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> your 10k npm dependencies Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways her

> your 10k npm dependencies Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here: > The web is a success The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

swah 6y ago
We can make those with JS/React so I wonder if users can tell. Of course the hugely popular, cross-platform apps are probably going to be "really native" forever..
tashoecraft 6y ago
Apps only work for very specific use cases. The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that. That study doesn’t seem to break down what apps are being used. I’m going to guess games, as they dominate the charts, or specific websites that have created mobile apps. Facebook, Twitter or maps, which are used for multiple hours straight when driving. If there is a site you use often enough it graduates to living in your phone. But the majority of what apps can do is never even touched. I’d be much more interested in a breakdown of app usage, as I bet active time shifts more towards web
- amw-zero 6y ago
  > The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that This one I'm always interested in. What is difficult about downloading an app?
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    You're misreading that statement. Downloading an app is not difficult, _getting_ people to download one is.
    - amw-zero 6y ago
      How is that different than any other distribution platform?
      - filleduchaos 6y ago
        I'm not sure it really needs to be explained that if you're trying to introduce a service to someone for the first time, asking them to access a web page (available on whatever device they're with at the moment and up, running and ready to interact with in seconds) is less likely to lose their attention than asking them to download and install yet another app.
  - tashoecraft 6y ago
    I personally don’t have much problem with the 100+ apps on my phone, but really it’s an app graveyard. I use maybe 10 regularly. I’ve also cut social media apps from my phone due to battery usage and privacy violations. Downloading an app is more personal, phone storage space is still a premium for many people. App devs don’t seem to care at all how big there app is. We yell at at web devs when their page is >1mb. I’ve tried downloading simple apps whose size are 400mb, what the hell are they doing? If I can visit their site that’s 1mb or download their app that’s 400x, maybe I’ll just visit the site and be on with my day.
  - Dacod 6y ago
    Downloading apps is not difficult but it's difficult to get people to download apps.
  - acdha 6y ago
    You’re on a web page. You can either do what you need or tap the install link, approve the install, wait for a huge download, find and open it, wait for it to initialize, authenticate in the app, and then find whatever you were doing. If you use this all the time it’s amortized over heavy usage but the vast majority of business apps are not, and every study I’ve seen shows people falling off at each of those stages.
mattrick 6y ago
How much of this is a consequence of companies intentionally crippling their websites, though? I can name countless companies that either don't have a website beyond what is essentially a link to the app store or have removed a significant number of features from their website.
amw-zero 6y ago
Well, I think this is really hyperbolic. I think it depends on the application, and the consumer. And the web is a tremendous success. You should take a step back and look at how your entire life is affected by the web. It seems really, really off the mark to say that the web is not a success. You can criticize it, sure. But - you are using a computer 100% because of the web, not because of spreadsheet software. Now, back to web vs. native. You just have people who prefer either. I exclusively use apps. I think the experience is better in every way, and I've never seen a web application deliver comparable experience to a native app. But, almost every native app is backed by a web server. And, some things I do want to remain web apps, like Wikipedia. I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use. Like always, if we understood why users enjoy native apps, we could learn a lot of things. I'd argue that we are learning that, which is why there are lots of SPAs. That doesn't mean that's the only way to build software, it just means that people do actually enjoy that experience.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  > I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use. There is some everything-looks-like-a-nail but that's not all. I'm making a native desktop app now which is slow going. Every platform I want to support is so different, and cross-platform tooling often requires branching and learning each ones quirks anyway. Just making an Electron/ReactNative app is often the best of both worlds should a website not suffice. (Excluding concerns like battery life, app size, or memory footprint.)
- gowld 6y ago
  There's a distinction to make between "the web is successful" and "the web has made humans successful". We've paid a tremendous privacy and security cost, and a loss of control over our online lives.
- Guidii 6y ago
  "I exclusively use apps." Curious. Did you post this using a native app?
ss3000 6y ago
If they dived deeper into the usage patterns and broke down app usage by specific apps, I'd suspect a vast majority of that time is spent in a tiny handful of popular apps, since there are also countless studies pointing to the fact that consumers don't install more than a handful of native apps. If you remove time spent in those popular apps and their respective websites from the stats, the data would likely paint a vastly different story (that might not be in the best interest for a site that relies on pushing "Launching mobile apps for your WordPress site" to highlight ofc).
- rich_harris 6y ago
  "If you remove some of the data, the data tells a different story"
  - Isomorpheus 6y ago
    Or "It's often useful to take context into account when evaluating statistics"
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    Well, "90% of user time on devices is in native apps, 10% web" does paint a rather different picture than "70% of user time is in social media and messaging apps, 10% media apps like Netflix or Spotify, 5% mobile games, 5% all other apps including all the built-in ones other than the browser, 10% web" if you're not in social media, media, or games and trying to decide whether to go web or native.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    If some of the data are outliers, they arguably should be removed.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Alternately, “If you don’t assume that all usage is fungible, the data tells a different story”. There are a few apps - music/movies/ebooks and Facebook - which get a disproportionately large amount of activity. If you’re not competing with them, the global numbers are going to be skewed. This is especially true when you think about tasks rather than screen time. If I’m Facebook or Spotify selling ads, I want people glued to the app for a long time. If I’m selling things, giving information or customer service, etc. the story is completely different: someone placing an order faster is actually a win. EDIT: My experience is colored by being in the cultural heritage space where the flurry of “we’re in the App Store!!!” entries met the hard reality of every engagement metric being much lower than web sites. There is huge variation hidden in global averages.
noad 6y ago
Yeah, we let the web become Cable TV. It's dying the same slow death as Cable TV while executives scratch their heads about why the perpetual growth stopped. The advertising is so pervasive, so annoying, so invasive and so awful it just makes the medium unusable. The same trends are starting to creep into podcasting and video games and I just wish people would realize they are slowly destroying their own businesses with this garbage.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Mobile games do have a lot of ads, thankfully desktop games have not yet suffered that fate. And it's often possible to pay to remove ads from mobile.
naavis 6y ago
> The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers. Does that really mean anything other than you can do more things with mobile devices than just browse the web? I might use WhatsApp on my phone, draw with Procreate on my iPad or play games. I don't see why any of those things should involve the web browser, but that doesn't mean the web is somehow dying. I mean, to draw an analogy, it doesn't mean Netflix is dying if I use 90% of my time at home not watching Netflix.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rich_harris 6y ago
  Why do any of those things need to be native apps, rather than instantly-accessible, no-install-required URLs that come with all the protections of the web's security model?
  - naavis 6y ago
    The first thing that comes to mind is that I can use them offline. I don't need the internet to draw or play most games. EDIT: I do understand you can make web apps that work offline by jumping through enough hoops. But then again, why would you? Why try to unnecessarily shoehorn everything into the web paradigm? Let's take an iPad drawing app that is super well integrated with Apple Pencil. What benefit would forcing it onto the web bring, considering the performance hit and usage of specialized hardware? Or a recording app that I might use to take voice notes or record other audio. Why does that need to be a web application?
    - onion2k 6y ago
      Web apps can also work offline.
    - perilunar 6y ago
quantummkv 6y ago
> The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers. That's a very weird assumption to make considering that the web was intended for sharing information, not running applications. The fact that customers prefer native apps does not mean that the web is dead. The web is good for somethings. And native is good for others. For ex., I read your article on a mobile webpage. Downloading an app for that would be madness. But trying to use a big webapp like jira on the mobile would be a study in madness. Hell, It doesn't work on the desktop well enough. The bottom line is that the web is good for some things, native apps are good for some things. Instead of trying to shoehorn web everywhere, it would be better to use the correct tool for the job
- fleddr 6y ago
  Even the word "prefer" is questionable. The typical consumer gets an Android phone which comes with pre installed apps. Should they somehow still by choice end up at a web property, they are aggressively pulled towards the native app. What do you mean "prefer"? The correct word is pushed.
grey-area 6y ago
The web is the most successful document publishing platform in history. It's what enabled this conversation. Many of the most popular apps are reliant on the web or web servers for their content (social media for example), and it's ok if some content is not on the web. Games for example are a special case which are better served by native code. A marketer like the one doing those surveys is understandably going to be concerned with where the captive eyeballs are, and platforms do have a tendency to try to herd users into their walled garden, but in the long run I think the open web will win over corporate walled gardens.
camgunz 6y ago
> The web is not a success. It's dying. Web apps are dying because the web isn't a good application platform. Google made a real good argument with Gmail and Maps, but unless you have their resources (even if you do, looking at Facebook here), it's very hard to create a great application experience on the web--for many of the reasons you write about in your post. But I think that's fine. The web isn't a good application platform, but it is a good information platform. There's also other protocols beyond HTTP. Imagine if getting the most out of the internet didn't require millions of lines of C++, hyper-complicated JS JITs, layer upon layer on HTTP, and opening the door to the surveillance state.
- gbear605 6y ago
  Even gmail and Google Maps aren’t what they used to be. On a machine that isn’t top of the line, Gmail takes ten+ seconds to load to interactivity, and then going to each email takes five or so seconds. It’s basically unusable.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    On a machine that isn’t top of the line, Gmail takes ten+ seconds to load to interactivity, and then going to each email takes five or so seconds For giggles, I just loaded HN on a 2011 MacBook Air. It took just under 2 seconds for the front page. Then I loaded GMail on the same machine. 15 seconds to the front page. Plus, it came in with 21 errors ranging from invalid headers to invalid sources to cross-origin issues.
    - gbear605 6y ago
      The errors are really embarrassing. Come on Google, how hard is it to just not have cross-origin issues?
  - juped 6y ago
    There's no good reason for an email client to be a SPA rather than normal web pages with some scripting to get pushed relevant updates.
enahs-sf 6y ago
I'm still struggling to understand why my small react app which has 7 dependencies (4 of which are react, react-dom, react-router, react-router-dom) needs 615 node modules.
saurik 6y ago
While the percentage of time that I use in apps vs. the web is definitely heavily skewed, it is just two apps: Facebook and YouTube... occasionally Instagram or TikTok. Now ask the question "what percentage of products do you use are you using via an app or via the web" and the answer is going to be ridiculously dominated by the web: I might use 20 different products over the course of 10 minutes on the web while researching some topic, flipping between hacker news, stack overflow, medium, smaller personal blogs, documentation from microsoft or mozilla, major and minor news sites... this list is absolutely endless. Even for sites I might use that have an app, I am not going to open that app for just the one page I want from it as that's slower and pointless as I probably only want to use that site for five seconds. Essentially, you have purposefully asked the wrong question in order to lie to us using statistics.
eitland 6y ago
> tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers. Given how hard certain sites (fb, LinkedIn, reddit for a start) push their apps it is kind of understandable. Please everyone remember though that using does not necessarily mean prefer. I mostly loathe apps.
city41 6y ago
Just about every major website will continually prod you to install their app when viewed on a phone. I have given in myself a few times just to make the nagging go away. That muddies the “web is a failure” argument imo.
eximius 6y ago
For who? If the sites in the genres I care about remain, I am unaffected (except for, perhaps, economically in a bigger picture). For example, I don't care if ESPN's app is favored over it's website. I don't care if various lifestyle magazines have apps. Lots of examples here, pick your own. I spend my time on the web or in a select few apps like Discord, Hangouts, Signal, etc. Even then, I don't really care if the sites are optimized for mobile. I usually prefer when they aren't because most people do it poorly. Just make a nice website with appropriate viewports and non-fixed whitespace on the sides and it'll probably work out unless you're doing some fancy interactive stuff. In which case, I probably want it to be on a desktop anyway.
fleddr 6y ago
Such a poor take. Consumers mass spending time in chat and Netflix doesn't mean the web is dying. Consumers hate apps. The average they install per month is zero. 90% of their installed apps are completely unused. Almost any new app they do install has single usage, and is then abandoned forever.
searchableguy 6y ago
I wanted to add one point to that - most people only install popular apps - top apps in playstore are actively hostile to using their website. Reddit, Imgur, instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, twitter etc. You name it. They either don't have a functioning mobile website or native only.

swah 6y ago

We can make those with JS/React so I wonder if users can tell. Of course the hugely popular, cross-platform apps are probably going to be "really native" forever..

tashoecraft 6y ago

Apps only work for very specific use cases. The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that. That study doesn’t seem to break down what apps are being used. I’m going to guess games, as they dominate the charts, or specific websites that have created mobile apps. Facebook, Twitter or maps, which are used for multiple hours straight when driving. If there is a site you use often enough it graduates to living in your phone. But the majority of what apps can do is never even touched. I’d be much more interested in a breakdown of app usage, as I bet active time shifts more towards web

amw-zero 6y ago
> The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that This one I'm always interested in. What is difficult about downloading an app?
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  You're misreading that statement. Downloading an app is not difficult, _getting_ people to download one is.
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    How is that different than any other distribution platform?
    - filleduchaos 6y ago
      I'm not sure it really needs to be explained that if you're trying to introduce a service to someone for the first time, asking them to access a web page (available on whatever device they're with at the moment and up, running and ready to interact with in seconds) is less likely to lose their attention than asking them to download and install yet another app.
- tashoecraft 6y ago
  I personally don’t have much problem with the 100+ apps on my phone, but really it’s an app graveyard. I use maybe 10 regularly. I’ve also cut social media apps from my phone due to battery usage and privacy violations. Downloading an app is more personal, phone storage space is still a premium for many people. App devs don’t seem to care at all how big there app is. We yell at at web devs when their page is >1mb. I’ve tried downloading simple apps whose size are 400mb, what the hell are they doing? If I can visit their site that’s 1mb or download their app that’s 400x, maybe I’ll just visit the site and be on with my day.
- Dacod 6y ago
  Downloading apps is not difficult but it's difficult to get people to download apps.
- acdha 6y ago
  You’re on a web page. You can either do what you need or tap the install link, approve the install, wait for a huge download, find and open it, wait for it to initialize, authenticate in the app, and then find whatever you were doing. If you use this all the time it’s amortized over heavy usage but the vast majority of business apps are not, and every study I’ve seen shows people falling off at each of those stages.

mattrick 6y ago

How much of this is a consequence of companies intentionally crippling their websites, though? I can name countless companies that either don't have a website beyond what is essentially a link to the app store or have removed a significant number of features from their website.

amw-zero 6y ago

Well, I think this is really hyperbolic. I think it depends on the application, and the consumer. And the web is a tremendous success. You should take a step back and look at how your entire life is affected by the web. It seems really, really off the mark to say that the web is not a success. You can criticize it, sure. But - you are using a computer 100% because of the web, not because of spreadsheet software. Now, back to web vs. native. You just have people who prefer either. I exclusively use apps. I think the experience is better in every way, and I've never seen a web application deliver comparable experience to a native app. But, almost every native app is backed by a web server. And, some things I do want to remain web apps, like Wikipedia. I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use. Like always, if we understood why users enjoy native apps, we could learn a lot of things. I'd argue that we are learning that, which is why there are lots of SPAs. That doesn't mean that's the only way to build software, it just means that people do actually enjoy that experience.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
> I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use. There is some everything-looks-like-a-nail but that's not all. I'm making a native desktop app now which is slow going. Every platform I want to support is so different, and cross-platform tooling often requires branching and learning each ones quirks anyway. Just making an Electron/ReactNative app is often the best of both worlds should a website not suffice. (Excluding concerns like battery life, app size, or memory footprint.)
gowld 6y ago
There's a distinction to make between "the web is successful" and "the web has made humans successful". We've paid a tremendous privacy and security cost, and a loss of control over our online lives.
Guidii 6y ago
"I exclusively use apps." Curious. Did you post this using a native app?

ss3000 6y ago

If they dived deeper into the usage patterns and broke down app usage by specific apps, I'd suspect a vast majority of that time is spent in a tiny handful of popular apps, since there are also countless studies pointing to the fact that consumers don't install more than a handful of native apps. If you remove time spent in those popular apps and their respective websites from the stats, the data would likely paint a vastly different story (that might not be in the best interest for a site that relies on pushing "Launching mobile apps for your WordPress site" to highlight ofc).

rich_harris 6y ago
"If you remove some of the data, the data tells a different story"
- Isomorpheus 6y ago
  Or "It's often useful to take context into account when evaluating statistics"
- karatestomp 6y ago
  Well, "90% of user time on devices is in native apps, 10% web" does paint a rather different picture than "70% of user time is in social media and messaging apps, 10% media apps like Netflix or Spotify, 5% mobile games, 5% all other apps including all the built-in ones other than the browser, 10% web" if you're not in social media, media, or games and trying to decide whether to go web or native.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  If some of the data are outliers, they arguably should be removed.
- acdha 6y ago
  Alternately, “If you don’t assume that all usage is fungible, the data tells a different story”. There are a few apps - music/movies/ebooks and Facebook - which get a disproportionately large amount of activity. If you’re not competing with them, the global numbers are going to be skewed. This is especially true when you think about tasks rather than screen time. If I’m Facebook or Spotify selling ads, I want people glued to the app for a long time. If I’m selling things, giving information or customer service, etc. the story is completely different: someone placing an order faster is actually a win. EDIT: My experience is colored by being in the cultural heritage space where the flurry of “we’re in the App Store!!!” entries met the hard reality of every engagement metric being much lower than web sites. There is huge variation hidden in global averages.

noad 6y ago

Yeah, we let the web become Cable TV. It's dying the same slow death as Cable TV while executives scratch their heads about why the perpetual growth stopped. The advertising is so pervasive, so annoying, so invasive and so awful it just makes the medium unusable. The same trends are starting to creep into podcasting and video games and I just wish people would realize they are slowly destroying their own businesses with this garbage.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Mobile games do have a lot of ads, thankfully desktop games have not yet suffered that fate. And it's often possible to pay to remove ads from mobile.

naavis 6y ago

> The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers. Does that really mean anything other than you can do more things with mobile devices than just browse the web? I might use WhatsApp on my phone, draw with Procreate on my iPad or play games. I don't see why any of those things should involve the web browser, but that doesn't mean the web is somehow dying. I mean, to draw an analogy, it doesn't mean Netflix is dying if I use 90% of my time at home not watching Netflix.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rich_harris 6y ago
Why do any of those things need to be native apps, rather than instantly-accessible, no-install-required URLs that come with all the protections of the web's security model?
- naavis 6y ago
  The first thing that comes to mind is that I can use them offline. I don't need the internet to draw or play most games. EDIT: I do understand you can make web apps that work offline by jumping through enough hoops. But then again, why would you? Why try to unnecessarily shoehorn everything into the web paradigm? Let's take an iPad drawing app that is super well integrated with Apple Pencil. What benefit would forcing it onto the web bring, considering the performance hit and usage of specialized hardware? Or a recording app that I might use to take voice notes or record other audio. Why does that need to be a web application?
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Web apps can also work offline.
  - perilunar 6y ago

quantummkv 6y ago

> The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers. That's a very weird assumption to make considering that the web was intended for sharing information, not running applications. The fact that customers prefer native apps does not mean that the web is dead. The web is good for somethings. And native is good for others. For ex., I read your article on a mobile webpage. Downloading an app for that would be madness. But trying to use a big webapp like jira on the mobile would be a study in madness. Hell, It doesn't work on the desktop well enough. The bottom line is that the web is good for some things, native apps are good for some things. Instead of trying to shoehorn web everywhere, it would be better to use the correct tool for the job

fleddr 6y ago
Even the word "prefer" is questionable. The typical consumer gets an Android phone which comes with pre installed apps. Should they somehow still by choice end up at a web property, they are aggressively pulled towards the native app. What do you mean "prefer"? The correct word is pushed.

grey-area 6y ago

The web is the most successful document publishing platform in history. It's what enabled this conversation. Many of the most popular apps are reliant on the web or web servers for their content (social media for example), and it's ok if some content is not on the web. Games for example are a special case which are better served by native code. A marketer like the one doing those surveys is understandably going to be concerned with where the captive eyeballs are, and platforms do have a tendency to try to herd users into their walled garden, but in the long run I think the open web will win over corporate walled gardens.

camgunz 6y ago

> The web is not a success. It's dying. Web apps are dying because the web isn't a good application platform. Google made a real good argument with Gmail and Maps, but unless you have their resources (even if you do, looking at Facebook here), it's very hard to create a great application experience on the web--for many of the reasons you write about in your post. But I think that's fine. The web isn't a good application platform, but it is a good information platform. There's also other protocols beyond HTTP. Imagine if getting the most out of the internet didn't require millions of lines of C++, hyper-complicated JS JITs, layer upon layer on HTTP, and opening the door to the surveillance state.

gbear605 6y ago
Even gmail and Google Maps aren’t what they used to be. On a machine that isn’t top of the line, Gmail takes ten+ seconds to load to interactivity, and then going to each email takes five or so seconds. It’s basically unusable.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  On a machine that isn’t top of the line, Gmail takes ten+ seconds to load to interactivity, and then going to each email takes five or so seconds For giggles, I just loaded HN on a 2011 MacBook Air. It took just under 2 seconds for the front page. Then I loaded GMail on the same machine. 15 seconds to the front page. Plus, it came in with 21 errors ranging from invalid headers to invalid sources to cross-origin issues.
  - gbear605 6y ago
    The errors are really embarrassing. Come on Google, how hard is it to just not have cross-origin issues?
- juped 6y ago
  There's no good reason for an email client to be a SPA rather than normal web pages with some scripting to get pushed relevant updates.

enahs-sf 6y ago

I'm still struggling to understand why my small react app which has 7 dependencies (4 of which are react, react-dom, react-router, react-router-dom) needs 615 node modules.

saurik 6y ago

While the percentage of time that I use in apps vs. the web is definitely heavily skewed, it is just two apps: Facebook and YouTube... occasionally Instagram or TikTok. Now ask the question "what percentage of products do you use are you using via an app or via the web" and the answer is going to be ridiculously dominated by the web: I might use 20 different products over the course of 10 minutes on the web while researching some topic, flipping between hacker news, stack overflow, medium, smaller personal blogs, documentation from microsoft or mozilla, major and minor news sites... this list is absolutely endless. Even for sites I might use that have an app, I am not going to open that app for just the one page I want from it as that's slower and pointless as I probably only want to use that site for five seconds. Essentially, you have purposefully asked the wrong question in order to lie to us using statistics.

eitland 6y ago

> tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers. Given how hard certain sites (fb, LinkedIn, reddit for a start) push their apps it is kind of understandable. Please everyone remember though that using does not necessarily mean prefer. I mostly loathe apps.

city41 6y ago

Just about every major website will continually prod you to install their app when viewed on a phone. I have given in myself a few times just to make the nagging go away. That muddies the “web is a failure” argument imo.

eximius 6y ago

For who? If the sites in the genres I care about remain, I am unaffected (except for, perhaps, economically in a bigger picture). For example, I don't care if ESPN's app is favored over it's website. I don't care if various lifestyle magazines have apps. Lots of examples here, pick your own. I spend my time on the web or in a select few apps like Discord, Hangouts, Signal, etc. Even then, I don't really care if the sites are optimized for mobile. I usually prefer when they aren't because most people do it poorly. Just make a nice website with appropriate viewports and non-fixed whitespace on the sides and it'll probably work out unless you're doing some fancy interactive stuff. In which case, I probably want it to be on a desktop anyway.

fleddr 6y ago

Such a poor take. Consumers mass spending time in chat and Netflix doesn't mean the web is dying. Consumers hate apps. The average they install per month is zero. 90% of their installed apps are completely unused. Almost any new app they do install has single usage, and is then abandoned forever.

searchableguy 6y ago

I wanted to add one point to that - most people only install popular apps - top apps in playstore are actively hostile to using their website. Reddit, Imgur, instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, twitter etc. You name it. They either don't have a functioning mobile website or native only.