Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster • Hacker News Board

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#21

Post by neuronic » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 9:32 AM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #2

I believe that mobile browser will beat apps, like it did on desktop. Mobile browsers were unusable, sites were not mobile-friendly, devices were slow with tiny screens. Now those factors change and browsing websites on modern smartphone is much more usable. And it's likely that we will see shift from mobile apps to mobile websites in the near future.

You have a point. The mobile-browsing experience on my 3.5 year old Galaxy Nexus is horrible.

This is completely different on an iPhone 6, Galaxy S6, Nexus 6...

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#22

Post by gozo » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 9:37 AM UTC

Uhm. I would say it's more notable that 1/3 of mobile traffic is seemingly under the control of a few companies. If you were ever concerned about the openess of the Internet, this is it.

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#23

Post by threeseed » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 9:50 AM UTC

michaelpinto wrote: post #14

bottled_poe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>like it did on desktop It's pretty great that this happened. I'm so sick of using these pesky desktop applications. Just remind me, which web apps can I use for the following? -Audio production -3D animation -Video editing -CAD design -Writing/debugging software

For anything that's processor intensive it's clear that apps will win, but flipping that think about the classic office bundle and how google moved that to the browser: - Email - Word Processing - Spreadsheets - Slideshows

Google didn't move email to the browser. Hotmail and Yahoo did.

And Google Apps hasn't displaced Office by and measure. Companies are still depending on and using standard SOE stacks which includes Office.

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#24

Post by sooheon » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 9:52 AM UTC

michaelpinto wrote: post #14

bottled_poe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>like it did on desktop It's pretty great that this happened. I'm so sick of using these pesky desktop applications. Just remind me, which web apps can I use for the following? -Audio production -3D animation -Video editing -CAD design -Writing/debugging software

For anything that's processor intensive it's clear that apps will win, but flipping that think about the classic office bundle and how google moved that to the browser: - Email - Word Processing - Spreadsheets - Slideshows

Other than email, most of that office bundle has clear shortcomings compared to native apps.

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#25

Post by vdaniuk » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 10:00 AM UTC

merb wrote: post #20

Fastest growing, yeah... https://xkcd.com/1102/ And also Traffic says nothing about usage. I mean a Browser needs to download more things than any App will do, thats why Apps are used so heavily. the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself

>the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself

Aren't you overreacting a bit? This premise is easily proven wrong by anyone driving growth in most startups.

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#26

Post by mnem » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 10:05 AM UTC

What the report is based on: a median value selected from the traffic to 42 of the top US websites (it ignores those which don't have both and app and a website) from data provided by Comscore.

The term "traffic" is never defined. Web requests? Quantity of data transferred? Both of those would have significantly shapes depending on whether the client was a browser or an app.

It's also interesting to note that the top 10 "Browser Reach Advantage" websites are basically text based websites - news sites, wikipedia and blogs.

Things I learned from the report: the top website (with 207.0x Browser Reach Advantage) Blogger has an app.

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#27

Post by EduardoBautista » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 10:11 AM UTC

no_gravity wrote: post #6

The difference between web and app is trust. A website has write access to my screen, my speakers and my internet connection. Plus limited read access. To keyboard, mouse, device orientation etc. Other rights can be granted (location, cookies etc). It can do all this only as long as it's "open". An app usually has read/write access to large parts of my device. The whole sd-card, raw internet access, the camera, the m…

You can pretty much deny access to the information you don't want the app to access though.

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#28

Post by IIAOPSW » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 10:11 AM UTC

bottled_poe wrote: post #17

dbrabera wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all very specialised types of apps for content creation. If those are the only examples that came to your mind, you pretty much proved the point.

So, you really believe that nobody, other than the use cases above, use native software? I only listed the software categories which I personally use...

No. He proved that only a specialized minority need specialized applications. For a majority of users the computer starts and ends with the web browser. The same thing will happen on mobile

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#29

Post by hewhowhineth » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 10:15 AM UTC

Web for the win!

Re: Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster

#30

Post by coob » Sun, Sep 27, 2015, 10:22 AM UTC

Apps use less data than mobile web sites - API's over full HTML/CSS/JS stacks. When a web page on a modern news site can be ~20MB, this news is no surprise.