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Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

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Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#31

Post by swalsh »

shareme wrote: post #24
ThomPete wrote: post #17

I think it's important to keep something straight here. If you are going for the consumer market and some parts of the B2B market then yes mobile will keep advancing. But you aren't going to do the design, programming, your taxes or any other labor intensive work or creation on your mobile. So yes we probably underestimate it, but if we believe in that, then we are most probably also underestimating how much both des…

You assume of course that there will never be a device powerful enough to match desktop. Should I remind you that the chip in the that SIm card is in fact the same cpu chip that was used in Apple IIs? In next ten years you will see design,programming, etc done on tablets

I think a large part of it is also form factor. My phone could have the power of 3 super computers, but i'd still choose my laptop over it. I prefer a larger screen, and a real keyboard.

For a mobile device to replace my desktop/laptop user interfaces + form factors are going to need some rapid advances.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#32

Post by jbail »

bignoggins wrote: post #27
jbail wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how mobile web fits into this. Sure, native apps are great, but I'd much prefer to not need to switch between a bunch of native apps and just use my phone's web browser. Mobile web apps like Facebook prove that you can build a non-trivial app that runs in a web browser and have the experience be so good that people don't even care about the native app version (at least everyone I know just uses Facebook righ…

I've seen the opposite. Almost everyone I know uses the native facebook app versus going to m.facebook.com. Most people only use a few websites/apps on their phones, and I think it's just simpler to tap on the app icon rather than start up mobile safari and type m.facebook.com.

These people have heard of bookmarks, right? You can bookmark a website and put the icon right on your home screen. I visit HN all the time from my phone, but I definitely don't type news.ycombinator.com every time.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#33

Post by amirnathoo »

agscala wrote: post #22

While I think the idea of this article is true, I think it's a bit unfair to compare the number of mobile apps to the number of web sites. Yes, there may be 350 million websites, but how many of those actually offer a valuable service? I think that the number of worthwhile websites is easily less than 400k. Same with the phone app market: there may be 400k apps, but most are crap. Honestly, I think that the web and m…

Yes, this isn't exactly a comprehensive study, I just looked up some ballpark figures to get an idea and was really surprised by just how big the diff was between where consumer attention vs developer attention seemed to be.

I'm not sure it makes sense to think of it in terms of number of 'useful' website vs mobile apps today by some definition of 'useful' though. Even if you expect the ratio of useful / not-useful to decline at 40M Android apps vs 400K you'd still expect that most of the top useful 100 apps in 3 years' time haven't been conceived yet and will be very different from today's.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#34

Post by marknutter »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #30
bignoggins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the opposite. Almost everyone I know uses the native facebook app versus going to m.facebook.com. Most people only use a few websites/apps on their phones, and I think it's just simpler to tap on the app icon rather than start up mobile safari and type m.facebook.com.

The "native" facebook app is just an html5 webapp believe it or not.

Is this true? Do you have a source?

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#35

Post by klochner »

jbail wrote: post #32
bignoggins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the opposite. Almost everyone I know uses the native facebook app versus going to m.facebook.com. Most people only use a few websites/apps on their phones, and I think it's just simpler to tap on the app icon rather than start up mobile safari and type m.facebook.com.

These people have heard of bookmarks, right? You can bookmark a website and put the icon right on your home screen. I visit HN all the time from my phone, but I definitely don't type news.ycombinator.com every time.

. . . or just google "HN news"

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#36

Post by steder »

agscala wrote: post #22

While I think the idea of this article is true, I think it's a bit unfair to compare the number of mobile apps to the number of web sites. Yes, there may be 350 million websites, but how many of those actually offer a valuable service? I think that the number of worthwhile websites is easily less than 400k. Same with the phone app market: there may be 400k apps, but most are crap. Honestly, I think that the web and m…

Agreed, The 350M websites to 400K apps comparison is completely silly.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#37

Post by brador »

Tossrock wrote: post #8

This is a pretty bold premise; I think mobile web consumption probably represents a pretty large fraction of those minutes. Having a web app that works well both for desktop and mobile seems more important than a native mobile app, to me.

If they included games in that then I'd say over 90% of that "mobile app use" time block is games or facebook for non-tech users. Games are better made as native apps due to audio issues and facebook is facebook. Hence, the articles dataset needs clarification before a firm conclusion can be made..

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#38

Post by jonstjohn »

Personally, I find most native apps to be much better designed for mobile devices than mobile websites. I know this is changing with newer web technologies, but the reality is that the mobile device provides a completely different set of options that mobile web will have a hard time catching up on. I'm thinking about things related to the hardware, such as near-field communication - or things related to processes that are not running inside the browser, e.g., push notifications.

To me, the possibilities with a mobile device are far greater than what lives within the browser. As much as I love the open standards of the web, and have become a software develop in their midst, there is something that really inspires the imagination about mobile devices that goes beyond the browser.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#39

Post by kmfrk »

People who are surprised about the time spent on mobile devices have obviously never been in a waiting room nor public transportation.

Since the iPhone, people have had a chance to kill "dead time" which would otherwise have been spent staring into walls and windows. Twitter's microblogging and -communication, of course, has exacerbated this where we see celebrities who tweet when there is downtime on the set where they are shooting.

I think it's completely ridiculous to say that this is something particular to mobile apps rather than mobile proper.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#40

Post by gwern »

rhizome wrote: post #15
mindstab wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. Desktop apps were great in the 90s because they leverage the local machine's speed and hardware (there weren't any mp3 or jukebox webapps in the 90s, games etc). But as the browser and web got more powerful and we started moving around more and having more computers (work, laptop, home) the centrality of "the cloud" because a selling point and for many applic…

We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. History tells us that this "balance" is a mirage. It's a see-saw with a foundation based on thick vs. thin clients, i.e. where the horsepower is located.

I always liked the metaphor of the 'wheel of reincarnation' from 1968 (!): http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html (Read the linked PDF paper, better than the HTML summary.)
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