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It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

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Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#61

Post by kurttheviking »

54mf wrote: post #23

"You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari." You can do this with PhoneGap. "Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit." Okay, yeah, this sucks. "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." This is probably your fault. "We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge." This is probably your fault. "We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is…

> "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." > This is probably your fault.

As someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time debugging kerning differences, line spacing, and obscure letter size differences across IE/Firefox/Chrome I can enthusiastically say, it might be his fault but I doubt it. Different browsers do things differently and in cases where things must be the same, this is an expensive and time-consuming problem.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#62

Post by JBReefer »

cjcenizal wrote: post #46

Pro-tip: You can make your article sound like it's been written by a grown-up if you find/replace all instances of the word "fucking" and "fuck" with "".

People also just speak differently. You're allowed to curse on the internet, and as someone who lives in Queens, I honestly have trouble speaking without cursing. It feels kind of stilted and overly proper. Language is fluid and evolves.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#63

Post by StefanKarpinski »

stcredzero wrote: post #50
deanCommie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read the same article? What is this condescending bullshit. Nobody is arguing these things CAN'T be done, just that it's too much effort on the web, and the only web devs that know the ins and outs of every browser enough to make it work are unaffordable and unavailable.

the only web devs that know the ins and outs of every browser enough to make it work are unaffordable and unavailable. The market has spoken. Doing those things is hard enough, people can charge lots for it. That sucks. "Sucks" == suffering. Suffering == opportunity. (Deliberate Yodaism. Actually high market price == market opportunity.)

Which is why it's cheaper to build multiple native apps... which was the point of the article.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#64

Post by wvenable »

ksenzee wrote: post #10

When you multiply that 90% consumer coverage by the percentage of people who will install your app when you ask them to, it's going to knock down your 90% pretty considerably.

For users, I'm not sure how this is significantly worse than asking people to visit your mobile website. In my personal experience, people will search the app store for your mobile web application by default anyway.

If your product is an "app" in the functionality sense, then people are going to look for it in the "app store". Period. For user, it's actually a better experience than using Chrome/Safari.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#65

Post by jokoon »

I'd say it again: break compatibility and make an open, preparsed/compiled/binary HTML format. You'll get several order of magnitude speed increase and reduced memory consumption in browsers (parsing text is expensive). Something a little similar to microsoft .CHM file format.

So instead of having a competition in browsers, you'll have competition is the HTML parsers that developers will use.

No more messy W3C messy standard which is VERY hard and ambiguous to parse for any browser.

I've repeated that rant so often, I might start making a simple example of what I'm talking about. We just MUST abandon the text only approach. It allowed the internet to thrive without microsoft's attempt to make money with it. But today browsers are so ubiquitous, all that there is to do is enable browsers to just render binary HTML, which would just be a tree of rectangles and styles, so really simple. I think.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#66

Post by donatj »

I don't think that's remotely true if you keep the responsive web app simple. YNGNI and KISS and what not.

I've been doing this for over ten years. In that time I've seen large web applications built for under 4k; I've also seen massively overbuilt simple applications go for 50k+. It comes down to often how needlessly complex you make the stack.

If you stick with solid simple guaranteed tech instead of cutting edge you can knock a web app out relatively cheap and easy.

When it comes right down to it, 95% of web apps have two jobs. Present text to the user, take text from the user. Everything else is a nice to have. HTTP has been doing those two jobs amazingly well for decades. It's a solved problem, don't make it harder than it needs to be.

Lastly: Don't fight the browser. Design for the browser. Responsive is easy if you design for things to flow as the browser would have it. It's one of the biggest mistake I see so often. If a design requires you to fight the native behaviours of the browser, it's likely a bad design. Fight back against that junk, it just makes future work that much harder.

tl;dr Develop for the web of a couple years ago and not the web of today. It'll save you time and headaches.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#67

Post by ksk »

54mf wrote: post #23

"You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari." You can do this with PhoneGap. "Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit." Okay, yeah, this sucks. "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." This is probably your fault. "We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge." This is probably your fault. "We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is…

>This is probably your fault.

I wonder if it is more arrogant to claim that things are broken or to tell someone its their fault without even knowing what they're trying to do.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#68

Post by rhizome »

kurttheviking wrote: post #61
54mf wrote: post #23

"You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari." You can do this with PhoneGap. "Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit." Okay, yeah, this sucks. "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." This is probably your fault. "We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge." This is probably your fault. "We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is…

> "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." > This is probably your fault. As someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time debugging kerning differences, line spacing, and obscure letter size differences across IE/Firefox/Chrome I can enthusiastically say, it might be his fault but I doubt it. Different browsers do things differently and in cases where things must be the same, this is an exp…

Can't a UI be designed such that minor fontsize differences aren't a disaster?

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#69

Post by bartof303 »

deanCommie wrote: post #38
54mf wrote: post #23

"You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari." You can do this with PhoneGap. "Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit." Okay, yeah, this sucks. "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." This is probably your fault. "We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge." This is probably your fault. "We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is…

Did we read the same article? What is this condescending bullshit. Nobody is arguing these things CAN'T be done, just that it's too much effort on the web, and the only web devs that know the ins and outs of every browser enough to make it work are unaffordable and unavailable.

The "condescending bullshit" is the title of the original post. I read the title "the fucking open web" and thought that 54mf's response was pretty diplomatic in comparison.

Re: It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

#70

Post by stouset »

54mf wrote: post #23

"You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari." You can do this with PhoneGap. "Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit." Okay, yeah, this sucks. "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." This is probably your fault. "We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge." This is probably your fault. "We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is…

> TL;DR: "We tried to make a responsive web app act like a native app and it didn't work because it doesn't work, and that makes me a grumpy goose."

That's literally his entire thesis.

There's been a ton of effort invested in trying to make web apps capable of competing with native apps, and his point is that it's still simply just not feasible. It's cheaper — and more importantly, costs are more predictable — to develop a native app for every platform you want to support, than to develop a single modern webapp of equivalent quality.

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