Native apps are just a momentary crutch until Web standards on devices get better. Especially since most so-called apps are merely glorified Web pages in custom browsers.
Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
31–40 of 131 posts
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#32The web is a great publishing medium for magazines and news outlets. Apps are for doing stuff beyond passive browsing.
While apps have more capability, the web can do pretty much anything you need with content and data. The only time you really need an app is for CPU-intensive work or accessing hardware.
If you want to do any sort of custom drawing or animation you basically can't do it with the web, the performance just isn't there. You must stay on the specific fast paths offered by the browser or you're screwed.
So no, the web cannot do pretty much anything with content and data. The web can do very, very little with content & data, it is just often enough coverage for passive things like articles.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#33The thing about potentially having to wait two weeks to make an updated app available, and the control over your business that implies, makes my testicles suck up into my torso.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. But I suspect this is one reason companies like apps. I'm not sure whether it's my imagination, but this seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past year or two, and is no longer limited to apps from shady no-name companies. Apps from reputable companies used to try to have some plausible reason rela…
There's a web feature for push notifications; I got a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to enable it for Facebook the other day. It was easy enough to push No (since push notifications were one of the reasons I got rid of the @#$%er in the first place), but many people will still get those.
The fact that you can choose no is precisely what makes the Web so good. The fact that you can block ads at all, that you can disable JS, that the Tor Browser bundle can be so simple to use, that you can easily get URLs to things, that you can copy text, are all huge benefits of the Web.
Ever tried getting a URL to some Facebook content on mobile? The only way that I've found is to "Send as Message" (Facebook for Android only implements sharing inside Facebook, there's no way to share via email or anything like that), choose myself in the contacts list, then go to Messenger, open the link in a browser, and copy the URL from there. It's infuriating.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a web feature for push notifications; I got a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to enable it for Facebook the other day. It was easy enough to push No (since push notifications were one of the reasons I got rid of the @#$%er in the first place), but many people will still get those.
The fact that you can choose no is precisely what makes the Web so good. The fact that you can block ads at all, that you can disable JS, that the Tor Browser bundle can be so simple to use, that you can easily get URLs to things, that you can copy text, are all huge benefits of the Web. Ever tried getting a URL to some Facebook content on mobile? The only way that I've found is to "Send as Message" (Facebook for And…
You can turn off push notifications for normal apps on Android, too.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#36I suspect the reason many think they prefer apps is the one-click launch and the automated bookmark created on your screen. If a mobile browser behaved like an appstore (Search for website, See results, Click to Install, i.e. bookmark), you would have the same behavior, downloads, and most people would not be able to tell whether they are using an app, web app, or website.
Firefox OS has something like this. On Firefox Marketplace, you can submit a mobile website that serves a small manifest.json file and it will be indistinguishable from a native app. I've been praising this innovative approach so many times on HN, but I have to do it again---it elegantly solves a lot of the problems we're having with native apps, and it all mostly works and integrates fine with the OS (the idea could use some polishing but is good as a proof-of-concept). It's a shame that the OS itself never really took off.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#37It's sad it's taken people so long to realize it, but at least they're starting to get a clue. Who'd have thought that an app that's essentially a web browser tied to a single site was a bad idea that nobody would want to use?
If desktop and laptop users access your content/game/social network/whatever from a web page, it's probably best to have mobile users access it that way, too.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#38How do you deal with offline support? If I'm not connected and I want to read an article, where do I go? Can't open the website.
Did you run metrics to find out how many people are going to miss offline?
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#39How do you deal with offline support? If I'm not connected and I want to read an article, where do I go? Can't open the website. Did you run metrics to find out how many people are going to miss offline?
Actually, sites in Chrome can work fully offline today using Service Worker (http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/service-worker/introd...). And they can get users to add the site to their homescreen, so they have the full icon+offline experience (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing...).
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#40Ironically this article doesn't render in MobileSafari for me.