The web is a great publishing medium for magazines and news outlets. Apps are for doing stuff beyond passive browsing.
I used the web to post this comment.
Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
91–100 of 131 posts
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#92As 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…
1. Both iOS Safari and Android Chrome have "Add to Home screen" feature. Is that not enough?
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by lack of retro compatibility? You can still ship apps that target ios6, you have runtime checks for APIs that are missing in one version, the IDE suggests what is available or not. The major versions (and minors) are thoroughly documented in API diffs, the IDE suggests what to modify according to your platform target. The review guidelines are basically changing for the major versions, accordingly…
I have an iPhone 3G in the drawer, as an emergency phone. The amount of apps, that this phone can download from App Store, whether running iOS 3 or 4, is exactly zero (yes, even those that were available in the past, cannot be downloaded). My brother has for exact the same purpose the original HTC G1, running Android 1.6. That phone can download every single app from the Play Store, that was made available when the p…
If you're using it as an emergency phone, do you really need to install apps? Apple has taken the position that the older phones are not worth the trouble it takes to support them. The numbers seem to bear out this decision -- most in-market iPhones seem to be 4S and newer, and people upgrade their iPhones almost immediately when the new OS is released (this I can't understand at all, the new OSes frequently break things, and I always wait a few months to update).
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by lack of retro compatibility? You can still ship apps that target ios6, you have runtime checks for APIs that are missing in one version, the IDE suggests what is available or not. The major versions (and minors) are thoroughly documented in API diffs, the IDE suggests what to modify according to your platform target. The review guidelines are basically changing for the major versions, accordingly…
I have an iPhone 3G in the drawer, as an emergency phone. The amount of apps, that this phone can download from App Store, whether running iOS 3 or 4, is exactly zero (yes, even those that were available in the past, cannot be downloaded). My brother has for exact the same purpose the original HTC G1, running Android 1.6. That phone can download every single app from the Play Store, that was made available when the p…
You are comparing two phones that combined have less than a fraction of one percent of the installed base.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#95Interesting that a smallish magazine is moving away from native mobile back to web while not too long ago I saw that some large retail company discontinued their mobile web site and require use of their native app (flipkart I think). I don't think expecting a new audience just because you have an app is reasonable. I'd be interested in seeing how many new users they generate with just the mobile web site - I suspect…
What's interesting about the Flipkart example is that they have a fully-functional website available which they serve to desktop browsers, but the website is blocked to mobile browsers. Clearly they have decided that they prefer their mobile users to use their app, not a website.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#96This is great! Mobile apps have taken our age back to the age where everything is platform dependent, the Internet was invented so that devices from multiple manufacturers could communicate with each other, but with Android and iOS we have created a new niche of platforms, now it is devices with specific Operating Systems, and they are pushing our age back!
There is a trend in Indian startups to abandon the web altogether and go "app only", among other reasons it defeats the entire purpose of the Internet as we know it, kudos Atavist!
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#97Earlier 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 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...
Unlike with iOS or Android, in HTML5 invasive APIs (including notifications) are all opt-in. Each permission is granular, instead of needing to choose between granting all permissions an app requires or none. IMO this is a massive improvement.
Although you could grant notification access to an app and then it could become a bad actor, I expect on the web you will be able to be far more choosy about granting access than with an app.
I believe Android is doing something to bring in granular permissions, there was discussion at Google I/O this year.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#98Could 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.
> as we pushed the design envelope further on our stories, we were constantly running into the technical limitations of the app approval process. While we could develop, deploy, and—if necessary—repair new code instantly on the web, any change to our apps required re-submitting it to the app store in question.
It's possilbe that if the design changes are only on the javascript side that the app could just download those instead of them having to be sent for review.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#99As 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…
1. Both iOS Safari and Android Chrome have "Add to Home screen" feature. Is that not enough?
The vast majority of non-technical users have no idea you can do this, and I've even heard many say that didn't know you could do it with any site - e.g. they thought they could only do it if the site had a popup that said they could do it.
Re: Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
#100Sencha does this for enterprise apps too. For publishing, I wish RSS feeds had taken off. Would be great to visit a site and see that I could just subscribe to their RSS feed and see it in my own reader app.