111–120 of 587 posts
In my dev shop, I always advise clients to look into website MVP over apps unless IT IS CRITICAL to the functionality. Websites can always bring back ppl who were initially uninterested. Faster development/instant updates. Better tracking and UX anazyling.
Edit: also better collaboration tools.
I am moving towards "Windows app first"; Windows still has dominant market share among Desktop users. You might impress investors and developers with Mac and Linux support, but far too many people are developing for platforms where the users are not and wondering why their stuff isn't catching on.
Windows OS has a dominant market share yes, but do those people download and install a lot of desktop applications? Especially on a platform like Windows, where a browser can do almost anything a native app can do?
For instance I use em client as a mail program and fastmail for the back end. It's a lot like MS Outlook except that it actually works. I prefer it to GMail.
With the rush to Electron we see developers leaving so much performance on the table, particularly with the rapidly increasing core counts.
There's also an argument that the "web" is no longer an open platform but is now becoming the "Google Platform". For instance you cannot trust conventional web sites from a privacy viewpoint now that most of them have numerous third-party trackers, download content from multiple CDNs, etc. This deviance is not so normalized for desktop apps.
Given the fact that most people are already maxed out on apps on their device with just things like facebook and youtube, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to install your app just to try it out. With a progressive web app if they like your app they can add it to their device home screen without installing via the app store and without using up space on their device. Also don't need to pay Apple $100 a ye…
> With a progressive web app if they like your app they can add it to their device home screen Does anyone even know they can do that? I've never seen anyone do it "in the wild". Would love to see any stats around usage of pwa's added to home screen.
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True. It's also worth noting that a $5/mo VPS can get you surprisingly far with respect to well-designed websites and services.
You shouldn't run a production environment on a single $5/mo VPS.
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On iOS you won’t get notifications or be able to run anything in the background. Ok, but what are the downsides?
As a user notifications are a problem, but as an app developer they absolutely work to drive engagement, which is why so many apps use them. So if you’re trying to run a business that’s a pretty important thing.
"No one wants to download apps anymore" I stopped reading there. The major advantage of the App Store (primarily for consumer apps though) is the fact that there's some kind of filtering at place. If I find a quality app, I want to actually pay for it. In fact, if it's a good app - then I prefer to pay, as it often ensures some kind of continuity in the app's lifecycle.
What kind of filtering is that? The fact that there is (hopefully) no malware? - A browser should prevent that as well and has similar failure rate as app review. The app store doesn't tell me anything about whether it's useful or of high quality or anything. From my perspective many apps are single tab browsers with additional spying capabilities.
As a developer, I also prefer writing native apps (iOS and Swift), but I certainly understand the occasional disadvantages here too. This is in fact why I'm also developing a Flutter app at the moment - we needed a cross platform MVP but there's too little time and resources to develop for both platforms. But given enough time and resources (e.g. post MVP) I'd mostly go native.
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Most of the points in the article are for the benefit of the developer (easier updating, lower dev cost, fewer platforms) and not for the benefit of the end user. If the goal is to make a product better for yourself then make a web application. If your goal is to make a product users will like then make mobile applications. The article talks about how users don't install apps but signing up for a website (enter email…
Just because everyone and their mother adds a signup flow just to be able to use their web app doesn't mean it has to be done that way. You can add the signup flow after you've already demonstrated the value to the user and when it would provide additional value, like saving things to your account. An anonymous user on the web is equivalent to some anonymous user downloading your app from the app store.
For a mobile app, you can store data locally or on a server keyed to the user without any potential for loss and without a signup.
Given the fact that most people are already maxed out on apps on their device with just things like facebook and youtube, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to install your app just to try it out. With a progressive web app if they like your app they can add it to their device home screen without installing via the app store and without using up space on their device. Also don't need to pay Apple $100 a ye…
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You shouldn't run a production environment on a single $5/mo VPS.
It depends on your speed, concurrent user capacity, and uptime requirements (among other things). I run two production servers off two separate $5/mo VPSs, one getting a few thousand hits a day. No issues whatsoever.
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> >you're going to be hard pressed to get people to install your app just to try it out > In fact, the statistics prove[1] that this is false. Most app installs are to try it out, and promptly delete it. Most users will delete your app shortly after installing it. I'm really not following how this disproves what was being said. They were saying it's difficult to get people to even install for a test run, and you're s…
>They were saying it's difficult to get people to even install for a test run How is it difficult to get someone to install something for a test run when like 90% of app installs are test runs? So you're saying it's difficult to get someone to install your app at all, and that has nothing to do with your product or your marketing, but it has something to do with the technology? And the PWA experience of pinning thing…
The link you shared does not provide any statistics about the amount of installs relative to didn't-installs. It only deals with the set of people who have already installed, which says nothing to prove or disprove the point in contention (that increasing the set of people who have installed at all is difficult).
> So you're saying it's difficult to get someone to install your app at all
Yes [they are].
> and that has nothing to do with your product or your marketing, but it has something to do with the technology?
Based only on what they wrote, not necessarily. They only seem to be saying that the statistics you provided do not support your conclusion:
>> you're going to be hard pressed to get people to install your app just to try it out
> In fact, the statistics prove[1] that this is false. Most app installs are to try it out, and promptly delete it. Most users will delete your app shortly after installing it.