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The Decline of the Mobile Web

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Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#161

Post by EGreg »

Companies care about user engagement, and that is driven by two major things: transactional notifications, and easy access. Apps provide both, while the web is a second class citizen on mobiles. Consider that web apps still cannot send In-App Notifications and can’t perform In-App Purchases. So, even if I do create a kick-ass web app, I would have to rely on — wait for it — SMS to deliver notifications to my users. I would have to rely on people manually typing in numbers in order to invite people, so viral spreading won’t be so great either. In short, even if we wanted to create a mobile web app instead — and we do — the ecosystem will select for the native apps in the long run.

And Apple, at least, is keeping things that way on purpose. Consider this dig at Google by the master himself, Steve Jobs — a few years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd-xXfIEpE

He was saying “for some reason” but really the reasons for choosing apps over web are enabled largely by these platforms themselves. Because they are more locked-down, they won’t allow too much integration, and it’s harder to get web apps to catch on.

That said, three years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there’s a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like WordPress for blogs or Git for version control.

Shameless plug: Qbix (my company) has been hard at work the last 3 years building an open, web-based platform that takes advantage of PhoneGap (Cordova) and emerging containers like MacGap and now WinJS! Write once, deploy anywhere, as a social app with contacts / roles / permissions / notifications / etc. working across all devices and integrated. So developers can focus on building the app and get best practices for virality and engagement (without annoying people) out of the box.

http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...

http://platform.qbix.com

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#162

Post by habosa »

yblu wrote: post #147
marknutter wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then again, you don't need to be the creators of Cocoa Touch to build high-performance iOS apps.

This. Anyone can make native fast for your average app, it takes a top-notch JS developer to make a similar web-app fast.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#163

Post by habosa »

wodenokoto wrote: post #127
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…

This was the main critique of the original article - that Apple and Google are blocking the open mobile web in order for native apps to thrive. Both Android and iOS are built around promoting apps. The web is a second class citizen. On iOS I would go as far as to say a third class citizen, since Apple are blocking the fast Javascript engine in native apps. This makes the idea of having an app as a simple web-wrapper…

I don't think that's a fair critique, at least not about Google. They are pushing JS with V8 as far as anyone besides maybe Mozilla. They also have made cross-platform Chrome/Android/iOS toolchains and in general promoted the use of apps based on web technologies. It's pretty clear that Google wants web apps to be awesome also, it's just hard.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#164

Post by habosa »

cousin_it wrote: post #133
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.

As lugg said, it took a long time for web apps to rival native apps in functionality, and there are still a lot of places where they don't (large files, graphics, etc). In ~3-5 years the class of web apps that are lightning fast on desktop now will be fast on mobile.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#165

Post by malandrew »

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…

FWIW, Dave Fetterman, the Facebook's former head of dev relations who helped create the Facebook developer platform (developer.facebook.com), later led mobile at Facebook and was the one who made the call to go HTML5 and then made the call to switch over to native is back working on high performance HTML5 at famo.us as VP of Engineering.

There is still a future for for pure web apps that feel great. The framework will be released on Wednesday night.

disclaimer: I work at famous.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#166

Post by madads »

habosa wrote: post #163
wodenokoto wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the main critique of the original article - that Apple and Google are blocking the open mobile web in order for native apps to thrive. Both Android and iOS are built around promoting apps. The web is a second class citizen. On iOS I would go as far as to say a third class citizen, since Apple are blocking the fast Javascript engine in native apps. This makes the idea of having an app as a simple web-wrapper…

I don't think that's a fair critique, at least not about Google. They are pushing JS with V8 as far as anyone besides maybe Mozilla. They also have made cross-platform Chrome/Android/iOS toolchains and in general promoted the use of apps based on web technologies. It's pretty clear that Google wants web apps to be awesome also, it's just hard.

Google showing results that go directly to an App is an important piece of this whole puzzle: https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/webmasters/

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#167

Post by Iftheshoefits »

IpxqwidxG wrote: post #143
Iftheshoefits wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what you want to do. If all you're interested in is presenting a static(-ish) web page with some "extra" interaction, then sure. If you want to do anything that harnesses the hardware or computing capability of the device, or anything more complicated the most basic HTML-based UI, then native apps are the way to go. This is independent of whether we're talking about mobile or desktop.

I really hope WebGL is adopted for the computation intensive apps, but yes you're right for most consumer needs basic static(-ish) HTML5 format would be sufficient.

Access to various hardware devices like the camera, speakers, sensors and the like are "basic" on mobile devices but for which there isn't any real way to access from HTML5 in a way that is useful or complete. It could be done, but then one runs into the performance/efficiency (in both development and end-user experience) issue again.

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#168

Post by [deleted] »

georgemcbay wrote: post #6
rschmitty wrote: post #2

Am 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.

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#169

Post by [deleted] »

joshfraser wrote: post #92
protomyth wrote: post #60

Which is easier to code: a mobile app or a mobile website? The tools are much better for the mobile app and it is much easier to do cool stuff. Plus the testing time is much quicker. Path of least resistance and biggest wow.

I don't agree that mobile apps are easier to build than mobile websites. Certainly not for anyone with a background in building for the web.

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of the Mobile Web

#170

Post by increment_i »

The web may or may not be in decline, but why worry about it? Clients that consume services (be it web browsers, or apps or whatever) have always been in a state of flux. The web was hot, now apps are, then something else will be, then something else after that, ad infinitum. It sucks for developers, but then again things have always kinda sucked for developers.
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