Does an iPhone Always Have to Feel Like an iPhone?

While I appreciate iWebkit and the fact that web developers are leveraging the insanely great abilities of the mobile webkit browsers to make web sites and web apps look and feel like native iPhone apps, do we really need everything to look and feel like an Apple interface? Apple has had a great influence over interface design, especially in the mobile realm (practically defining the new mobile device), and that influence is a good thing. But not every website is developed by Apple. In fact, very few are.

Early on in the development of the mobile version of our website (https://mediadesign.it.northwestern.edu) we experimented with iWebkit, and I really thought about implementing our contact page like a straight-forward iPhone interface. But in the end we went with a more customized approach, because… well… we’re not Apple (and we don’t all necessarily even use iPhones).