The ease with which you can write software for the web is an anomaly. It’s an incredibly forgiving medium and the barriers to entry are unnaturally low. It hardly takes any craftsmanship at all to connect a web form to a database and have it work well enough to publish content.

Outside of this anomaly, software development is generally hard. Magazine and newspaper publishers around the world are finding out just how hard as they all rush to bring their wares to native apps on iOS, Android.

These magazine apps completely suck, generally speaking. They suck in the same ways that the CD-ROM rush of the 90s sucked. They suck for all the reasons poorly written native software sucks: They’re slow, they crash, they get stuck.

It’s like every magazine is reinventing HTML and programming their own browser for it. Of course that’s going to end badly!

The solution when it hurts to hit yourself is to stop hitting yourself. Custom app development to publish a magazine is just nonsense.

Apple should save its customers from these cruddy experiences by either putting out something like iMagazine Creator (ala iBooks Creator) or find a better way to get existing HTML magazines on the iPad.

Reading magazines on the iPad is too good of a use case to have it screwed up by this rash of crappy native apps.