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The web apps that will eat mobile

kruschecompany.com

51–60 of 105 posts

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#51
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, so even his mistakes were not mistakes?

Basically yes. This is his famous "reality distortion field."

Indeed. Somehow people even manage to forget that he died of a typically curable cancer because of his hubris.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#52
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's out of fashion already :-p

According to this article, yes, it is. On the other hand it is a really, really easy to convert a react native app to a web app with react so it might have been a very good choice of technology anyway.

Basically my thought when I chose RN.

Although, after building my backend with php + frameworks, I already have a web app.

Im just hoping I wont need to update an IOS app every time apple breaks it. Also, I'm looking to avoid buying an apple computer and doing the compiling only 1 time. I hope...

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#53

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…

> there is reduced friction by bypassing app stores

It's funny, because Microsoft seems to be actively encouraging/misleading developers to bundle their PWAs as "Microsoft Store apps".

Seems like Microsoft is looking at PWAs from the opposite angle - an opportunity to "liberate" users from Android/iOS stores lock users in to its store.

Will it work? That depends on all of you developers out there.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#54
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

> If you really want the app store exposure ...

thanks. i got a lot out of your comment, but then you lost me when i read that.

i mean, what are the benefits of app store exposure? it's a needle in a haystack. the standard experience after putting an app in the store is crickets. do users pay more attention to app store listings than they do to mobile web sites?

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#55

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…

It will need Apple to introduce in Safari the same kind of prompts that Google has introduced in Chrome, to make saving to the home screen discoverable. At the moment there is no clear distinction on iOS between saving a standard web page to the home screen and saving a PWA, and a non-expert user simply won't make the conceptual leap to thinking of the PWA as an app.

All this seems quite carefully calculated by Apple, not to miss the boat on service workers, but also to hamstring PWA's just enough to make them non-competitive.

I think the most interesting area is apps which are written with web technologies, and then deployed to different platforms. For example, that could be a React Native codebase which renders to Android's native toolkit, iOS native, and HTML, and through that to a PWA and perhaps a Windows UWP app. There's a lot of flexibility there, to start just on HTML, or just on the native toolkits, and expand organically as appropriate.

Under the current circumstances, businesses will certainly want to be on the app stores, but there are a lot of services where just having an app is limiting, for instance I was looking recently at banking services for amalgamating accounts, and every one that I could find available in the UK has a website which is just a marketing page with a link to Google Play and the iOS Appstore. But surely most people also want to be able to look at their bank accounts on their computer, not everyone owns and iPad and a smartphone is a small form factor for that kind of information. A PWA, responsive, installable and offline-capable, is a good way of handling that.

I think, PWA will probably end up being a third target, not a replacement for Android or iOS.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#56
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,…

I have the same thoughts. Phones were too slow few years ago, web standards were not mature, so well written native apps were in obvious advantage. Now phones have proper CPUs, lots of RAM, so web apps for many tasks won't be distinguishable from native apps. Web standards are good too. May be Apple will curate list of blessed websites and allow them to launch background services, using icloud payments, etc. This way…

5G could help close the gap as well.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#57
How many years have we been hearing this tale? And yet almost every major web site continues to bend over backwards to persuade us to install their battery-killing surveillance system oops I mean mobile app.

So the solution now is even more battery-killing HTML + Javascript + Secret Sauce? Hell no...

PS Just say no to push like the Hulk says no to Banner.

All IMO of course but these days, I use my phone for Yelp, Google Maps, weather, GMail, stock prices, and little more. The improvement in battery life from 6-8 hours to 2+ days has been astounding and what it's drove me to the viewpoint I just espoused. Am I missing something here?

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#58

How many years have we been hearing this tale? And yet almost every major web site continues to bend over backwards to persuade us to install their battery-killing surveillance system oops I mean mobile app. So the solution now is even more battery-killing HTML + Javascript + Secret Sauce? Hell no... PS Just say no to push like the Hulk says no to Banner. All IMO of course but these days, I use my phone for Yelp, Goo…

Major sites have devs to waste. For the rest of us web is a valid alternative.

Strange, i use my phone mostly to browse stuff. I prefer the web version of Gmail cause i can switch between accounts and i also avoid all those annoying notifications.

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#59

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 average user downloads 1.5-3 apps per month[1]. That's not a very high number to build a native app for if you ask me.

[1] https://www.tune.com/blog/no-the-average-american-does-not-d...

Re: The web apps that will eat mobile

#60
post #43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is such a thing as "good enough". The cheap plastic solution tends to win when that happens. We weren't there in 2011, maybe we're not there in 2018, but the writing's on the wall.

When that happens, the browser would have turned into a general purpose VM running apps via WebAssembly with WebGL/WebGPU for rendering, thus becoming native as well.

The writing is on the wall with the ongoing efforts on .NET, Java, Go, Unity, Unreal and who knows, someone might even port Flash to it.

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