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The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

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Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#41

Post by zeroname »

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…

Apple-Land is fine, because it didn't adopt the broken security model of Android. That has nothing to do with "walled garden" (disallowing third-party applications). Google could've put the same limitations on Apps. In fact, they've slowly adopted the "Always Ask" permission model of iOS, but it still isn't fine-grained enough, especially when it comes to the file system.

Having said that, a "file system" for iOS that Apps could share with each other is something that just didn't exist for the longest time. Sending files from App to App has always been weird.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#42

Post by thunderbong »

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…

Also, have you considered that consuming content on mobile is a completely different experience than consuming content on the web?

Most comparisons I've seen talked about here on HN, seem to think these two are equivalent. They're not.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#43

Post by xg15 »

echevil wrote: post #20
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…

> 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

That might happen, but I wonder if the distinction will then still have any relevance.

If you continue the current trends, this process could involve making WebAssembly more powerful, making CSS and Web Components into an actual widget framework and adding more capabilities to service workers to enable OS hooks, background activities and offline use.

However, all of those changes will push web apps into the direction of becoming more "app-like", not more "web-like".

So after the improvements are done, I think we might end up with just another framework for building apps, not having moved away from apps. (With the one downside that HTML will still have to drag around reams of cruft to maintain backwards compatibility which other app framework could easily do away with)

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#44

Post by Apocryphon »

gman83 wrote: post #32
fit2rule wrote: post #26

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 d…

You've just described Flutter, it's basically a video game engine for apps.

Precisely. After nearly a decade of list-detail view apps doing REST API calls, and the most widely used apps having their own unique branding that's the same across both platforms, you might as well distill those common features into a Unity for mobile apps.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#45

Post by Apocryphon »

starbeast wrote: post #35
fit2rule wrote: post #26

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 d…

Unity is a very good tool for this.

There are business, non-game apps that use Unity?

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#47

Post by gitgud »

EZ-E wrote: post #36
gitgud wrote: post #5

So 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...

> So 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. This is actually happening in China to some extent. I'm blown away that Apple and Google actually approves apps that run a mini-OS inside them like WeChat/Alipay. I initially thought…

It is amazing how they are allowed to run these apps through the Play Store. I remember a few years ago Google removed thousands of alternative "app store" apps for the Play Store... Not sure how these are different...

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#48

Post by sundarurfriend »

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…

After I discovered F-Droid [1], I've found myself installing practically nothing from the Play Store, especially such neat little utility tools. F-Droid has a lot of half-done or unpolished stuff, but it also has tons of simple, elegant tools that do their job, as well as minor works of passion that have their own niche. I use the main repo, the Guardian one and one from IzzyOnDroid [2].

[1] https://f-droid.org/ [2] https://android.izzysoft.de/repo

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#49

Post by salvar »

zeroname wrote: post #40
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…

You're thinking of this too much in terms of technology. Even when what you say is true, it's rather irrelevant for most apps. > 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. I think you're mixing up causalities her…

> The core issue is that people aren't willing to install any more apps.

Is there any source for this? Are app installations declining?

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#50

Post by lazerwalker »

> Too many apps slow down your phone. They take up memory space, run background processes, and constantly check for push notifications even when not in use.

This is provably false on iOS, yeah? iOS's backgrounding model means apps that aren't actively doing work don't "take up memory space". Apps that you never open are quickly throttled from all forms of background processing on a pretty aggressive timescale (I know this firsthand, it's been a major pain for one or two specific apps I've worked on). Push notifications are, as the name implies, a push service rather than a pull/polling service.

Unused apps do take up storage space, but iOS 11 and newer automatically silently delete apps you don't use, keeping the user's data and the app icon around for when you open it again. In the settings UI where you can disable it, this is explicitly framed as only saving you storage space, rather than having performance benefits.

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