Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hueniverse.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 322 posts

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

#161

Post by erikpukinskis »

rsp1984 wrote: post #116
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…

I think the author is already addressing this: Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don’t want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps.

Sure, but "2016 App" and "2007 App" are not monolithic design choices. If you can decompose those things, you can keep the important bits and throw away the peacocking.

Just a simple example: it's trivially easy to make large, flat shaded buttons on the web. That's going to be more familiar to younger users than native web buttons like those on HN.

However, there's also spending weeks to make a web button that animates smoothly from one container to another and has a SVG icon that morphs into another different icon with magic sparkles. Doing that on the web will require grossly perverting the DOM and all of the web interaction expectations.

A lot of the things we consider "Just 2016 App Things" are performances that native app builders have to do to give clients a reason to believe their $300/hour is well spent. No real value is produced except "design" awards for the shelf.

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

#162

Post by fixermark »

ptx wrote: post #131
MichaelGG wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while, Firefox mobile would render different parts of HN's text in different sizes. At first I thought it was a mobile-only feature, but that would be odd for HN to do. Nope, turns out it was a Firefox table-something layout font issue. Seems fixed as of, perhaps 6 months ago? Searching around also finds this answer pointing to a now-dead link saying Chrome used to have known issues with "consistent" fonts on s…

It is actually a feature, called "font inflation"[1], that tries to find the main content text on a site not designed for mobile and make it a readable size. It just wasn't doing a good job figuring out which parts were the content. I would guess the recent improvement is due to the site itself being fixed – it now uses a "viewport" meta tag, which I don't think it did last year. [1] http://www.jwir3.com/font-inflati…

Yep. Features like this are basically why developing tightly-controlled UI experiences on the web are a garbage fire.

For a tightly-controlled UI experience, you want a thin, predictable framework that you can build your experience on top of. The web is the opposite of that. Big, big chunks of important detail for user experience are not specified in the RFCs and standards themselves.

Take CSS as an example. The first thing most web development frameworks will have you load is a CSS that sets the style for everything to some known defaults. If the web as an app development framework had been designed for a controllable experience, that would be unnecessary. But the web wasn't designed as an app development framework; it was designed as a heavily user-configurable presentation layer for standardized format of content.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

fixermark wrote: post #154
tracker1 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm available... and semi-actively looking... ;-) But I'm not cheap. That said, I provide great value. I've been writing web based applications for about 20 years now. It's a lot better than it was in the late 90's and early 2000's, so stop bitching or get off the lawn. (sarcasm) Seriously though, I'd much rather deal with webpack, babel, react, redux and the like than angular 1&2 (just feels like a decade old soluti…

But do you provide an amount of value that offsets the cost of two or three completely-adequate devs working in parallel on mobile apps? ;) That's the killer.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by IanCal »

fixermark wrote: post #162
ptx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a feature, called "font inflation"[1], that tries to find the main content text on a site not designed for mobile and make it a readable size. It just wasn't doing a good job figuring out which parts were the content. I would guess the recent improvement is due to the site itself being fixed – it now uses a "viewport" meta tag, which I don't think it did last year. [1] http://www.jwir3.com/font-inflati…

Yep. Features like this are basically why developing tightly-controlled UI experiences on the web are a garbage fire. For a tightly-controlled UI experience, you want a thin, predictable framework that you can build your experience on top of. The web is the opposite of that. Big, big chunks of important detail for user experience are not specified in the RFCs and standards themselves. Take CSS as an example. The firs…

While I generally agree, I'm not surprised mobile browsers did weird things with HN. Look at the source, it's nested tables with expanded invisible 1 pixel gifs used for indentation.

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

#166

Post by djsumdog »

paulddraper wrote: post #132
hanginghyena wrote: post #21

Seems like you're deferring one dragon for another. Deliver the project got easier; "Control the customer" got significantly harder. You've now got someone's app store in the middle of your customer relationships and are exposed to approval drama, various forms of revenue squeeze, and other meddling from the platform owner. What happens if the folks running the platform decide to launch their own offering? Speaking a…

Apps don't have to be downloaded from stores, thought that certainly does make things nice.

Apps stores are crippled excused for real package management. In the open world, you can import someone else's key and repository and install their packages. In Play/iOS/Windows you have a single provider. There's no bug tracker to add your packages and no way to add a stable and unstable channel..unless both apps are in the same store ...and every beta release then has to get approved.

It's maddening. I wrote a thing about it and other Android issues: http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

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

#167

Post by tracker1 »

heywire wrote: post #153
tracker1 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just check a couple times a day... honestly, I'm usually too busy when I'm not checking HN to deal with a reply right at any given moment anyway. It's a forum.

I use hnnotify to tell me about replies and the Hacker News app on iOS by premii is pretty decent for read only access ( I mostly only post when I'm at a computer, I find that my responses make a little more sense that way :) )

Kind of wish HN would adapt Open* or similar for token access for posting... though that opens the door to a lot of potential issues (spam) I'm guessing they're trying to avoid... maybe requiring the web interface until you hit 1K karma or something.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

codinghorror wrote: post #152
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…

I find the premise of the article wildly incorrect. If we had to split my current 9 person company (building a JavaScript based app that runs in the browser) into an org with Android and iOS native projects, we would easily need at least 3 more devs. Arguably more. And those devs would be dedicated to their respective native Swift/ObjC and Java code bases, completely unable to help us build the base webapp. Not to me…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by djsumdog »

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…

You can't disable auto-complete in a web app (or can you? If so, I'm sure it's different for each platform).

We're not just talking about iOS and Android. You've got Chrome mobile, the ASOP browser, Firefox mobile, whatever shitty browser the carrier wants to include and all the various versions of those that will never get upgraded.

Personally, I really like the ranty tone of this article. I don't think it's unjustified at all. The author's frustrations are very valid.

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

#170

Post by joehewitt »

I used publicly whine quite a lot in favor of open web standards. When the specs were simpler, this made more sense, but as they grew more and more complex I felt overwhelmed with the chore of developing cross-browser apps. The investment of time required just didn't make sense anymore, and I felt like the only way to serve the web was to develop simple content-focused pages, and leave any complex functionality to native apps.
Post reply on HN