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Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

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Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#191

Post by EduardoBautista »

chaostheory wrote: post #58
egeozcan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (paraphrasing) No PWA competes with a native experience even development wise I'm personally too spoiled by the React debugging experience, and I'm saying this as a developer who mainly does C#. On the other hand, I know many developers who can't stand a line of JavaScript. The answer is here a huge "it depends, really".

For those who can't stand javascript, typescript was made for you

Typescript is just a huge bandage. It doesn't change that JavaScript has horrible tooling that changes every full moon. Not to mention it still keeps many of JavaScript's horrible warts.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#192

Post by cturhan »

egeozcan wrote: post #48
endorphone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been hearing the same pitch for literally years. Heck, I've made some of them myself: "This is it, people! Native apps have been rendered unnecessary!" No PWA competes with a native experience. Not performance wise, not usability wise, and ultimately for the developer not even development wise. It may still make a lot of sense, and there are a lot of arguments for web apps, but the enthusiasm in this discussion…

> (paraphrasing) No PWA competes with a native experience even development wise I'm personally too spoiled by the React debugging experience, and I'm saying this as a developer who mainly does C#. On the other hand, I know many developers who can't stand a line of JavaScript. The answer is here a huge "it depends, really".

What is the actual problem during debugging react?

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#193

Post by TomK32 »

timdavila wrote: post #46
have_faith wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I run a PWA and can track this based on the "standalone" property. But what's more telling is customer requests. It's a confusing request that it seems like many potential customers haven't seen before. Lots of people ask me to "just put it in the app store" despite having an FAQ with instructions on how to add to the home screen. Many more say they will become customers "when you have an app" Because of this, I'm wo…

Users always have to be educated, whether it's PWA or how to pronounce the @ symbol a mere 20 years ago.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#194

Post by jMyles »

wvenable wrote: post #174
diminoten wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes longer to get to market with an app, especially if its your first. No contact with users == death.

But you also only get really once chance that with that user. Give them a crappy experience and they'll never come back. A web app is already starting at -100 points.

> Give them a crappy experience and they'll never come back.

Is that even true for a website though?

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#195

Post by rpedela »

wvenable wrote: post #174
diminoten wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes longer to get to market with an app, especially if its your first. No contact with users == death.

But you also only get really once chance that with that user. Give them a crappy experience and they'll never come back. A web app is already starting at -100 points.

In the early days, that is actually okay. Unless you did a large marketing campaign (you shouldn't), the number of people who never come back because of your crappy MVP will be small. And the group will likely be small enough where your product doesn't get a bad reputation either. But you absolutely need to get feedback from those users who never come back so that eventually the product gets better and gets traction. I think tools to collect that indirect feedback (e.g. click heatmaps) are more mature on web overall. Collecting direct feedback, talking to users, is equally hard regardless of web or mobile.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#196

Post by wasdfff »

guntars wrote: post #82
clarky07 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how so? click a button and download to device? now you have an icon that the user sees every day. How is the web better than that?

Are you saying you download more apps than you visit websites? I highly doubt it.

People only go to websites on mobile for one off things or they absolutely lack storage on their phone. Anything visited with any regularity demands an app instal, because bookmarks are clumsy on mobile and typing into the address bar on iOS at least has been frustrating since version 1 because of the lack of any spellcheck, even if you are very obviously typing a complete sentence or phrase, and how terrible moving the cursor can be with a touchscreen.

Not a lot of people know you can add a website to the homescreen, either.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#197

Post by johnday »

wvenable wrote: post #165
johnday wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by catastrophic? It's safe from the obvious things: * DB corruption / destruction: The database is backed up. * FS corruption / destruction: The production code is backed up with version control (obviously) and can be restored at the drop of a hat. * The server just randomly falls off the internet: It would take about 2 hours to get a new server up to the same point. What kind of problems could arise…

How frequently is that database backed up? How many hours of work are users going to lose? And you're going to wake up at 3:00am and take 2 hours to get a new server online? This is all fine for a service with a few thousand users that's not mission critical. But I assume the article is about building apps to be a real business not just a hobby. I run a few hobby sites under the same scenario as you but all my work s…

That all sounds very reasonable. Ours is a news website which publishes semi-frequently; so we'd probably lose about 5-10 articles on average. It's not just a hobby - it brings in more than a minimum job's worth per month at the moment and is growing fairly quickly, since we operate in a growing niche.

Like I said - it's all about your requirements, and for us $5/mo is just fine.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#198

Post by TACIXAT »

briandear wrote: post #51

If $100 per year for the Apple Developer program is too much, is whatever you’d be making an app for even worth it? Not saying app-first is or isn’t the answer, just questioning a criticism of an expense that’s comes out to $8.25 per month.

That expense isn't high, but you also have to own (unless something has changed in recent years) a Apple device to develop on and an Apple device to test on. I own a Linux laptop and an Android phone. If I wanted to write an iOS app I think I would be needing about $2k in devices.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#199

Post by pjmlp »

zanny wrote: post #123
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it's rare. Hell, I didn't even know I could do it until I was developing a PWA. I've never seen a website that offers it. It would be very nice if phones put that feature front-and-center. My guess is that they sideline it so the web can't compete with their native apps.

It really reeks of the same kind of anticompetitive behavior that got MS in trouble twenty years ago. Apple is way worse in this regard, but Google is still incentivized to keep at least PWAs from being first class citizens on Android because they don't get their app store sales cuts or microtransaction money from them. And at least on Android you can install other browsers. People consider the hegemony of Chrome to…

They do it on ChromeOS though, so I guess it is politics as usual.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#200

Post by nostrademons »

sinatra wrote: post #14

IMHO, the reasons mentioned are not very convincing. Your goal, when starting a product, is to find whether you serve a real user need or not. So, start with a website or a mobile app depending on what suits your users needs better. Where would a user naturally go (web or mobile) for that need? That's the platform you start with.

Very frequently, the right answer for an MVP is something like "an e-mail newsletter" or "a Salesforce extension" or "a CSV file" or "an IDE plug-in" or "throwing a pizza party for your target market and performing the service for them yourself". I've seen startups charge $3K+/month to dump a CSV file on a client's FTP server. Go where the user can most conveniently make use of your product; for a lot of businesses, that is neither app nor website.
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