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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

#71

Post by amasad »

>The web is the future. The web will always be the future. But that’s the problem. I need to ship products now.

It's like tomorrow is always tomorrow -- it is never today. One thing that bothers me about the web dev community is the insistence that technology has a will of it's own. As if the web will just eventually win no matter what. I consider myself an advocate for the Web but it needs to be good or better than the alternatives.

So, joke aside, it doesn't follow from the rant that the web is the future. It follows that there is a lot of work that needs to happen before you can say it might be part of the future.

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

#72

Post by stcredzero »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #63
stcredzero wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You seem to be laboring under the false impression that I'm disagreeing with the article. I'm agreeing with the article. I'm also pointing out that this situation would indicate there's a market opportunity somewhere. (In the words of Jeff Bezos: Your margin is my opportunity.)

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

#73

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

jokoon wrote: post #65

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…

Aren't the big bottlenecks things like waiting for large resources (images) to download and javascript processing? The parsing of HTML, as far as I'm aware, has a tiny relative impact.

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

#74

Post by wvenable »

mikeryan wrote: post #17

One app for iOS, one for Android, and I got over 90% consumer coverage However with a huge friction point of requiring users to download and install an app.

I don't understand why people think this is a huge friction point. Installing apps is comfortable, familiar, and easy for people. By comparison, finding a mobile web application in the browser on a phone has significantly more friction.

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

#76

Post by wvenable »

jokoon wrote: post #65

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…

If we had started with a binary HTML format to start with, many of the progressive enhancements that made the web possible could not have happened.

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

#77

Post by mrlatinos »

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.

This is also what I took from the article. Everything they're wanting to accomplish is certainly possible, but instead of just knowing the ins and outs of each platform, you have to know the ins and outs of each browser AND how each can affect the other browsers.

Beyond this, it is clear to me when an iOS-minded developer creates a web app that ends up on Android. Each have their own specific styles, and this gets lost with web apps.

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

#78

Post by rimantas »

donatj wrote: post #66

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 y…

And simple apps are absolutely trivial to build native.

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

#79

Post by joeblau »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #41
joeblau wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coverage is probably pretty high, but you're limited by each browsers respective feature set. There may be functionality that you can't ship due to limits on multiple browsers. Other issues arise if you factor in sites which needs to take into account all browsers; You'll end up bloating your JS/CSS to handle all of these conditions impacting mobile page size. It can be done, if the product is fairly simple, but…

"Giving up on total cross-browser compatibility" seems like it would entirely avoid "sites which needs to take into account all browsers".

Potentially, although I think that there are cases when it's fine. For example when I lived in San Francisco, my LTE speeds were insanely fast so it wasn't as big of a deal. Now that I'm in Pittsburgh, the LTE speeds here aren't as good so mobile web isn't as good.

Also on a desktop or laptop where you've got a good Wi-Fi connection most websites are really good. That being said, I still things like Tweetbot, Flume, and Airmail over twitter.com, instagram.com or gmail.com.

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

#80

Post by j1vms »

tmaly wrote: post #2

I can totally relate to some of this. If you take a look at Meeker's 2016 Internet trends report that came out last week, you will see that 3 apps dominate 80% of the usage on phones. I decided when I started my food side project a year back, that I was not going to do a native app. I have been trying to make the front end look better, but I did not want to use very heavy frameworks, so I settled on using the SASS mi…

sass+bourbon.io (or similar combos like sass+compass) can help a TON with keep front-end dev costs down.

Some apps do benefit a lot being native, but as others point out you throw in the middleman app-store model instead of just dealing with the browser, and keeping your UI simple, clean, efficient and of-course usable.

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