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The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

venturebeat.com

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Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#41

Post by 5hoom »

v21 wrote: post #18

I'm sympathetic to what he's saying. It is painful to develop lots of separate platforms. But I work making games. And so this promised land is still way over the horizon. We're only just getting to the point where a HTML5 game can be notable as anything other than a tech demo on the desktop. It'll be another few years before we reach that point for mobile.

Agreed.

There are always going to be classes of applications that need every bit of performance they can squeeze out of their host platform, and will be written native to that platform.

Web apps are very useful things, but this "native code is dead" line has been touted before and it was wrong then too.

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#42

Post by thom »

simonw wrote: post #17
codyrobbins wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the current popularity of web apps over desktop apps is driven by two different motivating factors: social and centralized storage. The nature of the Web makes it well suited to building social apps on top of it. It would be hard to build social apps on an application layer that didn’t transcend physical platforms, because then there would be platform-induced delineations between the social groups that could…

Web apps beat native apps because there's no install step, no upgrade step and hyperlinks provide the ultimate way for different apps to communicate with each other.

There _is_ an install step to almost all web apps, and it generally involves having to fill out a boring form, clicking through from a confirmation email, and trying to remember a username and password every week for the rest of the app's useful life.

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#43

Post by NHQ »

I would love to see browser become the primary interface for everything interweb (speaking as a web app developer). But this article would be more believable and reassuring if native mobile browser makers would make with filling the native functionality gap already. I mean access to contacts, cameras, mic, phone, bluetooth, file system, everything. They don't even offer all those yet on the desktop. The browser vendors are so far behind their own potential.

But: I think ChromeOS will be a big deal some day.

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#44

Post by NHQ »

extension wrote: post #3

Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do. Yes, we can finally relegate this obsolete dinosaur to the dustbin of history once we fai…

Moreover Yahoo as the dinosaur slayer !

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#45

Post by comedian »

commanda wrote: post #31
dmix wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear. Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly. It's still in alpha stages. When building mobile apps has matured and if they still have…

>But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores. Conversely, would you say that a kid in grade 5 who has bad scores is going to have a great job when he grows up, just you wait and see? We can only judge the mobile web as a platform (if one can even say that it is one platform and not many) by what it offers on mobile handsets today, not by what we hope it will one day becom…

Here's the fact: The web is a computing paradigm that was not designed for mobile.

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#46

Post by phatbyte »

peterwwillis wrote: post #20

I feel like anyone who makes an argument that Node.js is "the future" is making the same case that a polluted natural environment is "the future". A horrifying vision of what could be reality unless we make it better. Friends don't let friends make a career out of programming in JavaScript.

Really ? JS is an amazing language, much better then say PHP. And trust me, there are people building careers out of PHP. JS correctly used can do amazing things.

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#47

Post by phatbyte »

Wasn't someone from Wired who said that mobile apps were going to replace web apps, and so the web as dead ??

And now, we have Yahoo saying "no no no, web is the way to go, look at us !!".

Quite frankly, this type of discussions sucks and are totally irrelevant. Let the market decide, don't be a palm reader, as you might end up with your palm in your face.

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#49

Post by pavel_lishin »

comedian wrote: post #45
commanda wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores. Conversely, would you say that a kid in grade 5 who has bad scores is going to have a great job when he grows up, just you wait and see? We can only judge the mobile web as a platform (if one can even say that it is one platform and not many) by what it offers on mobile handsets today, not by what we hope it will one day becom…

Here's the fact: The web is a computing paradigm that was not designed for mobile.

A mobile device is just another client. The web was designed to be agnostic in that regard, was it not?

Re: The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

#50

Post by azov »

> tools that make web apps look and behave more like native apps [will somehow help web apps kill native apps]

You can't kill anything by trying to imitate it.

Especially when you have constraints that ensure that your imitation will always be lagging behind in terms of features and performance.

Web and mobile apps simply offer different tradeoffs between reach, features, and development costs and, as such, have every reason to coexist.

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