Four points: a) Tooling: yes, it's still much easier to debug a native app than a pseudo-native app. b) "Emulating native leads to bad UX": this section is absolutely right. Stop hijacking scrolling and building in cruft. c) "Hassle-free web": absolutely right. You don't need an app for that. Just give us the information and let us have the basic interaction we want. No, you shouldn't present your menu as a PDF eithe…
Disclosure: I work on the website of a blue-chip dead-tree newspaper. But I agree. As someone else said in another comment, the basic requirements of a news site is, let's be honest, Web 0.5 stuff. Look, some text about stuff that happened! A picture of stuff happening! These are, shall we say, solved problems.
If there's anything where you wouldn't expect significant value-add from the native or pseudo-native experience, it would be news. Certainly as a consumer I have no news apps installed - I go to the website.
Web APIs are in essence becoming an abstraction layer between OS and applications. It's not just about browser anymore. Browser is just one of the host for these APIs. In next decade or so, we should have all the power built in to standards that eliminates pretty much any advantage that native application can possibly have - even for heavy duty 3D gaming and offline video editing scenarios. Web APIs will and should become the standard way of developing apps across platforms. There is neither a theoretical reason that this is impossible or any other viable alternative agreeable among OS providers.
There is nothing to concede or regret about. It's just how things evolve. Get over it.
So, the OP is adverse to the JavaScript single page app fad, because in his opinion it is overly complicated to try to get a web app to behave like a native app, and instead should embrace its "weby-ness"? Is he just thinking about developers who have to use the tools he does not like, or the consumer experience side of it too?
Single page apps are in my experience a massive faff.
They may look good, but they tend to break things like back/forwards have text that can't be copied and pasted.
This post leads me to believe the author probably assumes there will always only be a handful of native platforms. I think, if we're lucky, the ecosystem will be far more diverse. In the future I envision, noone in their right mind would ever think native is the way to go.
This post leads me to believe the author probably assumes there will always only be a handful of native platforms. No offense, but I'd trust PPK's beliefs about the mobile ecosystem more than any random HN user.
None taken. It's probably not worth arguing who is right or wrong since none of us can reasonably assume we know what the future will be, but I will say that in general (1) diversity in ecosystems is good. (2) Monopolies are bad. Given only these two basic assumptions I think it's obvious that there should / will be a push for more diversity in mobile, and thus a larger number of platforms to develop for.
This can only lead to one result which is for developers to want a unifying platform on which to develop. I would argue that this exists, and is improving. It's called the web and web browsers enable this unifying platform.
Answer me this: What is the point of a plethora of platforms, if nobody in their right mind develops native?
It seems we have different assumptions we're basing our arguments on. I get the impression that the huge diversity of linux distros is enabled primarily by the fact that more and more development these days is web and not native.
You're missing my point. There's no purpose in having a huge diversity of linux distros, if they're just glorified browser shells.
Unless you're making something that needs really good performance (3D gaming for example) building a hybrid app wins every time. Something based on Cordova (eg PhoneGap, Ionic) with Crosswalk can get you to about 90% of the performance of a native app, with about 1/2 of the development time because it's all built with web technology. 90% is easily good enough for most applications. Cordova wraps a uiWebView in some b…
Is a "win" for the developer necessarily a win for the users? Whose experience takes precedence?
I don't think the tools we use impact the user experience that much, certainly not as much as the designs we use or the UX choices we make. If a hybrid app has a bad user experience it'd probably still be a bad experience if it'd have been built as a native app instead.
The web works best as a document platform. All the UI tricks that web developers work on all end up managing something related to just browsing/reading a document. It's amazing that modern browsers/HTML just don't have this basic user experience down. Why is it virtually impossible to read long articles on a web browser? After 25 years, why do web designers need to create their own page transition mechanics for long-…
Likely this hasn't been done because it would require many very difficult, "subjective" decisions to be made i.e. which font, line-spacing, photo-viewer UI, etc.? Better to make no decision at all than to spawn a few dozen endless committee debates.
By contrast, corporations can more easily make these sort of decisions – by fiat – which is why native app frameworks are more "opinionated" / make more design decisions for you out of the box.
This topic is as much the story of two historical forms: the operating system GUI and the World Wide Web hypertext project as it is about two organizational forms: hierarchical corporations and decentralized design-by-committee non-profits / multiple competing corporations.
It does not matter what platform you choose (web or mobile), bad developers develop bad software. For every horribly designed, slow, bloated website you find, you can likely find a similar horribly designed, slow, bloated native app. I'm sure you've heard of garbage in garbage out. I view development as a craft and like most crafts, not everyone has the same level of skill. This does not reflect on the platform people choose. It reflects on the people themselves, their time investment, work ethic, priorities, approach, methodologies, etc. Like with most crafts, there is usually more than one way to accomplish something; some more eloquent than others. At a very basic level, both web and native apps share many commonalities; some sort of UI being rendered and interactions with data via API calls. As long as you can reach your goal, does it really matter how you got there? How about this; the debate is ridiculous. They both rock (or suck depending on your perspective).
So, the OP is adverse to the JavaScript single page app fad, because in his opinion it is overly complicated to try to get a web app to behave like a native app, and instead should embrace its "weby-ness"? Is he just thinking about developers who have to use the tools he does not like, or the consumer experience side of it too?
Single page apps are in my experience a massive faff. They may look good, but they tend to break things like back/forwards have text that can't be copied and pasted. Some have embedded video, which eats everything.
This logic is flawed. Disabling back/forwards, copy/paste. and embedding video has nothing to so with a website being a single page app.