Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 184 posts

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#81

Post by passwd »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #59
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…

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…

>Nobody needs a reddit app

Here it's true if you talk about official app, which you seem to be doing, but there's a couple of other options - apps made by community, which can be way better than official anything. I guess that Reddit doesn't want to fall behind and that's it.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#82

Post by coldcode »

barrystaes wrote: post #63
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…

Sorry to say but from my perspective you seem to live in a bubble as well, to use your words. 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 en…

FB was at one time a web app, today it is a monstrous objective-c nightmare (someone a couple year ago measured 18,000 classes in the codebase). They never could get the web app to work. Building iOS apps is what I do for a living, its really not that hard.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

> The idea was to make it easy for individuals and small businesses to create their own personal apps for social or marketing purposes.

> The vision was that, one day, every legal entity (human beings and companies) would have its own mobile app. These apps would be dotted all over the internet, like physical properties on a map. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

Er, thank $deity that didn't happen. This is a vision that exemplifies the sales-level delusions I've seen some times, of the "we'll sell lots of useless shit and make boatloads of money" kind. It doesn't stop to consider that apps need to provide value to the users, and the technology context of a smartphone puts constraints on what form that value can take. Gross. I'm happy I've never heard of this vision in the past, as I wouldn't be nice to the people preaching it.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#84

Post by sametmax »

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…

Pretty much.

Like you said, it's slow, drains battery and add a barrier to customer conversion.

But also:

Web apps don't have a direct access to the file system. Forget about filming or recording voice and saving that for anything serious.

They can't respond to intents, making them completly isolated from the rest of the OS.

They can't use the share function so your data is hard to extract, move around or ... well, share.

They don't have access to the cryptographic facilities, or the authentification ones (e.g: no finger print unlock). They can't be directly filled in by other apps like lastpass. You can't even chose between security and convenience.

The amount of data they can store is very limited, hard to manipulate, and the API changes from one browser to the other. Unless you have a bit of texte, though luck.

Basically, anything that is not a simple CRUD service is useless offline, and slower online than the app version.

Plus, how many people know that they can "add this app" to the home menu ?

Not to say you should not offer a web version of your app. But it's an ersatz.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#85

Post by dreamcompiler »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #77
dreamcompiler wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody needs an app for anything, but the Reddit app is far superior for me vs. their mobile experience. So much so that I refuse to install it because it makes Reddit far more addictive. Same for Facebook. A huge percentage of their usage is the mobile app vs. mobile web. Like Reddit, part of that is due to them making the mobile web experience crappier to drive app adoption, but that's not the only thing going on.…

Good point. Another reason not to do business with a company is if they remove information from their mobile website that's available on their app. Looking at you here, Yelp.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#86

Post by TeMPOraL »

barrystaes wrote: post #63
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…

Sorry to say but from my perspective you seem to live in a bubble as well, to use your words. 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 en…

I agree with GP's reasons, but not the conclusion. Native apps are going away, which is a shame, because web apps are bad.

> For a webapp the installation is "Add to homescreen" on a webpage. It then behaves like a native app, no address bar.

Only as long as you have an open Internet connection. Maybe a properly made web app will cache itself somehow, but that process is relatively obscure and (from the user's POV) pretty unreliable. Whereas a native app is an executable on the phone, it will run whether or not you're on a network.

> They do everything the same way a native app does.

Only slower and worse. Between basic UI functions being (poorly) reimplemented one abstraction layer and extra VM level higher, and random 404 screens because oops, you briefly lost connectivity, it takes lots of extra work to get a web app to native level of quality - at which point one might want to consider why they didn't write it native in the first place?

> 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.

Yes, I can tell, by the frequency with which it breaks in unexpected ways, and shows its internals - by e.g. giving you a web error page instead of the app-specific one, or just giving you a blank screen.

Webapps are just "worse is better" in action. Gross.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#87

Post by monkeynotes »

TLDR: Betteridge's law applies.

Fact is mobile apps will remain useful for as long as mobile devices occupy the same space they do now. Maybe you don't have more than 100 apps installed, but that does not equate to all apps being deemed useless. Different people find different apps useful enough to install and continue using. I don't ever see myself using a web-app alternative over my security camera app, or my email app, and so on.

Fact is, native apps have their uses, but not all native apps are useful to all people.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#88

Post by eddieroger »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #59
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…

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…

> But I won't clutter up my phone with things that work just fine in a browser

That's the window for apps to compete. If "just fine" works for you, cool, but it's possible for apps to make the experience better in meaningful ways. A web page can't notify of you a new message, but an app can, for example. Look at all the Twitter apps that came up, and they've had to start to systematically kill over time because the experiences are _so much_ better than Twitter in the app. "Just fine" doesn't push us forward.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #59
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…

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…

If only the web made it easier to completely revamp someone else's pages... Reddit is a great example - on mobile, I still use the "reddit is fun" application, which is a solid piece of work. It's lighter than the old Reddit, not to mention the shitshow the new Reddit is. It has much better UX than the webpage. I'd use it on my PC if I could. All this is possible, because right now, APIs change slower than webpages, so if a service is publishing a functional enough API, there is a way to fix problems with the official interface.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

skohan wrote: post #73
KaiserPro wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browsers are getting more and more performant. 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 ca…

Performance is a detail which is often lost from the mobile/web discussion. Yes there are many reasons for good web-apps to exist, and they can often deliver a very good experience on modern hardware. But conceptually, the idea that all software should run on top of a compatibility layer, with many restrictions and performance considerations compared to running directly on the OS is a strange one. It’s an ecological…

> It’s an ecological concern as well: how many gigawatts of electricity a day is spent fetching react.js?

I've been asking questions like this for years now, mostly as rhetorical devices, but I swear one day I'll try to get data and compose a chart of "how much your bloated product is contributing to climate change".

Post reply on HN