61–70 of 184 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-...
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
Its important to say that it was a choice, there was no full page banner or bouncer that forced people to install the webapp, it was entirely optional.
If, however you are saying that people only click on it because there is an icon on their phone, then you are making possibly the biggest argument for keeping apps (although its perfectly possible to have webapps on the homescreen with icons)
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…
What apps do is add eas of install (app store), and usability (cache, use device sensors, do some offline tasks)
For a webapp the installation is "Add to homescreen" on a webpage. It then behaves like a native app, no address bar. Usability is tackled by modern browsers that allow webapps started like this to: - cache the entire webapp, and some/all data it requests. - run webworkers in background, (get push notifications, etc) - provide sensor access via APIs, (camera, etc) And to conclude, todays webapps respond FAST. They do everything the same way a native app does.
Ofcourse if your webapp does video transcoding or uses some specific OS feature it might profit from being native. But even then, its unbelievable easy to wrap your webapp in a shell that adds these functionality.
How do you think FB and other popular content consuming apps work nowadays? You are basically looking at webapps rendered in a shell that provides the few APIs a browser doesnt yet have, like share button and contact/calendar integration, to get/set data specific to/on your device.
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
For the longest time it was. Because $newsCompany was subscription it had to leave the apple store, or give apple ~25% cut. To get round this we had a fully offline HTML5 webapp.
it was very good, but despite mega optimisations, it was slower than native, and had limited storage.
Users were constantly asking for a native app, In every customer council/survey. Bear in mind that these people were not techhead, they were babyboomers who struggled with tech, they knew enough however, to know that native apps were faster. (for example the times, grauniad and telegraph. )
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 i…
I do have apps for all the shoppibg platforms I use, even though the performance isn't substantially better
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 tha…
We have some in-house apps, and it comes in handy to have control over the device you are using and developing for.
In general though, I do think apps (from the app stores) are not installed as much anymore as they once were. Anecdata, but I hardly install anything anymore on my phone.
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).
Even PWAs and WebAssembly adoption means that the Web stack is getting more app-like and less hypertext documents.
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.
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…
Moore's law is getting us out of a hole. The processing power, and performance per watt on mobile has increase exponentially. Those people who who are stuck on three year contracts feel the pain of this idea. Yes, JS engines are getting faster, but they are being asked to do more and more stuff.
React native is a marvel of engineering, where the bridge intercepts UI calls and diverts them to native. But thats not a webapp, that re-invented version of QT, Wx, tk or whatever java uses.
My point is this: a native app on a underclocked pi zero, can animate UI items at 60FPS. Via a browser, no where near. HTML is many things, but efficient is not one of them. HTML/CSS/JS is a marvel of engineering to get it anwhere near as fast as it is, but its comes from a very slow base.