The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? • Hacker News Board

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#121

Post by olau » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #62

buboard wrote: 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

A significant number of the subscribers. There were at the time something like 800k of them. 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 i…

Did your old company adjust for selection bias?

It seems to me the category of people who have gone to the length to install an app is perhaps going to spend more time with the content compared to the full set of people interacting with the content.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#122

Post by sodafountan » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

What the author doesn't mention is that apps have become increasingly easier to write as time has gone on. Not only do we have better native languages that you can write apps with (Swift and Kotlin) but we have incredible cross-platform tools as well in the forms of Xamarin and React-Native.

I've personally been working with React-Native over the past year and it's just as easy as writing React code for the web (if you're using expo), once people understand this it'll only be a matter of time before web-dev teams adopt it. Historically the problems with app development is that it was a lot harder than web development and often required you to learn a new language and framework in order to get anything functional, this is no longer the case.

I'd actually argue that there will be more apps going into the future as the technology needed to build them simplifies.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#123

Post by elvirs » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

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…

I think people actually prefer using decent mobile web apps over native apps and app vendors are actually actively fighting it by putting annoying 'get the app' link overlaying content on mobile web. they are trying to push people as much as as they can to force them to download the damn native app. you don't see any app publisher putting a link to mobile web app over the content inside the native app prompting people to use mobile web app over native app. For most of the content websites I use I don't feel the need for the app (twitter, reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) but they are making the mobile web experience horrible by putting that content overlaying link on every damn page.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#124

Post by ken » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

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…

> 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 ...

Does this finally work? I remember first reading about this many years ago. I tried to make a simplest-possible webpage that I could "add to homescreen" and have it work like a native app. Unfortunately, there were too many critical features that were missing, broken, or unreliable.

Every couple years I've tried again, and every time I've failed. Does it finally work? Is there any example of a webpage which can successfully pretend it's a phone app?

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#125

Post by pvinis » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

dvh wrote: post #27

pvinis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It opened on the medium app on iOS for me, and I could read it.

Do you realize how ironic that is considering the title of article...

I do. I just haven't taken the time to delete this app from my phone, as one of the 70 I don't use.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#126

Post by zepto » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

elvirs wrote: post #123

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…

I think people actually prefer using decent mobile web apps over native apps and app vendors are actually actively fighting it by putting annoying 'get the app' link overlaying content on mobile web. they are trying to push people as much as as they can to force them to download the damn native app. you don't see any app publisher putting a link to mobile web app over the content inside the native app prompting peopl…

Or, the mobile app experience is better, and the overlay link is a convenience, rather than “actively fighting”.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#127

Post by zepto » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

zeroname wrote: post #40

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…

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…

Medium is an absurd example because medium pages are the kind of content that the web was originally designed for so it’s unsurprising that an app is unnecessary.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#128

Post by fabrice_d » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:48 PM UTC

jaegerpicker wrote: post #94

barrystaes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, Apple is good at keeping their web stack good enough for "regular" web browsing but not feature full enough to compete with their native toolkits. And of course, doesn't allow alternative implementations of the web stack on their platform...

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#129

Post by HillaryBriss » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #15

"The vision was that, one day, every legal entity would have its own mobile app." Yes, that was a classic bad idea. There were magazine apps which simply contained JPEG files of all the pages. In both orientations, even. That was both unnecessary [1] and annoying [2]. The successful apps are now all from the big players. We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era. [1] https://xkcd.com/1367/ [2] https://xkcd.com/1174…

> We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era.

I think you've summarized the heart of the article here and I totally agree with you.

When OP says "the end is near" I think we can interpret it to mean that it's the end of the big growth era, the end of the era where that technology and demand for expertise in that technology dominates other technologies, the end of the era where new companies and their technologists are wise to invest their time in apps and learning apps.

The vast majority of apps (esp. android) make too little money to justify the expense required to create and maintain. They're not profit centers. They're loss centers.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#130

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

fabrice_d wrote: post #128

jaegerpicker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, Apple is good at keeping their web stack good enough for "regular" web browsing but not feature full enough to compete with their native toolkits. And of course, doesn't allow alternative implementations of the web stack on their platform...

Isn’t there a security argument for limiting native APIs to apps from the App Store?