101–110 of 184 posts
I don't agree with the overall premise that native apps will disappear. I agree that certain apps, such as the static content Wix example, don't need to exist. I found the article unconvincing. The core argument is that native apps will consolidate into larger social media apps as part of an in-app app? That may be the case for China, but not the US. Even if that did happen in the US, that means you are still buildin…
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> 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 again…
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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…
Is there a _convenient_ way to bill the user for microtransactions and subsriptions, after you have added the page to the home screen? As far as I know, the web alternatives are miles behind the convenience of ”click the side button twice to confirm this payment” that an app provides.
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…
BTW, no one needs to read the article, but if you’re here I guess it’s probably too late.
He’s actually arguing with his six-years-in-the-past self, who thought people wanted lots and lots of pointless shovelware apps. He’s now realized this isn’t the case, but has swung too far the other way and now sees no reason for apps. I think most people realized all along apps weren’t good for everything. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great for some things.
My favorite part is where one of his reasons the end is near is that people only have 100 or so apps on their phone and only use ~30 regularly. Right. Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
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…
Majority of the content on these apps is native and not html/js. They have a small amount of content on the settings screens in html/js but all of the main view code is native. For an app with complex layouts and content like facebook, html/js scroll performance would be far too slow. You can easily verify this by running the application with UIAutomator turned on which will show you the widgets being used on screen.
Native is faster because it's not layout and control agnostic. So you get controls like recyclerview which recycle view elements while scrolling large lists to keep animations smoooth. Sure, you can implement that in javascript too, but the javascript can't beat a native c++ implementation which is also GPU accelerated. This is also the reason why frameworks like React Native and Flutter were born. They use javascript/dart but render all UI content natively which allows them to maintain smooth 60fps animations.
To be honest, I wouldn't like mobile going the html/js way at all. Html/js has moved to desktop with electron and the results aren't that great. They take up huge amounts of memory ( gmail web on chrome takes up 500mb of ram on my machine, also slack is a noteworthy mention). Native desktop apps take up a fraction of that memory. For the sake of accessibility we have significantly sacrificed performance. I can't wait for webassembly to be widely adopted so that the browser can move away from html/js. Google has a nifty tool called ArcWelder which allows android apps to run in chrome. Apple has already announced support for running iOS apps on Mac. Would people really want to use html/js apps if they have native and more performant apps available on their platform?
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…
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…
> 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 e…