against poorly optimized resources being pulled from the web... ah, ok, so we have some bad programmers out there, but really, WTF has this to do with iOS??

Then we have the rant about privacy, and he analyzes several applications using Flurry. But ops, if you go to the Flurry web page you can see that it's a multiplatform analytics package, available among others for Windows Phone. So again more FUD.

Finally he talks about security, and we can see as an application sends a password in the clear, with no encryption... another clever developer. I guess Apple should kill all of them.

So Microsoft is back. Sad, really sad.