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Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

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Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#31

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

The shift to from native to web apps has been a disaster in a number of different fronts.

1) Performance. A Visual Basic 6 app on a 500 MHz system with 256 MB of ram was much more smooth, with less lag and instantaneous response than a modern web app on a 4 core 3 GHz machine with 16GB of RAM.

2) Cost. In the past, once you had purchased the binary it would continue to work basically forever as Microsoft did a great job with keeping Windows backwards compatible. Now, software has become a service that you have to pay for every month. If you don't pay, you can't log in to the web app. In addition, if the web app made changes you didn't like, too bad. If the web app is discontinued, too bad. Also, if you think that the cost is better because you are using "free" web apps, you are paying with your privacy.

3) Lock-in. With native applications your data was on your machine. Even it it was a proprietary format, if you tried hard enough, you could defacto reverse engineer the format since you had access to both the file itself and the machine code. Now, your data is not stored on your machine and the web app controls access to your data.

4) Privacy. With a native app, you could do all your computation and data manipulation on your machine, even disconnecting it completely from the network to make sure your sensitive information did not go where you did not want it. With a web app, you are of necessity sending your data to someone else to process, and you have only their word that they won't do anything bad with it.

5) Software Freedom. Web Apps basically did an end around on the GPL and LGPL. With native apps, if they used GPL or LGPL libraries they would have to inform you and you either had the whole source code (GPL) or the option of modifying the library and using it with the application (LGPL). With web apps, they don't even have to tell you if the backend is using GPL software and you have absolutely no way of inspecting or modifying that GPL software that you would have had with a native app.

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#32

Post by knlam »

Yes. I build apps/website for a living so here is my thought: PWA is still very early and buggy as hell. I try to ship PWA version of my website and it did not work well under many circumstances

I also build a React-native app. Although the experience is absolute amazing, it is a little bit laggy compare to other native app (and beautiful animation is a pain)

So yes, for now we still need native apps

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#33

Post by p3llin0r3 »

eadmund wrote: post #30
_5meq wrote: post #23

No. I don't think we do. Writing native apps is a huge waste of time and resources. While the big players in the OS space were squabbling the web browsers snuck in and drank their milkshake. Browsers / web apps are a more portable, and more productive method of distributing GUIs. Full stop. When deciding to go native or not, you have to decide: Will you hire several designated IOS application developers, several Andr…

> People moan about how it's slow No, I moan about how it's an abuse of my privacy, an abuse of my security & an abuse of the web itself. Web pages which use JavaScript enable all sorts of malicious nastiness which plain websites do not. They are impossible to properly secure (in that I get a new version every time I open it up). They are not what the WWW was meant to be. No thank you.

OK so how is a native application different? You can do the exact same things in a native app.

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#34

Post by chrisco255 »

_5meq wrote: post #23

No. I don't think we do. Writing native apps is a huge waste of time and resources. While the big players in the OS space were squabbling the web browsers snuck in and drank their milkshake. Browsers / web apps are a more portable, and more productive method of distributing GUIs. Full stop. When deciding to go native or not, you have to decide: Will you hire several designated IOS application developers, several Andr…

I love electron, and it's definitely leveled the playing field for cross platform desktop apps. However, Electron apps are difficult to do with high performance and low memory overhead. I still think that native matters on mobile, though. I have yet to see any Cordova-wrapped app that works as good as native. There are ways to get native performance and still write in a cross platform manner (React Native, Xamarin, etc).

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#36

Post by ksk »

Its great when you can use a service when the vendor is not interested in making an app for your platform, but browsers being so taxing (I'm assuming JS is the culprit here) is one of the reasons my battery doesn't last a full day. Not to mention needless bandwidth consumption on mobile, where data is scarce.

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#37

Post by BjoernKW »

forkLding wrote: post #27

Can web apps be updated without approval from the appstore or playstore? Just curious, having developed natively, this slowed me down the most.

I find this comment quite a bit disturbing. There's something wrong when people start to think that you need approval for putting something on the web.

This also sounds like something sinister from the 'well-intentioned' but misguided politician's playbook: Have every piece of content on the web approved beforehand to fight terrorism (or whatever other pretext du jour).

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#38

Post by BjoernKW »

Yes, but their use is relegated to specific purposes.

With business applications in particular, which often are mostly about entering, analysing and moving around data, native apps don't really make sense anymore.

The web is by far the superior platform (among other aspects) when it comes to relatively easy and scalable software delivery and maintenance.

Re: Ask HN: Do we still need native apps?

#39

Post by cecja »

yes, the most common resolution is still 1366x768 and the most RAM installed is 4GB. For us with their 32GB Ram and i7 processors everything is fine but for the most common user we still need native apps. If you buy a laptop with windows 10 of the shelf for under 500$ which is where most of the sold laptops everything like slack feels like crawling through mud. You even have to manage your Browser tabs or youtube starts to lag. There is no way we are ready to only serve webapps.
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