11 ms·

I hate apps. I installed this app for Best Buy because I thought it was needed for curbside pickup. Turns out bestbuy.com on my phone has all the same features

I hate apps. I installed this app for Best Buy because I thought it was needed for curbside pickup. Turns out bestbuy.com on my phone has all the same features. I also have Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu - but not because I want those apps, but because you can't play their video content in the mobile browser. But most of the time all apps do is annoy the crap out of me with pointless notifications. And I'm thankful that the latest Android let's me disable notifications for these apps - the entire experience is extremely pro-company, not pro-user. I think apps should die and if you want games get a switch.

echelon 6y ago
Apps are the worst. Not everything should be an app. There's no reason web couldn't continue to be a powerful app platform with full device API access. Rust+WASM+device APIs and you could have Google Maps and Netflix be "native" web apps. Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans.
- agust 6y ago
  That is also why they are currently preventing competition on web browser engines on iOS, by forcing other browsers to use theirs (webkit). That way they can limit the web app capabilities, by not implementing APIs like the Push API, and make the web look very bad by not fixing bugs. I'm wondering why Mozilla, amongst other companies, hasn't taken action against this anti-competitive behaviour.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Mozilla wins. Apple has to allow other engines on iOS. Most users switch to Chrome. Most developers stop supporting anything else. Mozilla loses.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      Indeed, say what you will about Safari on iOS, it certainly forces some amount of diversity in the overall browser market. (I realise this is a controversial opinion but I don’t lament the slower feature release cadence of Safari because IMHO the web is already far too complex and feature rich for its own good.)
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      I don't follow your logic. If a Gecko-based browser could be installed on iOS, there would be more Gecko users, which would mean developers would be slightly more likely to check rendering in Gecko. By what logic would more developers test against Gecko in the status quo. The only losers would be Safari and a good chunk of Apple's "services revenue" for selling the default search engine setting.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        I think the argument is that users will install Chrome instead of Mozilla, further pushing up Chrome's market share. Even as Mozilla's share increases slightly, the loss in Safari's will lead to a super-super-majority of Chrome and thus developers not caring about any alternative browsers at all.
        lern_too_spel 6y ago
        But they wouldn't care about Gecko-based browsers any less than they do now. They would simply not care about Webkit-based browsers. If anything, the developers who can now use a Gecko-based mobile browser who couldn't before would now care to test it. Meanwhile, Mozilla's job will be easier, only having to target mobile compatibility with one rendering engine.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        When a browser has 90+% market share, you can make a credible business argument about why you can ignore every other browser.
- restingrobot 6y ago
  I might be biased as an app developer, but if apps are done properly they can provide a much deeper experience for users. I understand your point that most things can be done in a cross platform manner, however in my 10 years of mobile development experience, cross platform is great for 90% of things, sucks at 5%, and simply cannot do the last 5%. If your tech needs fall into any of the 5's then a native app is simply the better solution. They killed flash because it was a bug riddled, security nightmare, owned by Adobe, (one of the greediest corporations in existence). I will never understand the flash nostalgia, good riddance.
- lupinglade 6y ago
  Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans. This is nonsense as initially Apple was pushing web apps, it actually took a lot of convincing to get them to move to native code. Flash never provided a good user experience.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    If you believe that Apple ever really intended web apps to be the only apps, I've got a bridge to sell you. The only reason they released a year earlier than their native app SDK was to get their product out in front of competition that they knew was coming so they could claim they were "first".
    - unclekev 6y ago
      > product out in front of competition that they knew was coming so they could claim they were "first" Who was coming? What competition? They weren't in a race with anyone to release the iPhone. Nobody was even close to what they had with iPhone at the time.
      - BlueTemplar 6y ago
        You don't think that completely dismissing the other smartphone makers would have been foolish?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - wayneftw 6y ago
        Do you really think Android popped up a year later after the release of the iPhone and nobody knew about its development? Android didn't start at Google. Google bought them in 2005, three years before the iPhone was released.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Sorry to spoil your Apple hate hard-on but your assertions about Flash cross-platform development are patently absurd. There's easily half a dozen cross-platform frameworks for developing mobile apps. Most emit native code and others target WebKit views. As for Flash, Jobs didn't want it on the iPhone because the Flash was a shit show. When the iPhone was released Flash Player 9 (with ActionScript 3 and the AVM2) had been out for a year. A vast majority of Flash content was using the older and much shittier AVM1. That content was also 100% developed for WIMP interfaces so there were zero affordances for multitouch or even just having hit boxes sized for fingers instead of cursors. Even if Steve Jobs loved Flash and ached to have it on the iPhone most content available would have been designed for a minimum of SVGA screen resolution, a cursor, and a desktop processor and RAM and would have not been running in a JIT runtime with zero understanding of app restore states or any iPhone features. Flash Lite was not a good option either as it did not support web content or run as a plug-in. It also did not have good touch support since most phones it was targeted for didn't have a touchscreen. It was number pad and hardware keys almost exclusively. So there was very little overlap between the goals of the iPhone and any aspect of Flash. Flash on Android basically proved Steve Jobs right as to the performance of Flash on a smartphone. The UX ended up terrible for most content, it absolutely killed the battery, and its security problems were myriad. Flash's problem was it sucked anywhere but the desktop. Even then it sucked on laptops as it was a major power drain and/or fan spinner. HTML5 obviated Flash for most of its use cases. Even Adobe eventually realized that and last their Flash authoring tools target HTML5.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    The funny thing is, all the arguments against Flash on iPhone also apply to HTML on iPhone. Flash and the Web have a concurrent development history. Hell, AS3 almost became JavaScript 2.0 - Adobe even gave Mozilla the AVM2 runtime to replace SpiderMonkey. Conversely, pretty much no website was designed for smartphones before the iPhone. Everything was sized for large screens and had hover content. The difference is that Apple put a lot of time and effort into making old content work. They wrote dynamic JIT compilers for JavaScript, sliced up webpages into GPU layers, downscaled old content to fit on tiny screens, changed the behavior of hovers so that you could use them with a finger, and added detects for undersized tap targets and form fields. Adobe's approach was to shove all that compatibility work onto the developer. Why make a JIT for AVM1 when you could just make a new version of ECMAScript and make everyone rewrite their movies in AS3? Why embrace GPU rendering and composition when you can just hand people a thin wrapper around OpenGL and tell them to use Starling Framework? Why bother fixing broken hovers when you can just throw more events to the developer to handle? Like, imagine if Steve Jobs went up on stage and told people that the iPhone would run webapps, but only if people wrote everything in Angular and WebGL. That's kind of what Flash Player was trying to do. Apple knew that you had to get the existing, broken, not mobile-friendly-at-all content up and running first and they they could push through more mobile-friendly web standards. Adobe figured they could just entice developers into writing not-terrible Flash movies and then they'd be allowed on smartphones again.
- astlouis44 6y ago
  Cannot upvote this enough. I wrote an article on this recently, shameless plug: https://alexstlouis.medium.com/apple-vs-the-web-e88b9362c010 https://alexstlouis.medium.com/apple-vs-the-web-e88b9362c010
lupinglade 6y ago
You do no know that you can disable notifications on iOS right? Ever since they first added them. Apps should not die. They provide an infinitely better user experience, battery efficiency and many more capabilities. To the contrary, web apps should die (or maybe move to a separate medium) as they go against what the web was designed for - web apps are horribly bad for search-ability, archival and accessibility.
- hartator 6y ago
  Most of the apps out there are just webview of a web app.
  - alickz 6y ago
    Those apps, if they exist, are explicitly against Apple's App Store policy. Usually they don't pass review. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#minimum-functionality https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...
    - nikitaga 6y ago
      This section seems to be against repackaging websites, not web apps. People ship Cordova apps all the time.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    I would be curious to see your sources on this. Last I checked the overwhelming majority of applications were actually native. [1] https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/09/ios-developers-app-store-play-store/ https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/09/ios-developers-app-stor...
- kevincox 6y ago
  > web apps are horribly bad for search-ability, archival and accessibility And iOS apps are somehow better? Also accessibility is quite good on the web, but I think iOS does a good job here too.

echelon 6y ago

Apps are the worst. Not everything should be an app. There's no reason web couldn't continue to be a powerful app platform with full device API access. Rust+WASM+device APIs and you could have Google Maps and Netflix be "native" web apps. Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans.

agust 6y ago
That is also why they are currently preventing competition on web browser engines on iOS, by forcing other browsers to use theirs (webkit). That way they can limit the web app capabilities, by not implementing APIs like the Push API, and make the web look very bad by not fixing bugs. I'm wondering why Mozilla, amongst other companies, hasn't taken action against this anti-competitive behaviour.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Mozilla wins. Apple has to allow other engines on iOS. Most users switch to Chrome. Most developers stop supporting anything else. Mozilla loses.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Indeed, say what you will about Safari on iOS, it certainly forces some amount of diversity in the overall browser market. (I realise this is a controversial opinion but I don’t lament the slower feature release cadence of Safari because IMHO the web is already far too complex and feature rich for its own good.)
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    I don't follow your logic. If a Gecko-based browser could be installed on iOS, there would be more Gecko users, which would mean developers would be slightly more likely to check rendering in Gecko. By what logic would more developers test against Gecko in the status quo. The only losers would be Safari and a good chunk of Apple's "services revenue" for selling the default search engine setting.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I think the argument is that users will install Chrome instead of Mozilla, further pushing up Chrome's market share. Even as Mozilla's share increases slightly, the loss in Safari's will lead to a super-super-majority of Chrome and thus developers not caring about any alternative browsers at all.
      - lern_too_spel 6y ago
        But they wouldn't care about Gecko-based browsers any less than they do now. They would simply not care about Webkit-based browsers. If anything, the developers who can now use a Gecko-based mobile browser who couldn't before would now care to test it. Meanwhile, Mozilla's job will be easier, only having to target mobile compatibility with one rendering engine.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        When a browser has 90+% market share, you can make a credible business argument about why you can ignore every other browser.
restingrobot 6y ago
I might be biased as an app developer, but if apps are done properly they can provide a much deeper experience for users. I understand your point that most things can be done in a cross platform manner, however in my 10 years of mobile development experience, cross platform is great for 90% of things, sucks at 5%, and simply cannot do the last 5%. If your tech needs fall into any of the 5's then a native app is simply the better solution. They killed flash because it was a bug riddled, security nightmare, owned by Adobe, (one of the greediest corporations in existence). I will never understand the flash nostalgia, good riddance.
lupinglade 6y ago
Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans. This is nonsense as initially Apple was pushing web apps, it actually took a lot of convincing to get them to move to native code. Flash never provided a good user experience.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  If you believe that Apple ever really intended web apps to be the only apps, I've got a bridge to sell you. The only reason they released a year earlier than their native app SDK was to get their product out in front of competition that they knew was coming so they could claim they were "first".
  - unclekev 6y ago
    > product out in front of competition that they knew was coming so they could claim they were "first" Who was coming? What competition? They weren't in a race with anyone to release the iPhone. Nobody was even close to what they had with iPhone at the time.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      You don't think that completely dismissing the other smartphone makers would have been foolish?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - wayneftw 6y ago
      Do you really think Android popped up a year later after the release of the iPhone and nobody knew about its development? Android didn't start at Google. Google bought them in 2005, three years before the iPhone was released.
giantrobot 6y ago
Sorry to spoil your Apple hate hard-on but your assertions about Flash cross-platform development are patently absurd. There's easily half a dozen cross-platform frameworks for developing mobile apps. Most emit native code and others target WebKit views. As for Flash, Jobs didn't want it on the iPhone because the Flash was a shit show. When the iPhone was released Flash Player 9 (with ActionScript 3 and the AVM2) had been out for a year. A vast majority of Flash content was using the older and much shittier AVM1. That content was also 100% developed for WIMP interfaces so there were zero affordances for multitouch or even just having hit boxes sized for fingers instead of cursors. Even if Steve Jobs loved Flash and ached to have it on the iPhone most content available would have been designed for a minimum of SVGA screen resolution, a cursor, and a desktop processor and RAM and would have not been running in a JIT runtime with zero understanding of app restore states or any iPhone features. Flash Lite was not a good option either as it did not support web content or run as a plug-in. It also did not have good touch support since most phones it was targeted for didn't have a touchscreen. It was number pad and hardware keys almost exclusively. So there was very little overlap between the goals of the iPhone and any aspect of Flash. Flash on Android basically proved Steve Jobs right as to the performance of Flash on a smartphone. The UX ended up terrible for most content, it absolutely killed the battery, and its security problems were myriad. Flash's problem was it sucked anywhere but the desktop. Even then it sucked on laptops as it was a major power drain and/or fan spinner. HTML5 obviated Flash for most of its use cases. Even Adobe eventually realized that and last their Flash authoring tools target HTML5.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  The funny thing is, all the arguments against Flash on iPhone also apply to HTML on iPhone. Flash and the Web have a concurrent development history. Hell, AS3 almost became JavaScript 2.0 - Adobe even gave Mozilla the AVM2 runtime to replace SpiderMonkey. Conversely, pretty much no website was designed for smartphones before the iPhone. Everything was sized for large screens and had hover content. The difference is that Apple put a lot of time and effort into making old content work. They wrote dynamic JIT compilers for JavaScript, sliced up webpages into GPU layers, downscaled old content to fit on tiny screens, changed the behavior of hovers so that you could use them with a finger, and added detects for undersized tap targets and form fields. Adobe's approach was to shove all that compatibility work onto the developer. Why make a JIT for AVM1 when you could just make a new version of ECMAScript and make everyone rewrite their movies in AS3? Why embrace GPU rendering and composition when you can just hand people a thin wrapper around OpenGL and tell them to use Starling Framework? Why bother fixing broken hovers when you can just throw more events to the developer to handle? Like, imagine if Steve Jobs went up on stage and told people that the iPhone would run webapps, but only if people wrote everything in Angular and WebGL. That's kind of what Flash Player was trying to do. Apple knew that you had to get the existing, broken, not mobile-friendly-at-all content up and running first and they they could push through more mobile-friendly web standards. Adobe figured they could just entice developers into writing not-terrible Flash movies and then they'd be allowed on smartphones again.
astlouis44 6y ago
Cannot upvote this enough. I wrote an article on this recently, shameless plug: https://alexstlouis.medium.com/apple-vs-the-web-e88b9362c010 https://alexstlouis.medium.com/apple-vs-the-web-e88b9362c010

lupinglade 6y ago

You do no know that you can disable notifications on iOS right? Ever since they first added them. Apps should not die. They provide an infinitely better user experience, battery efficiency and many more capabilities. To the contrary, web apps should die (or maybe move to a separate medium) as they go against what the web was designed for - web apps are horribly bad for search-ability, archival and accessibility.

hartator 6y ago
Most of the apps out there are just webview of a web app.
- alickz 6y ago
  Those apps, if they exist, are explicitly against Apple's App Store policy. Usually they don't pass review. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#minimum-functionality https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...
  - nikitaga 6y ago
    This section seems to be against repackaging websites, not web apps. People ship Cordova apps all the time.
- folkrav 6y ago
  I would be curious to see your sources on this. Last I checked the overwhelming majority of applications were actually native. [1] https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/09/ios-developers-app-store-play-store/ https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/09/ios-developers-app-stor...
kevincox 6y ago
> web apps are horribly bad for search-ability, archival and accessibility And iOS apps are somehow better? Also accessibility is quite good on the web, but I think iOS does a good job here too.