This is a very Western centric point of view. Even if most of the RN like apps become "good enough" there will be a market for those apps that want to differentiate with the sluggish good enough apps.
The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
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Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#12Basically every flashlight app on Google Play contains adware or malware and wants non-negotiable (thanks, Google) access to my contact list and files and network. Same with many task managers and qr code scanners and other random little apps and utilities. Fuck that. I'll install Uber and an IM client or two, but that's it. No more "that looks like it might be cool" apps for me. I've said this before - the app ecosy…
"the app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000" amen. Maybe even worse, as it's harder to get people to pay for mobile apps than line of business / productivity software.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#13So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for the sub-apps. Eventually these platforms will bloat and bloat until they basically become their own operating system.... then tada we're back at the beginning...
These platforms own the food delivery and ride hailing platform too so it is much more difficult to compete as users have much fewer incentives to switch.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#14I have two points on this. 1. The end has been here for some of us. But only for the apps the author is talking about. And these apps are the whitelabeled generic restaurant menu apps. If an "app" like that is not useful, who cares about it. If I need to order from that restaurant, why not just use the ordering app that includes that restaurant? 2. He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use…
Yes. And in particular:
> He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max 30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying.
Mobile app usage is (likely) Pareto-distributed which makes it... just as alive as every other such phenomenon.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#15"The vision was that, one day, every legal entity would have its own mobile app."
Yes, that was a classic bad idea. There were magazine apps which simply contained JPEG files of all the pages. In both orientations, even. That was both unnecessary [1] and annoying [2].
The successful apps are now all from the big players. We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#16As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been around for some time and have not proven compelling.
Points 1 & 2 were invariants from the start. On the contrary, excellent and fast on device search has enabled me to keep hundreds of apps, as long as I remember their names or keywords. I have always argued that pure information is better served as a single page website, and I have always told my clients so.
Point 3 is interesting, but at some point the OS vendors will take steps against that to maintain control. I also cannot see how shipping an app in WeChat is fundamentally different from shipping it on the App Store, bare technical details like programming language.
Point 4 is the one-sided observation of the centralize-decentralize circle that is happening in all ecosystems. Once FAANG have purchased all the startups and apps, people will crave for new ones. Governments will even incentivize that.
I think the only thing that can kill on-device apps in the next years is PWAs with WASM and friends (IF a central market place for PWAs develops). But Apple and Google will have it let that actively happen; and development paradigms might not even change that much, with Swift/Kotlin to WASM compilers in the works.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#17This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store.
The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying.
Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread, so any heavy lifting is serverside, which means latency in anything other then decent bandwidth areas (so no travelling for you....)
Secondly, and possibly most importantly, the GUI language of the native OS doesn't exist, which means everyone re-designs every thing, making things much much harder for end users, old people and hard of sight.
Consolidation has a point, but I suspect its the OS that will provide these apps/function.
The data I have seen from the old company was this: people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged than the people who used our uber mobile friendly and fast news site. Apps can be faster, handle offline/near offline far better.
Apps are here to stay, until mobile web changes from a inefficient presentation layer to something more like a windowing toolkit.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#18This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store. The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying. Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread…
> people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged
That's maybe because people that are engaged with something could be more willing to install the app. Also once the app is installed there is an icon on your phone constantly reminding you to use it.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#19This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store. The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying. Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread…
> people who installed our news reader
But how many people installed your reader? I think it's easy to explain why they engage more with your site in your app: they have nowhere else to go, and the website icon is there, on the screen. This doesnt scale
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#20This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store. The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying. Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread…
> The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so.
I agree it’s still suboptimal for now, incremental improvements are making it less so year over year. More parts of native apps are also getting written with web technologies. Eventually, maybe, most of the app icons in our phones might just be a shortcut to some website