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The web apps that will eat mobile

kruschecompany.com

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Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#31

Post by pjmlp »

djanogo wrote: post #12

There are two ways to write mobile app... 1. Write native app's for both the platforms, pay once and cry once. 2. Write web mobile apps, realize how sub par the experience is, rewrite in native. Pay twice, loose competitive advantage, and cry twice. This is what, 3rd or 4th iteration of web app's are going to take over mobile cycle?. My first instinct about any blog that promotes this turd is, either their business d…

They are clearly trying to sell their business "If you have further questions regarding the PWA development, reach out to the K&C team as right now we’re actively working in this field".

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#32

Post by pjmlp »

chii wrote: post #18
djanogo wrote: post #12

There are two ways to write mobile app... 1. Write native app's for both the platforms, pay once and cry once. 2. Write web mobile apps, realize how sub par the experience is, rewrite in native. Pay twice, loose competitive advantage, and cry twice. This is what, 3rd or 4th iteration of web app's are going to take over mobile cycle?. My first instinct about any blog that promotes this turd is, either their business d…

> realize how sub par the [mobile web app] experience is why is this a given?

A proven experience since Symbian introduced the Web Runtime in 2011, with a few dead OSes pushing for a Web only experience?

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#33

Post by jaegerpicker »

bsbechtel wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion here, but I just don't see PWAs living up to the hype. Yes, there are lots of technical advantages, they're catching up to native apps in capabilities, and there is reduced friction by bypassing app stores. However, the ingrained user behavior of downloading apps from the app store, trust of knowing what you're downloading by doing so (yes, even on Android), and browsability on mobile falling behind…

I very much agree, we evaluated PWA vs native recently and found PWA(on iOS) to be a really poor decisions. We likely build one for Android as the experience is better there but it's very poor on iOS and unlikely to get better anytime soon(next 1-2 years).

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#34

Post by pjmlp »

bsbechtel wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion here, but I just don't see PWAs living up to the hype. Yes, there are lots of technical advantages, they're catching up to native apps in capabilities, and there is reduced friction by bypassing app stores. However, the ingrained user behavior of downloading apps from the app store, trust of knowing what you're downloading by doing so (yes, even on Android), and browsability on mobile falling behind…

The service worker concept feels like a kludge to do something that native just gets for free without extra hoops.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#35

Post by oblio »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #33
bsbechtel wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion here, but I just don't see PWAs living up to the hype. Yes, there are lots of technical advantages, they're catching up to native apps in capabilities, and there is reduced friction by bypassing app stores. However, the ingrained user behavior of downloading apps from the app store, trust of knowing what you're downloading by doing so (yes, even on Android), and browsability on mobile falling behind…

I very much agree, we evaluated PWA vs native recently and found PWA(on iOS) to be a really poor decisions. We likely build one for Android as the experience is better there but it's very poor on iOS and unlikely to get better anytime soon(next 1-2 years).

At this point, isn't Apple actively delaying PWAs? It seems like it, based on their recent sluggishness in adopting web standards in Safari.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#36

Post by zwieback »

bsbechtel wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion here, but I just don't see PWAs living up to the hype. Yes, there are lots of technical advantages, they're catching up to native apps in capabilities, and there is reduced friction by bypassing app stores. However, the ingrained user behavior of downloading apps from the app store, trust of knowing what you're downloading by doing so (yes, even on Android), and browsability on mobile falling behind…

Depends on the user, I might be an outlier but my "ingrained behavior" is to not download an app unless I absolutely have to.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#37

Post by [deleted] »

zwieback wrote: post #36
bsbechtel wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion here, but I just don't see PWAs living up to the hype. Yes, there are lots of technical advantages, they're catching up to native apps in capabilities, and there is reduced friction by bypassing app stores. However, the ingrained user behavior of downloading apps from the app store, trust of knowing what you're downloading by doing so (yes, even on Android), and browsability on mobile falling behind…

Depends on the user, I might be an outlier but my "ingrained behavior" is to not download an app unless I absolutely have to.

[deleted]

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#38

Post by elboru »

hrayr wrote: post #29
mikece wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple didn't have the app store and it's 30% rake of all transactional revenue at the time. Jobs was somewhat notorious about being adamantly opposed to something one day and then announcing to the world that Apple had created a best-in-class product that he previously said they would never make. I seem to recall him saying they would never make a tablet device -- that it wasn't so critical to surf the web on the toi…

Also don't forget his famous comments on no one will watch video on small screens and no need for big phones. I don't think any of his comments were lack of insight, rather it was him playing the market until he was ready.

Come on, so even his mistakes were not mistakes?

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#39

Post by thinkingemote »

PWAs feel to me as if they are a way for websites to get around adblocking or any kind of extra browser extension. They are the equivalent as a website wrapper webview as a native app. I equate a PWA similar to an Electron-based stand alone web app (e.g. like Discord).

Am I incorrect in my assumptions about PWAs? I know you can run them in browsers, but the intended use is to launch them in their own browser window as a separate process, right?

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#40

Post by mikece »

xamarinthrw wrote: post #11
mikece wrote: post #2

Progressive Web Apps have the potential to be massively disruptive to apps as we know them now... and that's before the near-native speeds that WASM will bring are factored into the equation. After making the mistake of going all-in on Xamarin in 2014 I realized, much to my chagrin, that the future of mobile is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, there are cases where certain features require vendor-native apps for now,…

Can you tell us a bit about your Xamarin experience? I want to create an app where the users would be regular mom and pop- my primary users would be windows and Android and a few iOS (iphone). Would you recommend I go the Xamarin way? Who is xamarin good for and who not?

I refer to my period as a Xamarin contractor as "bomb technician programming." The biggest advantage of Xamarin is also the greatest source of its problems: anyone who programs C# can start a Xamarin.Forms app and get a proof-of-concept sufficiently advanced to show their boss who will run it up the chain and get it approved as a project. And THEN the devs -- who are awesome web developers -- begin to realize just how much they don't know about mobile and that they've coded themselves into more than a few corners and aren't sure how to get out... and I know this from first-hand experience from my first couple Xamarin projects. There comes a point where you realize that knowing C# is only part of the solution. You wouldn't take an accomplished ASP.NET MVC developer who has only done web work and assign them to an Akka.net or advanced, massively concurrent, highly-multi-threaded Windows Service project and expect them to succeed right away just because it's all C#. Same idea... different platform.

Xamarin is great for people who want to use C# to write mobile apps and know the underlying platforms well enough to know where the landmines are and how to side-step them. There's undeniable time-savings in being able to write non-platform-specific code one time and just link to it from the Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android project. It's also possible to write cross platform apps very, very quickly with Xamarin.Forms if you understand where the issues are there as well...

But it's even faster to just write a mobile web site. When I am asked for my recommendations for a mobile app idea my first question always is: "Can this be done with a mobile web site (which is PWA these days)?" If yes, why go further? If you really want the app store exposure then packing up your PWA as a hybrid app isn't all that difficult so mobile web is still my first choice. It's not unless you have specific, unambiguous needs that mobile web or hybrid cannot handle that going native -- Xamarin or otherwise -- is recommended.

Keep it simple, deliver value, and go home happy and a little richer.

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