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The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

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Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#51
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what the story is in Apple-land The walled garden is great and protects my privacy.

Please mark sarcasm at least with a ";)" otherwise many people might think you mean what you say becaise they don't know that it's a ridiculous idea that a big corp will come and protect each users privacy.

Google's business model, in broad strokes, is selling user data to advertisers.

Apple's business model, in broad strokes, is charging consumers premium prices for hardware.

As long as Apple thinks the market values user privacy, they are economically incentivized to provide privacy- and security-focused software features that get people to buy their hardware over Android equivalents.

Is that an irontight guarantee? Of course not. Is it a (current) alignment of incentives that means Apple is categorically more likely to protect privacy than e.g. Google? Absolutely. That's also played out so far in practice, between things like app security sandboxing and Apple's historical unwillingness to help law enforcement decrypt encrypted backups — see e.g. the San Bernardino shooter case.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#52

There are domains of problems that can be solved with the WeChat model. Money, shopping, paying utilities, ordering food, etc, make sense to have in one app. I don't know if I'd want my task planner or email/cal app in there.

Congrats, you have then moved into a walled garden inside another walled garden.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#53
post #43
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, I think you’re totally right. We’ll end up writing clientside code for phones, tablets, and desktops. A lot of the code can be shared if you use good engineering practices, but if you use good design practices, each UI will be different so there will need to be some custom code for each. It doesn’t really matter whether this code is Swift, Java, JS, “native”, “web” or whatever.

I’d add that that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario is that everything goes the way of desktop apps, where everything just becomes a lowest-common-denominator web page with crappy UI design that doesn’t really use the platform effectively, just because it’s cheaper that way and cheap always wins.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#54
post #19

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…

> 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

In what way does it need to scale?

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#55
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s-consumers-...

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#56

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…

>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....)

This was the case a decade ago, but not anymore. I have been writing medium complex web apps using Angular/React, Web-workers and RxJS which runs on mobile (Android 4.4+ and iOS 9+) from last 4 years with no extra battery draining side effects and native (like) look and feel. You just need to choose write framework and responsive design UI guidelines. Today most frameworks provides it out of the box. JS, DOM and CSS engines in mainstream browsers are getting more and more performant.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#57

> 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…

Most users aren't on iOS, but even the ones that are probably have the perception that apps do stuff in the background that drains battery.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#58
post #39

I only agree with the third point the author makes > Smaller apps will become part of social media and mobile wallet ecosystems. I find actually unbelievable that Apple and Google didn't crack down on it yet as it takes considerable control away from them. Through iOS's WeChat for example, I can install and run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control or review scrutinity away from Apple. Not to mention about ho…

WeChat in China is more important than Facebook is in the US. That's why they get away with it.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#59

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…

90% of apps just deliver information and work just fine (or better) on the web, at least for me. Nobody needs a reddit app or a Medium app, even though those companies try to convince you otherwise.

Yeah, I'll download an app for Uber or Southwest airlines or Airbnb because their two-way information requirements work better as apps. But I won't clutter up my phone with things that work just fine in a browser, which is most of what I need. I don't play games, so maybe I'm not most people.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#60
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

In what way does it need to scale?

in every way. imagine having to switch between apps to read every article in HN
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