17 ms·

The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?

144 points by miguelrochefort 8y ago

dvh 8y ago
How can I read that article? Even web link gives me the paywall.
- pvinis 8y ago
  It opened on the medium app on iOS for me, and I could read it.
  - dvh 8y ago
    Do you realize how ironic that is considering the title of article...
    - pvinis 8y ago
      I do. I just haven't taken the time to delete this app from my phone, as one of the 70 I don't use.
- TomK32 8y ago
  Just open it in a private window.
brynlewis 8y ago
This was obvious 10 years ago, so why have mobile apps been successful? What has changed?
- a_imho 8y ago
  Awareness?
gitgud 8y ago
So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for the sub-apps. Eventually these platforms will bloat and bloat until they basically become their own operating system.... then tada we're back at the beginning...
- origami777 8y ago
  It really made sense for the Chinese companies to go this route since they didn't own the mobile OS. They effectively become an OS like you say.
- likium 8y ago
  These platforms own the food delivery and ride hailing platform too so it is much more difficult to compete as users have much fewer incentives to switch.
- EZ-E 8y ago
  > So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for the sub-apps. This is actually happening in China to some extent. I'm blown away that Apple and Google actually approves apps that run a mini-OS inside them like WeChat/Alipay. I initially thought they would have rules to kick these apps off their store. These mega-apps are able to run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control from Apple/Google, the loss of control on their end is maddening. Google and Apple have no control over whether WeChat mini-apps respect their respective App Store rules and guidelines for example. Also, WeChat got so big that I wonder if they would even ban it from the app store if transgressions are found. WeChat literally took control away from them. Example : people install WeChat, from there install mini-apps that aren't controlled by Google/Apple, and even can pay though third party apps : Google/Apple don't get a piece of the cake like they would if you used their IAP system.
  - gitgud 8y ago
    It is amazing how they are allowed to run these apps through the Play Store. I remember a few years ago Google removed thousands of alternative "app store" apps for the Play Store... Not sure how these are different...
pvinis 8y ago
I have two points on this. 1. The end has been here for some of us. But only for the apps the author is talking about. And these apps are the whitelabeled generic restaurant menu apps. If an "app" like that is not useful, who cares about it. If I need to order from that restaurant, why not just use the ordering app that includes that restaurant? 2. He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max 30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying. I don't agree. We might have 100 and use 30. But I bet I have and use a different 100 and 30 than you, and you from the person next to you. That doesn't mean the apps are dying. That means there is diversity and choice. To me that's a plus for the platform. Of course we can get to extremes, but I don't think apps are on the way out. In conclusion, I felt the post was "controversial" just for the sake of it.
- steviecleveland 8y ago
  Yes. And in particular: > He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max 30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying. Mobile app usage is (likely) Pareto-distributed which makes it... just as alive as every other such phenomenon.
- rimliu 8y ago
  Yes, but these metrics web is dead already. I mean there are billions of the websites and I only have five in my favorites. The apps are dying and the year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner. (I wonder what's the ration of Linux desktops in use vs. Android phones in use, which are running Linux after all).
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I always find ironically that these type of articles mention how hard apps are to find and monetize and we should all go Web, as if the Web was wasn't that in an even bigger scale. Even PWAs and WebAssembly adoption means that the Web stack is getting more app-like and less hypertext documents.
origami777 8y ago
There are domains of problems that can be solved with the WeChat model. Money, shopping, paying utilities, ordering food, etc, make sense to have in one app. I don't know if I'd want my task planner or email/cal app in there.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Congrats, you have then moved into a walled garden inside another walled garden.
  - taobility 8y ago
    For Mini program in WeChat, they are independent with iOS or Android. So it just inside one broader walled garden
ohazi 8y ago
Basically every flashlight app on Google Play contains adware or malware and wants non-negotiable (thanks, Google) access to my contact list and files and network. Same with many task managers and qr code scanners and other random little apps and utilities. Fuck that. I'll install Uber and an IM client or two, but that's it. No more "that looks like it might be cool" apps for me. I've said this before - the app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000. I don't know what the story is in Apple-land, but Google did this to themselves, and they deserve the oncoming fallout. Google Play has been a neglected disaster for years.
- nicodjimenez 8y ago
  "the app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000" amen. Maybe even worse, as it's harder to get people to pay for mobile apps than line of business / productivity software.
- psergeant 8y ago
  > I don't know what the story is in Apple-land The walled garden is great and protects my privacy.
  - erikb 8y ago
    Please mark sarcasm at least with a ";)" otherwise many people might think you mean what you say becaise they don't know that it's a ridiculous idea that a big corp will come and protect each users privacy.
    - jnaina 8y ago
      I actually pay more for an iPhone to be in their walled garden (with all the restrictions therein) for the better security and privacy. I consider my smartphone to be an appliance and am ok to trade-off uber-customization-capabilities for better than Android level of security. I also carry an Android phablet for on-the-go mobile hacking/coding/exploring shenanigans, but don't keep any data on it for obvious reasons
    - 8y ago
theredbox 8y ago
This is a very Western centric point of view. Even if most of the RN like apps become "good enough" there will be a market for those apps that want to differentiate with the sluggish good enough apps.
Animats 8y ago
"The vision was that, one day, every legal entity would have its own mobile app." Yes, that was a classic bad idea. There were magazine apps which simply contained JPEG files of all the pages. In both orientations, even. That was both unnecessary [1] and annoying [2]. The successful apps are now all from the big players. We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era. [1] https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/ [2] https://xkcd.com/1174/ https://xkcd.com/1174/
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  > We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era. I think you've summarized the heart of the article here and I totally agree with you. When OP says "the end is near" I think we can interpret it to mean that it's the end of the big growth era, the end of the era where that technology and demand for expertise in that technology dominates other technologies, the end of the era where new companies and their technologists are wise to invest their time in apps and learning apps. The vast majority of apps (esp. android) make too little money to justify the expense required to create and maintain. They're not profit centers. They're loss centers.
manmal 8y ago
As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been around for some time and have not proven compelling. Points 1 & 2 were invariants from the start. On the contrary, excellent and fast on device search has enabled me to keep hundreds of apps, as long as I remember their names or keywords. I have always argued that pure information is better served as a single page website, and I have always told my clients so. Point 3 is interesting, but at some point the OS vendors will take steps against that to maintain control. I also cannot see how shipping an app in WeChat is fundamentally different from shipping it on the App Store, bare technical details like programming language. Point 4 is the one-sided observation of the centralize-decentralize circle that is happening in all ecosystems. Once FAANG have purchased all the startups and apps, people will crave for new ones. Governments will even incentivize that. I think the only thing that can kill on-device apps in the next years is PWAs with WASM and friends (IF a central market place for PWAs develops). But Apple and Google will have it let that actively happen; and development paradigms might not even change that much, with Swift/Kotlin to WASM compilers in the works.
KaiserPro 8y ago
This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store. The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying. Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread, so any heavy lifting is serverside, which means latency in anything other then decent bandwidth areas (so no travelling for you....) Secondly, and possibly most importantly, the GUI language of the native OS doesn't exist, which means everyone re-designs every thing, making things much much harder for end users, old people and hard of sight. Consolidation has a point, but I suspect its the OS that will provide these apps/function. The data I have seen from the old company was this: people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged than the people who used our uber mobile friendly and fast news site. Apps can be faster, handle offline/near offline far better. Apps are here to stay, until mobile web changes from a inefficient presentation layer to something more like a windowing toolkit.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  > people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged That's maybe because people that are engaged with something could be more willing to install the app. Also once the app is installed there is an icon on your phone constantly reminding you to use it.
- buboard 8y ago
  > people who installed our news reader But how many people installed your reader? I think it's easy to explain why they engage more with your site in your app: they have nowhere else to go, and the website icon is there, on the screen. This doesnt scale
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    In what way does it need to scale?
    - 8y ago
dustinmoris 8y ago
For years I haven't installed any apps but the absolute minimum. I don't have an app for news, Facebook, Amazon, airlines, this, that, because of all the reasons mentioned in the article. I read news on the mobile optimised websites, I retrieve my flight ticket as a PDF in my inbox, I never like to shop from my phone anyway (best done on a desktop when having a mental break at work) and don't think Facebook offers anything that requires my attention more than maybe once a couple weeks.
- p4bl0 8y ago
  Completely agree. I do the same thing and even uninstall or deactivate unecessary apps installed by default. As a result I have less app than my phone can display on a single page of the app drawer even with good sized icons, which is actually very convenient.
ricokatayama 8y ago
The question isn't solely about tech, but how the mobile OS' wrap and deliver the experience. Even with attempts like progressible web apps, we still have the same approach and behavior to navigate on our mobile home, a central place to launch a specific problem-solver. I don't think that we are going to change this, but develop the pattern above this concept. That is what we already see with the evolution of iOS on iPad or Chrome OS. Apple and Google respectively could be inspired by different analogies, but instead, they are doubling down on the new conceived standard brought the mobile phone.
fit2rule 8y ago
You know what rocks, and which doesn't get nearly as much attention these days, vis a vis mobile app development? Using a single game engine for real business apps, and then shipping those apps on every platform the game engine supports. Sure, you maybe have to do a bit more work to get a data entry field up on the screen - but you only have to do it once and you've got the same, consistent, agreeable (assuming you design it right) interface across all supported platforms. This isn't the same as using browser-based frameworks to accomplish the same thing. What I mean is, a game engine that provides equal access to the rendering and input event pipeline across the board. Its the native-framework dance that is killing mobile apps. The time spent grok'ing one Android SDK release, only to have to do it all over again just to keep your app current and constant on the platform. To a lesser degree its the same with iOS. But, if you take sufficient responsibility for the engine such that you're really targeting GLES and an event queue, you can produce amazing apps that run everywhere. This is the promise that needs to be fulfilled going forward. We don't need more apps that just look the same, yet take up infinite resources and attention just to stay in place. With a game-engine approach, app developers can actually differentiate themselves again - and the good ones, the really good ones, produce really good apps. Think about this some time: the most-shipped, most-used apps on any of the mobile platforms are those that, pretty much, eschew tight integration with the vendor-provided frameworks and instead bring their own to the party. This will get traction as more and more devs start to understand just how far you can take your modern engine these days .. and those engines are becoming their own OS in their own right, anyway ...
- gman83 8y ago
  You've just described Flutter, it's basically a video game engine for apps.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Precisely. After nearly a decade of list-detail view apps doing REST API calls, and the most widely used apps having their own unique branding that's the same across both platforms, you might as well distill those common features into a Unity for mobile apps.
  - 8y ago
rexf 8y ago
I don't agree with the overall premise that native apps will disappear. I agree that certain apps, such as the static content Wix example, don't need to exist. I found the article unconvincing. The core argument is that native apps will consolidate into larger social media apps as part of an in-app app? That may be the case for China, but not the US. Even if that did happen in the US, that means you are still building mobile apps (with another abstraction layer). As long as native apps provide a better UI (as expected of native apps) & continue to have access to OS APIs that the mobile browser does not, native apps will continue succeed by providing a better experience.
- Shaddox 8y ago
  So it would be like myspace but a mobile app?
oh-kumudo 8y ago
One thing this article gets right is that it is just going to be harder to persuade users to download an App that only brings in marginal/augmented functionality. I have about 1.5 screens of Apps installed, probably somewhere near 30-50 apps in total, and use barely 10 of them fairly frequently as far as I can recall. Maybe it won't be too surprising that Google/Apple will announce something similar to Wechat's mini-program, a lightweight application distribution system that doesn't require a browser, nor installation to work. In fact, Google's Instant App aren't that far from the above description, it is just a matter of marketing effort to push it closer to users.
EZ-E 8y ago
I only agree with the third point the author makes > Smaller apps will become part of social media and mobile wallet ecosystems. I find actually unbelievable that Apple and Google didn't crack down on it yet as it takes considerable control away from them. Through iOS's WeChat for example, I can install and run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control or review scrutinity away from Apple. Not to mention about how all payements are processed thru these mega-apps, fully bypassing the in-app purchase system. Could Apple even ban some of these big offending Mega-Apps like WeChat at this point? Probably not, as that would cripple their marketshare in China. So meanwhile they effectively host a third party app store competitor... in their app store.
- zeroname 8y ago
  WeChat in China is more important than Facebook is in the US. That's why they get away with it.
lazerwalker 8y ago
> Too many apps slow down your phone. They take up memory space, run background processes, and constantly check for push notifications even when not in use. This is provably false on iOS, yeah? iOS's backgrounding model means apps that aren't actively doing work don't "take up memory space". Apps that you never open are quickly throttled from all forms of background processing on a pretty aggressive timescale (I know this firsthand, it's been a major pain for one or two specific apps I've worked on). Push notifications are, as the name implies, a push service rather than a pull/polling service. Unused apps do take up storage space, but iOS 11 and newer automatically silently delete apps you don't use, keeping the user's data and the app icon around for when you open it again. In the settings UI where you can disable it, this is explicitly framed as only saving you storage space, rather than having performance benefits.
- zeroname 8y ago
  Most users aren't on iOS, but even the ones that are probably have the perception that apps do stuff in the background that drains battery.
  - eugeniub 8y ago
    I've seen probably most of my iOS friends open the app switcher and kill every single app after they're done showing me something. It's not worth it to try to explain it to anyone because it's such an ingrained muscle memory now.
    - RandallBrown 8y ago
      My coworker, who is an iOS Developer, does this fully understanding it's counterproductive. He just doesn't want to see any apps in the app switcher.
Insanity 8y ago
"Betteridge's law" comes to mind when reading this. We have some in-house apps, and it comes in handy to have control over the device you are using and developing for. In general though, I do think apps (from the app stores) are not installed as much anymore as they once were. Anecdata, but I hardly install anything anymore on my phone.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> The idea was to make it easy for individuals and small businesses to create their own personal apps for social or marketing purposes. > The vision was that, one day, every legal entity (human beings and companies) would have its own mobile app. These apps would be dotted all over the internet, like physical properties on a map. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Er, thank $deity that didn't happen. This is a vision that exemplifies the sales-level delusions I've seen some times, of the "we'll sell lots of useless shit and make boatloads of money" kind. It doesn't stop to consider that apps need to provide value to the users, and the technology context of a smartphone puts constraints on what form that value can take. Gross. I'm happy I've never heard of this vision in the past, as I wouldn't be nice to the people preaching it.
monkeynotes 8y ago
TLDR: Betteridge's law applies. Fact is mobile apps will remain useful for as long as mobile devices occupy the same space they do now. Maybe you don't have more than 100 apps installed, but that does not equate to all apps being deemed useless. Different people find different apps useful enough to install and continue using. I don't ever see myself using a web-app alternative over my security camera app, or my email app, and so on. Fact is, native apps have their uses, but not all native apps are useful to all people.
perpetualcrayon 8y ago
App ecosystems help perpetuate oligopolies.
jaegerpicker 8y ago
This article is shortsighted to me. Is it the end of mobile apps? No of course not, webapps are gaining features of native apps and will run more like a native app. The real difference will be the app delivery method. Is it the web or an App Store. An App is an App, if it’s written in Dart, Js, Swift, and C++ it doesn’t matter it’s still an app experience. That experience is fundamentally better than the web page and still has all the downsides of an app also. How we deliver the app experience may change but I don’t think it will. Is there are difference for th emend user if they have 100+ shortcuts vs 100+ apps from the App Store? What we are seeing is a competive market where you have to offer real value to attract users. No much different than the current indie game market. It’s completely overwhelmed with numbers of options and users are sticking with the top level of apps/games. Maybe the delivery of apps changes but honestly I doubt that as discovery is much better in the App Store.
eugeniub 8y ago
> Chances are, if you take away the manufacturer’s pre-installed apps that you can’t delete, you have, at most, 100 apps. I don't see how this can be the first point in arguing that the end of mobile apps is near. Imagine saying, "The end of desktop apps are near, people will only put up with 100 third-party apps on their computers these days!"
TimesOldRoman 8y ago
Blizzard would like a word....
jmull 8y ago
Poor Lance Ng. He has an article with a lot of attention, but it’s this silly piece. BTW, no one needs to read the article, but if you’re here I guess it’s probably too late. He’s actually arguing with his six-years-in-the-past self, who thought people wanted lots and lots of pointless shovelware apps. He’s now realized this isn’t the case, but has swung too far the other way and now sees no reason for apps. I think most people realized all along apps weren’t good for everything. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great for some things. My favorite part is where one of his reasons the end is near is that people only have 100 or so apps on their phone and only use ~30 regularly. Right. Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
me551ah 8y ago
To be honest, I wouldn't like mobile going the html/js way at all. Html/js has moved to desktop with electron and the results aren't that great. They take up huge amounts of memory ( gmail web on chrome takes up 500mb of ram on my machine, also slack is a noteworthy mention). Native desktop apps take up a fraction of that memory. For the sake of accessibility we have significantly sacrificed performance. I can't wait for webassembly to be widely adopted so that the browser can move away from html/js. Google has a nifty tool called ArcWelder which allows android apps to run in chrome. Apple has already announced support for running iOS apps on Mac. I actually believe that the reverse will happen and for more popular apps like fb, gmail etc people will move back to using native , less memory hogging applications once they are out.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Whats the issue with using 500mb memory? I have 8gb on a 5 year old computer.
  - me551ah 8y ago
    That's also multiplied by the number of tabs that you have open. A medium tab is right now taking up 200mb and so is Amazon. I have over 3 browser windows open with many tabs and need to use extensions to auto kills tabs so that the OS doesn't end up into swap space territory. I also run Android Studio and an emulator on the side which compete for memory.
    - mkirklions 8y ago
      I do similar where I have 60 tabs and 5 windows open, a few servers, text editors, etc... But I can always close tabs.
      - me551ah 8y ago
        You need to close tabs, but when was the last time you had to close apps on mobile for performance reasons? Even though mobile devices have significantly lesser specifications.
sodafountan 8y ago
What the author doesn't mention is that apps have become increasingly easier to write as time has gone on. Not only do we have better native languages that you can write apps with (Swift and Kotlin) but we have incredible cross-platform tools as well in the forms of Xamarin and React-Native. I've personally been working with React-Native over the past year and it's just as easy as writing React code for the web (if you're using expo), once people understand this it'll only be a matter of time before web-dev teams adopt it. Historically the problems with app development is that it was a lot harder than web development and often required you to learn a new language and framework in order to get anything functional, this is no longer the case. I'd actually argue that there will be more apps going into the future as the technology needed to build them simplifies.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  They're easier to write now, but still not easy enough: the vast majority of apps earn too little revenue to justify their dev cost.
rchaud 8y ago
Author seems to have missed a big reason for why apps will continue to persist: they obscure data access permissions far better than browsers do. If you install FB messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever, you will be asked one time which permissions (location, microphone, contacts) you want to grant it, and most people won't even review the list before hitting Install. On the web, the browser dialog will ask you each time the app wants to access any of these things, whereas on the app, it'll quietly continue the use the permissions you granted it, and eventually you'll forget you signed off on them in the first place. Not to mention some particularly shameless actors will gimp their mobile web functionality to ensure you use their app at all times (FB, Airbnb, others).
casper345 8y ago
Working with IoT (i.e. Beacon technology) HTML5 and even React Native, nothing beats native code responsiveness. The need for "White label" apps may start going away, but emerging technologies that rely on efficiency and speed should be utilizing mobile app native environment.
thrower123 8y ago
I'm convinced that mobile devices are useless for anything but the most trivial usages. Just last night I sat and watched my mother-in-law flail for the better part of two hours trying to look up and then purchase some replacement filters for her vacuum cleaner. What should have been relatively simple on a real computer was torturous on a smartphone. Between the tiny display, awful on-screen keyboard that is flaky and obscures most of what you are looking at, clunky apps and busted mobile websites, it's just a rage-inducing disaster. Not to mention that if you are not on absolutely perfect WiFi, everything is so slow and janky to load. It's just not acceptable that the bar is so low for usability; I'm convinced that we've gone backwards to a significant degree, and I'd much rather go back to the web that we had in 2008 than the one we have in 2018.
- ativzzz 8y ago
  These kinds of apps is exactly what the linked article is arguing against. However, if a mobile app has worse usability than desktop then the company failed to redesign their product experience for mobile. That or, their product is simply not meant to be used on small screens at all.
smoser 8y ago
Functionally yes, most apps could be mobile websites except for one thing: Mobile users don’t use bookmarks. Mobile users use icons on the home screen. It is easier for users to add an app to their home screen than a website.
- butz 8y ago
  But you can add a website to your home screen too, and it will act like app.
olliej 8y ago
Here’s the thing: a webpage will never be able to do a number of privileged operations, for a very simple reason - visiting an arbitrary web page is not controlled by a user, as any webpage can cause an automatic navigation to another. Installing an app acts as a user intent driven security boundary. Dialogs coming up on random webpages is a buck-passing technique, as users cannot discern a “safe” request from an unsafe one. This applies to technical users as well - dialog fatigue, incorrect script inclusion, ads, etc. eventually you can end up accidentally saying yes to the wrong dialogue and a random website gets to download your contact list, etc.
pier25 8y ago
The end? No. But PWA websites will most likely kill many native apps. I use the Twitter PWA and it works perfectly fine on Android.
gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago
I remember when people were saying that the end is near for web apps since mobile apps are going to eat everything. No one knows what will happen in the next three to seven years. Best we can do is observe the market every year and adjust course as necessary.

dvh 8y ago

How can I read that article? Even web link gives me the paywall.

pvinis 8y ago
It opened on the medium app on iOS for me, and I could read it.
- dvh 8y ago
  Do you realize how ironic that is considering the title of article...
  - pvinis 8y ago
    I do. I just haven't taken the time to delete this app from my phone, as one of the 70 I don't use.
TomK32 8y ago
Just open it in a private window.

brynlewis 8y ago

This was obvious 10 years ago, so why have mobile apps been successful? What has changed?

a_imho 8y ago
Awareness?

gitgud 8y ago

So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for the sub-apps. Eventually these platforms will bloat and bloat until they basically become their own operating system.... then tada we're back at the beginning...

origami777 8y ago
It really made sense for the Chinese companies to go this route since they didn't own the mobile OS. They effectively become an OS like you say.
likium 8y ago
These platforms own the food delivery and ride hailing platform too so it is much more difficult to compete as users have much fewer incentives to switch.
EZ-E 8y ago
> So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for the sub-apps. This is actually happening in China to some extent. I'm blown away that Apple and Google actually approves apps that run a mini-OS inside them like WeChat/Alipay. I initially thought they would have rules to kick these apps off their store. These mega-apps are able to run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control from Apple/Google, the loss of control on their end is maddening. Google and Apple have no control over whether WeChat mini-apps respect their respective App Store rules and guidelines for example. Also, WeChat got so big that I wonder if they would even ban it from the app store if transgressions are found. WeChat literally took control away from them. Example : people install WeChat, from there install mini-apps that aren't controlled by Google/Apple, and even can pay though third party apps : Google/Apple don't get a piece of the cake like they would if you used their IAP system.
- gitgud 8y ago
  It is amazing how they are allowed to run these apps through the Play Store. I remember a few years ago Google removed thousands of alternative "app store" apps for the Play Store... Not sure how these are different...

pvinis 8y ago

I have two points on this. 1. The end has been here for some of us. But only for the apps the author is talking about. And these apps are the whitelabeled generic restaurant menu apps. If an "app" like that is not useful, who cares about it. If I need to order from that restaurant, why not just use the ordering app that includes that restaurant? 2. He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max 30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying. I don't agree. We might have 100 and use 30. But I bet I have and use a different 100 and 30 than you, and you from the person next to you. That doesn't mean the apps are dying. That means there is diversity and choice. To me that's a plus for the platform. Of course we can get to extremes, but I don't think apps are on the way out. In conclusion, I felt the post was "controversial" just for the sake of it.

steviecleveland 8y ago
Yes. And in particular: > He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max 30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying. Mobile app usage is (likely) Pareto-distributed which makes it... just as alive as every other such phenomenon.
rimliu 8y ago
Yes, but these metrics web is dead already. I mean there are billions of the websites and I only have five in my favorites. The apps are dying and the year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner. (I wonder what's the ration of Linux desktops in use vs. Android phones in use, which are running Linux after all).
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I always find ironically that these type of articles mention how hard apps are to find and monetize and we should all go Web, as if the Web was wasn't that in an even bigger scale. Even PWAs and WebAssembly adoption means that the Web stack is getting more app-like and less hypertext documents.

origami777 8y ago

There are domains of problems that can be solved with the WeChat model. Money, shopping, paying utilities, ordering food, etc, make sense to have in one app. I don't know if I'd want my task planner or email/cal app in there.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Congrats, you have then moved into a walled garden inside another walled garden.
- taobility 8y ago
  For Mini program in WeChat, they are independent with iOS or Android. So it just inside one broader walled garden

ohazi 8y ago

Basically every flashlight app on Google Play contains adware or malware and wants non-negotiable (thanks, Google) access to my contact list and files and network. Same with many task managers and qr code scanners and other random little apps and utilities. Fuck that. I'll install Uber and an IM client or two, but that's it. No more "that looks like it might be cool" apps for me. I've said this before - the app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000. I don't know what the story is in Apple-land, but Google did this to themselves, and they deserve the oncoming fallout. Google Play has been a neglected disaster for years.

nicodjimenez 8y ago
"the app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000" amen. Maybe even worse, as it's harder to get people to pay for mobile apps than line of business / productivity software.
psergeant 8y ago
> I don't know what the story is in Apple-land The walled garden is great and protects my privacy.
- erikb 8y ago
  Please mark sarcasm at least with a ";)" otherwise many people might think you mean what you say becaise they don't know that it's a ridiculous idea that a big corp will come and protect each users privacy.
  - jnaina 8y ago
    I actually pay more for an iPhone to be in their walled garden (with all the restrictions therein) for the better security and privacy. I consider my smartphone to be an appliance and am ok to trade-off uber-customization-capabilities for better than Android level of security. I also carry an Android phablet for on-the-go mobile hacking/coding/exploring shenanigans, but don't keep any data on it for obvious reasons
  - 8y ago

theredbox 8y ago

This is a very Western centric point of view. Even if most of the RN like apps become "good enough" there will be a market for those apps that want to differentiate with the sluggish good enough apps.

Animats 8y ago

"The vision was that, one day, every legal entity would have its own mobile app." Yes, that was a classic bad idea. There were magazine apps which simply contained JPEG files of all the pages. In both orientations, even. That was both unnecessary [1] and annoying [2]. The successful apps are now all from the big players. We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era. [1] https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/ [2] https://xkcd.com/1174/ https://xkcd.com/1174/

HillaryBriss 8y ago
> We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era. I think you've summarized the heart of the article here and I totally agree with you. When OP says "the end is near" I think we can interpret it to mean that it's the end of the big growth era, the end of the era where that technology and demand for expertise in that technology dominates other technologies, the end of the era where new companies and their technologists are wise to invest their time in apps and learning apps. The vast majority of apps (esp. android) make too little money to justify the expense required to create and maintain. They're not profit centers. They're loss centers.

manmal 8y ago

As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been around for some time and have not proven compelling. Points 1 & 2 were invariants from the start. On the contrary, excellent and fast on device search has enabled me to keep hundreds of apps, as long as I remember their names or keywords. I have always argued that pure information is better served as a single page website, and I have always told my clients so. Point 3 is interesting, but at some point the OS vendors will take steps against that to maintain control. I also cannot see how shipping an app in WeChat is fundamentally different from shipping it on the App Store, bare technical details like programming language. Point 4 is the one-sided observation of the centralize-decentralize circle that is happening in all ecosystems. Once FAANG have purchased all the startups and apps, people will crave for new ones. Governments will even incentivize that. I think the only thing that can kill on-device apps in the next years is PWAs with WASM and friends (IF a central market place for PWAs develops). But Apple and Google will have it let that actively happen; and development paradigms might not even change that much, with Swift/Kotlin to WASM compilers in the works.

KaiserPro 8y ago

This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It also neglects the apple store. The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to use, and generally annoying. Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native, which means less battery. You still can't multithread, so any heavy lifting is serverside, which means latency in anything other then decent bandwidth areas (so no travelling for you....) Secondly, and possibly most importantly, the GUI language of the native OS doesn't exist, which means everyone re-designs every thing, making things much much harder for end users, old people and hard of sight. Consolidation has a point, but I suspect its the OS that will provide these apps/function. The data I have seen from the old company was this: people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged than the people who used our uber mobile friendly and fast news site. Apps can be faster, handle offline/near offline far better. Apps are here to stay, until mobile web changes from a inefficient presentation layer to something more like a windowing toolkit.

Double_a_92 8y ago
> people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged That's maybe because people that are engaged with something could be more willing to install the app. Also once the app is installed there is an icon on your phone constantly reminding you to use it.
buboard 8y ago
> people who installed our news reader But how many people installed your reader? I think it's easy to explain why they engage more with your site in your app: they have nowhere else to go, and the website icon is there, on the screen. This doesnt scale
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  In what way does it need to scale?
  - 8y ago

dustinmoris 8y ago

For years I haven't installed any apps but the absolute minimum. I don't have an app for news, Facebook, Amazon, airlines, this, that, because of all the reasons mentioned in the article. I read news on the mobile optimised websites, I retrieve my flight ticket as a PDF in my inbox, I never like to shop from my phone anyway (best done on a desktop when having a mental break at work) and don't think Facebook offers anything that requires my attention more than maybe once a couple weeks.

p4bl0 8y ago
Completely agree. I do the same thing and even uninstall or deactivate unecessary apps installed by default. As a result I have less app than my phone can display on a single page of the app drawer even with good sized icons, which is actually very convenient.

ricokatayama 8y ago

The question isn't solely about tech, but how the mobile OS' wrap and deliver the experience. Even with attempts like progressible web apps, we still have the same approach and behavior to navigate on our mobile home, a central place to launch a specific problem-solver. I don't think that we are going to change this, but develop the pattern above this concept. That is what we already see with the evolution of iOS on iPad or Chrome OS. Apple and Google respectively could be inspired by different analogies, but instead, they are doubling down on the new conceived standard brought the mobile phone.

fit2rule 8y ago

You know what rocks, and which doesn't get nearly as much attention these days, vis a vis mobile app development? Using a single game engine for real business apps, and then shipping those apps on every platform the game engine supports. Sure, you maybe have to do a bit more work to get a data entry field up on the screen - but you only have to do it once and you've got the same, consistent, agreeable (assuming you design it right) interface across all supported platforms. This isn't the same as using browser-based frameworks to accomplish the same thing. What I mean is, a game engine that provides equal access to the rendering and input event pipeline across the board. Its the native-framework dance that is killing mobile apps. The time spent grok'ing one Android SDK release, only to have to do it all over again just to keep your app current and constant on the platform. To a lesser degree its the same with iOS. But, if you take sufficient responsibility for the engine such that you're really targeting GLES and an event queue, you can produce amazing apps that run everywhere. This is the promise that needs to be fulfilled going forward. We don't need more apps that just look the same, yet take up infinite resources and attention just to stay in place. With a game-engine approach, app developers can actually differentiate themselves again - and the good ones, the really good ones, produce really good apps. Think about this some time: the most-shipped, most-used apps on any of the mobile platforms are those that, pretty much, eschew tight integration with the vendor-provided frameworks and instead bring their own to the party. This will get traction as more and more devs start to understand just how far you can take your modern engine these days .. and those engines are becoming their own OS in their own right, anyway ...

gman83 8y ago
You've just described Flutter, it's basically a video game engine for apps.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Precisely. After nearly a decade of list-detail view apps doing REST API calls, and the most widely used apps having their own unique branding that's the same across both platforms, you might as well distill those common features into a Unity for mobile apps.
- 8y ago

rexf 8y ago

I don't agree with the overall premise that native apps will disappear. I agree that certain apps, such as the static content Wix example, don't need to exist. I found the article unconvincing. The core argument is that native apps will consolidate into larger social media apps as part of an in-app app? That may be the case for China, but not the US. Even if that did happen in the US, that means you are still building mobile apps (with another abstraction layer). As long as native apps provide a better UI (as expected of native apps) & continue to have access to OS APIs that the mobile browser does not, native apps will continue succeed by providing a better experience.

Shaddox 8y ago
So it would be like myspace but a mobile app?

oh-kumudo 8y ago

One thing this article gets right is that it is just going to be harder to persuade users to download an App that only brings in marginal/augmented functionality. I have about 1.5 screens of Apps installed, probably somewhere near 30-50 apps in total, and use barely 10 of them fairly frequently as far as I can recall. Maybe it won't be too surprising that Google/Apple will announce something similar to Wechat's mini-program, a lightweight application distribution system that doesn't require a browser, nor installation to work. In fact, Google's Instant App aren't that far from the above description, it is just a matter of marketing effort to push it closer to users.

EZ-E 8y ago

I only agree with the third point the author makes > Smaller apps will become part of social media and mobile wallet ecosystems. I find actually unbelievable that Apple and Google didn't crack down on it yet as it takes considerable control away from them. Through iOS's WeChat for example, I can install and run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control or review scrutinity away from Apple. Not to mention about how all payements are processed thru these mega-apps, fully bypassing the in-app purchase system. Could Apple even ban some of these big offending Mega-Apps like WeChat at this point? Probably not, as that would cripple their marketshare in China. So meanwhile they effectively host a third party app store competitor... in their app store.

zeroname 8y ago
WeChat in China is more important than Facebook is in the US. That's why they get away with it.

lazerwalker 8y ago

> Too many apps slow down your phone. They take up memory space, run background processes, and constantly check for push notifications even when not in use. This is provably false on iOS, yeah? iOS's backgrounding model means apps that aren't actively doing work don't "take up memory space". Apps that you never open are quickly throttled from all forms of background processing on a pretty aggressive timescale (I know this firsthand, it's been a major pain for one or two specific apps I've worked on). Push notifications are, as the name implies, a push service rather than a pull/polling service. Unused apps do take up storage space, but iOS 11 and newer automatically silently delete apps you don't use, keeping the user's data and the app icon around for when you open it again. In the settings UI where you can disable it, this is explicitly framed as only saving you storage space, rather than having performance benefits.

zeroname 8y ago
Most users aren't on iOS, but even the ones that are probably have the perception that apps do stuff in the background that drains battery.
- eugeniub 8y ago
  I've seen probably most of my iOS friends open the app switcher and kill every single app after they're done showing me something. It's not worth it to try to explain it to anyone because it's such an ingrained muscle memory now.
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    My coworker, who is an iOS Developer, does this fully understanding it's counterproductive. He just doesn't want to see any apps in the app switcher.

Insanity 8y ago

"Betteridge's law" comes to mind when reading this. We have some in-house apps, and it comes in handy to have control over the device you are using and developing for. In general though, I do think apps (from the app stores) are not installed as much anymore as they once were. Anecdata, but I hardly install anything anymore on my phone.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> The idea was to make it easy for individuals and small businesses to create their own personal apps for social or marketing purposes. > The vision was that, one day, every legal entity (human beings and companies) would have its own mobile app. These apps would be dotted all over the internet, like physical properties on a map. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Er, thank $deity that didn't happen. This is a vision that exemplifies the sales-level delusions I've seen some times, of the "we'll sell lots of useless shit and make boatloads of money" kind. It doesn't stop to consider that apps need to provide value to the users, and the technology context of a smartphone puts constraints on what form that value can take. Gross. I'm happy I've never heard of this vision in the past, as I wouldn't be nice to the people preaching it.

monkeynotes 8y ago

TLDR: Betteridge's law applies. Fact is mobile apps will remain useful for as long as mobile devices occupy the same space they do now. Maybe you don't have more than 100 apps installed, but that does not equate to all apps being deemed useless. Different people find different apps useful enough to install and continue using. I don't ever see myself using a web-app alternative over my security camera app, or my email app, and so on. Fact is, native apps have their uses, but not all native apps are useful to all people.

perpetualcrayon 8y ago

App ecosystems help perpetuate oligopolies.

jaegerpicker 8y ago

This article is shortsighted to me. Is it the end of mobile apps? No of course not, webapps are gaining features of native apps and will run more like a native app. The real difference will be the app delivery method. Is it the web or an App Store. An App is an App, if it’s written in Dart, Js, Swift, and C++ it doesn’t matter it’s still an app experience. That experience is fundamentally better than the web page and still has all the downsides of an app also. How we deliver the app experience may change but I don’t think it will. Is there are difference for th emend user if they have 100+ shortcuts vs 100+ apps from the App Store? What we are seeing is a competive market where you have to offer real value to attract users. No much different than the current indie game market. It’s completely overwhelmed with numbers of options and users are sticking with the top level of apps/games. Maybe the delivery of apps changes but honestly I doubt that as discovery is much better in the App Store.

eugeniub 8y ago

> Chances are, if you take away the manufacturer’s pre-installed apps that you can’t delete, you have, at most, 100 apps. I don't see how this can be the first point in arguing that the end of mobile apps is near. Imagine saying, "The end of desktop apps are near, people will only put up with 100 third-party apps on their computers these days!"

TimesOldRoman 8y ago

Blizzard would like a word....

jmull 8y ago

Poor Lance Ng. He has an article with a lot of attention, but it’s this silly piece. BTW, no one needs to read the article, but if you’re here I guess it’s probably too late. He’s actually arguing with his six-years-in-the-past self, who thought people wanted lots and lots of pointless shovelware apps. He’s now realized this isn’t the case, but has swung too far the other way and now sees no reason for apps. I think most people realized all along apps weren’t good for everything. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great for some things. My favorite part is where one of his reasons the end is near is that people only have 100 or so apps on their phone and only use ~30 regularly. Right. Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

me551ah 8y ago

To be honest, I wouldn't like mobile going the html/js way at all. Html/js has moved to desktop with electron and the results aren't that great. They take up huge amounts of memory ( gmail web on chrome takes up 500mb of ram on my machine, also slack is a noteworthy mention). Native desktop apps take up a fraction of that memory. For the sake of accessibility we have significantly sacrificed performance. I can't wait for webassembly to be widely adopted so that the browser can move away from html/js. Google has a nifty tool called ArcWelder which allows android apps to run in chrome. Apple has already announced support for running iOS apps on Mac. I actually believe that the reverse will happen and for more popular apps like fb, gmail etc people will move back to using native , less memory hogging applications once they are out.

mkirklions 8y ago
Whats the issue with using 500mb memory? I have 8gb on a 5 year old computer.
- me551ah 8y ago
  That's also multiplied by the number of tabs that you have open. A medium tab is right now taking up 200mb and so is Amazon. I have over 3 browser windows open with many tabs and need to use extensions to auto kills tabs so that the OS doesn't end up into swap space territory. I also run Android Studio and an emulator on the side which compete for memory.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    I do similar where I have 60 tabs and 5 windows open, a few servers, text editors, etc... But I can always close tabs.
    - me551ah 8y ago
      You need to close tabs, but when was the last time you had to close apps on mobile for performance reasons? Even though mobile devices have significantly lesser specifications.

sodafountan 8y ago

What the author doesn't mention is that apps have become increasingly easier to write as time has gone on. Not only do we have better native languages that you can write apps with (Swift and Kotlin) but we have incredible cross-platform tools as well in the forms of Xamarin and React-Native. I've personally been working with React-Native over the past year and it's just as easy as writing React code for the web (if you're using expo), once people understand this it'll only be a matter of time before web-dev teams adopt it. Historically the problems with app development is that it was a lot harder than web development and often required you to learn a new language and framework in order to get anything functional, this is no longer the case. I'd actually argue that there will be more apps going into the future as the technology needed to build them simplifies.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
They're easier to write now, but still not easy enough: the vast majority of apps earn too little revenue to justify their dev cost.

rchaud 8y ago

Author seems to have missed a big reason for why apps will continue to persist: they obscure data access permissions far better than browsers do. If you install FB messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever, you will be asked one time which permissions (location, microphone, contacts) you want to grant it, and most people won't even review the list before hitting Install. On the web, the browser dialog will ask you each time the app wants to access any of these things, whereas on the app, it'll quietly continue the use the permissions you granted it, and eventually you'll forget you signed off on them in the first place. Not to mention some particularly shameless actors will gimp their mobile web functionality to ensure you use their app at all times (FB, Airbnb, others).

casper345 8y ago

Working with IoT (i.e. Beacon technology) HTML5 and even React Native, nothing beats native code responsiveness. The need for "White label" apps may start going away, but emerging technologies that rely on efficiency and speed should be utilizing mobile app native environment.

thrower123 8y ago

I'm convinced that mobile devices are useless for anything but the most trivial usages. Just last night I sat and watched my mother-in-law flail for the better part of two hours trying to look up and then purchase some replacement filters for her vacuum cleaner. What should have been relatively simple on a real computer was torturous on a smartphone. Between the tiny display, awful on-screen keyboard that is flaky and obscures most of what you are looking at, clunky apps and busted mobile websites, it's just a rage-inducing disaster. Not to mention that if you are not on absolutely perfect WiFi, everything is so slow and janky to load. It's just not acceptable that the bar is so low for usability; I'm convinced that we've gone backwards to a significant degree, and I'd much rather go back to the web that we had in 2008 than the one we have in 2018.

ativzzz 8y ago
These kinds of apps is exactly what the linked article is arguing against. However, if a mobile app has worse usability than desktop then the company failed to redesign their product experience for mobile. That or, their product is simply not meant to be used on small screens at all.

smoser 8y ago

Functionally yes, most apps could be mobile websites except for one thing: Mobile users don’t use bookmarks. Mobile users use icons on the home screen. It is easier for users to add an app to their home screen than a website.

butz 8y ago
But you can add a website to your home screen too, and it will act like app.

olliej 8y ago

Here’s the thing: a webpage will never be able to do a number of privileged operations, for a very simple reason - visiting an arbitrary web page is not controlled by a user, as any webpage can cause an automatic navigation to another. Installing an app acts as a user intent driven security boundary. Dialogs coming up on random webpages is a buck-passing technique, as users cannot discern a “safe” request from an unsafe one. This applies to technical users as well - dialog fatigue, incorrect script inclusion, ads, etc. eventually you can end up accidentally saying yes to the wrong dialogue and a random website gets to download your contact list, etc.

pier25 8y ago

The end? No. But PWA websites will most likely kill many native apps. I use the Twitter PWA and it works perfectly fine on Android.

gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago

I remember when people were saying that the end is near for web apps since mobile apps are going to eat everything. No one knows what will happen in the next three to seven years. Best we can do is observe the market every year and adjust course as necessary.