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Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

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Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#51

Post by declan »

It looks like the folks at Atavist did the right thing. As far as I can tell they created a publishing platform that lets folks format thousands of words of text and photos and videos, which is a very good use case for a web browser. Plus, contributors can add links, italics, subheds, captions, etc. This is not the best use case for mobile apps.

They have a beautiful digital magazine that doesn't need to live in a native app -- and had no compelling reason to.

When we started building our smart news app ( more info at https://recent.io/ ) we considered creating a non-native web app and took a few steps in that direction. But we rely on touch gestures a lot, require no keyboard input except for searching, update news recommendations minute-by-minute, and wanted to appear in the app stores, so we went down the iOS and Android paths instead.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#52

Post by fabioyy »

i hear the same bullshit since the time when iphone was released ( and without apps support )

yet, there isn't a single "amazing" case of webapp. ( the same for xamarin, phonegap, cordova, name_your_cross_app_development_here )

i call it laziness to learn how to code native apps.

the only cross development that works, is for games ( almost all top 10 mobile games are in unreal or unity ( or cocosx ) )

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#53

Post by mintplant »

_delirium wrote: post #25
mark_l_watson wrote: post #7

+1 for the article As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site. Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome. My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind…

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…

>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user.

On Android, at least, you can disable notifications on a per-app basis. Press and hold on a notification, touch the icon that appears, and uncheck the notifications checkbox on the next screen.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#54

Post by ergothus »

fabioyy wrote: post #52

i hear the same bullshit since the time when iphone was released ( and without apps support ) yet, there isn't a single "amazing" case of webapp. ( the same for xamarin, phonegap, cordova, name_your_cross_app_development_here ) i call it laziness to learn how to code native apps. the only cross development that works, is for games ( almost all top 10 mobile games are in unreal or unity ( or cocosx ) )

It's about your content, not a universal rule.

Text content? Turns out the web is great, and you don't get much benefit from going native.

Highly interactive, multiple control, local database content? Turns out web sucks at it on mobile devices.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#55

Post by mintplant »

owencm wrote: post #39
st3fan wrote: post #38

How 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... ).

Service Workers are also in Firefox Nightly right now, but are hidden behind an about:config flag until the feature is fully baked.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

http://caniuse.com/serviceworkers

There's also the Application Cache, which has been fully supported in the stable versions for a while now.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Using_the_...

http://caniuse.com/offline-apps

And of course, FF for Android has an "Add to Homescreen" button too.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#56

Post by rebootthesystem »

Well, the most important thing you gain from moving your apps to the web is owning the relationship with your users. And that is HUGE.

With the Apple iOS App Store you are isolated from your users, it is very difficult and nearly impossible to build a list and keep in touch with them in a meaningful way. I am sure there are cases where this isn't true, but I think I can say this is probably the case for the vast majority of apps out there.

By being on the web it is your business, your platform and your users. Not Apple's (or whoever).

And, yes, depending on your niche, building an audience could be very difficult. Guess what? The vast majority of apps on the app store fail. I think we might actually be able to say success on the web might actually be easier.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#57

Post by 0x400614 »

_delirium wrote: post #25
mark_l_watson wrote: post #7

+1 for the article As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site. Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome. My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind…

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…

I had to kill the My Fitness Pal app on my Android because the notification dispatch was inside some kind of infinite loop where my phonr would not stop vibrating even after disabling notifications in their UI.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#58

Post by dominotw »

_delirium wrote: post #25
mark_l_watson wrote: post #7

+1 for the article As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site. Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome. My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind…

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…

>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications

I remember reading about this a while ago; not sure how widely implemented this feature is

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#59

Post by stephengillie »

mintplant wrote: post #53
_delirium wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. On Android, at least, you can disable notifications on a per-app basis. Press and hold on a notification, touch the icon that appears, and uncheck the notifications checkbox on the next screen.

This can be done via a checkbox on the app's info page. It's nice to know it can also be done directly from the notification too, that's even more convenient.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#60

Post by [deleted] »

tootie wrote: post #19

I'd add that if you intend to maintain a web site then adding support for apps (presumably multiple since cross-platform is still hard) then you are throttling your bandwidth to actually improve features and stability. I'm thinking of certain food delivery app that had enough bugs on their Android app, then I fell back to their mobile site and haven't looked back. They could have saved themselves probably a few milli…

[deleted]
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