Web might be nice, but you need live Internet connection to use it; plus, a web app needs some way to login, or it's not actually capable of generating revenue, while mobile apps have the free/freemium/premium options built in -- including for future content. Android has the highest market penetration, but I think that's limited to phones. Windows 8 devices could run an app or a desktop app, but those still tend to be a laptop form factor, with "table-friendly" devices either rare or expensive. Going for iOS also has the advantage of targeting the mobile users that are most likely to actually pay for an app -- statistically speaking, Android users appear to be mooches; even at roughly three times the users, identical Android apps make less money than the iOS equivalent.
Nailed it. I work for a software development firm, we are developing apps, and this is all true. We're a bunch of Android users, but we know where the market is right now. Beyond that, when you target the iPad, you target a very well-defined platform, one that has the majority 33% marketshare. This is so crucial in getting a first version out the door. We know the screen-size, the processor, the components available to us through Xcode and the iOS SDK, and so on. With Android, we have 10+ manufacturers to test against, and a massive variety of features in those tablets.
As for the mentions of "web based" and HTML5, a few things about that. As an aside, I used DS hands-on at Origins a few months ago. To replicate that user experience with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS would be... challenging. To have that render with any consistency across the universe of tablets, PCs, OSes, user input methods and browsers would, to me, be inconceivable at this time. In addition, HTML5 is SLOW, and in and of itself limited as to how it can manage sessions and storage, or access device functionality. There are very legitimate reasons why developers take the native app approach, especially for tablets and mobile. If you don't believe me, ask yourself: why are most of the apps on your smartphone and tablet are native? Why did Facebook back off its HTML5 roadmap for its apps? And in the PC world, why are we still dealing with [FONT=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]
Flash, Shockwave, Java and Silverlight?[/FONT]
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The directive from TPTB for this new digital D&D initiative was to target tablets first. The fastest way for anyone to respond to that would be with a prototype on iPad, and the most reliable way to get it to the biggest segment of that market (as outlined above) first really is to do the iPad first.
[/FONT]As an Android tablet user, I may not like it. But as a fellow software developer, it gives me confidence that Trapdoor knows what it is doing. We can question whether or not "tablet first" was the right approach, or if Wizards perhaps should have had some parallel effort for a simple browser-based 5E character generator similar to DDI. But the scope of DungeonScape is beyond that and, based on my experience with it, I am of the opinion that that also was the right decision. When the time comes, I'll simply buy a used or refurbished iPad3 or 4, specifically for use at the gaming table, so that I can use DS sooner rather than later.
