Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#21

Post by drivebyacct2 » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 10:19 PM UTC

gaborcselle wrote: post #18

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #12

>My proposal would be to let mobile browsers download small apps and execute them within the browser window Is this a sick joke? Besides the fact that the browser can trivially redirect to the exact app in the app store, I'm already annoyed that ABC wants me to download their god damn app everytime I accidentally click on one of their articles on Google News. Not only that, but if the user has the app installed they'…

Most publishers that have terrible apps also have terrible sites. Apps that get very little usage today are hardly going to get better if users don't start using them. Building an easier onramp for apps is going to increase app usage and cause publishers to build better apps.

That's pretty much the opposite of what I want. And what they want regardless of whether or not they know it.

Firefox OS is going to continue to open peoples' eyes to web apps and make people wonder why they scrambled around wasting so much money to make native news apps that do nothing but render a webkit view anyway. As another person has pointed out, there are very increasingly few things that webapps can't do that native apps can, especially on mobile where they're unprivileged anyway.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#22

Post by drivebyacct2 » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 10:20 PM UTC

gaborcselle wrote: post #16

daleharvey wrote: post #13

Take a look at open web apps / chrome apps / phonegap / the Firefox OS project (I work on the latter). The line between apps and websites is getting thinner by the day, and getting very close to being non existent. Also the 'apps are an island' comment is quite specific to iOS, Android has a very elegant system for allowing apps to interact with each other, one which the web is adopting (web intents/activities). The…

Both iOS and Android allow apps interacting with each other. iOS has URL schemes, Android has Intents which are obviously far more elegant. There are tricks you can play to have apps intercept web page visits on Android [1], but other than that, web apps are disconnected from native apps. [1] Intent Filters: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Inten...

That's ... one way to characterize Intent Filters. They enable, more or less, exactly what you talk about in the article, as I mentioned in my other comment.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#23

Post by moocow01 » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 10:52 PM UTC

"let mobile browsers download small apps and execute them within the browser window"

If you want to know how this turns out you only have to look at the evolution of browser plugins (applets->flash,silverlight,unity,etc) that has taken place for the last 20 years. We could also decide to skip all that and just concentrate on moving forward the HTML spec and tools to make better mobile web applications.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#24

Post by phil » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 10:53 PM UTC

gaborcselle wrote: post #19

webXL wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take out that automatic nonsense and I think he makes a good proposal. A URL can currently load a local app rather than a page in webkit. Only in this case, there would be some markup that would tell the browser to check for the installed app, perhaps the browser would present some unobtrusive indicator that a hybrid app was available to download. Just keep the address bar and the rest of the browser chrome there, sw…

Thanks for seeing the value in my (somewhat avantgarde) argument. I'd be happy with the app availability indicator as well. The native app would still remain within the confines of the browser, so that you could easily navigate away. People don't install apps today because it takes time to download them, and the browsing experience is interrupted by switching to a different app.

Ah, I misunderstood your proposal. This would actually be a great update and is pretty plausible.

Like, a streamlined way of installing an app and the ability to launch it with some URL the first time. Relatively easy, not a platform threat.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#25

Post by lukifer » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 11:01 PM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #17

gaborcselle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing apps to access browser cookies is a solution to the problem that apps and websites are disconnected and don't know about each other's state. That's a different aspect than the one you're talking about. Yes, you can build responsive sites, but what you can do in the browser is limited, especially when it comes to flaky connections that are still very typical. To take the example in the post a little bit furth…

web apps can know about your network state and can pre-cache content you're about to read next. ( http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/workingoffthegrid/ )

Last I checked, implementations of offline caching were unusably buggy. Has this improved?

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#26

Post by pspeter3 » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 11:24 PM UTC

I think it would be far more useful for Android Browser/Chrome and iOS Safari to support special tags for rendering apps in their native style. Ideally have it be the same set of tags and Android and iOS figure out how they want to render them.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#27

Post by daleharvey » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 11:29 PM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #25

daleharvey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web apps can know about your network state and can pre-cache content you're about to read next. ( http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/workingoffthegrid/ )

Last I checked, implementations of offline caching were unusably buggy. Has this improved?

Its rarely straighforward, but definitely usable

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#28

Post by notatoad » Tue, Dec 04, 2012, 11:57 PM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #25

daleharvey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web apps can know about your network state and can pre-cache content you're about to read next. ( http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/workingoffthegrid/ )

Last I checked, implementations of offline caching were unusably buggy. Has this improved?

It works. LocalStorage API is pretty solid and widely supported, if you're doing some simple buffering to handle connectivity issues it's awesome, except that it prompts the user for permission to store data. WebSQL is solid where it's implemented, and IndexedDB is solid where it's implemented but unfortunately there isn't a lot of overlap (screw you apple). and AppCache works great, but figuring out how it works in the first place is annoying as hell.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#29

Post by jiggy2011 » Wed, Dec 05, 2012, 1:02 AM UTC

webXL wrote: post #9

jiggy2011 wrote: post #6

Automatically downloading and executing binary code from the web. What could possibly go wrong? Isn't NaCL supposed to in part solve this?

Take out that automatic nonsense and I think he makes a good proposal. A URL can currently load a local app rather than a page in webkit. Only in this case, there would be some markup that would tell the browser to check for the installed app, perhaps the browser would present some unobtrusive indicator that a hybrid app was available to download. Just keep the address bar and the rest of the browser chrome there, sw…

The internet doesn't need more confirm/deny dialogues.

Re: Beyond App Stores: Weaving Apps into the Web

#30

Post by awo » Wed, Dec 05, 2012, 1:21 AM UTC

gaborcselle wrote: post #3

signalsignal wrote: post #2

I don't know how else to put this but local, compiled apps run faster than web apps. And the problems laid out in the article are indicative of development choices, for example not being able to pick up where one left off in a local app as opposed to in a browser app in the NYT example.

Running a compiled app instead of a web page, as laid out in the post, would have that benefit. The central theme of the post is that the local app and the webpage are disconnected - the fact that you can't pick up where you left off in the other is not a development choice.

The analogy of native apps being an island is a good one. But I'd argue that native apps is a pretty fucking big island ;) Check out this chart - http://www.emarketer.com/Mobile/Article.aspx?R=1009155

People use apps on their phones, not the web. Mobile web is a subpar experience. LTE will fix some of the speed issues. HTML5...well that's going to take a lot longer than people think. Cool technology but ANY lag with a gesture makes the touch interaction feel broken.

I've been thinking on this problem for the past 4 months. Seems like you're pretty passionate about it too. It's a big problem for users, and companies are sitting back and ignoring it. I have lots of theories as to why. Would love to meet up in person and share thoughts.