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The Decline of the Mobile Web

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Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#131

Post by marknutter »

bsaul wrote: post #128
elwell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Check out this attempt with the Sencha Touch Framework from a couple years ago: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...

This demo from sencha touch has always seemed dubious to me. I remember having coded extremely basic mobile web app with this framework and having had layency issues from almost day one. My guess is that what they are doing with their framework to get to this result is pretty far from a normal use.

Agrees but it was written by the people who created the framework so I'm sure they're much more aware of how to keep it performant.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#132

Post by just2n »

Maybe it's because you don't typically see an "app" that is just completely unusable on your device.

When the vast majority of simple websites (not even applications) have terrible experiences on mobile web browsers, is it really any surprise that users prefer using an app that at least puts effort into being usable?

HN and at least 80% of the linked articles I read on my commute have terrible mobile interfaces.

I really don't see the "performance" argument. It's unlikely anything you build natively is going to compete with a browser's raw HTML/CSS performance. That's something they do incredibly well. And really, that's all a static blog needs to be. I don't need your comments. I don't need your ads. I don't need your HTTPS. I don't need your massively broken up application that requires a GET for every asset on the page (and the 20+ JS files you've decided not to package together, none of which is needed). I don't need your parallax effects, your hover/click listeners, your scroll events, your damn lightboxes, or your image rotators.

At the end of the day, I don't use the mobile web very much. It's not because mobile web sucks. It's because nearly everything on the mobile web sucks.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#133

Post by cousin_it »

habosa wrote: post #108

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…

Sure, native apps have better performance on mobile. But the same thing is true on desktop, yet the web somehow stays popular on desktop. That suggests that the behavior of platform owners (Apple and Google) is the real reason for the popularity of apps on mobile, and performance is just a distraction.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#135

Post by methodover »

just2n wrote: post #132

Maybe it's because you don't typically see an "app" that is just completely unusable on your device. When the vast majority of simple websites (not even applications) have terrible experiences on mobile web browsers, is it really any surprise that users prefer using an app that at least puts effort into being usable? HN and at least 80% of the linked articles I read on my commute have terrible mobile interfaces. I re…

More than anything else, I wish simple web pages were vogue.

Complex web pages are a pain to maintain. They're a huge liability, really. And there's really no need for them to be so complex.

The only reason I can see is people who have little understanding of how web pages are constructed are usually the ones in charge of designing them.

... Maybe I should transition over to web design.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#136

Post by err4nt »

cpprototypes wrote: post #130

Security could become a big factor in web vs native. For example, I don't trust the facebook native app. I've used both the web and native versions and the native version is smoother and better. But I don't trust facebook. There's a lot of personal information on mobile phones these days and I don't want facebook accessing that data. For me, using the web version is much safer. And random apps on the app store from u…

Same thing for me - I uninstalled Facebook's app after hearing about how LinkedIN's new app was grabbing people's contact list without their knowledge.

Fool me once…

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#137

Post by tieTYT »

I think this article is about web sites, but if you're a game developer, it feels like google and apple are actively trying to kill off the web option, or at least don't care about it. It's easy to find complaints about how audio is terrible in HTML5 on mobile devices, but its been that way for years. I still don't think you can play two sounds simultaneously on mobile safari (eg: background music and a sound effect).

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#138

Post by briantakita »

stonogo wrote: post #77
ChuckMcM wrote: post #25

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…

Rendering on the client side is fast, especially on the newer high end devices like the S4 & the IPhone5. It will only continue to get faster.

The biggest issues are bandwidth/asset file sizes & using heavy-weight frameworks. They bog down the UX on mobile devices.

On my current project, I'm using browserify, Backbone, jQuery, & compiled Handlebars. The same codebase supports rendering on the web server, rendering on the web client, mobile web, & apps using PhoneGap. Things seem to be performing well, even on the S2.

Note: there are strange performance issues with the S4 stock browser.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#139

Post by Ingon »

While performance is often cited as the main reason for having a native app, I think that one of the biggest reasons to prefer native apps is usability. More concretely I can see the following:

- A web app/site is often an app within an app. This means that what usually works as an interface to this device is no longer true, or rather different. The gestures are different, how the app is treating them is different and so on.

- On the performance side the web apps suffer from UI delivery problem - the site must deliver both the app it self and the data for which you use this app. A native app have to work with the data only, and its not restricted to be always connected with the web.

- Another reason is that although the same on the surface mobile is actually shifting our usage patterns. Our usage is far less consistent, more spaced out, under more conditions and with smaller screens. The native apps work well here because their components are thought out to work under these conditions and of course tested for this.

- Finally because of the usage patterns we see some native apps more versed to cover specific use cases. This differs from the mobile web which just have everything the normal web has, but tested to work on mobile.

Some of this points of course can be tackled by html5 wrapped web apps. But this approach comes with own set of limitations and problems - we are compromising on both openness and performance sides. So while I want the mobile web to work, for now I think that native apps are winning.

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