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The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

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Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#161

Post by Terretta »

cft wrote: post #147
fabrice_d wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That will be irrelevant in 7 years (time horizon in the article) since Apples's device share will continue to dwindle relative to Android. It will be the same as the historical OSX/Windows ratio. They already signaled that by focusing on pushing up the price per phone versus the number of phones as their stock price driver.

Arguing “market share” as a headcount instead of, say, disposable income share or % of mobile spend, is like arguing the 1% is irrelevant because they’re only 1 in 100.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#162

Post by Terretta »

coldcode wrote: post #82
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…

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.

That app, or rather its descendent, still works, and is arguably preferable for privacy and battery.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#163

Post by taobility »

Apocryphon wrote: post #52
origami777 wrote: post #7

There are domains of problems that can be solved with the WeChat model. Money, shopping, paying utilities, ordering food, etc, make sense to have in one app. I don't know if I'd want my task planner or email/cal app in there.

Congrats, you have then moved into a walled garden inside another walled garden.

For Mini program in WeChat, they are independent with iOS or Android. So it just inside one broader walled garden

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#164

Post by taobility »

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…

1. Not all apps need multi-thread capability, and handle offline scenarios, like pay utility bills, book tickets, order food etc 2. GUI is most easy part for web app to mock. WeChat mini-program has its own UI controls

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#165

Post by ArchTypical »

asdff wrote: post #152
salvar wrote: post #49

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?

Anecdotally, plenty of my friends have 16gb phones still, and often are deleting and reinstalling apps like instagram/snapchat/anything you can dispense for a few days to free up storage to actually use the device. Want to record a 2 minute video? Better delete an app or else recording will abruptly cease. While I still had a 16gb phone, it got to the point where I wasn't reliably getting emails pushed to the device…

This is very common around anyone who is a heavy phone user for photos or as their main digital device.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#166

Post by KaiserPro »

taobility wrote: post #164
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…

1. Not all apps need multi-thread capability, and handle offline scenarios, like pay utility bills, book tickets, order food etc 2. GUI is most easy part for web app to mock. WeChat mini-program has its own UI controls

> Not all apps need multi-thread[ing]

you are correct, not all apps need multi-threading, but it sure is useful. Especially if you don't like callbacks. Blocking the UI to do a HTTP call with no network isn't not a good move.

> GUI is most easy part for web app to mock.

Yes, but thats not my original point. Mocking a UI in a webapp easy to do, but very hard to do fast, smooth, offline capable, with all the features you want, and cross platform.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#168

Post by HillaryBriss »

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…

> I think people actually prefer using decent mobile web apps over native apps ...

agree. right or wrong, as an android user, i feel less vulnerable, less bloated, less violated, using a web app than i do installing a native app.

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#169

Post by buboard »

iainmerrick wrote: post #71
buboard wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in every way. imagine having to switch between apps to read every article in HN

That would be okay if there were a Hacker News app that could display all the stories. I mean, I agree with you that simple web pages are best for simple news and articles. But I don’t think you can immediately generalize that to “apps don’t scale”.

an app for every website would not scale icon-wise. and it would destroy the hypertext

Re: The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

#170

Post by marcelgarus »

fit2rule wrote: post #26

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…

What you're describing sounds an awful lot like Flutter's architecture to me, which ships the rendering engine + code as native ARM code to any supported OS. Currently it targets Android, iOS & Fuchsia, but support for Windows and MacOS is in the works; the only requirement for the OS is that it supports OpenGL.
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