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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 som

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?
  - buboard 8y ago
    in every way. imagine having to switch between apps to read every article in HN
    - iainmerrick 8y ago
      That would be okay if there were a Hacker News app that could display all the stories. I mean, I agree with you that simple web pages are best for simple news and articles. But I don’t think you can immediately generalize that to “apps don’t scale”.
      - asdff 8y ago
        There is a HN app that displays all the stories (safari popup for links)
      - buboard 8y ago
        an app for every website would not scale icon-wise. and it would destroy the hypertext
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  A significant number of the subscribers. There were at the time something like 800k of them. Its important to say that it was a choice, there was no full page banner or bouncer that forced people to install the webapp, it was entirely optional. If, however you are saying that people only click on it because there is an icon on their phone, then you are making possibly the biggest argument for keeping apps (although its perfectly possible to have webapps on the homescreen with icons)
  - olau 8y ago
    Did your old company adjust for selection bias? It seems to me the category of people who have gone to the length to install an app is perhaps going to spend more time with the content compared to the full set of people interacting with the content.
    - KaiserPro 8y ago
      Yes. Engagement is measured across the entire subscriber cohort. consumer "councils" are made up of a selection of subscribers, so we can adequately get data from all sections. We had a webapp, the users were very engaged. We replaced the webapp with a native app, we got way more people who very engaged, we also got loads more people who were mildly engaged. The overall effect was more engagement from a wider base of subscribers. Lowering the bar to entry, proper offline caching of content, faster loading, just a better more seamless experience.
echevil 8y ago
> The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. I agree it’s still suboptimal for now, incremental improvements are making it less so year over year. More parts of native apps are also getting written with web technologies. Eventually, maybe, most of the app icons in our phones might just be a shortcut to some website
- xg15 8y ago
  That might happen, but I wonder if the distinction will then still have any relevance. If you continue the current trends, this process could involve making WebAssembly more powerful, making CSS and Web Components into an actual widget framework and adding more capabilities to service workers to enable OS hooks, background activities and offline use. However, all of those changes will push web apps into the direction of becoming more "app-like", not more "web-like". So after the improvements are done, I think we might end up with just another framework for building apps, not having moved away from apps. (With the one downside that HTML will still have to drag around reams of cruft to maintain backwards compatibility which other app framework could easily do away with)
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    Yes, I think you’re totally right. We’ll end up writing clientside code for phones, tablets, and desktops. A lot of the code can be shared if you use good engineering practices, but if you use good design practices, each UI will be different so there will need to be some custom code for each. It doesn’t really matter whether this code is Swift, Java, JS, “native”, “web” or whatever. I’d add that that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario is that everything goes the way of desktop apps, where everything just becomes a lowest-common-denominator web page with crappy UI design that doesn’t really use the platform effectively, just because it’s cheaper that way and cheap always wins.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  > might just be a shortcut to some website For the longest time it was. Because $newsCompany was subscription it had to leave the apple store, or give apple ~25% cut. To get round this we had a fully offline HTML5 webapp. it was very good, but despite mega optimisations, it was slower than native, and had limited storage. Users were constantly asking for a native app, In every customer council/survey. Bear in mind that these people were not techhead, they were babyboomers who struggled with tech, they knew enough however, to know that native apps were faster. (for example the times, grauniad and telegraph. )
sgt 8y ago
Agreed - for the quality experience there's really no substitute. Maybe the author thinks that this will change (technologically speaking) in the next 7 years, but I doubt it. Things will definitely improve, but there'll still be reasons to code native apps. Desktop still has tons of native apps - it's not all running in browsers. We're in 2018, and your web browser is leaking memory and performance is sub-optimal (try scrolling through a large number of threads on Reddit and observe your CPU usage).
lloeki 8y ago
I have an eerie feeling of déjà vu, namely that "This is the year of Web Apps!" appears to be the new "This is the Year of the Linux Desktop!" in many ways.
zeroname 8y ago
You're thinking of this too much in terms of technology. Even when what you say is true, it's rather irrelevant for most apps. > 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. I think you're mixing up causalities here. Those users that are already more engaged are the ones that can even be bothered to install your news reader app. How many users is that though? Do they make up for the ones that don't install the app? You're probably going to need both anyway, you're paying for both, you better make sure the native app is worth it. For a lot of business, it isn't worth it. The core issue is that people aren't willing to install any more apps. Case in point, the very article wants me to install the "Medium" app. I'm not going to do that, because it's pointless. Medium works just fine as a website and that's true for most other apps you use merely on occasion. Could it be more responsive, use less battery, if it was native? Of course. I don't care.
- salvar 8y ago
  > The core issue is that people aren't willing to install any more apps. Is there any source for this? Are app installations declining?
  - zeroname 8y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s-consumers-still-download-zero-apps-per-month-says-comscore/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s-consumers-...
    - salvar 8y ago
      Thanks. I wouldn't characterize this as "users aren't willing to install any more apps" though; that's quite the leap from the conclusion of the report.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        To be clear, I didn't mean it in the sense of "there is a global trend towards less app installations", but rather "I already have 100 apps on this phone, I'm not installing this one too". I think that's anecdotally true for most people who have had a smartphone for a while. Of course strictly speaking I will install more apps in the future, but the chance that it's going to be the kind of App that I could just use as a website is practically zero.
thunderbong 8y ago
Also, have you considered that consuming content on mobile is a completely different experience than consuming content on the web? Most comparisons I've seen talked about here on HN, seem to think these two are equivalent. They're not.
truth_seeker 8y ago
>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....) This was the case a decade ago, but not anymore. I have been writing medium complex web apps using Angular/React, Web-workers and RxJS which runs on mobile (Android 4.4+ and iOS 9+) from last 4 years with no extra battery draining side effects and native (like) look and feel. You just need to choose write framework and responsive design UI guidelines. Today most frameworks provides it out of the box. JS, DOM and CSS engines in mainstream browsers are getting more and more performant.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  > browsers are getting more and more performant. Moore's law is getting us out of a hole. The processing power, and performance per watt on mobile has increase exponentially. Those people who who are stuck on three year contracts feel the pain of this idea. Yes, JS engines are getting faster, but they are being asked to do more and more stuff. React native is a marvel of engineering, where the bridge intercepts UI calls and diverts them to native. But thats not a webapp, that re-invented version of QT, Wx, tk or whatever java uses. My point is this: a native app on a underclocked pi zero, can animate UI items at 60FPS. Via a browser, no where near. HTML is many things, but efficient is not one of them. HTML/CSS/JS is a marvel of engineering to get it anwhere near as fast as it is, but its comes from a very slow base.
  - skohan 8y ago
    Performance is a detail which is often lost from the mobile/web discussion. Yes there are many reasons for good web-apps to exist, and they can often deliver a very good experience on modern hardware. But conceptually, the idea that all software should run on top of a compatibility layer, with many restrictions and performance considerations compared to running directly on the OS is a strange one. It’s an ecological concern as well: how many gigawatts of electricity a day is spent fetching react.js?
    - 8y ago
dreamcompiler 8y ago
90% of apps just deliver information and work just fine (or better) on the web, at least for me. Nobody needs a reddit app or a Medium app, even though those companies try to convince you otherwise. Yeah, I'll download an app for Uber or Southwest airlines or Airbnb because their two-way information requirements work better as apps. But I won't clutter up my phone with things that work just fine in a browser, which is most of what I need. I don't play games, so maybe I'm not most people.
- puranjay 8y ago
  Yeah, same for me. The only apps I have are the ones where the web experience is either non existent (Camscanner) or extremely sub par (Spotify/Google Music) I do have apps for all the shoppibg platforms I use, even though the performance isn't substantially better
- Uberphallus 8y ago
  > Nobody needs a reddit app Oh, reddit on mobile without an app is a displeasing experience. The official app though, isn't much better.
  - king_magic 8y ago
    It’s only a displeasing experience because Reddit is doing everything they can to make the mobile web experience miserable so you use their app.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Nobody needs an app for anything, but the Reddit app is far superior for me vs. their mobile experience. So much so that I refuse to install it because it makes Reddit far more addictive. Same for Facebook. A huge percentage of their usage is the mobile app vs. mobile web. Like Reddit, part of that is due to them making the mobile web experience crappier to drive app adoption, but that's not the only thing going on. The web just for UX in many ways, and will never beat a well-built app for anything other than ease of initial installation.
barrystaes 8y ago
Sorry to say but from my perspective you seem to live in a bubble as well, to use your words. What apps do is add eas of install (app store), and usability (cache, use device sensors, do some offline tasks) For a webapp the installation is "Add to homescreen" on a webpage. It then behaves like a native app, no address bar. Usability is tackled by modern browsers that allow webapps started like this to: - cache the entire webapp, and some/all data it requests. - run webworkers in background, (get push notifications, etc) - provide sensor access via APIs, (camera, etc) And to conclude, todays webapps respond FAST. They do everything the same way a native app does. Ofcourse if your webapp does video transcoding or uses some specific OS feature it might profit from being native. But even then, its unbelievable easy to wrap your webapp in a shell that adds these functionality. How do you think FB and other popular content consuming apps work nowadays? You are basically looking at webapps rendered in a shell that provides the few APIs a browser doesnt yet have, like share button and contact/calendar integration, to get/set data specific to/on your device.
- nikanj 8y ago
  Is there a _convenient_ way to bill the user for microtransactions and subsriptions, after you have added the page to the home screen? As far as I know, the web alternatives are miles behind the convenience of ”click the side button twice to confirm this payment” that an app provides.
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    On iOS devices that support Apple Pay, yes, this is available to the browser for transactions. Not sure what mechanism exactly, I’m just an end user using Apple Pay to pay on websites in Safari on my iPhone without any issues.
- coldcode 8y ago
  FB was at one time a web app, today it is a monstrous objective-c nightmare (someone a couple year ago measured 18,000 classes in the codebase). They never could get the web app to work. Building iOS apps is what I do for a living, its really not that hard.
sametmax 8y ago
Pretty much. Like you said, it's slow, drains battery and add a barrier to customer conversion. But also: Web apps don't have a direct access to the file system. Forget about filming or recording voice and saving that for anything serious. They can't respond to intents, making them completly isolated from the rest of the OS. They can't use the share function so your data is hard to extract, move around or ... well, share. They don't have access to the cryptographic facilities, or the authentification ones (e.g: no finger print unlock). They can't be directly filled in by other apps like lastpass. You can't even chose between security and convenience. The amount of data they can store is very limited, hard to manipulate, and the API changes from one browser to the other. Unless you have a bit of texte, though luck. Basically, anything that is not a simple CRUD service is useless offline, and slower online than the app version. Plus, how many people know that they can "add this app" to the home menu ? Not to say you should not offer a web version of your app. But it's an ersatz.
projectileboy 8y ago
Your points are all valid, but they were also all valid in 1998 when people told me that desktop apps weren’t going to be replaced by web apps.
- zepto 8y ago
  And they haven’t, so that argument seems to have held up pretty well.
  - projectileboy 8y ago
    I can’t tell if you’re being facetious. Of course desktop apps haven’t disappear entirely, and they won’t anytime soon. But entire classes of apps have largely disappeared, especially internal corporate apps.
    - zepto 8y ago
      Any ‘entire classes’ other than the corporate apps?
rado 8y ago
Not all apps need many resources. The beauty of Web apps is simplification and delivering crucial functionality. Limitations and focus are good things.
ngrilly 8y ago
The FastMail mobile app is an example of an "hybrid" app working correctly: it's a native app wrapping the web app using a WebView. The native part takes care of things like notifications. The web part part takes care of the rest and is shared by all platforms. Anyone here using it?
- pgm8705 8y ago
  Basecamp's mobile app is also a good example of this. Native navigation and notifications but web based content.
- toast0 8y ago
  I use it, and it works fine when I have good connectivity. But I'd really prefer something that was better. Things like tapping a notification about new mail and having to wait to load it are amazingly frustrating (maybe I should turn off notifications). It also only works with good connectivity, I wish there was an option to download message bodies (but not attachments) automatically when available.
elvirs 8y ago
I think people actually prefer using decent mobile web apps over native apps and app vendors are actually actively fighting it by putting annoying 'get the app' link overlaying content on mobile web. they are trying to push people as much as as they can to force them to download the damn native app. you don't see any app publisher putting a link to mobile web app over the content inside the native app prompting people to use mobile web app over native app. For most of the content websites I use I don't feel the need for the app (twitter, reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) but they are making the mobile web experience horrible by putting that content overlaying link on every damn page.
- zepto 8y ago
  Or, the mobile app experience is better, and the overlay link is a convenience, rather than “actively fighting”.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > Or, the mobile app experience is better, and the overlay link is a convenience For whom is it better? Me, the customer, or you, the vendor? I buy furniture from Wayfair's website, and browse on the site quite often. On the mobile site, I'm able to view products, add/remove them from a wishlist, and make a purchase. All from a browser with ad and tracking blockers enabled. Wayfair still puts a "Download the app!" popup on the site, even though it can see from my repeated visits and purchases that I primarily use the mobile site. I imagine it's because on an app, notifications are opt-out and tracking is continuous.
    - zepto 8y ago
      For me the customer. The sites I use most often have better apps than websites. As for your imagination about tracking, it’s both false and paranoid. Mobile notifications are opt-in, and tracking is limited to behavior within the app, unlike the web where you are tracked across sites wherever you go.
  - asdff 8y ago
    The overlay link for reddit takes up 1/3 the screen, and the link to hide it is in 9pt font at the edge while clicking anywhere else opens the App store.
taobility 8y ago
1. Not all apps need multi-thread capability, and handle offline scenarios, like pay utility bills, book tickets, order food etc 2. GUI is most easy part for web app to mock. WeChat mini-program has its own UI controls
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  > Not all apps need multi-thread[ing] you are correct, not all apps need multi-threading, but it sure is useful. Especially if you don't like callbacks. Blocking the UI to do a HTTP call with no network isn't not a good move. > GUI is most easy part for web app to mock. Yes, but thats not my original point. Mocking a UI in a webapp easy to do, but very hard to do fast, smooth, offline capable, with all the features you want, and cross platform.
wasm_future 8y ago
> This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. Most mobile developers have no idea how web-centric non-mobile devs are. I've recently started working in a web-centric company, and am the only mobile dev. It's mind boggling, freaking unbelievable how less open minded web developers really are. I had no idea. I don't know what is the cause of this, but this article is pretty common to the crowd who were trying to convince everyone that Phonegap was a viable solution 5 years ago. All I know is that the web community need to get this kind of hyperbole under control because they're losing credibility. I've almost reached the point where I don't take anything they say seriously anymore, especially when it comes to platforms that they've never spent a single project developing on.
grey-area 8y ago
people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged Of course they were more engaged, they're the tiny minority that cared enough to find and download your app. You have't adressed the most important point in the article - people simply don't want hundreds of apps on their phone.

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?
- buboard 8y ago
  in every way. imagine having to switch between apps to read every article in HN
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    That would be okay if there were a Hacker News app that could display all the stories. I mean, I agree with you that simple web pages are best for simple news and articles. But I don’t think you can immediately generalize that to “apps don’t scale”.
    - asdff 8y ago
      There is a HN app that displays all the stories (safari popup for links)
    - buboard 8y ago
      an app for every website would not scale icon-wise. and it would destroy the hypertext
KaiserPro 8y ago
A significant number of the subscribers. There were at the time something like 800k of them. Its important to say that it was a choice, there was no full page banner or bouncer that forced people to install the webapp, it was entirely optional. If, however you are saying that people only click on it because there is an icon on their phone, then you are making possibly the biggest argument for keeping apps (although its perfectly possible to have webapps on the homescreen with icons)
- olau 8y ago
  Did your old company adjust for selection bias? It seems to me the category of people who have gone to the length to install an app is perhaps going to spend more time with the content compared to the full set of people interacting with the content.
  - KaiserPro 8y ago
    Yes. Engagement is measured across the entire subscriber cohort. consumer "councils" are made up of a selection of subscribers, so we can adequately get data from all sections. We had a webapp, the users were very engaged. We replaced the webapp with a native app, we got way more people who very engaged, we also got loads more people who were mildly engaged. The overall effect was more engagement from a wider base of subscribers. Lowering the bar to entry, proper offline caching of content, faster loading, just a better more seamless experience.

echevil 8y ago

> The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. I agree it’s still suboptimal for now, incremental improvements are making it less so year over year. More parts of native apps are also getting written with web technologies. Eventually, maybe, most of the app icons in our phones might just be a shortcut to some website

xg15 8y ago
That might happen, but I wonder if the distinction will then still have any relevance. If you continue the current trends, this process could involve making WebAssembly more powerful, making CSS and Web Components into an actual widget framework and adding more capabilities to service workers to enable OS hooks, background activities and offline use. However, all of those changes will push web apps into the direction of becoming more "app-like", not more "web-like". So after the improvements are done, I think we might end up with just another framework for building apps, not having moved away from apps. (With the one downside that HTML will still have to drag around reams of cruft to maintain backwards compatibility which other app framework could easily do away with)
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Yes, I think you’re totally right. We’ll end up writing clientside code for phones, tablets, and desktops. A lot of the code can be shared if you use good engineering practices, but if you use good design practices, each UI will be different so there will need to be some custom code for each. It doesn’t really matter whether this code is Swift, Java, JS, “native”, “web” or whatever. I’d add that that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario is that everything goes the way of desktop apps, where everything just becomes a lowest-common-denominator web page with crappy UI design that doesn’t really use the platform effectively, just because it’s cheaper that way and cheap always wins.
KaiserPro 8y ago
> might just be a shortcut to some website For the longest time it was. Because $newsCompany was subscription it had to leave the apple store, or give apple ~25% cut. To get round this we had a fully offline HTML5 webapp. it was very good, but despite mega optimisations, it was slower than native, and had limited storage. Users were constantly asking for a native app, In every customer council/survey. Bear in mind that these people were not techhead, they were babyboomers who struggled with tech, they knew enough however, to know that native apps were faster. (for example the times, grauniad and telegraph. )

sgt 8y ago

Agreed - for the quality experience there's really no substitute. Maybe the author thinks that this will change (technologically speaking) in the next 7 years, but I doubt it. Things will definitely improve, but there'll still be reasons to code native apps. Desktop still has tons of native apps - it's not all running in browsers. We're in 2018, and your web browser is leaking memory and performance is sub-optimal (try scrolling through a large number of threads on Reddit and observe your CPU usage).

lloeki 8y ago

I have an eerie feeling of déjà vu, namely that "This is the year of Web Apps!" appears to be the new "This is the Year of the Linux Desktop!" in many ways.

zeroname 8y ago

You're thinking of this too much in terms of technology. Even when what you say is true, it's rather irrelevant for most apps. > 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. I think you're mixing up causalities here. Those users that are already more engaged are the ones that can even be bothered to install your news reader app. How many users is that though? Do they make up for the ones that don't install the app? You're probably going to need both anyway, you're paying for both, you better make sure the native app is worth it. For a lot of business, it isn't worth it. The core issue is that people aren't willing to install any more apps. Case in point, the very article wants me to install the "Medium" app. I'm not going to do that, because it's pointless. Medium works just fine as a website and that's true for most other apps you use merely on occasion. Could it be more responsive, use less battery, if it was native? Of course. I don't care.

salvar 8y ago
> The core issue is that people aren't willing to install any more apps. Is there any source for this? Are app installations declining?
- zeroname 8y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s-consumers-still-download-zero-apps-per-month-says-comscore/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/25/majority-of-u-s-consumers-...
  - salvar 8y ago
    Thanks. I wouldn't characterize this as "users aren't willing to install any more apps" though; that's quite the leap from the conclusion of the report.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      To be clear, I didn't mean it in the sense of "there is a global trend towards less app installations", but rather "I already have 100 apps on this phone, I'm not installing this one too". I think that's anecdotally true for most people who have had a smartphone for a while. Of course strictly speaking I will install more apps in the future, but the chance that it's going to be the kind of App that I could just use as a website is practically zero.

thunderbong 8y ago

Also, have you considered that consuming content on mobile is a completely different experience than consuming content on the web? Most comparisons I've seen talked about here on HN, seem to think these two are equivalent. They're not.

truth_seeker 8y ago

>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....) This was the case a decade ago, but not anymore. I have been writing medium complex web apps using Angular/React, Web-workers and RxJS which runs on mobile (Android 4.4+ and iOS 9+) from last 4 years with no extra battery draining side effects and native (like) look and feel. You just need to choose write framework and responsive design UI guidelines. Today most frameworks provides it out of the box. JS, DOM and CSS engines in mainstream browsers are getting more and more performant.

KaiserPro 8y ago
> browsers are getting more and more performant. Moore's law is getting us out of a hole. The processing power, and performance per watt on mobile has increase exponentially. Those people who who are stuck on three year contracts feel the pain of this idea. Yes, JS engines are getting faster, but they are being asked to do more and more stuff. React native is a marvel of engineering, where the bridge intercepts UI calls and diverts them to native. But thats not a webapp, that re-invented version of QT, Wx, tk or whatever java uses. My point is this: a native app on a underclocked pi zero, can animate UI items at 60FPS. Via a browser, no where near. HTML is many things, but efficient is not one of them. HTML/CSS/JS is a marvel of engineering to get it anwhere near as fast as it is, but its comes from a very slow base.
- skohan 8y ago
  Performance is a detail which is often lost from the mobile/web discussion. Yes there are many reasons for good web-apps to exist, and they can often deliver a very good experience on modern hardware. But conceptually, the idea that all software should run on top of a compatibility layer, with many restrictions and performance considerations compared to running directly on the OS is a strange one. It’s an ecological concern as well: how many gigawatts of electricity a day is spent fetching react.js?
  - 8y ago

dreamcompiler 8y ago

90% of apps just deliver information and work just fine (or better) on the web, at least for me. Nobody needs a reddit app or a Medium app, even though those companies try to convince you otherwise. Yeah, I'll download an app for Uber or Southwest airlines or Airbnb because their two-way information requirements work better as apps. But I won't clutter up my phone with things that work just fine in a browser, which is most of what I need. I don't play games, so maybe I'm not most people.

puranjay 8y ago
Yeah, same for me. The only apps I have are the ones where the web experience is either non existent (Camscanner) or extremely sub par (Spotify/Google Music) I do have apps for all the shoppibg platforms I use, even though the performance isn't substantially better
Uberphallus 8y ago
> Nobody needs a reddit app Oh, reddit on mobile without an app is a displeasing experience. The official app though, isn't much better.
- king_magic 8y ago
  It’s only a displeasing experience because Reddit is doing everything they can to make the mobile web experience miserable so you use their app.
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Nobody needs an app for anything, but the Reddit app is far superior for me vs. their mobile experience. So much so that I refuse to install it because it makes Reddit far more addictive. Same for Facebook. A huge percentage of their usage is the mobile app vs. mobile web. Like Reddit, part of that is due to them making the mobile web experience crappier to drive app adoption, but that's not the only thing going on. The web just for UX in many ways, and will never beat a well-built app for anything other than ease of initial installation.

barrystaes 8y ago

Sorry to say but from my perspective you seem to live in a bubble as well, to use your words. What apps do is add eas of install (app store), and usability (cache, use device sensors, do some offline tasks) For a webapp the installation is "Add to homescreen" on a webpage. It then behaves like a native app, no address bar. Usability is tackled by modern browsers that allow webapps started like this to: - cache the entire webapp, and some/all data it requests. - run webworkers in background, (get push notifications, etc) - provide sensor access via APIs, (camera, etc) And to conclude, todays webapps respond FAST. They do everything the same way a native app does. Ofcourse if your webapp does video transcoding or uses some specific OS feature it might profit from being native. But even then, its unbelievable easy to wrap your webapp in a shell that adds these functionality. How do you think FB and other popular content consuming apps work nowadays? You are basically looking at webapps rendered in a shell that provides the few APIs a browser doesnt yet have, like share button and contact/calendar integration, to get/set data specific to/on your device.

nikanj 8y ago
Is there a _convenient_ way to bill the user for microtransactions and subsriptions, after you have added the page to the home screen? As far as I know, the web alternatives are miles behind the convenience of ”click the side button twice to confirm this payment” that an app provides.
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  On iOS devices that support Apple Pay, yes, this is available to the browser for transactions. Not sure what mechanism exactly, I’m just an end user using Apple Pay to pay on websites in Safari on my iPhone without any issues.
coldcode 8y ago
FB was at one time a web app, today it is a monstrous objective-c nightmare (someone a couple year ago measured 18,000 classes in the codebase). They never could get the web app to work. Building iOS apps is what I do for a living, its really not that hard.

sametmax 8y ago

Pretty much. Like you said, it's slow, drains battery and add a barrier to customer conversion. But also: Web apps don't have a direct access to the file system. Forget about filming or recording voice and saving that for anything serious. They can't respond to intents, making them completly isolated from the rest of the OS. They can't use the share function so your data is hard to extract, move around or ... well, share. They don't have access to the cryptographic facilities, or the authentification ones (e.g: no finger print unlock). They can't be directly filled in by other apps like lastpass. You can't even chose between security and convenience. The amount of data they can store is very limited, hard to manipulate, and the API changes from one browser to the other. Unless you have a bit of texte, though luck. Basically, anything that is not a simple CRUD service is useless offline, and slower online than the app version. Plus, how many people know that they can "add this app" to the home menu ? Not to say you should not offer a web version of your app. But it's an ersatz.

projectileboy 8y ago

Your points are all valid, but they were also all valid in 1998 when people told me that desktop apps weren’t going to be replaced by web apps.

zepto 8y ago
And they haven’t, so that argument seems to have held up pretty well.
- projectileboy 8y ago
  I can’t tell if you’re being facetious. Of course desktop apps haven’t disappear entirely, and they won’t anytime soon. But entire classes of apps have largely disappeared, especially internal corporate apps.
  - zepto 8y ago
    Any ‘entire classes’ other than the corporate apps?

rado 8y ago

Not all apps need many resources. The beauty of Web apps is simplification and delivering crucial functionality. Limitations and focus are good things.

ngrilly 8y ago

The FastMail mobile app is an example of an "hybrid" app working correctly: it's a native app wrapping the web app using a WebView. The native part takes care of things like notifications. The web part part takes care of the rest and is shared by all platforms. Anyone here using it?

pgm8705 8y ago
Basecamp's mobile app is also a good example of this. Native navigation and notifications but web based content.
toast0 8y ago
I use it, and it works fine when I have good connectivity. But I'd really prefer something that was better. Things like tapping a notification about new mail and having to wait to load it are amazingly frustrating (maybe I should turn off notifications). It also only works with good connectivity, I wish there was an option to download message bodies (but not attachments) automatically when available.

elvirs 8y ago

I think people actually prefer using decent mobile web apps over native apps and app vendors are actually actively fighting it by putting annoying 'get the app' link overlaying content on mobile web. they are trying to push people as much as as they can to force them to download the damn native app. you don't see any app publisher putting a link to mobile web app over the content inside the native app prompting people to use mobile web app over native app. For most of the content websites I use I don't feel the need for the app (twitter, reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) but they are making the mobile web experience horrible by putting that content overlaying link on every damn page.

zepto 8y ago
Or, the mobile app experience is better, and the overlay link is a convenience, rather than “actively fighting”.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > Or, the mobile app experience is better, and the overlay link is a convenience For whom is it better? Me, the customer, or you, the vendor? I buy furniture from Wayfair's website, and browse on the site quite often. On the mobile site, I'm able to view products, add/remove them from a wishlist, and make a purchase. All from a browser with ad and tracking blockers enabled. Wayfair still puts a "Download the app!" popup on the site, even though it can see from my repeated visits and purchases that I primarily use the mobile site. I imagine it's because on an app, notifications are opt-out and tracking is continuous.
  - zepto 8y ago
    For me the customer. The sites I use most often have better apps than websites. As for your imagination about tracking, it’s both false and paranoid. Mobile notifications are opt-in, and tracking is limited to behavior within the app, unlike the web where you are tracked across sites wherever you go.
- asdff 8y ago
  The overlay link for reddit takes up 1/3 the screen, and the link to hide it is in 9pt font at the edge while clicking anywhere else opens the App store.

taobility 8y ago

1. Not all apps need multi-thread capability, and handle offline scenarios, like pay utility bills, book tickets, order food etc 2. GUI is most easy part for web app to mock. WeChat mini-program has its own UI controls

KaiserPro 8y ago
> Not all apps need multi-thread[ing] you are correct, not all apps need multi-threading, but it sure is useful. Especially if you don't like callbacks. Blocking the UI to do a HTTP call with no network isn't not a good move. > GUI is most easy part for web app to mock. Yes, but thats not my original point. Mocking a UI in a webapp easy to do, but very hard to do fast, smooth, offline capable, with all the features you want, and cross platform.

wasm_future 8y ago

> This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. Most mobile developers have no idea how web-centric non-mobile devs are. I've recently started working in a web-centric company, and am the only mobile dev. It's mind boggling, freaking unbelievable how less open minded web developers really are. I had no idea. I don't know what is the cause of this, but this article is pretty common to the crowd who were trying to convince everyone that Phonegap was a viable solution 5 years ago. All I know is that the web community need to get this kind of hyperbole under control because they're losing credibility. I've almost reached the point where I don't take anything they say seriously anymore, especially when it comes to platforms that they've never spent a single project developing on.

grey-area 8y ago

people who installed our news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged Of course they were more engaged, they're the tiny minority that cared enough to find and download your app. You have't adressed the most important point in the article - people simply don't want hundreds of apps on their phone.