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

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

#61

Post by bphogan »

cft wrote: post #37
icebraining wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you find a web app you like, you can put it front and center on your Home screen. Just open the web app on your iPhone or iPod touch, tap the plus sign, and then tap “Add to Home screen.” A Web Clip will be added to your Home screen automatically for easy, one-tap access. http://www.apple.com/webapps/whatarewebapps.html

not sure about android, and 80% of users will not do this (like they do not use bookmarklets). Also many web apps require you to re-login after a certain period, which adds even more pain compared to apps.

"many web apps" do. But they don't have to. That's a choice the developer makes. That's super easy to fix, too.

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

#62

Post by bphogan »

comedian wrote: post #51
pavel_lishin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

no it was not. hence the need for "mobile" versions of websites and various hacks to make the web work on mobile devices.

that's not the web's fault... that's the fault of most developers doing the web wrong, refusing to separate content from presentation.

If mobile users only need service-type apps, the web can provide that. Programmers just have to write the screens.

The Web is a dumb terminal. You fill in a form, press XMIT or the equivalent, and get the next screen. Just because someone decided that the content needs to be jammed in a 900px table cell doesn't mean the web can't do mobile too.

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

#63

Post by bphogan »

georgieporgie wrote: post #36
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…

That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear. And it still holds true in many cases. Microsoft Outlook, in many ways an example of both great and horrible desktop software, still holds the email client majority: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/ Web apps are great when you get along with the designer's UI decisions. When you have a fast network c…

Agreed. And for some apps, where you need to work offline, native is great. But for apps that require a network connection to work, I don't see the point of a native app.

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

#64

Post by bphogan »

The motivating factor I've seen is the fact that somehow, people got it in their head that in order to be legitimate, the "app" has to be in the App Store. This is one reason why we have a mobile app, which offers nothing we couldn't already do with jQuery Mobile. We're not using the accelerometer. We're displaying data.

But "being in the app store" is more important to our users right now.

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

#65

Post by michaelpinto »

You can knock apps all you like but what Jay Sullivan hasn't done is to give us a clear reason why we need Firefox as a mobile browser, or even why it's so much better than Chrome. Firefox was a breath of fresh air in a world that was owned by IE, but it seems to have lost a core focus. And ironically the one browser my friends keep talking about on mobile platforms is Opera...

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

#66

Post by slipperyp »

I think a couple interesting things are happening.

It's becoming more obvious to everybody that good mobile applications are not cheap. This isn't news, but I think the fact that it's widely understood is new within the past year or so.

Also, supporting multiple platforms tends to linearly multiply costs.

Also, good web based mobile apps are getting "more possible" with new technologies so there are reactions kind of like what this author seems to be saying is a done deal. The idea that mobile apps are dead is totally absurd. I mean, ask anyone on Android who's used maps.google.com on their phone (which is totally amazing) whether they have uninstalled the Google Maps app - it's just not happening.

There are two things that are important that the author seems to be ignoring - first is the fact that developing a good mobile web based app isn't easy or cheap either. The costs of supporting a gajillion mobile device web browsers and form factors won't multiply directly with the number of platforms out there, but there will be many, many platform/browser/form-factor specific bugs and annoyances to deal with. Second is the fact that regardless of how awesome canvas / mojito / etc. all get, afaik there is no model in the future where mobile web-based apps have an ability to do something like interact with the local data sitting on the device in other formats (like people / calendar) or with other devices that the mobile app developer can take advantage of (bump / beam). Rich interactions like that can let the mobile app developer build a much cooler experience.

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

#67

Post by curveship »

georgieporgie wrote: post #36
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…

That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear. And it still holds true in many cases. Microsoft Outlook, in many ways an example of both great and horrible desktop software, still holds the email client majority: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/ Web apps are great when you get along with the designer's UI decisions. When you have a fast network c…

Outlook? The "majority" email client? Really? From your source:

"The fine print

The email client a person is using can only be detected if images are displayed. This can give an inflated weighting to email clients that display images by default, such as Outlook 2000 and the iPhone. It will also provide a lesser weighting to those that block images by default such as Gmail and Outlook 2007. Those email clients that aren't capable of displaying images, such as older Blackberry models and other mobile devices cannot be included in this study."

Outlook isn't nearly the majority email client, it's just the one most likely to not block img bugs.

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

#68

Post by drewcrawford »

dmix wrote: post #7
codyrobbins wrote: post #5

No. Somebody please stop this guy. After reading this I feel about him like the machines must have when they sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Web apps are to native mobile apps as Java apps are to native desktop apps: ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience. With some notable exceptions I think they can be a pragmatically motivated stopgap step (in regards…

> 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…

> Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly.

Your argument assumes that building good web applications is merely a function of tools. It's not.

We have a performance-per-watt wall, plus a heat wall, plus a weight wall in mobile hardware.

There is a reason that Apple is pushing C-based development without as much as a garbage collector, it's not just the stubbornness of Jobs. It's because a dynamic language with state-of-the-art VMs struggles hard to do basic smooth animations on current-gen mobile hardware, and will continue to struggle, for at least the next five releases of Nitro.

You're going to need something like a battery revolution to build the mobile web app panacea that you want.

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

#69

Post by calebmpeterson »

codyrobbins wrote: post #5

No. Somebody please stop this guy. After reading this I feel about him like the machines must have when they sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Web apps are to native mobile apps as Java apps are to native desktop apps: ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience. With some notable exceptions I think they can be a pragmatically motivated stopgap step (in regards…

I realize you're referring to Swing Java apps, and I won't argue on their behalf for a second. However the SWT library is a dream of a native toolkit experience if you're writing a client app in Java. It's fast, does a good job of working across a wide variety of platforms (Win32, Cocoa, GTK, and I think Motif), and is extremely well documented.

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

#70

Post by InclinedPlane »

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.

So? The web was not designed for video. It wasn't designed for dynamic interactivity either or applications at all, actually. Yet here we are.
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