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It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

• tmaly 10y ago
  I can totally relate to some of this. If you take a look at Meeker's 2016 Internet trends report that came out last week, you will see that 3 apps dominate 80% of the usage on phones. I decided when I started my food side project a year back, that I was not going to do a native app. I have been trying to make the front end look better, but I did not want to use very heavy frameworks, so I settled on using the SASS mixin library Bourbon.io along with the grid and a few others the company provides. The css that is produces is very tight, and I can save on developer costs. I should say, save on finding another front end developer as the one I was using took some money and ran.
  • potatolicious 10y ago
    I don't really see how user time-share is relevant unless your goal is to start a social network/messaging system. 80% of user time is spent in those 3 apps, that doesn't preclude very profitable apps from being developed. After all, people spend 16+ hours a day at home/work, but there are still plenty of reasons to open restaurants. Unless you profit directly from time-spent-in-app this doesn't seem like a consequential measurement. See: Uber, pretty low on the charts for time-in-app but yet a massive business. Ditto Amazon, or GrubHub, or any number of other apps that deliver value to their users (and revenue to their owners) without long sessions.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Totally agree. The most money I've ever spent is on Tasker and AutoApps family of Tasker plugins, and I rarely even open them - they're the ultimate background apps, but they work, they work well, and they're very much worth the money I paid.
    • tmaly 10y ago
      There is going to be some reluctance to download a new app. If you can get tons of VC money, and you can pour it into marketing, you can get people to download your app. But I think user adoption is just that much easier if all they have to do is open up your mobile web app in their phones browser. You could always build the app later after you have gotten the traction and growth.
  • j1vms 10y ago
    sass+bourbon.io (or similar combos like sass+compass) can help a TON with keep front-end dev costs down. Some apps do benefit a lot being native, but as others point out you throw in the middleman app-store model instead of just dealing with the browser, and keeping your UI simple, clean, efficient and of-course usable.
    • briandear 10y ago
      Agree, but have you ever built a responsive drag and drop document builder? Anytime you start getting into mobile-specific UX on a responsive web page, it often becomes and unpredictable mess. Parallax scrolling isn't the best example, but it is a good illustration. Parallax on mobile browsers historically has been pretty glitchy and horrible. When a similar kind of UX interaction that's actually a necessary part of the app is done in responsive, it's generally very hard. Really the problem with mobile web seems to be JavaScript.
    • briandear 10y ago
      Agree, but have you ever built a responsive drag and drop document builder? Anytime you start getting into mobile-specific UX on a responsive web page, it often becomes and unpredictable mess. Parallax scrolling isn't the best example, but it is a good illustration. Parallax on mobile browsers historically has been pretty glitchy and horrible. When a similar kind of UX interaction that's actually a necessary part of the app is done in responsive, it's generally very hard. Really the problem with mobile web seems to be JavaScript.
• dang 10y ago
  Although a rant, this is also pretty substantive. We've replaced the baity title with a representative sentence from the article in the hope that commenters will follow suit.
  • pboutros 10y ago
    The fact that you go to this effort is why I love HN.
    • emdd 10y ago
      If only we could get notifications for replies & a decent mobile app existed.
      • tracker1 10y ago
        I just check a couple times a day... honestly, I'm usually too busy when I'm not checking HN to deal with a reply right at any given moment anyway. It's a forum.
        • emdd 10y ago
          As do I, but the conversations I have on HN are more fascinating to me, so I'd actually rather have push-notifications on HN than Reddit. The biggest thing is still a better way to browse/post on iOS.
          • tracker1 10y ago
            Dunno, I'd be okay with web notifications via chrome. Though that some clickbait sites are asking for that permission is really irritating... I mean more so than interstitial or late-loading ads that push content down.
        • heywire 10y ago
          I use hnnotify to tell me about replies and the Hacker News app on iOS by premii is pretty decent for read only access ( I mostly only post when I'm at a computer, I find that my responses make a little more sense that way :) )
• brlewis 10y ago
  "One app for iOS, one for Android, and I got over 90% consumer coverage" What's the consumer coverage for Mobile Chrome + Mobile Safari? Giving up on total cross-browser compatibility doesn't have to mean writing native apps.
  • joeblau 10y ago
    The coverage is probably pretty high, but you're limited by each browsers respective feature set. There may be functionality that you can't ship due to limits on multiple browsers. Other issues arise if you factor in sites which needs to take into account all browsers; You'll end up bloating your JS/CSS to handle all of these conditions impacting mobile page size. It can be done, if the product is fairly simple, but problems arise as you increase your products complexity and feature set. Native apps have their own set of problems with distribution and the web has it's own set of problems with performance and hardware API access.
    • aeorgnoieang 10y ago
      "Giving up on total cross-browser compatibility" seems like it would entirely avoid "sites which needs to take into account all browsers".
      • joeblau 10y ago
        Potentially, although I think that there are cases when it's fine. For example when I lived in San Francisco, my LTE speeds were insanely fast so it wasn't as big of a deal. Now that I'm in Pittsburgh, the LTE speeds here aren't as good so mobile web isn't as good. Also on a desktop or laptop where you've got a good Wi-Fi connection most websites are really good. That being said, I still things like Tweetbot, Flume, and Airmail over twitter.com, instagram.com or gmail.com.
• wesleyfsmith 10y ago
  Ehhhh, I really haven't had these issues with any of the meteor apps I've made. Even getting swiping and full page animation transitions has been relatively simple. My experience is anecdotal, but I actually left being android developer to do mobile web and I've found the experience to be far easier.
  • zghst 10y ago
    Easier, yes. The tools for web development are awesome and amazing, but there's so many restrictions and limitations that come with the web. Maybe the web is the way forward, but native will be kicking its ass (regarding experience) for a long time.
    • copperx 10y ago
      80% of "experience" is micro-interactions, which are mostly nice-to-haves.
  • needz 10y ago
    Similar experience here using Meteor + Ionic, exported with Cordova. I also feel like the skills I'm developing in web development are much more widely applicable than learning a particular mobile OS.
    • hypercluster 10y ago
      I often hear this. I tend tp agree but what exactly do you mean? That Javascript is used more widely?
      • saiprashanth93 10y ago
        Exactly this. I guess for people who have built their careers building mobile apps they couldn't care less about more rounded skills(in relation to web at least), its mostly full stack/back-end devs who know JS seem to state this. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
• sawthat 10y ago
  (note: I've met Eran a few times, he is very smart and I respect his opinion) Note aside: this is one of those "it really depends" kind of situations. For many cases native apps are always going to be cheaper to build. For others the web is just much better. It seems like the problem Eran is describing is more of a labor shortage. It's really, really difficult to hire good web developers. I have no idea why this is.
  • pdonis 10y ago
    > It's really, really difficult to hire good web developers. I have no idea why this is. The obvious answer is the one given in the article: Google, Facebook, etc. can afford to pay good web developers far more than a small business.
• jcoffland 10y ago
  What this article needs is more F-bombs. Otherwise it's ranty but makes some good points.
• ksenzee 10y ago
  When you multiply that 90% consumer coverage by the percentage of people who will install your app when you ask them to, it's going to knock down your 90% pretty considerably.
  • caiohdf 10y ago
    Totally agree.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    For users, I'm not sure how this is significantly worse than asking people to visit your mobile website. In my personal experience, people will search the app store for your mobile web application by default anyway. If your product is an "app" in the functionality sense, then people are going to look for it in the "app store". Period. For user, it's actually a better experience than using Chrome/Safari.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I agree. Personally, I consciously avoid anything that smells of webapp and consider this to be a product of a lazy-ass company. Non-native applications pretty much universally suck, and it only shows that the quality/usefulness is not a goal.
• gallonofmilk 10y ago
  at first I rolled my eyes but by the end I was filled with sympathy and agreement! spot on!
• mknocker 10y ago
  What about developing a core codebase to build an app for different platforms (including the web)? There are framework out there that can help you do that. At least in C++ (this is the language I use the most).
• meerita 10y ago
  1 dev = all 5 device dev = 5 apps 1 dev 100k 1*5 500k in salaries
• josh_carterPDX 10y ago
  And if only there were solutions that made it easier to prototype and get your backend running faster. It could make it even cheaper to make native apps. end: self serving response :)
  • minimaxir 10y ago
    Hawking your own startup here doesn't make sense since the issues presented in the rant discuss user-facing product architecture.
    • josh_carterPDX 10y ago
      It was done tongue and cheek. Sounds like that's frowned upon. Heard and heard.
• Kazamai 10y ago
  I guess he hasn't heard of React Native...
  • mwcampbell 10y ago
    React Native is no panacea. For example, Discord has found it unsuitable for Android so far. [1] https://discord.engineering/using-react-native-one-year-later-91fd5e949933#.a3kbj831w https://discord.engineering/using-react-native-one-year-late...
    • maelito 10y ago
      They tried it for Android at the "early stages". It may be better now ?
• mikeryan 10y ago
  One app for iOS, one for Android, and I got over 90% consumer coverage However with a huge friction point of requiring users to download and install an app.
  • tootie 10y ago
    And not being searchable or deep linkable or shareable.
    • xenadu02 10y ago
      None of this is true. Universal links on iOS even allow the same links to work whether you have the app installed or not.
    • jdmichal 10y ago
      I'm not sure exactly what you mean by each of these, but at least in Android apps can register to open URLs. So you can search for and share, say, a Facebook link. Tap it, and it opens in the Facebook app (or the browser, or any other app registered to handle the URL, your choice!).
      • Sylos 10y ago
        I think these are the definitions that he/she goes by: Searchable: It being possible to find contents on the service via web search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo etc.). Deep linkable: It being possible to link to specific content on the service (and not just to the service as a whole). Shareable: It being likely that your service as a whole is linked to. While you can share with someone that an app exists, it's far less likely that users will do so, because of the install-barrier. And what you mentioned requires the service to maintain both an app and a webpage, so that doesn't work when we're talking about dropping the webpage...
        • jdmichal 10y ago
          So the criticism is that apps alone, without a web presence, cannot be "searchable" and "sharable". "Deep-linkable" is still possible; your app can handle and resolve URLs that another app could not. And I'm going to assume that it's the content of the app we're discussing, and not the app itself, since that's kind of trivial. So, the question is, without a web presence or API of some type, how exactly is data expected to be searched and shared by third-party participants? If the argument is that apps don't solve the problem of having a universal ontology, then I think the GP is not quite understanding just how intractable a problem that has been in computer science for a very long time.
• hanginghyena 10y ago
  Seems like you're deferring one dragon for another. Deliver the project got easier; "Control the customer" got significantly harder. You've now got someone's app store in the middle of your customer relationships and are exposed to approval drama, various forms of revenue squeeze, and other meddling from the platform owner. What happens if the folks running the platform decide to launch their own offering? Speaking as another small developer, our solution to the cross-browser feature support is simple: anything that doesn't run on most modern browsers doesn't make the final design. If the customer doesn't bite on basic design, we don't expect a miraculous shift with the latest widgets.
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    Apps don't have to be downloaded from stores, thought that certainly does make things nice.
    • Cpoll 10y ago
      On iPhone they do, and I doubt you'll have much luck getting the average Android user to side-load either.
    • tracker1 10y ago
      Circumventing the App Store on iOS is problematic at best...
      • equalarrow 10y ago
        Not really. It's called the Enterprise Program. While this is for 'enterprise', you can also use it - and Apple allows this - to distribute _outside the App Store_. A few years ago I built a nice sms delivery system for installing an app I was working on. Text anything to our number (we had multiple numbers thru twilio based on market). App replies back with a download link. Install. It worked perfect and we could actually tell who requested the app and who installed it. We had around 75k users installing. Not millions, of course, but still, not too bad. So, it is possible. We also did not have to wait for any approval process. And when the app started up, it checked for an updated version on our system. If there was, the app would then prompt the user to start the update. It was a very nice flow and we had many comments from users telling us that 'it just worked'. This was app pre-iOS 7 and automatic app update, but it's still being used today.
• ams6110 10y ago
  If you're a two person startup quit building on quicksand. Use stuff that works. Once you have some users you can start venturing towards the bleeding edge of what's possible.
• 54mf 10y ago
  "You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari." You can do this with PhoneGap. "Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit." Okay, yeah, this sucks. "Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off." This is probably your fault. "We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge." This is probably your fault. "We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is the letter F." This is probably your fault. "How about hiding the address bar or controlling swipes from the left edge of the screen? Don’t be stupid." Stop trying to make the browser not a browser. Users hate when you hijack expected behavior. (See: Imgur.) "Oh, and don’t get me started on all these new custom mobile keyboards you can use and how autocomplete can fuck with your input box events." You can disable autocomplete. Did you mean predictive word suggestions? TL;DR: "We tried to make a responsive web app act like a native app and it didn't work because it doesn't work, and that makes me a grumpy goose."
  • hnal943 10y ago
    This is probably your fault That's the point of the article. Getting these things right on the web is non-trivial (and therefore expensive).
    • squeaky-clean 10y ago
      Ehhh.... These examples seem really amateurish to me. You'll run into lots of issues developing for the web, sure, it's not perfect. Especially web "apps" that need to work cross-browser. But the listed problems stem from not understanding your platform, not problems inherent to the web itself. To make an analogy, it's like the equivalent writing a native app where input and UI rendering are handled by the same thread, and then complaining that input doesn't work during intensive operations, so javascript / the web is better for apps, and native is terrible. It's also an unfair comparison. These statements: > We made a bet on the web. Built a responsive site for desktop and mobile and tried to avoid the native app space (still are). And then later > One app for iOS, one for Android, and I got over 90% consumer coverage. I can even use a framework to share work between the two. So originally with the web, they're trying to target Desktop Chrome, Desktop Safari, Desktop Firefox, Desktop Edge, Mobile Chrome and Mobile Safari with one codebase. Then they move to only targeting Android and iOS (native mobile only) with two separate codebases? They could have just as easily targeted mobile Chrome and mobile Safari, and shared 100% of the code. I'm not sure what they mean by a framework to share work between the two. If they're referring to something like Xamarin, I hope they've at least tried it before assuming everything works great. They're very unstable, and you still need separate codebases for your views, typically more. Ironically, the most stable ones of these I've tried have been web-dev based frameworks. tl;dr: "It's cheaper to make an app for 2 platforms than for 8 you don't understand."
• ciokan 10y ago
  Agree with everything except with the numbers. Users won't install your app that much so it goes to a balance. It depends of course on the application itself but, since you're struggling so hard to go 'web', I presume it might be a mobile version of a website. I visit a lot of websites each day but do I install everything those websites suggest? No!
• evo_9 10y ago
  Since the article doesn't touch on specific I'm wondering where React Native falls regarding all this. I'm considering using it for our pending iOS and Android apps, seems like a no-brainer at this point versus true native.
  • zghst 10y ago
    Well React Native is one of many strategies they could use to build their app and later on back port their components to the web, should they resurrect it. I would agree with your point that it's a no brainer.
• fallo 10y ago
  Well, I'll take all of that instead of the fg cp the native gives me from all the bright minds at ge, ae and mt, anytime. The future is here.
• seanwilson 10y ago
  Meh, supporting a couple of iOS versions and a couple of Android versions for a native app along with device specific quirks is as much of a pain as supporting Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE. Also, maintaining two code bases for native Android and iOS apps is a massive investment compared to a single web app code base.
  • zghst 10y ago
    Well, Native could also mean transitioning over to React Native, Cordova, Phone Gap, etc
• WalterSear 10y ago
  No it's not. Get better designers - ones who understand responsive design, and developers who speak modern javascript.
  • elliotec 10y ago
    I'd argue that "modern JavaScript" is a pretty huge part of the issue at hand.
• takno 10y ago
  A lot of the issues here are with mobile Safari. I agree it completely sucks just due to how behind Safari are with ES6. On the upside the work is complete to fix this in dev releases, so there's a very good chance that we're 3 months or so away from a large step change. I'm not planning on releasing anything in the next 3 months, so that timetable is okay for me, YMMV
  • zghst 10y ago
    I don't think that it's ES6 that's holding them back, there's Babel to fix that, I think it's all the browser vendors and the varying level of standards, different bugs and behaviors on every browser platform, plus there's features on Native platforms that are nearly impossible to replicate on the web. For instance `backdrop-filter`/iOS 7 like blurring wasn't possible on the web until Webkit implemented it, a year later only Safari has it and it's buggy in Chrome Canary (it blurs content under the box shadow). Another example ServiceWorkers, only in Firefox and Chrome, which cover most users on the Desktop, but on mobile you're screwed because half of your users use mobile Safari.
    • xenadu02 10y ago
      And for good reason. I don't want random websites burning my battery for their "oh so important" background tasks.
      • takno 10y ago
        This seems like a misunderstanding of the tech. Service workers can really only fire up when they get a push notification, which you have to explicitly opt into, or when the page is running in the browser. The processing allowed is tightly controlled, and even with permission the push notification can't do anything behind your back - it has to result in a visible notification which will alert you that there's something you want to disable.
    • takno 10y ago
      backdrop-filter tends to go in my not-very-nice-to-have bucket. It's certainly something you can live fairly comfortably without. Service workers are more of an issue - realistically if you want to build a serious web-app for iPhone right now you're going to have to build a shim around it for notifications and offline, although that can be quite small. If you are aiming to provide a worthwhile experience to the users who will never install your app, or need some serious selling first then you need something on the web, so you are going to have a mobile site. Building a lightweight service-worker shim around that for iPhone and providing a couple of browser-specific stylesheets ought to be less work than full native apps.
• padseeker 10y ago
  I understand and empathize with the author's aggravation. But cheaper? Really? So iOs and Android are more than 90% of the market. You are telling me that it is cheaper to build and maintain 2 separate apps and pass on the remaining part of the market than have one app that covers everything? Android device support is supposed to be a nightmare - there are so many versions to contend with, each device manufacturer can customize things. iOS is easier to support but fighting with Apple can be quite the ordeal. Using the web means you bypass these other issues but have to contend with the ones cited in the article. It sounds like pick your poison. I could conceive that after the initial cost of building 2 separate apps, for iOS and Android, that perhaps it is less aggravating and costly to maintain them, as opposed to dealing with the web. However how complicated is the UI for the web apps? Can't you keep it simple? Unless you can show numbers I cannot in my wildest dreams believe that building and maintain 1 web app is more than twice the cost of building and maintaining 2 separate native apps. What are you building that requires building a 2016 Web app with every new feature? Maybe that is your problem.
  • AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Using the web means you bypass these other issues Not really. If you are doing anything that relies on device hardware, camera, microphone etc... then device type absolutely matters - and it's even worse on mobile web because you can't get close to the metal.
    • padseeker 10y ago
      I would agree, the native interface with hardware would be easier with native than the web. But the testing issues across all android devices is still an issue that the web should not have to contend with. And the Apple store issue is hard to quantify. You just don't know if they are going to let you in. The web means you don't have to get the user to install the app. Of course if you use cordova or phone gap you still have to do deal with those issues. I still cannot conceive when 2 separate apps are cheaper to maintain than one.
      • rimantas 10y ago
• prozaic 10y ago
  if web is future then future is now!
• andrewclunn 10y ago
  He forgot to mention how web frameworks come and go, and then you've got this legacy code nightmare. Also breaking upgrades and dependency hell. I'm a front end web developer, and yeah. If your building something simple, the web is the way to go, but his complaints are totally on spot.
  • mmargerum 10y ago
    Yup. I've got iOS native code written for iOS 2 still runs like a champ. My 2 year old angular 1 code is looking like a total rewrite.
• volune 10y ago
  Problem is no one wants to download your native app.
• cjcenizal 10y ago
  Pro-tip: You can make your article sound like it's been written by a grown-up if you find/replace all instances of the word "fucking" and "fuck" with "".
  • JBReefer 10y ago
    People also just speak differently. You're allowed to curse on the internet, and as someone who lives in Queens, I honestly have trouble speaking without cursing. It feels kind of stilted and overly proper. Language is fluid and evolves.
    • adamqureshi 10y ago
      Fo-Realz...LOL
    • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      But presumably you don't write in every "um", <cough>, stutter and mis-speak so why keep in the swear words rather than cutting them and increasing your readability and information density? You may have trouble speaking without cursing but you clearly manage to write without including the curse words.
• 010a 10y ago
  You are quite bad at understanding the point of an article.
  • dang 10y ago
    Personal attacks aren't allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't. Instead, find a civil, substantive way to make your point. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11871902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11871902 and marked it off-topic.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• ChrisArgyle 10y ago
  If you miss Ted Dziuba's writing at Unvoc you will thoroughly enjoy this article
• bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Sure, it may be cheaper to build an Android app and an iOS app than it is to build a responsive web app. I'll buy that. But most customers want an Android app, an iOS app and a web site for desktop. It's certainly cheaper to build that desktop webapp if you don't have to make it mobile-y, but is it cheaper to build an Android app, an iOS app and a desktop webapp than it is to build a responsive webapp?
• neom 10y ago
  Related: http://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-19-web-vs-mobile-vs-native-vs-open/ http://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-19-web-vs-...
• njharman 10y ago
  "Building" is very small part of software life cycle. Is it also cheaper to bug fix, add features to, update apps when each native platform updates, hire developers who know details of each platform, etc.
  • sintaxi 10y ago
    I'll disagree and say its cheaper, faster, and less risk to bug fix and add features if you only maintain one codebase.
    • njharman 10y ago
      Well then you are agreeing with me, because that is what I said. One webapp cheaper, faster and less risk than multiple native apps.
• jokoon 10y ago
  I'd say it again: break compatibility and make an open, preparsed/compiled/binary HTML format. You'll get several order of magnitude speed increase and reduced memory consumption in browsers (parsing text is expensive). Something a little similar to microsoft .CHM file format. So instead of having a competition in browsers, you'll have competition is the HTML parsers that developers will use. No more messy W3C messy standard which is VERY hard and ambiguous to parse for any browser. I've repeated that rant so often, I might start making a simple example of what I'm talking about. We just MUST abandon the text only approach. It allowed the internet to thrive without microsoft's attempt to make money with it. But today browsers are so ubiquitous, all that there is to do is enable browsers to just render binary HTML, which would just be a tree of rectangles and styles, so really simple. I think.
  • oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    Aren't the big bottlenecks things like waiting for large resources (images) to download and javascript processing? The parsing of HTML, as far as I'm aware, has a tiny relative impact.
    • spriggan3 10y ago
      > javascript processing? Actually Javascript engines are extremely fast, the UI in a web app isn't because web engines have to deal with a complex repaint model. Resources can be loaded asynchronously, so it's not really a bottleneck. On the other hand repaints can absolutely be a serious bottleneck in webpage. Native UI use a much much more simple model, which makes repaints less expensive and allow a better FPS rate. That's why webpages shouldn't try to look like native apps on mobile.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    If we had started with a binary HTML format to start with, many of the progressive enhancements that made the web possible could not have happened.
    • jokoon 10y ago
• donatj 10y ago
  I don't think that's remotely true if you keep the responsive web app simple. YNGNI and KISS and what not. I've been doing this for over ten years. In that time I've seen large web applications built for under 4k; I've also seen massively overbuilt simple applications go for 50k+. It comes down to often how needlessly complex you make the stack. If you stick with solid simple guaranteed tech instead of cutting edge you can knock a web app out relatively cheap and easy. When it comes right down to it, 95% of web apps have two jobs. Present text to the user, take text from the user. Everything else is a nice to have. HTTP has been doing those two jobs amazingly well for decades. It's a solved problem, don't make it harder than it needs to be. Lastly: Don't fight the browser. Design for the browser. Responsive is easy if you design for things to flow as the browser would have it. It's one of the biggest mistake I see so often. If a design requires you to fight the native behaviours of the browser, it's likely a bad design. Fight back against that junk, it just makes future work that much harder. tl;dr Develop for the web of a couple years ago and not the web of today. It'll save you time and headaches.
  • rimantas 10y ago
    And simple apps are absolutely trivial to build native.
  • elliotec 10y ago
    My favorite comment here. People are trying to resolve too many solved problems. Life is much smoother when you're not obsessively teetering on the bleeding edge.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • rsp1984 10y ago
    I think the author is already addressing this: Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don’t want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps.
• amasad 10y ago
  >The web is the future. The web will always be the future. But that’s the problem. I need to ship products now. It's like tomorrow is always tomorrow -- it is never today. One thing that bothers me about the web dev community is the insistence that technology has a will of it's own. As if the web will just eventually win no matter what. I consider myself an advocate for the Web but it needs to be good or better than the alternatives. So, joke aside, it doesn't follow from the rant that the web is the future. It follows that there is a lot of work that needs to happen before you can say it might be part of the future.
  • hutzlibu 10y ago
    I don't like the dramatic at all. It allways has been the case, that if you used the most bleeding-edge features, you will bleed getting it to work everywhere. Very painful indeed, but I won't suspect, that this is going to change in the future, with so many people and companys involved. So if you need to ship products now, you have to use, what's stable enough, if you want to target everyone.
• jtwebman 10y ago
  Has he looked at mixed tech like React? Get web tech with native controls!
  • elliotec 10y ago
    React is absolutely not going to make things easier for him.
• z3t4 10y ago
  > Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. There you have it. Using bleeding edge features will create a lot of problems. First you need to figure out what type of users you want to target, PC users with 24 inch monitors and keyboard? Or 12 year olds with iPads? But still, for your software to really work across as many units as possible, and continue to work for years, you have to look what existed 5-10 years ago, and only use those features that are still standard. I have a mobile phone that no longer gets updates. It is HTML 5 compatible, so it should handle everything that is not bleeding edge, but still many web pages, for example medium.com does not work! I remember being a web developer ten years ago, it was your professional duty do make sure it was pixel perfect on existing GUI based browsers and even look good on the text based ones. I think web dev's today is too quick to jump on the latest and greatest. If you take a look at the browser features that existed 5-10 years ago, it's way behind the native phone app experience! It seems browser vendors totally missed the mobile explosion, and only lately have begun to catch up! Considering how fast the web tech moves now though, the future for web dev looks bright. I think that in in 5-10 years, the mobile browser experience will be on pair or even ahead of native, at least considering dev experience and cross device/platform support.
• jflatow 10y ago
  'www' should stand for wild, wild, web. In many ways, the web is a technology frontier, with all the frustration and liberation that goes along with it. I sympathize with the author. The problem is trying to tame the web, as opposed to embracing it for what it is.
  • dave2000 10y ago
    It would appear that "what it is" is "not good enough", and that the sort of functionality and control over behaviour an layout is so hard to achieve on the browser that it's just not possible for any reasonably complex app and for a sensible price.
• deleted 10y ago
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• nsxwolf 10y ago
  This person is angry. I can't imagine that if someone was ridiculing me on Twitter for destroying the free internet I'd care enough to start swearing up a storm.
• joeyspn 10y ago
  Comparing "responsive web apps" with native mobile apps? Really? What about cordova/phonegap/ionic? Don't blame the web because you made a poor decision picking your tech stack (or hiring your devs). Nowadays a single webdev can ship OSX, Android and Windows apps with frameworks like Ionic... in weeks. Starters (there are hundreds) help a lot: https://market.ionic.io/starters https://market.ionic.io/starters
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    Stuff like Cordova and Phonegap almost universally produce crappy apps. Doubly so if the person doesn't think they need to style the app for the individual platform, instead of just shipping the default (usually iOS) styling. Shipping an app with one of those is almost universally saying, "I don't care about user experience, I just want to shovel something out the door as cheaply and quickly as possible."
    • joeyspn 10y ago
      > Stuff like Cordova and Phonegap almost universally produce crappy apps. Again, don't blame the tool. Blame the bad usage of the tool. You're just saying: "Let's ban knives, assassins use them to do bad stuff!" > [...] style the app for the individual platforms [...] Ionic does this for you automatically. Surprise! http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/components/ http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/components/ It's easier to complain about the tools than acknowledge that you might be wrong about how you or your devs use them (because of unfamiliarity). Truth is many people are shipping stunning apps in no time thanks to web technologies.
      • st3v3r 10y ago
        No, I blame the tool because it's a poor tool. And I'm not using them wrong, because I'm not using them. I do native apps, because I care about my user's experience.
• tonyle 10y ago
  I wonder if multiple native app is still cheaper than maintaining multiple different web builds. Reminds me of this library I stumbled across. http://www.zebkit.com/ http://www.zebkit.com/ People either respond with this is cool or your going against the web when I told them about it.
• pfooti 10y ago
  Mobile Chrome + Mobile Safari would be a great way to cover enough bases to make a good responsive web app reach a huge audience. The core problem is that Mobile Safari is really quite frustrating in a lot of ways. As a simple example, I had a bug with some of the dialogs and menu popups I was using not rendering in Mobile Safari. It turns out that if you have a div that is a child (in the DOM) of a div that has overflow: hidden, that child will not be rendered outside of the clipping box of the parent, even if the child div is position: absolute and at a higher z-index than the parent. This works differently in chrome. There are plenty of workarounds available, but the basic strategy of creating a position: relative context and having a position: absolute floating menu / dialog that's rendered near the button that creates it won't work if your menu bar has overflow: hidden on it. But then you have to make sure you've got your menubar set up well so that it doesn't become super-tall in narrow screens, because you specified overflow: visible. Or you have to put your floating divs elsewhere in the DOM tree and specify their position as fixed and manually calculate where to put them using javascript. It's things like this that frustrate me the most in working with safari - I'm constantly wrestling with a rendering stack that doesn't seem to do what I want (it was only in recent versions that I could stop setting flex-basis: 0.01px instead of flex-basis: auto (on safari) like I do everywhere else on divs that had only text children that I wanted to make expand but also become multiline text instead of pushing everything way out to the right. And don't get me started on safari's support for indexeddb, let alone the other neat features that chrome is supporting to make mobile just plain better. I'm at the point now where I'd literally be willing to tell my users: "install chrome for iOS" if it were actually chrome, instead of supporting safari. But instead, I deal with the sort of resonance back-and-forthing when I fix a safari layout bug that introduces oddities in chrome's renders.
• unicornporn 10y ago
  VERY relevant article: https://govinsider.asia/smart-gov/why-britain-banned-mobile-apps/ https://govinsider.asia/smart-gov/why-britain-banned-mobile-... Ben Terrett was former head of design at the UK Government Digital Service and he wholehearted disagrees.
  • hutzlibu 10y ago
    It's refreshing to hear so much competence from a part of a government ... But about the disagreement: government-apps don't need to be bleeding-edge, like the one from the article. They just have to work without glamour. So 2007 works fine for them ...
• llamataboot 10y ago
  "native app developers seems to think $50K is the smaller amount you should bill for a native app these day" Ummm, yeah, I would say $50k would cover a small native app using Parse or similar or an extremely light backend. Even a medium size native app is going to run $100-150k. That's the price of software development if it's happening in the US.
• Glyptodon 10y ago
  Is there some rule that startup CEOs have to say "fuck" a lot?
• r2dnb 10y ago
  One thing we tend to forget as developers is that in any industrial process, there needs to be technical limitations enforcing requirements before requirements enforce technical specifications. We tend to be too easy because everything seems achievable with software systems. A project should start by considering political things such as: is it smart to have this particular application hosted in a marketplace. Right after that, the chief engineer should be consulted to know the technical approach (platform, stack, etc...) that should be used, and the technical limitations that the requirements should observe to allow the development effort to be successful and efficient. The more self-imposed technical constraints are observed, the more successful and easy the development will be - and passed a certain point, the more difficult it becomes to sell the product or service. Applying this reasoning to the article, to me the problem is the very thing they have decided to develop.
• mark_l_watson 10y ago
  The author of the article ignores user experience: it is much nicer to use a web app than install yet another app. Personally I don't like installing web apps, even if they don't ask for a lot of permissions. Also re: notifications: I think most users don't like to be interupted by notifications.
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    User experience is generally much better in native apps than in websites, though. Native apps match the look and feel of the native platform, with all of the network and performance benefits that entails. Native apps can integrate with the platform to a degree that web apps just can't.
  • vbezhenar 10y ago
    On the other side, I prefer apps and use them almost all the time. And I like notifications very much. I can disable those I don't need and instant notifications of important things are very handy.
• danjayh 10y ago
  Key takeaway: "Open standards are always going to be inferior to closed ones." This is totally true, but as the author notes, open standards still have their place. Also, I realize he's mad, but he really needs to expand his expletive vocabulary :)
• chadcmulligan 10y ago
  Have a look at Delphi if you want cross platform native apps https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi. It's very easy, $50K would take you a very long way.
• siegecraft 10y ago
  The core of his argument really boils down to: I have to do it this way because my audience is 12 year olds and this is what they want. A good lesson in knowing your customer I guess. But I don't think the conclusion is useful for most people. Another thing that stood out to me: "a closed ecosystem will always deliver higher quality in any given moment." Which is so absolute it's ridiculously easily disproved, even while being true at certain points.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• joehewitt 10y ago
  I used publicly whine quite a lot in favor of open web standards. When the specs were simpler, this made more sense, but as they grew more and more complex I felt overwhelmed with the chore of developing cross-browser apps. The investment of time required just didn't make sense anymore, and I felt like the only way to serve the web was to develop simple content-focused pages, and leave any complex functionality to native apps.
• lsiebert 10y ago
  My current employer bought the app I work on from my previous employer. It embeds websites in webviews with JS-Objective-C/JS-Java bridges so they can make native calls. You get most if not all the benefits of native apps, native UI when you really want it, quicker iteration then the App Store, and can build in whatever stack you want. Of course I've had to follow an intermittent bug from the rails back end, to the angular front end, to the native java and up to the companies api servers before, so YMMV.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• hartator 10y ago
  I think it's interesting to know that native apps need to be responsive as well.
• csours 10y ago
  You should still STRONGLY PREFER Web Apps. The cost and headaches of a web app will be MUCH LOWER than native or even hybrid app development. BUT, if you need a Native App, make a Native App and don't try to fake it on Web.
• sockopen 10y ago
  No.
• untog 10y ago
  Even if this is true, I doubt it's a wise idea, given that the average US consumer downloads zero apps per month: http://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-download-zero-apps-per-month/ http://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-download-zero-app... Unless you're in a very fortunate niche, you can't afford to not do the web. You can afford to not do apps.
• 0xsnowcrash 10y ago
  I think this is a bit of "grass is greener" syndrome. I developed web apps for 14 years before building ios apps for 5 years. The last couple of years I've worked on both native apps and responsive web sites. Both can be pains in the ae. But the pain points are different. Both are moving rapidly. eg Ios: having to rejig xibs to storyboards was annoying. Css: Supporting older versions of IE has been a pain. I could go on at length but plenty of people have already done so.
  • jordanlev 10y ago
    Was just going to comment that "the grass is always greener..." For example, here is something that was on the HN front page just a few weeks ago: http://clean-swift.com/mobile-development-projects-fail/ http://clean-swift.com/mobile-development-projects-fail/
• Joeri 10y ago
  The web's view layer, html and css, has the wrong granularity for building precise ui. Html's controls are too high level for pixel perfect manipulation, and too low level for easy assembly into rich ui. CSS meanwhile tries to get you to make general rules that interact to produce a precise rendering, which you never quite achieve because there are always unintended side effects of the rules. No native view api works like this, and for good reason. Since these technologies are almost entirely but not quite unsuitable for building a native-like view layer, people build abstractions around them to approximate the view layer api any native ui gives you. But then the problem becomes one of synchronizing the facade view to the real view, hence ten thousand templating and layout frameworks, all while continually dealing with the leaky nature of the abstraction. I guess what i'm saying is that i believe in the principles of the web, but i think html and css are terrible technologies that do a disservice to those principles.
  • CharlesW 10y ago
    > Html's controls are too high level for pixel perfect manipulation, and too low level for easy assembly into rich ui. HTML+CSS isn't the only abstraction available, though. If you want a lower-level abstraction, you can use canvas. If you want a higher-level abstraction, you have your choice of composable view component systems (e.g. React).
• enturn 10y ago
  I completely agree with the article. I joined a startup a few years ago and we went mostly native on Android and iOS with some simple screens as web views shared between them. Later on some clients wanted desktop and Windows Phone versions so we built a lesser featured version as a website to cater for any other devices (adding features as necessary). We started out as 3 software developers and a designer and are expanding. Native apps was a more cost effective way to deliver a good experience while the competition mostly developed web apps resulting in a lesser experience in my opinion.
• jordanlev 10y ago
  I don't like how the author mocks other people who make decisions based on money over ideals: > That group, btw, has mostly sold out taking high paying jobs at Facebook and Google, and have not heard from since ...but then later justifies his argument to forsake his ideals because "hey I've got a business to run": > I don’t need you to troll me on Twitter and tell me how I’m betraying the web and the free fucking world. I am just trying to keep my startup going.
• dalacv 10y ago
  I like the last line
• jtmarmon 10y ago
  It might be true that it's a pain in the ass to write a responsive web app, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it. Users are unlikely to download a mobile app just because you say so. Of course YMMV. If you have control over what the user does like some kind of internal enterprise app then go for it.
• mmanfrin 10y ago
  But which is easier to maintain?
• bradscarleton 10y ago
  Responsive web apps are difficult to build, however settling for native Android and iOS is not sufficient for comparison since he's leaving out the desktop (so he should probably include Windows and OSX for some level of parity for what a responsive web app can do). The real underlying problem is the state of the mobile web browser, which neither Apple nor Google have much incentive to improve due to their revenue generating app stores. That's not to say that there wouldn't still be some major differences between native apps and mobile web (especially in the discovery / delivery department), but if you had better feature parity between these platforms I think rants like this guys would be fewer and farther between. tl;dr: He picked the wrong technology platform for his product, therefore since it didn't work for his use case, it must be fundamentally broken.
• return0 10y ago
  Good luck having the users download your app. I use everything from the browser, including gmail and twitter (both load faster and don't bother me with notifications). However I hate how they prompt me to download the native apps every fucking time (obligatory). I actually wonder, what are the action rates for those app install prompts? If you don't play games there is barely a reason to download an app ever. And really how bad or difficult is the mobile web? Use bootstrap and you have a pretty fine experience. I think we are focusing too much on slick experience instead of offering something useful.
• chriswwweb 10y ago
  I don't think "web apps" are as problematic today than they were several years ago. I don't say this because I hope web apps will be the future of app development, but because together with a few other devs we have built such an app at the company I work for. I think the result is a success but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to write about our experience yet. I hope I will have the time to so anytime soon. Yes the development costs are super important, especially for small companies / startups. As important is the performance of your app(s) and also super important is the usability of such an app. If the development costs are much higher than building native apps besides your website, then you failed. If your app is slow and unresponsive then you failed. If your users dislike the app because it is not smooth like a native app and feels sluggish then you failed. But does this mean that building mobile web apps is impossible, I don’t think so. We did several things that helped us to keep the costs as low as possible and for sure much lower than if we would have written server, apps and client code using different languages / frameworks and libraries. Our server side code, the code of our web apps as well as (obviously) our client (browser) code are written in javascript. We have used typescript to write all our code, this allowed us to use the latest ES6 features and gave us features like strict typing. The ES6 features we have most used are promises and classes. Typescript compiles our ES6 code into ES5 UMD modules. We choosed Visual Studio as IDE as it compiles typescript on the fly, which allowed as to quickly test new code almost in real time. We also used the node js tools for visual studio which allowed us to use the node js debugger from within our IDE. Setting breakpoints (typescript creates Javascript to TypeScript source maps), reading stack traces or watching variables was a piece of cake. We have built an isomorphic website first. Our server side got built on top of express js (node js). All our modules and libraries are UMD modules, which means that more than 95% of the code we wrote is the same that we use on the server and in the client. We have built a server views renderer using Backbone and domino. Our collections and models are the same on the server and in the client, the only difference are the adapters we wrote to make ajax or server side requests. We use the same router on the server and in the client, which means the first page that gets served is always built on the server but the next pages are built in the client. This also means that crawlers can harvest our pages but for users we only retrieve the data needed to build the pages from server and do all other work in the client, which makes the pages load very quickly. We also had to write a cache library once, the only difference again are their adapters, the server adapter of our caching library saves objects into redis while our client adapter saves them in IndexedDB. A lot of things needed to built the pages get cached too, so each template, each translation and so on only needs to get fetched once by the client and can be reused until we publish an updated version of the item. Our web apps are built using phonegap. Again 95% of the code of our apps is the same as the code that is being used by the client (browsers). Obviously we had to write clean and powerful code to ensure that our apps come as close as possible to the speed that people expect from a native app. We had to track every minor memory leak, especially those that occur when binding events to ensure that our apps use a minimum of memory. This was not only important for the web apps but also for the node js code. A memory leak is something you really don’t want to have when writing a nodejs app ;). I think what helped us to keep the costs low, was that we used the same language and therefore resulting code for the client, server and apps. But this did not only allow us to work quickly, it will also allow us to add new features quickly in the future. If we now write a new feature, as soon as we release it, it will be available to users that use our website as well as users that are using our Android / iOS apps either on their phone or tablet. The same is true for bugs, if we find a bug in the client and fix it, it will be fixed for all our platforms. The other big advantage was that all the know-how we had but especially the one we acquired during the time we needed to build our project did benefit all our platforms. We didn’t have to optimize our Java code for Android our Objective-C or Swift code for iOS and our PHP, Ruby or .Net code for the server. We just needed to optimize our Javascript code. We reduced the amount of platform / language specific problems to a minimum. It is really great when all your devs use (speak) the same language ;).
• api 10y ago
  At age 38 I'm a little bit of an oldster for this industry, and I remember PCs in the 80s. I was a kid but that's when I learned to code and I distinctly remember what it was like. It was a lot like today: loads of fragmentation and loads of vertical 'silos' with their own peculiar way of doing things. Until the late 1980s you had a million little vertically integrated platforms: Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore 64, TI-99, IBM PC, etc. Even within manufacturers you had major incompatibilities, like Commodore VIC-20 vs. Commodore 64. Those were almost totally different machines. Then the explosion of cheap IBM PC/AT clones changed all that and killed all the smaller players. There was a brief period from about 1988 until roughly 1999 when we had essentially one platform MS/Intel. That was MS-DOS and Windows, and the latter would usually run DOS apps. You also had one UI metaphor: the mouse and the keyboard and the screen. You had some hardware fragmentation but if you were targeting OS APIs and not trying to be bare metal it wasn't too hard to deal with. You mostly had one platform you could target and get 90%+ of the end-user market. No more. Today if you want that 90th percentile of the user base you have to roll at least three completely different UIs at a minimum. Either that or you go all-web, which as this author correctly points out is a major headache if you want something that's mobile friendly. We've had good luck with bootstrap+react but it is more work than targeting a single native platform. (Not sure if I buy that many native platforms are more work... probably depends on the stack.) On one hand all this diversity is interesting, but on the other hand if you just want to ship a damn product it's infuriating. It's also true on the backend: you have at least six Linux distributions, Docker, a million different 'stacks', clouds like Amazon building closed mainframe platforms like lambda, etc.
• jaredcwhite 10y ago
  This article might have had some resonance a couple of years ago. Today it's just not the reality. Mobile apps are running into major engagement issues. App Stores are loosing their value prop and running towards web-like SaaS pricing models (Apple's hand was basically forced here). On the other hand, mobile web browsers are way better than they ever have been. Desire to maximize web performance instead of allowing bloatware JS and ad cruft is at all-time high of industry awareness. Many mobile apps are "hybrids" anyway. Basecamp 3's new mobile apps are good examples of how you can create a pretty solid experience with a sensible mix of native and web-based functionality. In other words, the open web is actually in better shape now technologically than several years ago. If only the big VC-backed SV startups would see that instead of chasing their tails trying to grab app users' ever decreasing attention.
• donw 10y ago
  I can speak with some knowledge of a not-insignificant B2C company -- not my current gig -- that went down this exact same route some years ago. Swore off mobile web in favor of pushing people to the app, because app conversions were much higher. A satellite office broke away from the fold and implemented a responsive mobile site, immediately increasing their bottom-line revenue by 30%... and that's before doing any sort of conversion optimization. The main office followed suit shortly thereafter... with a new head of engineering. Native apps are no easier or harder to build than web apps. Equivalent level of difficulty in my experience, with apps being slightly harder because end-to-end testing needs to be done almost completely manually, and because the release cycle is partially outside of your control. But for most businesses, you really, really do not want to neglect the mobile web. Yes, conversion for in-app users is broadly higher across the board. But that's not because conversions suddenly spike when people use an app. Rather, your most dedicated users -- the ones most likely to convert -- are the ones that will install an app. For the rest of us, if it's "app or bust", we will pick "bust". As a consumer, I deal on an annual basis with probably over a hundred different companies. I do not want an app for each of those companies. And if you force me to download an app from the get-go, I will go to your competition.
  • podcastrank 10y ago
    exactly, http://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/11883518/app-boom-over-snapchat-uber http://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/11883518/app-boom-over-snapch... Alternatives are webapp's or even building chat bots/apps on messenger platforms. This progressive mobile webapp example is impressive http://www.flipkart.com/ http://www.flipkart.com/
• moribondus 10y ago
  Consider the following problem. If this very question is relevant, then your project is not. Would it have mattered what they had picked for Google Search? A web site or an app? No. It would not have made any difference. If what you are building is compelling to its users, they will want it badly. Otherwise, regardless of how well you package it, it will be a waste of time. You see, for example, companies choose SAP, and then they buy the servers, desktops, and other hardware and software that is suitable for running in a SAP context. Nobody cares whether the SAP client is a desktop GUI or a web client. It is immaterial. In other words, if that kind of things matter, your program doesn't.
• z0r 10y ago
  >But it pisses me off every time I see a Twitter thread about how native apps are destroying the free world. I can't understand this sentiment the author claims to see. Web apps are generally going to be less free than native apps. A native app doesn't have to be open and a web app doesn't have to be open, but a web app is definitely going to require that you connect to the host, will probably keep all your data stored away from your grasp on its servers, and may change its functionality and terms of service at any time. Native apps can share many or all of these traits but at least there's a chance you can control a copy of the software. The web is a terrible software platform for users.
  • arjie 10y ago
    I freaking love the web as an app platform. Now I don't have to wait for Google Maps for Linux, or Gmail for Linux, or whatever. That world sucked.
    • z0r 10y ago
      Google Maps is magical, but it isn't magical when you can't view uncached tiles or search for things when your connection is offline. A downloadable map application that you could purchase and view and search entirely offline would be even more magical.
      • prewett 10y ago
        Seeing as how Open Street Map's complete dataset is 40 GB compressed (and that probably doesn't have all the businesses, addresses, keywords, etc. of Google Maps), there's a pretty good reason why you can't search it offline. Not to mention, why would Google give away all their data on every install. But, you are partially in luck. Google Maps now allows you to download up to 120,000 sq. km. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?hl=en https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?hl=en
• EGreg 10y ago
  Seriously... there should be a framework that takes care of all that for you. We built this framework. And it took us four YEARS. Ok, it also does a ton more stuff than just make the app work across devices. But, the web rocks. Seriously. PhoneGap lets you basically stuff the web app into a fullscreen shell and go to town. And the best part is that you gey to control updates, totally legally without Apple holding you up. Have a front-end bug? Fix it for everyone tomorrow! Have a new feature you want to roll out to only 5% of your users? YOU CAN! And then A/B test it. Whoa. Like how would you A/B test with the app store? Yeah, that. Also... when invitation links are clicked, where do you think the mobile user goes? TO THE WEB. And so... you need a web experience anyway, that does more than say "Please download our app. Here is a nice picture and description so you can clutter your phone now." And finally... web push notifications? Yes, this is one of the TWO BIGGEST THINGS MISSING in iOS Safari. (The other is access to the address book, with permission of course.) But I think that's about to change at WWDC. Android Chrome has Web Push!
• anuraj 10y ago
  We do the same - each of our Android and iOS developers can complete a medium complexity app in 2 months flat without any issues - Web - not so much - while initial work is done much faster - it takes ages to tackle responsiveness issues even with Bootstrap. So although our web apps are responsive - we still provide native Android and iOS apps to clients. I don't see web apps replacing native apps anytime soon.
• mkem 10y ago
  The requirement logic of my benefactors necessitated no less...
• sidneys 10y ago
  you're wrong. dead wrong. about 2012 was the turning point in this game...
• eggy 10y ago
  > How many of our web evangelist are using an Apple laptop, the most closed ecosystem around? He's got a point here. I gave up my MBPs for a Win 10/Linux notebook, and I've come across some opensource and commercial projects I hadn't noticed only worked on OS X and Windows (MAX/MSP). Sometimes Linux is supported, but as a third, less-supported option (Mathematica 10.4). Maybe it's because I made the change that I am focused on this now, but every talk I watch has the Apple logo. I've noticed some older coders with cred are rocking Lenovos and 3 to 5 year old laptops. I used keep a laptop for 4 or more years, but now I am guilty of 'upgrading' every 2 to 3 years.
• Illniyar 10y ago
  There might be something to the headline but the content isn't delivering. 1. You can't compare making an ios and android app to making an app for every bloody broweser, I mean you could just as easily built your webite to safari and chrome for mobile. You want a true cost comparision compare building an app for universal windows, and mac and linux. Of course if you reduce the scope of your app's access you are going to get reduced costs. 2. Building a messaging app is probably the least appropriate and one of the hardest things to build with web technologie( after a game). Use the appropriate technology for your app. 3. By your remarks on how costly mobile developers are, I'm guessing you've hired to inexpierenced web developrs. Get expierenced developers who know the limitations and best practices and you wont encounter so many issues.
• myoxide1337 10y ago
  Makes sense
• myoxide1337 10y ago
  Makes sense and reminds me of 2006-2007 when this was a big topic in the US with Android and Windows mobile apps with Apple in the passenger seat
• mozey 10y ago
  "Do I miss IE6? As a CEO, actually yes." Seriously? Article should just have started with this, then I wouldn't have had to read the rest.
• nikdaheratik 10y ago
  I can sense the frustration, but I don't think it's the web's problem necessarily, and I've done work in both areas. Some ideas just don't work well in a web browser, because despite 20 years of attempts to force it down that path, a web browser isn't the same as something like Flash, let alone a native software stack. There are more stakeholders than just the app development people, and they don't always care about the same things you do.
• petermolyneux 10y ago
  I built this app with web tech. It was sweaty, and I many times wished that I had gone native. But now that it's done it is something native could never be :) http://www.oneviewcalendar.com http://www.oneviewcalendar.com
• ProfChronos 10y ago
  Really excessive and sometimes completely out of the road: "Open standards are always going to be inferior to closed ones. How many of our web evangelist are using an Apple laptop, the most closed ecosystem around?" You have many open standards that are superior to closed ones, simply because it unleashes creativity of the community. Many techies use Apple because they build an amazing user experience, based on a closed but very large ecosystem - go to the App Store and you'll see most of the apps you need
• Bino 10y ago
  You're clearly doing it wrong...
• gmarcus 10y ago
  How about a real world example. tl;dr The Hybrid app took longer to ship (+ 20%), and was more expensive (+ 525%) We were able to participate in a unique experiment: - Develop a native app for iOS and Android at the same time a separate team was developing the exact same app as Hybrid (Cordova/React). The app had 20 screens and used modern UX (onboarding, profiles, hamburger menus, alerts, GPS, content rich screens (text/images/video) with lists/details talking to a backend REST API with local/offline/sync'd storage. Native = 8 man/weeks - 1 iOS dev for 4 weeks - 1 Android dev for 4 weeks Hybrid = 50 man/weeks - 5 Hybrid devs 10 weeks You can argue that the 5 devs had overhead in communication and project management, but we observed that was not a major contributing factor. The above was for app development (not the server). Hybrid app required the same amount of QA as the Native app.