iPhone web apps and data plans

One valid concern regarding Apple's announcement of web-only third-party apps for iPhone is the cost of the regular use of those, since web apps will always move more data over the network than an installed client app would. We still have no idea what sort of voice and data plans will be available for iPhone. I can imagine three scenarios:

1. One or two reasonably affordable plans with lots of minutes and lots of data (Apple's choice)


2. Same plans they have now (AT&T's choice)


3. A la carte plans, starting cheap but getting very expensive at the high-minutes, high-data end (or some other form of compromise)

Which one they go with depends on who can wrestle whom in their negotiations which, I'm sure, are still going on - that's why the plans haven't been made public yet.

I think my little app is going to be the least of anyone's worries, data-wise. The whole thing is 14 KB in size and it only needs to load once. The NY Times website, for instance, is about 150 KB - and that's just the front page. Clicking around it for a few minutes will easily add up to a few MB. Remember that iPhone loads entire web pages, with full-size images.

My guess is you'll want an unlimited data plan on iPhone.