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Are apps even that relevant anymore?

tinyprojects.dev

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Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#11

Post by oblib »

I have almost no apps on my iPhone, and rarely use it other than calls, text, News, photos and maps. When I use it for web surfing, which is how I access News, I use Firefox, not Safari.

As for myself, I decided from the start not to develop "apps" for iOS or Android and instead keep building "web apps" instead. My apps are all business tools so I really don't need any special access or permissions to make them usable.

I will say LocalStorage sucks and I wasted too much time trying to make it not suck. In the end I gave up so Apple's and others decisions to stomp on it won't really affect me or my apps' users.

But Local-First assets and data management are something that developers will have to demand and there seems to be little thrust for that right now. Still, the shine is most certainly wearing off the hype developers were attracted by for these platforms so we might start seeing some movement that direction soon now.

I've been working on a local-first, offline-first, web app for desktop PCs that uses CouchDB installed on the user's PC instead of a CouchDB in the Cloud. Used this way with a web app CouchDB is somewhat akin to a sandboxed runtime engine for web apps on the client side. And the increase in performance of the app is quite noticeable. I think it's fair to say it runs at near native speed.

Configured with service workers to run offline first the web app only checks the server to see if any updates have been issued and if not it never sends any data over the internet.

It's very easy to provide the user an option to sync their local CouchDB with one in the Cloud, and they can turn that option on and off. When it's on they can access their data with any device and "Live Sync" the data between the Cloud CouchDB and their Desktop CouchDB.

Now, it's beyond my skills to develop it but it seems to me that a sandboxed runtime engine for web apps on mobile devices would be a good thing for us all. Of course, I don't think Apple and Google think so, but they do most definitely depend on indie developers to entice people to use their devices.

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#12

Post by endemic »

api wrote: post #2

I try avoid installing apps unless it's something I really want and the app is far better than the web site. Apps these days are loaded with spyware. I assume that any mobile app will track me as much as it can possibly get away with. It's almost like voluntarily installing malware. Web sites track too of course, but their capacity to do so is more limited. I fully revoke location, camera, and microphone from the bro…

Yeah, native apps are basically a black box in terms of what data gets “sent home.” At least with blockers such as uBlock Origin, scripts/requests directly from known tracking domains are denied.

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#13

Post by 1123581321 »

Native apps are still more pleasant and performant enough that they make users happier than mobile web apps and PWAs. Web apps have become better, so native apps are not mandatory to achieve acceptable levels of performance, but at the same time, the cost of developing and releasing a good native app has fallen, so the utility of native relative to incrementally improving a mobile web app is still quite good.

Developers may not like that this is the case, but I expect users will like being provided a better experience for some time, and that we’re likely to see companies develop natively for new platforms faster than native apps for mature devices will be folded.

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#14

Post by muunbo »

There are challenges retaining users and bringing them back to a webapp instead of a native app. That being said I also am hugely in favour of web apps because the likelihood of people visiting my site is higher than them downloading my app. So user acquisition is easier but retention is hard. I do like the idea of email notifications as a replacement for push notifications - I think others such as Twitter/FB notifications could also work.

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#15

Post by schwartzworld »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #4

There are many reasons: 1. They want the distribution effect of the app store. You can go from zero to king overnight if the app store features your product. 2. Unless you're building a dumb wrapper around a CRUD backend app, most apps need access to the state of the art API. Especially if you're aiming high, chances are, you won't be able to find a new app idea without using the new APIs because the old APIs have be…

#2 is just wrong. lots of powerful apps do most of their work on the back end, and lots more could just as easily be built with web apis.

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

pwinnski wrote: post #7

This was what Jobs initially claimed to want, and Apple several times acted to enforce. For a while they were really negative on apps that were simply wrappers around websites. But the market spoke, and now Apple seems to be very much on the other side of things along with nearly every company out there. Some possible reasons: Bookmarks to websites get buried in long ever-growing lists of bookmarks, while installed a…

[deleted]

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#17

Post by Sloppy »

The argument was, the web and its tech is too slow for phones, we need apps.

This is no longer true and apps are a pain in the rear when it comes to all the integrations you have for mobile aware sites.

How can app content be crawled, don't ask it's a major pain. How do you track usage like site clicks, ouch! How about integrations like commenting or site support chat, good luck, there might be one for your app.

Not to mention the 30% vig to Apple and Google, or the lock-in.

Many thought apps would bring money back into what sites were giving away and ok, it did -- for Apple and Google.

Can we please stop making "apps" now?

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#19

Post by lupinglade »

Please stop making terrible web apps - all these "revolutionary" re-invent-the-wheel frameworks are not making things any better, they are still a major pain to use and highly inefficient. Native apps will always have a better experience for anything other than general web browsing/reading/searching.

Re: Are apps even that relevant anymore?

#20

Post by egfx »

cglong wrote: post #10
pwinnski wrote: post #7

This was what Jobs initially claimed to want, and Apple several times acted to enforce. For a while they were really negative on apps that were simply wrappers around websites. But the market spoke, and now Apple seems to be very much on the other side of things along with nearly every company out there. Some possible reasons: Bookmarks to websites get buried in long ever-growing lists of bookmarks, while installed a…

Almost all of those have been solved by Android's PWA implementation. I can go to an enabled site and add it to my apps list. After that, it looks and acts like any other app on the device [except that it doesn't take up any space on my phone :)]

iOS has PWA too although severely limited, notably in the areas of webcam and push support. And other proprietary phone features like contact lists.
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