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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

#171

Post by fixermark »

padseeker wrote: post #34

I understand and empathize with the author's aggravation. But cheaper? Really? So iOs and Android are more than 90% of the market. You are telling me that it is cheaper to build and maintain 2 separate apps and pass on the remaining part of the market than have one app that covers everything? Android device support is supposed to be a nightmare - there are so many versions to contend with, each device manufacturer ca…

If you're building a web app (of more than trivial complexity, where you need to do things like profile for performance or access the user's hardware), you are building four apps: Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari. I mean, there are other browsers, but let's not kid ourselves. ;)

You are, in fact, also building those four apps on five different architectures: Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS. There are others, but again, let's not kid ourselves.

Your complexity surface is the product of your feature-set, the quirks of each of those browsers as they silently version-up for your users, and the quirks of each of those browsers on each OS platform as they also vary in version.

If you're building a trivial web app, it's a web page and by all means build it directly in the browser. But when you start to bust out the profiler to figure out why this one interaction is butter-smooth in Chrome and runs like crap in Firefox from versions X to Y, except on Linux where it's X to Z... Two mobile platforms is fewer than 4 browser platforms.

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

#172

Post by equalarrow »

tracker1 wrote: post #156
paulddraper wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Circumventing the App Store on iOS is problematic at best...

Not really. It's called the Enterprise Program. While this is for 'enterprise', you can also use it - and Apple allows this - to distribute _outside the App Store_.

A few years ago I built a nice sms delivery system for installing an app I was working on. Text anything to our number (we had multiple numbers thru twilio based on market). App replies back with a download link. Install. It worked perfect and we could actually tell who requested the app and who installed it. We had around 75k users installing. Not millions, of course, but still, not too bad.

So, it is possible. We also did not have to wait for any approval process. And when the app started up, it checked for an updated version on our system. If there was, the app would then prompt the user to start the update. It was a very nice flow and we had many comments from users telling us that 'it just worked'.

This was app pre-iOS 7 and automatic app update, but it's still being used today.

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

#173

Post by lsiebert »

My current employer bought the app I work on from my previous employer. It embeds websites in webviews with JS-Objective-C/JS-Java bridges so they can make native calls. You get most if not all the benefits of native apps, native UI when you really want it, quicker iteration then the App Store, and can build in whatever stack you want. Of course I've had to follow an intermittent bug from the rails back end, to the angular front end, to the native java and up to the companies api servers before, so YMMV.

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

#174

Post by spriggan3 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #73
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.

> javascript processing?

Actually Javascript engines are extremely fast, the UI in a web app isn't because web engines have to deal with a complex repaint model. Resources can be loaded asynchronously, so it's not really a bottleneck. On the other hand repaints can absolutely be a serious bottleneck in webpage.

Native UI use a much much more simple model, which makes repaints less expensive and allow a better FPS rate.

That's why webpages shouldn't try to look like native apps on mobile.

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

#175

Post by djsumdog »

stcredzero wrote: post #72
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

There are a lot of those little frameworks that try and bridge all this together: PhoneGap, Titanium, etc. They're all varying levels of terrible (unless you want to make games, in which case Unity mobile is a pretty solid bet).

So there is a market, people are trying to fill those gaps, and yet none of them seem to be able to bridge the gap in such a way that devs prefer maintaining two or more native apps over one that compiles for multiple devices with a common framework.

So there is a market, but it doesn't look like it's an easy problem to solve.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

What does that even mean?

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

#179

Post by icebraining »

tracker1 wrote: post #167
heywire wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worrying about spam doesn't make much sense here, as the web interface is pure HTML forms, with no client-side checks. It isn't hard to automate the posting process.

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

lsiebert wrote: post #173

My current employer bought the app I work on from my previous employer. It embeds websites in webviews with JS-Objective-C/JS-Java bridges so they can make native calls. You get most if not all the benefits of native apps, native UI when you really want it, quicker iteration then the App Store, and can build in whatever stack you want. Of course I've had to follow an intermittent bug from the rails back end, to the a…

[deleted]
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