6 ms·

The Mobile Downturn (continued)

62 points by dave1619 11y ago

dave1619 11y ago
I'm not sure if I would call it a mobile "downturn" since mobile is here to stay and may already be more important than desktop. I only see mobile growing, especially with huge numbers of people still to get online via smartphones in India and China. So mobile for sure has a great future ahead. However, there definitely seems to be a maturation of mobile. It's no longer the great "gold rush" that it was back in 2008-2010. It's much more difficult to get traction on native apps if you're starting out, and even if you have a successful app there isn't as much growth in new users as there was prior. I think one sign of mobile's maturation is that people now see mobile as part of a bigger integrated picture of distribution. For example, it's essential (more than ever) to have a strong strategy to be on mobile, on desktop, and in social channels. I think this makes it more challenging for small startups since they typically don't have the manpower to do everything well. So you've got to prioritize and go with what gives you the most bang for your buck. Sometimes it's mobile; sometimes it's desktop; sometimes it's social.
- gvb 11y ago
  More accurately, it is a mobile app downturn. My opinion: * Downloading a new app has lost its novelty. It used to be "there's an app for that", now it is more "is it compelling enough to load an app to do that?" * Mobile web is good and continuing to get better due to better phones, browsers, and web sites. This is making apps less necessary and thus less compelling. Personally, I treat my phone like my house. I am vary particular about who I invite in.
  - swah 11y ago
    I wish it was that way. Apps are still growing strong the way I see it. EasyTaxi is the greatest example in Brazil. You want to have it installed and with your credit card data already there before you go out and leave your wifi/cards. (Thinking if I should move to mobile development..)
  - gdilla 11y ago
    Downloading hasn't lost it's novelty (though it is still high barrier compared to mobile web). It's discovery which is the problem. New publishers are mostly doomed to fail. Apart from that, apps have short half lives. If someone doesn't use your app everyday, it's basically toast. Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences. It's just a better UX. For things like uber, you don't even have that choice. On the other hand, if you're experience is not task intensive, mobile web is just fine.
    - wnevets 11y ago
      >Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences. I've uninstalled the facebook android app and switched to a chrome shortcut. Works just as well and even gets notifications. Not to mention the better battery life.
      - soylentcola 11y ago
        When I got my most recent phone I declined to install the app and it's definitely noticeable. Even though I had app notifications off (I just get an email if someone directly messages or tags me) it liked to run in the background all the time and additionally, I got tired of it constantly trying to push secondary apps for messaging and such. Currently I use "Tinfoil" which is essentially just a wrapper for the mobile site with a bit of sandboxing and tweaking. Not perfect but then again, I prefer it to a constantly running, resource hogging, frequently nagging app when all I want is to occasionally look at Facebook and see what friends and family have posted. (app in question, not affiliated: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco.fbwrapper&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...)
    - eva1984 11y ago
      Downloading is THE problem. Compare to apps, I can easily bookmark website and revisit if I like it, easy to get you a customer.
    - petra 11y ago
  - ashark 11y ago
    My opinion: * People made a bunch of things that should have been websites apps. Still happens way too often. This sucks. * More recently, people have been making things "mobile web apps" that should be websites. This sucks. Mobile apps are a mess and the mobile web keeps getting worse, IMO. This won't stop until people quit pretending Javascript/DOM performance — including power drain and memory footprint — is acceptable on mobile. It's even bad on laptops!
    - sanderjd 11y ago
      I think mobile Javascript/DOM performance is acceptable while being in bad need of improvement. When looking at the state of web applications on mobile, I don't think we should say, "it's horrible and hopeless!", but rather, "it's horrible and we should improve it!".
      - ashark 11y ago
        I'm not sure how it could improve much. Without major changes to the language it'll be hard to reduce memory use much. Tons of resources have been thrown at e.g. v8 to get us where we are today, but the biggest gains were years ago and the pace of performance improvement has slowed. There's only so much you can do with a highly dynamic, interpreted language. [EDIT] as for being acceptable, ever looked at how much memory Slack or Atom or any of those other JS-on-the-Desktop applications use? It's insane. Batshit crazy. A Google Inbox tab? Nuts. And try keeping an eye on what they're doing to your laptop battery some time.
        sanderjd 11y ago
        "Acceptable" is arguable and subjective. Every day when I open multiple web applications on my phone, I tacitly accept the performance, as does everyone else who does the same. But, of course, we would also all love everything to be faster and for our batteries to last longer. Those desires are being attacked from different angles with different trade-offs all the time. I'm not at all convinced that the pace of improvement has leveled off, but that's just my gut feeling, and I would be interested in seeing analysis. I'm also not convinced that, assuming evolutionary improvement has indeed leveled off, there isn't still plenty of potential for new techniques that bear more fruit. One area of research I'm aware of targeting further improvement to performance is increasing concurrency, which the servo project[0] is exploring. Perhaps things like asm.js and webassembly will also make an impact. I'm not a complete web apologist and I'll freely admit that you may well be right that it is inevitably a resource hog, but it is an incredibly useful platform, and I think giving up on it would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". (I also find it pretty crazy that things like Slack and Atom spin up a full web rendering environment, and I would rather see us have better tools for making nice cross-platform desktop applications where they make sense.) [0]: https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    There's another thing I kept thinking while reading this article: while I'm not a software developer or involved in the startup/entrepreneur community in any direct fashion and probably not the target audience for the article, isn't the whole approach sort of backwards? If you have created a valuable service/tool/game/etc that people really want to use and is also a good fit for mobile use, people will download the mobile app. But the conversation is all about "how do we come up with apps that people want to use and can compete with the top handful?" Isn't that just a solution in search of a problem? Maybe those top 10-20 mobile apps that get the lion's share of relative adoption are the 10-20 things that people find worth doing with apps on a mobile platform. The mobile apps that I always install and continue to use/reinstall on new devices are the ones that address an existing need. I only have so many of those needs that can be reasonably addressed by mobile apps. I need something to jot down quick notes wherever I am? Notes app. I want to see what amusing things my friends are up to on Facebook? Facebook app (not really in my case but as an example). Same for Skype or Uber or any other service. I want the service first and since it makes sense to access those services from my phone or tablet, I get the app. I don't just go looking for apps randomly because I feel like (outside of games) there is a limited set of things I want to be able to do on my cell phone. The only time that set gets larger is when someone comes up with a really useful or desirable new service. Not because someone came out with a really cool and well-designed app.
  - tootie 11y ago
    We just took $1M from a client to build an iOS-only app that can be done just as easily on mobile web. It would support deep-linking, be cross-platform and we could deploy at will and it would have cost about the same. But this way, we get in the app store for as long as Apple permits us.
- aaronkrolik 11y ago
  "mobile is here to stay" nothing in the past decade has been here to stay. I dont know what the next decade holds, but i highly doubt it will look like what we now call 'mobile'
gdilla 11y ago
mobile and mobile apps are just an access point. You still have to build something people want. the fact you have an app buys you nothing itself (though maybe it used to back in the early days of the app store).
guelo 11y ago
Part of the problem is that Apple and Google will steal any successful idea and incorporate it into the OS. Categories that could be thriving competitive markets are subsumed and the category killed. Huge potential markets like notes, calendar, voice recording, video conferencing, fitness tracking, game leaderboard/achievements. Even little utilities like flashlight. Some categories are outright prohibited, like phone apps or app stores on iPhone. Basically the game is rigged, apps are just a testing ground for ideas that Google and Apple can ripoff at their will. If you're extremely successful and lucky the best you can hope for is an acquihire. But usually they just steal the idea and kill the market.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > steal any successful idea and incorporate it into the OS Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters. If Google and Apple can integrate your idea that easily into their ecosystem, its overvalued as an idea.
  - untog 11y ago
    > Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters. That strikes me as an overplayed sentiment. Your execution can never be as good as one done at the OS level by the company that owns it. That does not mean your idea is 'overvalued'. In fact, quite the opposite - it usually means you have proved that your idea has enough value that it should be bundled up and given to every single person who uses the OS. You just won't benefit from it.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Let's me try again then. If you're unable to extract value from your idea, but someone else can, the idea has no value to you. Does it have value? In the right hands, probably. That doesn't entitle you to that value though.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Good, good, good. I know that he is talking about mobile apps as a business rather than the end user experience, but I am disliking mobile apps from a user experience more and more. I access Twitter and Facebook on my Android Note 4 via their web apps - I like the user experience just fine, thank you, and I don't worry as much about giving mobile apps permissions that I don't think they need. I also logoff after using the web versions of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe with finer grained access controls in Android version 6 I might change my mind but probably not. On my iPad, I find it much nicer reading GMail using the browser (not mobile) version of the web app, including access to the calendar. Use the apps: no thanks. Web HTML 5 standards are fantastic - let's use them.
- RankingMember 11y ago
  One "app" I would use is a browser plug-in that silences the "download our app!" bars on all of these sites when you try to just use them through the website from a mobile/tablet.
  - mark_l_watson 11y ago
    Seriously a good idea! I would buy such an app.
dirtyaura 11y ago
"i can’t think of many consumer facing mobile apps that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three years. can you?" Are there consumer facing web sites that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three years? Is the problem really mobile specific or is it just that consumer space has become much harder in general as Facebook and messaging juggernauts capture a lion share of people's attention. In 2005-2010, when social media was still young, there were a lot of cheap or even free marketing and distribution tactics that were not oversaturated, but now as the new medium has matured a bit, and even less nimble players start to understand the game, you need huge ad budgets to capture attention of consumers.
cinquemb 11y ago
>The funny thing about all of this is that I don’t see any shortage of entrepreneurs walking into our offices with plans to build and launch consumer facing mobile apps. This is the interesting thing to me. I tried to explain this to some friends who wanted to do something and they immediately wanted to submit themselves to the walled gardens… well, I'll watch them try, I could be wrong, and that's like Fred and their kindred that continue to let such people in the building… now I find that phenomena interesting as well and wonder why?

62 points by dave1619 11y ago

I'm not sure if I would call it a mobile "downturn" since mobile is here to stay and may already be more important than desktop. I only see mobile growing, especially with huge numbers of people still to get online via smartphones in India and China. So mobile for sure has a great future ahead. However, there definitely seems to be a maturation of mobile. It's no longer the great "gold rush" that it was back in 2008-2010. It's much more difficult to get traction on native apps if you're starting out, and even if you have a successful app there isn't as much growth in new users as there was prior. I think one sign of mobile's maturation is that people now see mobile as part of a bigger integrated picture of distribution. For example, it's essential (more than ever) to have a strong strategy to be on mobile, on desktop, and in social channels. I think this makes it more challenging for small startups since they typically don't have the manpower to do everything well. So you've got to prioritize and go with what gives you the most bang for your buck. Sometimes it's mobile; sometimes it's desktop; sometimes it's social.

gvb 11y ago
More accurately, it is a mobile app downturn. My opinion: * Downloading a new app has lost its novelty. It used to be "there's an app for that", now it is more "is it compelling enough to load an app to do that?" * Mobile web is good and continuing to get better due to better phones, browsers, and web sites. This is making apps less necessary and thus less compelling. Personally, I treat my phone like my house. I am vary particular about who I invite in.
- swah 11y ago
  I wish it was that way. Apps are still growing strong the way I see it. EasyTaxi is the greatest example in Brazil. You want to have it installed and with your credit card data already there before you go out and leave your wifi/cards. (Thinking if I should move to mobile development..)
- gdilla 11y ago
  Downloading hasn't lost it's novelty (though it is still high barrier compared to mobile web). It's discovery which is the problem. New publishers are mostly doomed to fail. Apart from that, apps have short half lives. If someone doesn't use your app everyday, it's basically toast. Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences. It's just a better UX. For things like uber, you don't even have that choice. On the other hand, if you're experience is not task intensive, mobile web is just fine.
  - wnevets 11y ago
    >Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences. I've uninstalled the facebook android app and switched to a chrome shortcut. Works just as well and even gets notifications. Not to mention the better battery life.
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      When I got my most recent phone I declined to install the app and it's definitely noticeable. Even though I had app notifications off (I just get an email if someone directly messages or tags me) it liked to run in the background all the time and additionally, I got tired of it constantly trying to push secondary apps for messaging and such. Currently I use "Tinfoil" which is essentially just a wrapper for the mobile site with a bit of sandboxing and tweaking. Not perfect but then again, I prefer it to a constantly running, resource hogging, frequently nagging app when all I want is to occasionally look at Facebook and see what friends and family have posted. (app in question, not affiliated: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco.fbwrapper&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...)
  - eva1984 11y ago
    Downloading is THE problem. Compare to apps, I can easily bookmark website and revisit if I like it, easy to get you a customer.
  - petra 11y ago
- ashark 11y ago
  My opinion: * People made a bunch of things that should have been websites apps. Still happens way too often. This sucks. * More recently, people have been making things "mobile web apps" that should be websites. This sucks. Mobile apps are a mess and the mobile web keeps getting worse, IMO. This won't stop until people quit pretending Javascript/DOM performance — including power drain and memory footprint — is acceptable on mobile. It's even bad on laptops!
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    I think mobile Javascript/DOM performance is acceptable while being in bad need of improvement. When looking at the state of web applications on mobile, I don't think we should say, "it's horrible and hopeless!", but rather, "it's horrible and we should improve it!".
    - ashark 11y ago
      I'm not sure how it could improve much. Without major changes to the language it'll be hard to reduce memory use much. Tons of resources have been thrown at e.g. v8 to get us where we are today, but the biggest gains were years ago and the pace of performance improvement has slowed. There's only so much you can do with a highly dynamic, interpreted language. [EDIT] as for being acceptable, ever looked at how much memory Slack or Atom or any of those other JS-on-the-Desktop applications use? It's insane. Batshit crazy. A Google Inbox tab? Nuts. And try keeping an eye on what they're doing to your laptop battery some time.
      - sanderjd 11y ago
        "Acceptable" is arguable and subjective. Every day when I open multiple web applications on my phone, I tacitly accept the performance, as does everyone else who does the same. But, of course, we would also all love everything to be faster and for our batteries to last longer. Those desires are being attacked from different angles with different trade-offs all the time. I'm not at all convinced that the pace of improvement has leveled off, but that's just my gut feeling, and I would be interested in seeing analysis. I'm also not convinced that, assuming evolutionary improvement has indeed leveled off, there isn't still plenty of potential for new techniques that bear more fruit. One area of research I'm aware of targeting further improvement to performance is increasing concurrency, which the servo project[0] is exploring. Perhaps things like asm.js and webassembly will also make an impact. I'm not a complete web apologist and I'll freely admit that you may well be right that it is inevitably a resource hog, but it is an incredibly useful platform, and I think giving up on it would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". (I also find it pretty crazy that things like Slack and Atom spin up a full web rendering environment, and I would rather see us have better tools for making nice cross-platform desktop applications where they make sense.) [0]: https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo
- soylentcola 11y ago
  There's another thing I kept thinking while reading this article: while I'm not a software developer or involved in the startup/entrepreneur community in any direct fashion and probably not the target audience for the article, isn't the whole approach sort of backwards? If you have created a valuable service/tool/game/etc that people really want to use and is also a good fit for mobile use, people will download the mobile app. But the conversation is all about "how do we come up with apps that people want to use and can compete with the top handful?" Isn't that just a solution in search of a problem? Maybe those top 10-20 mobile apps that get the lion's share of relative adoption are the 10-20 things that people find worth doing with apps on a mobile platform. The mobile apps that I always install and continue to use/reinstall on new devices are the ones that address an existing need. I only have so many of those needs that can be reasonably addressed by mobile apps. I need something to jot down quick notes wherever I am? Notes app. I want to see what amusing things my friends are up to on Facebook? Facebook app (not really in my case but as an example). Same for Skype or Uber or any other service. I want the service first and since it makes sense to access those services from my phone or tablet, I get the app. I don't just go looking for apps randomly because I feel like (outside of games) there is a limited set of things I want to be able to do on my cell phone. The only time that set gets larger is when someone comes up with a really useful or desirable new service. Not because someone came out with a really cool and well-designed app.
- tootie 11y ago
  We just took $1M from a client to build an iOS-only app that can be done just as easily on mobile web. It would support deep-linking, be cross-platform and we could deploy at will and it would have cost about the same. But this way, we get in the app store for as long as Apple permits us.
aaronkrolik 11y ago
"mobile is here to stay" nothing in the past decade has been here to stay. I dont know what the next decade holds, but i highly doubt it will look like what we now call 'mobile'

gdilla 11y ago

mobile and mobile apps are just an access point. You still have to build something people want. the fact you have an app buys you nothing itself (though maybe it used to back in the early days of the app store).

guelo 11y ago

Part of the problem is that Apple and Google will steal any successful idea and incorporate it into the OS. Categories that could be thriving competitive markets are subsumed and the category killed. Huge potential markets like notes, calendar, voice recording, video conferencing, fitness tracking, game leaderboard/achievements. Even little utilities like flashlight. Some categories are outright prohibited, like phone apps or app stores on iPhone. Basically the game is rigged, apps are just a testing ground for ideas that Google and Apple can ripoff at their will. If you're extremely successful and lucky the best you can hope for is an acquihire. But usually they just steal the idea and kill the market.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> steal any successful idea and incorporate it into the OS Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters. If Google and Apple can integrate your idea that easily into their ecosystem, its overvalued as an idea.
- untog 11y ago
  > Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters. That strikes me as an overplayed sentiment. Your execution can never be as good as one done at the OS level by the company that owns it. That does not mean your idea is 'overvalued'. In fact, quite the opposite - it usually means you have proved that your idea has enough value that it should be bundled up and given to every single person who uses the OS. You just won't benefit from it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Let's me try again then. If you're unable to extract value from your idea, but someone else can, the idea has no value to you. Does it have value? In the right hands, probably. That doesn't entitle you to that value though.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Good, good, good. I know that he is talking about mobile apps as a business rather than the end user experience, but I am disliking mobile apps from a user experience more and more. I access Twitter and Facebook on my Android Note 4 via their web apps - I like the user experience just fine, thank you, and I don't worry as much about giving mobile apps permissions that I don't think they need. I also logoff after using the web versions of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe with finer grained access controls in Android version 6 I might change my mind but probably not. On my iPad, I find it much nicer reading GMail using the browser (not mobile) version of the web app, including access to the calendar. Use the apps: no thanks. Web HTML 5 standards are fantastic - let's use them.

RankingMember 11y ago
One "app" I would use is a browser plug-in that silences the "download our app!" bars on all of these sites when you try to just use them through the website from a mobile/tablet.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  Seriously a good idea! I would buy such an app.

dirtyaura 11y ago

"i can’t think of many consumer facing mobile apps that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three years. can you?" Are there consumer facing web sites that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three years? Is the problem really mobile specific or is it just that consumer space has become much harder in general as Facebook and messaging juggernauts capture a lion share of people's attention. In 2005-2010, when social media was still young, there were a lot of cheap or even free marketing and distribution tactics that were not oversaturated, but now as the new medium has matured a bit, and even less nimble players start to understand the game, you need huge ad budgets to capture attention of consumers.

cinquemb 11y ago

>The funny thing about all of this is that I don’t see any shortage of entrepreneurs walking into our offices with plans to build and launch consumer facing mobile apps. This is the interesting thing to me. I tried to explain this to some friends who wanted to do something and they immediately wanted to submit themselves to the walled gardens… well, I'll watch them try, I could be wrong, and that's like Fred and their kindred that continue to let such people in the building… now I find that phenomena interesting as well and wonder why?