App ecosystems help perpetuate oligopolies.
The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
91–100 of 184 posts
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#92This 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…
Your points are all valid, but they were also all valid in 1998 when people told me that desktop apps weren’t going to be replaced by web apps.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#93> 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.
I've seen probably most of my iOS friends open the app switcher and kill every single app after they're done showing me something. It's not worth it to try to explain it to anyone because it's such an ingrained muscle memory now.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#94This 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…
Almost nothing you said here is true. Add to homescreen is a horrid broken mess on iOS, caching is broken/bugging as hell on chrome and safari, webworkers are really horrid battery drains and again don’t work on iOS. Wrapping a native HTML5 mixed with native code results in a buggy, spaghetti code mess of an app.
Also literally NONE of the biggest most popular apps are HTML5/native. FB, Twitter, Uber, etc... are all native apps.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? O…
More accurate description, with fewer words:
Google's business model, in broad strokes, is selling advertisement space.
Apple's business model, in broad strokes, is selling hardware.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
How much electricity is used to power casual games on mobile phones? People should stop playing games, they are contributing to climate change.
How much electricity is spent by developers using Electron based apps like VS Code and Slack and npm packages during their work hours? We should all develop in terminals, with no GUIs and no GPU usage. Only in non-bloated languages like C and ASM. Anything else is crime against the climate.
All sites should also be text only (like the motherfucking website), no images, especially hero ones.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#97This article is shortsighted to me. Is it the end of mobile apps? No of course not, webapps are gaining features of native apps and will run more like a native app. The real difference will be the app delivery method. Is it the web or an App Store. An App is an App, if it’s written in Dart, Js, Swift, and C++ it doesn’t matter it’s still an app experience. That experience is fundamentally better than the web page and still has all the downsides of an app also. How we deliver the app experience may change but I don’t think it will. Is there are difference for th emend user if they have 100+ shortcuts vs 100+ apps from the App Store? What we are seeing is a competive market where you have to offer real value to attract users. No much different than the current indie game market. It’s completely overwhelmed with numbers of options and users are sticking with the top level of apps/games. Maybe the delivery of apps changes but honestly I doubt that as discovery is much better in the App Store.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I have to think that bitcoin etc are far worse offenders.
And it seems that server usage consumes around 1% of the USA energy budget. Heating, industry and transportation are most of that list. Not sure apps are going to show up.
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#99> Chances are, if you take away the manufacturer’s pre-installed apps that you can’t delete, you have, at most, 100 apps.
I don't see how this can be the first point in arguing that the end of mobile apps is near. Imagine saying, "The end of desktop apps are near, people will only put up with 100 third-party apps on their computers these days!"
Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
I have to think that bitcoin etc are far worse offenders. And it seems that server usage consumes around 1% of the USA energy budget. Heating, industry and transportation are most of that list. Not sure apps are going to show up.
Yeah, ceilings should be easy to establish. The max possible cost of bloat on mobile is (number of mobile users * average phone battery) / average charges per day. The max possible waste on backend will be roughly constrained by the energy use of data centres, and that value is available.
I don't expect the answer to come out very high, relative to other things. But it would be good to see an absolute value, if only to drive home the point that everything your software externalizes to your users has costs multiplied by the number of those users.