81–90 of 105 posts
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When that happens, the browser would have turned into a general purpose VM running apps via WebAssembly with WebGL/WebGPU for rendering, thus becoming native as well. The writing is on the wall with the ongoing efforts on .NET, Java, Go, Unity, Unreal and who knows, someone might even port Flash to it.
I don't consider an universal bytecode as native.
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I agree that the $99/year/developer isn’t that much for Apple. The 30% of all sales is probably significant though - the App Store has a lot of users. I don’t necessarily agree that PWA developers have no way of monetising their apps though - if I’m not mistaken they could use ads and subscriptions for their services. These would normally grant a cut to Apple if they were done through the App Store, hence the incenti…
$99/year isn't small. There are 2m apps in the iOS App Store today. Each app must pay $99/year. That's $198m/year as a passive income stream for Apple. Factor in 30% of app purchase price, plus 30% of in-app purchases, and you have a significant revenue stream.
I'm down for enhancing what sites I only go to on occasion can do for me as a user, but that PWAs will replace Native is IMO not desirable (particularly every website asking me to allow notifications these days -- turn that right off immediately) A PWA will never be nicer than Tweetbot, but if it means I no longer get harassed to install an app for EVERYTHING it will have a place alongside native
How many years have we been hearing this tale? And yet almost every major web site continues to bend over backwards to persuade us to install their battery-killing surveillance system oops I mean mobile app. So the solution now is even more battery-killing HTML + Javascript + Secret Sauce? Hell no... PS Just say no to push like the Hulk says no to Banner. All IMO of course but these days, I use my phone for Yelp, Goo…
Major sites have devs to waste. For the rest of us web is a valid alternative. Strange, i use my phone mostly to browse stuff. I prefer the web version of Gmail cause i can switch between accounts and i also avoid all those annoying notifications.
[0]: https://www.allbusiness.com/web-apps-vs-mobile-apps-which-is...
Progressive Web Apps have the potential to be massively disruptive to apps as we know them now... and that's before the near-native speeds that WASM will bring are factored into the equation. After making the mistake of going all-in on Xamarin in 2014 I realized, much to my chagrin, that the future of mobile is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, there are cases where certain features require vendor-native apps for now,…
Snark aside, I've heard very little marketing around PWA that explains why users should want them - almost everything is focused on benefits for developers.
“According to Google’s data, for native apps 80% of time is spent in each users’ top 3 apps. Just 3 apps!“ I also probably spend a large percentage of my time online on a handful of websites. That doesn’t mean the other 20% of my time isn’t incredibly valuable and not worth building an app/website for. As an advertising company Google have plenty of incentives to push PWAs. Apple, who own the minority hardware platfo…
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Also don't forget his famous comments on no one will watch video on small screens and no need for big phones. I don't think any of his comments were lack of insight, rather it was him playing the market until he was ready.
Come on, so even his mistakes were not mistakes?
Steve would have been trying very hard to avoid the 'Osborne Effect', which was very well known to everyone in the early industry. Osborne portable/luggable computers had a very strong market share and growing, based on the CP/M operating system. They announced that they would be coming out with a DOS-compatible machine, far too early as it turned out. Everyone decided to wait for the introduction of the DOS machine, sales and revenue went to effectively zero, and the company died before it ever introduced the new machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-amazing-rise-and-fall-of-...
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"A cynical interpretation is that Apple is deliberately dragging their feet because PWAs undermine their $99/year + 30% app price + 30% in-app purchases business." That interpretation doesn't make sense. The $99/year/active developer is a nominal amount -- sofa change to Apple -- that couldn't sanely affect the Safari development roadmap. The 30% is a much a larger amount (though still small to Apple's scale), but PW…
I agree that the $99/year/developer isn’t that much for Apple. The 30% of all sales is probably significant though - the App Store has a lot of users. I don’t necessarily agree that PWA developers have no way of monetising their apps though - if I’m not mistaken they could use ads and subscriptions for their services. These would normally grant a cut to Apple if they were done through the App Store, hence the incenti…
"We're happy to announce that this week, we're going to achieve another huge milestone. The money that developers have earned through the App Store will top $100 billion."
So if that's the developer's %70 to Apple's 30%, then Apple's share is $43 billion. That's a lot, but over just about 10 years. I don't know how much was, e.g., in the last year, but Apple's revenue is over $200 billion/year, I think, so in terms of percent, it's in the low single-digits.
> I don’t necessarily agree that PWA developers have no way of monetising their apps though.
I didn't say they have no way of monetizing, just nothing with the reach comparable to the Apple app store. Outside the app store, a PWA developer can charge, e.g., subscriptions. But (1) it's not free (they'll have to create or buy a mechanism for doing so... there are transaction fees too, but much less than 30%); and (2) would entirely lack the discoverability of Apple's app store. Sure, it's perhaps possible that a completing PWA app marketplace could be created and marketed, but it doesn't exist now, and it would take a lot of time and a lot of money.
I didn't think Apple generally took a piece of ad revenue from iOS apps. Wasn't it just their own iAd network that took a piece? (Also, I thought that was killed off).
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2018/06/04/live-from-wwdc-2018/
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"A cynical interpretation is that Apple is deliberately dragging their feet because PWAs undermine their $99/year + 30% app price + 30% in-app purchases business." That interpretation doesn't make sense. The $99/year/active developer is a nominal amount -- sofa change to Apple -- that couldn't sanely affect the Safari development roadmap. The 30% is a much a larger amount (though still small to Apple's scale), but PW…
>> The $99/year/active developer is a nominal amount Is it really? There are 2 million apps in the iOS App Store[0]. At $99/year to be listed in the store, that's $198,000,000/year for Apple. On top of that, you have 30% price of an app. 12% of those apps are paid[1], that's 240,000 paid apps. Suppose the average price of a paid app is $5, and suppose each app is purchased 2000 times. (I have no idea what the average…
We don't have to guess: Apple reports these numbers. They earned $11.5 billion in revenue from the app store in 2017.
I'm not sure what you're expecting here. Apple clearly views their role as protecting users from the hostile aspects of the web: see content blockers, reader mode, anti-tracking features in iOS 12.
Of course Apple is not going to jump on unrestricted JS background execution, unreviewable OTA-updatable tracking, etc. And of course Apple is going to focus their efforts on their native APIs.