The Decline of the Mobile Web
cdixon.org
The Decline of the Mobile Web
1–10 of 209 posts
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#2Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#3> It is also why so many mobile websites are broken.
Many mobile websites are broken. On a mobile phone, both websites and "mobile websites" are broken.
If anyone is looking for a money-making idea, here's a website I use all the time -
On my desktop it takes me five seconds to use. On my Android HTC One it takes me maybe five minutes to use.
If someone made an equivalent Android app, or a functional mobile web site of course I'd use it. Actually - I'm an Android programmer and could do it myself, but am busy with other things at the moment to do it singlehandedly.
That is just one web site. Many web sites I use are designed for the desktop, and work horribly on smartphones. No wonder people go running for apps when the functionality pops up in one.
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#4Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?
Yes, you are, along with most users here. But it's not stopping companies from wanting to control UX entirely though a mobile application. One of the reasons for this is that in general, mobile webpage performance is complete ass. A thorough but by-no-means complete diagnosis of the problem can be found here: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#5If app is the best hire for the job then so be it. Ditto web when it is best. However the two dominant gatekeeper paradigm is scary.
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#6Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?
Nope, I don't want that either.
I also don't want every mobile webpage I visit to use some slow janky JavaScript framework to emulate native app behavior either because in my experience the user experience for those are universally worse than just trying to be a relatively normal web page (perhaps with some media queries for image sizes, etc) and letting the mobile web browser do its thing.
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#7Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?
Yes, you are, along with most users here. But it's not stopping companies from wanting to control UX entirely though a mobile application. One of the reasons for this is that in general, mobile webpage performance is complete ass. A thorough but by-no-means complete diagnosis of the problem can be found here: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
More control of UX sounds the reason people used Flash before web 2.0.
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#8The Flurry stats [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-S...] show 32% of user time is spent gaming; 17% on facebook; 9.5% on messaging and 4% on youtube - that's 62% for those of you keeping count.
That doesn't look like the end of the mobile web - that just looks like people spending a lot of time gaming and on facebook.
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#9In my opinion mobile web is yet to arrive, we have just gotten HTML5 standards finalized only about an year ago.
While native has had roughly seven years lead when it comes to providing quality online experience, web apps can beat native easily. And no it's not that web apps or web development or talent for mobile web development is limited or is the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is usually the vendors and support of standards in the existing breed of mobile browsers that destroy the web experience.
For example, Apple introduced this shitty non-standard swipe gesture feature on iPhone Safari/iOS7 that breaks so many things:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a...
But I think this will change with more competition among tablets and mobiles. IMHO, it is normal for the web to catch up a little later; but when it does native will find it hard to breath.
Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web
#10I'm of the view this is a lot of fuss about nothing. Big deal if people prefer apps over the "open" web. The reality is a large number of people use the likes of MSN and Yahoo as web home pages, and unless you were linked to from them they were unlikely to find you. The app launcher situation is an improvement over that.
The big problem is that dipping your toes into something via a website (assuming you don't hit an auth wall) is easier than finding then downloading an app.
Besides, a lot of these "web" apps are just things like Facebook or G+ which are no more open to scraping or any of the other supposed benefits of an open web than your average iOS or Android mobile clients are. The web has morphed into an unholy mix of the worst qualities of everything else.