101–110 of 209 posts
And here we are, with Silicon Valley as the gate-keeper instead.
In 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 st…
The "HTML5 will catch up" argument is a common fallacy. It assumes native apps are standing still, when in fact they are moving rapidly forward. If anything, the gap continues to grow. The web isn't even in their cross-hairs, there's just so much effort for each native platform to keep surging ahead of the others. If you think Android and iOS are "done", consider where they are headed and you can see they are barely…
I'm sorry, but there are only so many ways you can display a CRUD application. I don't see the next versions of Twitter and Instagram pushing the hardware much more than they are today..
It seems 'mobile apps' are like Flash was in the 90's, basically a way to take full control over the UX to achieve some particular goal. Given the preponderance of such apps it seems as if home screens are due for a make over that looks more like iPod music libraries than 'desktop.' Basically something which supports dozens if not hundreds of apps on a device.
The entirety of current web design practice is taking full control over the UX. Gone are the days when you sent a GET and got an html document back, the most interactive element of which was a textarea box. The other reason flash was a pain, incidentally, was because it was easy to bog down a client computer with overzealous flash stuff... just like the current tendency to use javascript to do all your rendering and…
In 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 st…
The "HTML5 will catch up" argument is a common fallacy. It assumes native apps are standing still, when in fact they are moving rapidly forward. If anything, the gap continues to grow. The web isn't even in their cross-hairs, there's just so much effort for each native platform to keep surging ahead of the others. If you think Android and iOS are "done", consider where they are headed and you can see they are barely…
When it comes to mobile, I think we are in the "web exists and the tools are almost good enough but the networks suck" phase. When the mobile networks get fast enough, I suspect most applications will just be websites. Of course there will always be some applications that are built for native because of performance or they have some fancy touch-based interaction.
And text:
People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop:
And more of their mobile time using apps, not the web:
This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing.
Moreover, there are signs that it will only get worse. Ask any web company and they will tell you that they value app users more than web users. This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Resources are going to app development over web development. As the mobile web UX further deteriorates, the momentum toward apps will only increase.
The likely end state is the web becomes a niche product used for things like 1) trying a service before you download the app, 2) consuming long tail content (e.g. link to a niche blog from Twitter or Facebook feed).
This will hurt long-term innovation from a number of reasons:
1) Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic that favors the status quo over new innovations. Popular apps get home screen placement, get used more, get ranked higher in app stores, make more money, can pay more for distribution, etc. The end state will probably be like cable TV – a few dominant channels/apps that sit on users’ home screens and everything else relegated to lower tiers or irrelevance.
2) Apps are heavily controlled by the dominant app stores owners, Apple and Google. Google and Apple control what apps are allowed to exist, how apps are built, what apps get promoted, and charge a 30% tax on revenues.
Most worrisome: they reject entire classes of apps without stated reasons or allowing for recourse (e.g. Apple has rejected all apps related to Bitcoin). The open architecture of the web led to an incredible era of experimentation. Many startups are controversial when they are first founded. What if AOL or some other central gatekeeper had controlled the web, and developers had to ask permission to create Google, Youtube, eBay, Paypal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Sadly, this is where we’re headed on mobile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Why should the app stores decide what can and cannot be on our phones This is not a freedom problem. You have the freedom to buy an Android device, and you have the freedom to install any apk you want without ever even opening the Google app store. Moreover, Google even allows 3rd party app stores on their devices. And of course these new players are acting as middlemen, but you are forgetting the fundamental differ…
There are no gatekeepers, who decide what gets published and what doesn't, anymore. Apple routinely rejects applications to their App store. Have you not read any of the numerous stories where app devs get denied? This is not a freedom problem. You have the freedom to buy an Android device, and you have the freedom to install any apk you want without ever even opening the Google app store. The freedom to do something…
Yes, I am aware. And yes, you are right. But the gatekeeping on the app stores has nothing to do with the music, movie or even book industry. Could they be more lenient? Yes, but you can't denied that the game has indeed changed.
>I'm speculating of course, but real world anecdotes would lead me to believe that a very small % of the population even knows what an APK is.
I would say that you are right again. And you are also right, maybe this is a debate about freedom, but personally, I don't consider having to go to settings, security and checking a box, a large barrier to freedom. If you actually seek freedom, it's only a few (acceptable) steps away.
We recently rewrote our mobile website to be a much more modern experience ( http://m.trulia.com ). Our ability to easily deploy and test ideas while behaving almost exactly like our iOS / Android apps is quite powerful. It's also added a lot to the value of a web visitor, which is important given the SEO nature of our content. In general, I agree with the sentiment that the mobile web is only now getting it's feet u…
I'd say 80% of developers who choose native do so for performance, and 20% do it because the app store and home screen placement is better for branding and content discovery than just sticking up your website on a server somewhere.
I think there's room for some sort of hybrid product but I'm not sure what it would look like. Maybe a mobile browser with super-aggressive caching (like not even a HEAD request for JS and CSS) and the ability to improve performance for the foreground page to the point where it's near-native. I'd use that for the mobile websites that I use less frequently, and continue to download the native apps for the things I use every day.
I think Facebook is an instructive example here. They tried for a long time to make their native app (for Android, anyway) just a wrapper over the mobile web client, but they could never get the performance all the way there. They went native and have seen great results. They resisted as long as they could but eventually the products had to diverge. I'd say 80% of developers who choose native do so for performance, a…