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Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

atavistinsider.atavist.com

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Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#61

Post by stephengillie »

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…

I feel exactly this way about a certain image sharing site. After numerous bad experiences with their app, I went back to their mobile website and found it fully functional. For some reason, copy and paste didn't work in the app, which is unacceptable in a community based on copying and pasting cat image URLs.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#62

Post by yaur »

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?

On iPhone, this is what "reading list" is for.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#63

Post by finalight »

_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. But I suspect this is one reason companies like apps

poorly maintained or non-efficient backend that didn't take note of whether the user receive a push or not leads to this problem. It's not the app problem itself totall

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#65

Post by marknutter »

stephengillie wrote: post #23
idibidiart wrote: post #9

The web is a great publishing medium for magazines and news outlets. Apps are for doing stuff beyond passive browsing.

Choosing the mobile website over the app is one way of keeping the relationship from going any further. A website can't ask you for your contact list like an app can.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#66

Post by marknutter »

seivan wrote: post #27

Could have used React and tried to share component source between iOS, Android and Web. I mean since you're going to fully go web, I don't see the problem in this. It's all JavaScript anyway, unless you want to start playing with the hardware APIs. Yeah you would have to write some of the UI layer differently, but I think it isn't that much. You can wrap your own UI components to use Android/iOS/Web internally.

That doesn't solve any of the problems they listed in the article.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#67

Post by hackcasual »

mintplant wrote: post #55
owencm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Application cache is a fucking nightmare. Service Worker's can't come soon enough.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#69

Post by ksec »

As a user, I dont really care about it being an App or Mobile Web. It needs two things,

1. An Icon on my Springbroad, so i can easily view it whenever I want to.

2. It should be butter smooth and dont warm my pants after reading. ( i.e lots of CPU cycle. )

Native Apps does better in both department. And whenever users gets a choice most would likely prefer the App version. HTML5 or Web has definitely improve, and it could or will do better then the web if we dont have the Ads constantly loading in the background. ( Ad blocker is another topic )

I guess atavist already have their group of loyal customers it makes sense for them to change.

Personally I see the article mostly complain about the Distribution and Discovery Problem. And some App Store Approval process.

Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

#70

Post by izym »

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.

I'm not sure it can be done directly from the notification, but on iOS you can also disable notifications per app and specify how it should be displayed (pop up vs at the top etc.)

I've also noticed an increasing amount of apps that now also use the notifications for ads. Definitely not what I like to see on my lock screen.

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