171–180 of 184 posts
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…
Unity is a very good tool for this.
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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”.
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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.…
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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".
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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.
And they haven’t, so that argument seems to have held up pretty well.
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…
No, it doesn't, I'm sorry. It's often a far cry from how a native app would be behave, both in terms of usability and performance.
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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…
So the problem appears to be ios in this case. I personally have 3 web apps on my android phones home screen and they offer a decent experience same as a native app. They are not processor or graphics intensive apps but the same applies for a lot of store apps
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So the problem appears to be ios in this case. I personally have 3 web apps on my android phones home screen and they offer a decent experience same as a native app. They are not processor or graphics intensive apps but the same applies for a lot of store apps
This could also mean that Android native apps are just worse than iOS native apps.
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And they haven’t, so that argument seems to have held up pretty well.
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious. Of course desktop apps haven’t disappear entirely, and they won’t anytime soon. But entire classes of apps have largely disappeared, especially internal corporate apps.