121–130 of 209 posts
Apps have an enormous advantage when it comes to acces to the device like photos, camera, address book and notifications.
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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…
>Apple routinely rejects applications to their App store. Have you not read any of the numerous stories where app devs get denied? 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…
However, if I am starting a business, and most people don't know how to exercise that freedom to install an app from somewhere else, I am not going to get very far in my business if this is what is required for my end users to use my program. Therefore, I am not going to invest time in developing anything that requires that sort of installation, making it practically the same as not being able to do that at all.
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…
appcache does something like this and is something that Firefox OS is pushing.
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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.
Which particular development tools do you use that are easier than the mobile equivalents?
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…
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 much harder to accomplish.
But if the systems were actually optimized for open web, then content producers could build 1 web-app, that could have important logic and graphic stored offline in an app container, while still being just as functional via direct web access.
This could work great for 90% of all the apps that are basically just glorified websites.
This of course is the main mission of FirefoxOS.
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Facebook comes up a lot in these discussions and it's important to provide some context. Facebook's HTML5-first strategy pre-dated the launch of the original iPhone. In the first native mobile app they were simply rendering the mobile facebook site in a UIWebView. There are so many better ways to do HTML5 and HTML5/native hybrid apps these days. Check out the Basecamp app, for instance. It's every bit as good as Face…
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...
It will probably be based on cards as the unit of interaction.
And random apps on the app store from unknown developers? I trust those even less. I may install one if the list of permissions is very restricted and reasonable. But I don't like spending time looking at the permissions and trying to figure out if it's ok.
Another example is banking apps. I remember there was news a while ago that many banking apps were not handling passwords properly. If I use the web, I can see the SSL lock icon, inspect the certificate, and know that it's properly handled. I can't do that for a native app.