5 ms·

Mobile apps must die

53 points by namzo 15y ago

gte910h 15y ago
I don't really see his conclusion following from his statements. Also, what phone doesn't have a search feature now to find the app you're looking for?
- Apple-Guy 15y ago
  Agree. The article believes SMS has higher value than optimized mobile apps. Quite a goofy thought (or maybe the person doesn't have a phone that is passable for anything besides SMS).
  - Xlythe 15y ago
    (Cheap) SMS was compared to (expensive per-minute) calling, as an example of a technology that caught on even though its use wasn't easy. (The phone keypad being unwieldy for typing long messages because every 3 letters is grouped with a single number)
Xlythe 15y ago
A QR Code and a simple mobile website, isn't that what the author is asking for? Stores or areas offering something to a crowd (Where sharing a physical code with everyone seems inefficient) can set up a WiFi network and redirect users to the store's website.
famousactress 15y ago
Google has publicly said that if they just reduce the load speed of the Google.com home page by TENTHS of a second, usage noticeably improves. Anyone have a link for this claim? I'd be really interested in reading more about what GOOG found... I probably missed a flurry of remarkable discussion around this that I'd love to catch up on.
- rimantas 15y ago
  http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-f... More numbers: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performance-optimization/ http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performa...
nirvana 15y ago
Imagine an article that asserted "Desktop apps must die!" to be replaced by web apps, naturally. Sure, organizing mobile apps is a pain. I agree. But I can't tell you the number of times I've known there was a website that had some web app, and had a heck of a time trying to find it. URLs, in people's minds, are very ephemeral... while apps are more tangible in a way. I think for some applications the web delivery mechanism will be superior, while for other applications, native apps will always be superior. Is the Facebook iPhone app a web app or a mobile app, or a hybrid? Facebook gives people the choice.
- suivix 15y ago
  Search is replacing the need to know URLs or even the names of apps. I use command + space all the time on my Macbook Air to open apps. I use Google Chrome and never enter in URLs... I type in a few letters of the site I'm looking for, and the browser is intelligent enough to fill the rest in.
  - freejack 15y ago
    I think this only solves part of the problem. Apps need to become addressable in order for discovery to properly work. I think its a great startup opportunity. I wrote a longer thought on this at my blog earlier tonight - http://www.byte.org/2011/10/10/mobile-apps-need-more-than-google-they-need-their-own-dns/ http://www.byte.org/2011/10/10/mobile-apps-need-more-than-go...
rjd 15y ago
I can't help but be suspicious this is a propaganda push to try and move people off devices competing with MS. I never read .net magazine even when I had a subscription, theres something about the tone of the magazine that rubs me up the wrong way, and its in this article as well. Not sure how to describe it but I always get a feeling like I'm dealing with a shady street vendor and I have to watch every moment to make sure I'm not being conned. Like buying off pikeys in the UK, you just know something isn't legit.
- astrodust 15y ago
  If the Windows Phone platform was doing famously, you can bet there'd be an article touting exactly the opposite. '"C# and XNA are vastly superior to HTML5", says industry expert.' would be the pull-quote.
  - stan_rogers 15y ago
    Don't confuse .net Magazine with Microsoft's .NET platform (or anything to do with it). ".net" has been around quite a bit longer than ".NET", and has always been a web-centric publication.
    - rjd 15y ago
      Actually I must admit I thought it was an MS publication, I'm sure I was getting it with my MSDN subscription... I'm even thinking I may even have the wrong magazine now I'm not sure... The MS evangelists I dealt with where A+ characters so I guess they just threw it in as a bribe to butter me up and I was foolish enough to snap up free goodies without question... EDIT: MS do infact make a magazine called .Net Magazine, I was totally confused by another magazine with the same
natesm 15y ago
Sorry that this isn't related to the article text at all, but I have been noticing this a lot recently. It's a web design thing. It's about margin-left. Have one that isn't zero. Please. I don't want to resize my browser (currently 925px, which is reasonable) to make your content readable. This is what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/Dlcgg.png http://i.imgur.com/Dlcgg.png
- Wilduck 15y ago
  This is especially true when thinking about those reading from a smartphone... Adds a hint of irony to the piece.
- Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
  It reads well in instapaper! Laughed when I realized why I didn't understand tour comment.
- rjd 15y ago
  You might want to do yourself a favor and move your browser width out a bit more. 940 is a commonly used width content for many grid based frameworks. That 940 doesn't include an internal margin, instead it is handle by an external 10px margin taking the whole width upto 960px. Check out 960.gs for their framework, but they aren't alone in those figures, because of the way it subdivides.
  - tesseract 15y ago
    Sorry, but I want web designers to do me a favor and make sites that, even if they don't look perfect, at least don't horribly break in my ~860px wide browser window. Which, I feel compelled to point out, is a full 100px wider than an iPad in portrait. Actually I would rather use a browser width of 600-700px, as that would fill around half the width of my 13" laptop screen, and be more typographically optimal in terms of not requiring as much horizontal eye scanning, and not stretching out paragraphs into 2 or 3 line horizontal stripes. But there are too many websites out there that assume I have a giant monitor and a browser window that's maximized to fill it.
Detrus 15y ago
If there's a reasonable conclusion to be made from app overload it's that apps must die. Web, desktop and mobile apps, the way they're presented are a pain for the end user. He has to think in terms of apps, not in terms of functionality. Apple's Siri is a good example. You're using many apps simultaneously through one interface - calendar, weather, alarms, maps, etc. You don't have to worry about how someone decided to bundle functionality into apps, you just access the functionality. If this new genre of apps appears it doesn't sound like the user experience will be improved.
ary 15y ago
Maybe. Why is it so hard to imagine a world where we have both? I don't use Google's dedicated iOS app because www.google.com happens to load just fine in Mobile Safari. I do use the iOS Maps application because maps.google.com doesn't work as well as I'd like in the aforementioned browser. We have to let go of this notion that for web apps to win, mobile apps have to lose (or vice versa). [1] [1] http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/08/06/when-apple-and-microsoft-made-amends-sort-of-video/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/08/06/when-apple-and-microso...
- nigelsampson 15y ago
  I think this is a problem that surrounds us in tech, that we approach everything with the notion of "for x to win, y must lose".
drivingmenuts 15y ago
> too much trouble to organize & maintain I disagree. That's a solved problem. The App Store and Android Market both notify when there are updates and it's very painless to apply them. The real problem is discovery. Apple and Google both set the precedent for crapware while building up their markets and it hasn't gotten any better. What we need is access to curated collections outside the respective app stores. This won't happen until Apple unbinds their iDevices from the App Store and Android goes a bit further. > apps magically appearing on your phone There is no way that anyone can make that sound at all reasonable. Security & privacy demand that, at a minimum, the user be allowed to reject the installation of a native app. The privacy-destroying aspects of what he describes are beyond terrifying.
scottjenson 15y ago
I think I'm paying a price for having a linkbait title. I don't honestly think this is a web vs native issue at all. I think that native has had too much power and that apps 'must die' as they suck up all the oxygen. It blinds people from seeing alternatives. That's my point, we have to be able to explore alternatives and the current native app silo approach will make JIT interaction impossible. As to the people on this thread that think JIT interaction is a privacy nightmare, i never said these things would install automatically, this has to offer itself when the user requests it, i.e. I want to look at THIS bustop now. All I'm talking about is reducing the pain threshold to getting to functionality. That's all. It's not as sinister as you make it sound.
- kolinko 15y ago
  Ah, a good old "you don't agree with me, therefore you must be blind" argument. No - other people aren't blind, they just disagree with you. Webapps are fine in very few scenarios (like the movie poster one you mentioned), but for quite many they are lousy. For example, most games & productivity tools perform far better when on the device. And these are the best selling apps. Finally, the first argument of your post, about the app organisation.. Really? In case of the iPhone there are three ways to access each app. First there is the home screen, and I agree that it becomes messy when dealing with >50 apps. BUT there is also an app search and the "recently opened" list - these make the whole "app organisation" thing a non-issue. I guess the same goes for other mobile platforms. Besides - you're trying to tell us that mobile apps are easier to organise? I either have to type in the whole address (so it's slower than using the built-in app search), or google the app name (even slower & requires net access), or choose it from my bookmarks (which is basically the same as the home screen).
kolinko 15y ago
A terrible, terrible article. - App organisation problem If there are too many apps on the device for the user to handle, there are other solutions. For example sorting them by how often they are used (iPhone does this already on the task bar) The rest of the article is even worse...
taverr 15y ago
Apps essentially exist because of the limitations of the mobile OS - or, rather, the browser of the mobile OS - to access web content. As the web is changing and mobile devices are progressing (from a hardware and software perspective), apps are really becoming redundant unless they are embedded as part of the natural interface. Certain pieces of functionality make sense to keep "app-ified", but others i think will converge to become part of natural interfaces, much like what has happened to twitter with iOS5 and facebook across all mobile OS's.
diminish 15y ago
A wonderful article, which must awaken some dreamers; majority of mobile app developers just lose time in hope of earning money through mobile app sales, because their revenues dont cover their lost time and development costs. Mobile app development is fragmented, cumbersome, ugly and I bet in few years most apps will be abandoned. In addition most apps I bothered to try were not even worth the download. People will stop buying apps at some point, and unfortunately a lot of development effort will be lost.

53 points by namzo 15y ago

I don't really see his conclusion following from his statements. Also, what phone doesn't have a search feature now to find the app you're looking for?

Apple-Guy 15y ago
Agree. The article believes SMS has higher value than optimized mobile apps. Quite a goofy thought (or maybe the person doesn't have a phone that is passable for anything besides SMS).
- Xlythe 15y ago
  (Cheap) SMS was compared to (expensive per-minute) calling, as an example of a technology that caught on even though its use wasn't easy. (The phone keypad being unwieldy for typing long messages because every 3 letters is grouped with a single number)

Xlythe 15y ago

A QR Code and a simple mobile website, isn't that what the author is asking for? Stores or areas offering something to a crowd (Where sharing a physical code with everyone seems inefficient) can set up a WiFi network and redirect users to the store's website.

famousactress 15y ago

Google has publicly said that if they just reduce the load speed of the Google.com home page by TENTHS of a second, usage noticeably improves. Anyone have a link for this claim? I'd be really interested in reading more about what GOOG found... I probably missed a flurry of remarkable discussion around this that I'd love to catch up on.

rimantas 15y ago
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-f... More numbers: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performance-optimization/ http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performa...

nirvana 15y ago

Imagine an article that asserted "Desktop apps must die!" to be replaced by web apps, naturally. Sure, organizing mobile apps is a pain. I agree. But I can't tell you the number of times I've known there was a website that had some web app, and had a heck of a time trying to find it. URLs, in people's minds, are very ephemeral... while apps are more tangible in a way. I think for some applications the web delivery mechanism will be superior, while for other applications, native apps will always be superior. Is the Facebook iPhone app a web app or a mobile app, or a hybrid? Facebook gives people the choice.

suivix 15y ago
Search is replacing the need to know URLs or even the names of apps. I use command + space all the time on my Macbook Air to open apps. I use Google Chrome and never enter in URLs... I type in a few letters of the site I'm looking for, and the browser is intelligent enough to fill the rest in.
- freejack 15y ago
  I think this only solves part of the problem. Apps need to become addressable in order for discovery to properly work. I think its a great startup opportunity. I wrote a longer thought on this at my blog earlier tonight - http://www.byte.org/2011/10/10/mobile-apps-need-more-than-google-they-need-their-own-dns/ http://www.byte.org/2011/10/10/mobile-apps-need-more-than-go...

rjd 15y ago

I can't help but be suspicious this is a propaganda push to try and move people off devices competing with MS. I never read .net magazine even when I had a subscription, theres something about the tone of the magazine that rubs me up the wrong way, and its in this article as well. Not sure how to describe it but I always get a feeling like I'm dealing with a shady street vendor and I have to watch every moment to make sure I'm not being conned. Like buying off pikeys in the UK, you just know something isn't legit.

astrodust 15y ago
If the Windows Phone platform was doing famously, you can bet there'd be an article touting exactly the opposite. '"C# and XNA are vastly superior to HTML5", says industry expert.' would be the pull-quote.
- stan_rogers 15y ago
  Don't confuse .net Magazine with Microsoft's .NET platform (or anything to do with it). ".net" has been around quite a bit longer than ".NET", and has always been a web-centric publication.
  - rjd 15y ago
    Actually I must admit I thought it was an MS publication, I'm sure I was getting it with my MSDN subscription... I'm even thinking I may even have the wrong magazine now I'm not sure... The MS evangelists I dealt with where A+ characters so I guess they just threw it in as a bribe to butter me up and I was foolish enough to snap up free goodies without question... EDIT: MS do infact make a magazine called .Net Magazine, I was totally confused by another magazine with the same

natesm 15y ago

Sorry that this isn't related to the article text at all, but I have been noticing this a lot recently. It's a web design thing. It's about margin-left. Have one that isn't zero. Please. I don't want to resize my browser (currently 925px, which is reasonable) to make your content readable. This is what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/Dlcgg.png http://i.imgur.com/Dlcgg.png

Wilduck 15y ago
This is especially true when thinking about those reading from a smartphone... Adds a hint of irony to the piece.
Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
It reads well in instapaper! Laughed when I realized why I didn't understand tour comment.
rjd 15y ago
You might want to do yourself a favor and move your browser width out a bit more. 940 is a commonly used width content for many grid based frameworks. That 940 doesn't include an internal margin, instead it is handle by an external 10px margin taking the whole width upto 960px. Check out 960.gs for their framework, but they aren't alone in those figures, because of the way it subdivides.
- tesseract 15y ago
  Sorry, but I want web designers to do me a favor and make sites that, even if they don't look perfect, at least don't horribly break in my ~860px wide browser window. Which, I feel compelled to point out, is a full 100px wider than an iPad in portrait. Actually I would rather use a browser width of 600-700px, as that would fill around half the width of my 13" laptop screen, and be more typographically optimal in terms of not requiring as much horizontal eye scanning, and not stretching out paragraphs into 2 or 3 line horizontal stripes. But there are too many websites out there that assume I have a giant monitor and a browser window that's maximized to fill it.

Detrus 15y ago

If there's a reasonable conclusion to be made from app overload it's that apps must die. Web, desktop and mobile apps, the way they're presented are a pain for the end user. He has to think in terms of apps, not in terms of functionality. Apple's Siri is a good example. You're using many apps simultaneously through one interface - calendar, weather, alarms, maps, etc. You don't have to worry about how someone decided to bundle functionality into apps, you just access the functionality. If this new genre of apps appears it doesn't sound like the user experience will be improved.

ary 15y ago

Maybe. Why is it so hard to imagine a world where we have both? I don't use Google's dedicated iOS app because www.google.com happens to load just fine in Mobile Safari. I do use the iOS Maps application because maps.google.com doesn't work as well as I'd like in the aforementioned browser. We have to let go of this notion that for web apps to win, mobile apps have to lose (or vice versa). [1] [1] http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/08/06/when-apple-and-microsoft-made-amends-sort-of-video/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/08/06/when-apple-and-microso...

nigelsampson 15y ago
I think this is a problem that surrounds us in tech, that we approach everything with the notion of "for x to win, y must lose".

drivingmenuts 15y ago

> too much trouble to organize & maintain I disagree. That's a solved problem. The App Store and Android Market both notify when there are updates and it's very painless to apply them. The real problem is discovery. Apple and Google both set the precedent for crapware while building up their markets and it hasn't gotten any better. What we need is access to curated collections outside the respective app stores. This won't happen until Apple unbinds their iDevices from the App Store and Android goes a bit further. > apps magically appearing on your phone There is no way that anyone can make that sound at all reasonable. Security & privacy demand that, at a minimum, the user be allowed to reject the installation of a native app. The privacy-destroying aspects of what he describes are beyond terrifying.

scottjenson 15y ago

I think I'm paying a price for having a linkbait title. I don't honestly think this is a web vs native issue at all. I think that native has had too much power and that apps 'must die' as they suck up all the oxygen. It blinds people from seeing alternatives. That's my point, we have to be able to explore alternatives and the current native app silo approach will make JIT interaction impossible. As to the people on this thread that think JIT interaction is a privacy nightmare, i never said these things would install automatically, this has to offer itself when the user requests it, i.e. I want to look at THIS bustop now. All I'm talking about is reducing the pain threshold to getting to functionality. That's all. It's not as sinister as you make it sound.

kolinko 15y ago
Ah, a good old "you don't agree with me, therefore you must be blind" argument. No - other people aren't blind, they just disagree with you. Webapps are fine in very few scenarios (like the movie poster one you mentioned), but for quite many they are lousy. For example, most games & productivity tools perform far better when on the device. And these are the best selling apps. Finally, the first argument of your post, about the app organisation.. Really? In case of the iPhone there are three ways to access each app. First there is the home screen, and I agree that it becomes messy when dealing with >50 apps. BUT there is also an app search and the "recently opened" list - these make the whole "app organisation" thing a non-issue. I guess the same goes for other mobile platforms. Besides - you're trying to tell us that mobile apps are easier to organise? I either have to type in the whole address (so it's slower than using the built-in app search), or google the app name (even slower & requires net access), or choose it from my bookmarks (which is basically the same as the home screen).

kolinko 15y ago

A terrible, terrible article. - App organisation problem If there are too many apps on the device for the user to handle, there are other solutions. For example sorting them by how often they are used (iPhone does this already on the task bar) The rest of the article is even worse...

taverr 15y ago

Apps essentially exist because of the limitations of the mobile OS - or, rather, the browser of the mobile OS - to access web content. As the web is changing and mobile devices are progressing (from a hardware and software perspective), apps are really becoming redundant unless they are embedded as part of the natural interface. Certain pieces of functionality make sense to keep "app-ified", but others i think will converge to become part of natural interfaces, much like what has happened to twitter with iOS5 and facebook across all mobile OS's.

diminish 15y ago

A wonderful article, which must awaken some dreamers; majority of mobile app developers just lose time in hope of earning money through mobile app sales, because their revenues dont cover their lost time and development costs. Mobile app development is fragmented, cumbersome, ugly and I bet in few years most apps will be abandoned. In addition most apps I bothered to try were not even worth the download. People will stop buying apps at some point, and unfortunately a lot of development effort will be lost.