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The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

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Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#21

Post by sgt »

KaiserPro wrote: post #17

This 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…

Agreed - for the quality experience there's really no substitute. Maybe the author thinks that this will change (technologically speaking) in the next 7 years, but I doubt it. Things will definitely improve, but there'll still be reasons to code native apps. Desktop still has tons of native apps - it's not all running in browsers. We're in 2018, and your web browser is leaking memory and performance is sub-optimal (try scrolling through a large number of threads on Reddit and observe your CPU usage).

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#22

Post by dustinmoris »

For years I haven't installed any apps but the absolute minimum. I don't have an app for news, Facebook, Amazon, airlines, this, that, because of all the reasons mentioned in the article. I read news on the mobile optimised websites, I retrieve my flight ticket as a PDF in my inbox, I never like to shop from my phone anyway (best done on a desktop when having a mental break at work) and don't think Facebook offers anything that requires my attention more than maybe once a couple weeks.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#23

Post by psergeant »

ohazi wrote: post #9

Basically 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…

> I don't know what the story is in Apple-land

The walled garden is great and protects my privacy.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#24

Post by p4bl0 »

dustinmoris wrote: post #22

For years I haven't installed any apps but the absolute minimum. I don't have an app for news, Facebook, Amazon, airlines, this, that, because of all the reasons mentioned in the article. I read news on the mobile optimised websites, I retrieve my flight ticket as a PDF in my inbox, I never like to shop from my phone anyway (best done on a desktop when having a mental break at work) and don't think Facebook offers an…

Completely agree. I do the same thing and even uninstall or deactivate unecessary apps installed by default. As a result I have less app than my phone can display on a single page of the app drawer even with good sized icons, which is actually very convenient.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#25

Post by ricokatayama »

The question isn't solely about tech, but how the mobile OS' wrap and deliver the experience. Even with attempts like progressible web apps, we still have the same approach and behavior to navigate on our mobile home, a central place to launch a specific problem-solver. I don't think that we are going to change this, but develop the pattern above this concept. That is what we already see with the evolution of iOS on iPad or Chrome OS. Apple and Google respectively could be inspired by different analogies, but instead, they are doubling down on the new conceived standard brought the mobile phone.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#26

Post by fit2rule »

You know what rocks, and which doesn't get nearly as much attention these days, vis a vis mobile app development?

Using a single game engine for real business apps, and then shipping those apps on every platform the game engine supports.

Sure, you maybe have to do a bit more work to get a data entry field up on the screen - but you only have to do it once and you've got the same, consistent, agreeable (assuming you design it right) interface across all supported platforms.

This isn't the same as using browser-based frameworks to accomplish the same thing. What I mean is, a game engine that provides equal access to the rendering and input event pipeline across the board.

Its the native-framework dance that is killing mobile apps. The time spent grok'ing one Android SDK release, only to have to do it all over again just to keep your app current and constant on the platform. To a lesser degree its the same with iOS.

But, if you take sufficient responsibility for the engine such that you're really targeting GLES and an event queue, you can produce amazing apps that run everywhere.

This is the promise that needs to be fulfilled going forward. We don't need more apps that just look the same, yet take up infinite resources and attention just to stay in place. With a game-engine approach, app developers can actually differentiate themselves again - and the good ones, the really good ones, produce really good apps.

Think about this some time: the most-shipped, most-used apps on any of the mobile platforms are those that, pretty much, eschew tight integration with the vendor-provided frameworks and instead bring their own to the party. This will get traction as more and more devs start to understand just how far you can take your modern engine these days .. and those engines are becoming their own OS in their own right, anyway ...

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#28

Post by rexf »

I don't agree with the overall premise that native apps will disappear. I agree that certain apps, such as the static content Wix example, don't need to exist.

I found the article unconvincing. The core argument is that native apps will consolidate into larger social media apps as part of an in-app app? That may be the case for China, but not the US. Even if that did happen in the US, that means you are still building mobile apps (with another abstraction layer).

As long as native apps provide a better UI (as expected of native apps) & continue to have access to OS APIs that the mobile browser does not, native apps will continue succeed by providing a better experience.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#30

Post by rimliu »

pvinis wrote: post #6

I 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, but these metrics web is dead already. I mean there are billions of the websites and I only have five in my favorites.

The apps are dying and the year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner. (I wonder what's the ration of Linux desktops in use vs. Android phones in use, which are running Linux after all).

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