18 ms·

Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web

163 points by joeyespo 15y ago

ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Haven't heard a better metaphor for apps yet. Long live the web. In all my infinite wisdom, I tried out a few apps from google chrome. And gave them permission to see what websites I view. Does anyone know if that goes away once I uninstall said app, or is there any extra mucking about and cookie removal I should take care of to make sure feedly isn't following me everywhere, even after it's uninstalled?
- jaredsohn 15y ago
  You should be okay. Once you uninstall a Chrome extension and close all tabs (since code could have been injected into them), there won't be any code related to it running on your machine. It is still theoretically possible that while a Chrome extension was running that it updated state (via a cookie or otherwise) on webpages you were visiting, so perhaps clearing cookies could be helpful, but I'm not aware of this happening.
marknutter 15y ago
I posted this comment in another thread about apps, but too late for it to really get any responses: - app discoverability sucks ass - apps require updates - app development is unnecessarily tedious and must be done x number of times for x platforms - iOS apps need to be approved by Apple, and you have to play the game by their rules if you want to charge money for them - apps lack basic features of browsers - no universal find, no back/forward buttons, no bookmarking of pages or states, no organizing apps into tabs, etc. Let's be honest: not counting games, the vast majority of the native apps out there would work just fine (or better) as websites. Add API's like access to the camera and there's even less reasons to develop a native app. Apps will be relegated to games and highly sophisticated interfaces, which if I had to guess probably represents around 10% of all the apps out there (heck, most of the games out there could probably be done in the browser).
- huxley 15y ago
  There were a small number of great CD-ROMs back then. The Voyager Company did as much as was possible given the crappy hardware that existed. Anyhow, I could come up with an equally harsh assessment of web apps as you did of native apps: * web app discoverability sucks (seriously how much money is spent on SEO?) * web apps constantly change on you or disappear when the shop is bought out * web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims * you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web (let's see how Stripe works out long term before we declare victory there) * many apps lack basic features like site-wide search, working back/forwards buttons, working bookmarking due to bad Ajax use, incoherent and inconsistent UI, etc. Now, I happen to like web app development better than native app development, but I'm not a big fan of triumphalism in any of its stripes. Heck, the vast majority of websites out there would work just fine (or better) as paper brochures or a rolodex. The web will continue changing and evolving and the browser will only be one of many ways that it will be consumed. Native apps will be integrated with web services more and more over time. Apple has done a spectacular job of monetizing small apps, Google is building a good infrastructure for ad-sponsored apps, I wouldn't discount their long term potential.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    "I happen to like web app development better than native app development" I find the distinction to pretty blurry, myself. If you look at Cappuccino, you could practically search and replace a few tokens and have your code natively compile in Cocoa. As web applications become more complex, proper separation of concerns, like MVC, starts to become important. Once you do that, as seen with Cappuccino and echoed in many other frameworks like SproutCore Backbone to name a couple more, the process starts to very closely resemble native development. We now have the web browser playing double duty. We want it to be a hyperlink document viewer and we want it to be a platform for applications. Personally, I would like to see the browser be only a platform for applications and let the hyperlink document viewer be one of the many applications you can run in the browser.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    seriously how much money is spent on SEO? Smart companies and individuals don't spend much money on SEO, as most white-hat practices require long-term focus and black-hat practices can get you erased from the Internet. You can't do anything unless you're doing marketing, however marketing must be part of the product and can't be outsourced. With that said, web apps go viral faster than anything else, that's because there's no barrier to entry. You don't have to be a member of the iPhone users club to try out links. web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims Compared to multi-platform development for OS X, iOS, Android, Symbian, WinMo 6, WinMo 7, Windows 7, Windows 8, Blackberry, Samsung Bada, Linux ; it's heaven like. you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web Except Paypal or a bank are NOT in the same market as you are. They also don't control the platform you operate on. They couldn't suddenly one day decide that your product should be part of the OS, making their own alternative. If you're getting screwed by Paypal, you're only losing some money. However, if you're getting screwed by Apple, you lose your product and business model.
webisbest 15y ago
I think that people are more likely to pay for an app then for a website.. maybe that is why, Apple, Google & Microsoft are pushing apps instead of pushing the web..
- prawn 15y ago
  I think your first point is fair, but those giants are pushing them because they can easily install themselves as gateway and take a fat cut.
- Getahobby 15y ago
  Then somebody will come out with a free app that does the something or better than the paid app. Lather, rinse, repeat. Blah.
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  This is a good point, and touches on what calebbrown said above, that apps are concrete, which makes it easier to pay for (psychologically). Perhaps the powers that be recognize this, or perhaps it's just a matter of the biz end of then interent starting to trend towards paid material. Money drives motivation here. This scares me a little, because it tells me we really are going to move into a world of apps....
calebbrown 15y ago
I think apps are popular because they are more concrete than the web. A user knows where an app starts and ends and they know what icon they need to touch to get there. Websites are far more ethereal and it isn't as clear when you've left one site and landed on another. And it's much harder remembering how to get there. Case in point: how many people type 'facebook' into google and click the first link instead of entering 'www.facebook.com' into the address bar.
peterwwillis 15y ago
'APPS' AND 'THE WEB' ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FUCKING THINGS!!! Do you realize you're comparing a crippled, poorly-designed gadget with a distributed, massively networked system for browsing documents and information? 'Apps' do not work like 'the web' because they're not supposed to work that way. They're supposed to be static, stable, simple, reliable, offline, well-tested, usable. 'The web' is literally thrown together like so many ingredients in hobo chili. 'An app' is a Bonsai tree. Unfortunately, most people spend all their time tweaking the chili and spend absolutely no time pruning their bonsai. God, I hate making these comparisons. I'm sorry for being angry, but it's getting sickening just reading the titles for weird articles like these that make no sense.
- webisbest 15y ago
  so many apps do what the web can already do
  - TylerE 15y ago
    That's true, but on the other hand, there are many apps that are pleasure to use where a web site is a pain in the ass. The android gmail app comes to mind.
dlsspy 15y ago
I wish this were true. Those 1990s CD-ROMs were useful when I wasn't connected to a network. My iPad has 32GB of space (about 50 CD-ROMs), two cores each faster than any computer in the 1990s plenty of RAM, etc... It wants to be used like a thin client web browser thing. What a horrible waste.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
I just tried viewing this fellow's website through an iPad and an iPhone, and am pleased to report that he had the native good sense to make sure his site didn't look like garbage on a mobile device before singing the praises of the mobile web. However. This good sense is far from universal, yet. When I browse the web on my mobile device, I stumble across a lot of pages that look as if they've never been viewed on a mobile browser - or, worse, that seem to think I'm using a mobile browser from 2003. Many other sites still use Flash - it will probably be another five years before the last one of those gets the memo that Apple mailed four years ago. And even the sites that have a mobile design often use stock frameworks like OnSwipe, which I find to be an effective commercial for native apps or, for that matter, unstyled plain text. In short, it's too early in the web's counterattack to deem it effective. For at least another year, that app icon is more valuable than a hyperlink, because it provides evidence that at least one programmer has spent at least five minutes looking at the app on a mobile device before signing off on it.
- shanselman 15y ago
  Thanks, I'm a responsive design fan and worked hard on that. Thanks for noticing. :)
MrMan 15y ago
This "insight" is why WebOS was such a good idea. Entertainingly written though.
- scrod 15y ago
  Clearly. WebOS has proven the author correct with its stunning success in the marketplace.
brisance 15y ago
One thing that web apps lag behind now is the "micropayments" thing. The eponymous "in-app purchase" is a damn sight easier for the end-user to understand and use ("Do you wish to purchase 99 potions for US$0.99?" Yes/No button). Because the App Store already has your card on file, they can do this with minimal friction. Same goes for Amazon.
akg 15y ago
This reminds me of the dichotomy that Apple and Microsoft faced when developing their empires. There are two major camps I think: one that ties in hardware + software (native apps) and one that relies on software with disregard to the underlying hardware (the web). It's really tough to say what the clear winner is. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. AFAIK, Apple has always bet the bank on the first approach and it's done well for them. History would seem to suggest that the first approach provides a richer end user experience where as the latter provide ubiquity. I'm not sure which will win out in the long-run.
cellis 15y ago
Keep in mind there are ton of mobile apps that do things that shouldn't require web access. I'm often in areas with spotty coverage, yet still need to use some of the following: camera apps flashlight calculators document editors / todos games It seems like in these debates people are confusing HTML based browsers with internet connectivity. Internet connectivity is all that matters. The hypertext web browser, on smartphones, is looking rather obsolete from a performance standpoint.
- notatoad 15y ago
  webapps don't require web access. localstorage and application cache apis are widely supported.
jaequery 15y ago
Yeah, apps were cool in the beginning, like when you first bought your iphone. But after you've installed like 10+, the novelty wears off and all the apps feels like a scam junk yard.
jermar 15y ago
Native apps have their place and so do web apps. One major benefit of native apps on iOS is consistent user experience. This is because a lot of apps use standard UI elements and navigation. I tend to feel more at home in native iOS apps than a mobile version. I still don't understand how discovery is any worse for native apps. On the web most people use search engines to find an app? App stores have search too. Plus, search engines usually find apps on app stores. If anything this makes discovery better for the native app.
Apocryphon 15y ago
Tangent: how does developing for webOS compare to developing for the mobile web?
scrod 15y ago
>As browsers get smarter native apps will introduce new interaction models, hardware accesses and new features. Those will get folded into HTML 9, then HTML 10 and the cycle will continue. So in other words, the latest web technology will always be lagging behind. Yeah, that's pretty obvious. But the sad thing is we're comparing two already horribly flawed systems. No one in their right mind should be arguing in terms of a locked-down, Disney-fied, compartmentalized experience versus a slow, infuriatingly clumsy and intermittently-available simulacrum of the same thing. We need to own our own devices and create, modify, and deploy our own software on our own terms. (And please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that the ability to browse to any given URL can constitute these freedoms in any materially useful way.) To publicly ask for anything less is so lacking in imagination and ambition as to be criminal; it serves only to reinforce the pathetic productivity-destroying dichotomy seemingly being forced upon us.
playhard 15y ago
Why the fuck there is a debate over apps vs webs going on lately?? web,app or desktop is a medium and way to provide your service to users/customers.. You choose the medium depending on solutions u provide.. u do location based service on apps and u cannot do it well in web.. Each platform has its own advantage/disadvantage. it depends on users you target, solution you provide. i dont know why there is a debate?? is web developers vs native platform developers and their concern about their future,the root cause of this debate??
bonaldi 15y ago
HTML/JS is up to running Doom now? Is that the best example? It puts it 17 years behind native. The article also says the water level is rising -- which is true, but why assume native is standing still? On the contrary, I see native APIs evolving far more quickly because of the huge competition in mobile platforms. iOS has gone from 1.0 to 5.0 while HTML5 has been in gestation. Native is a moving target, and HTML isn't catching up, let alone surpassing.
andrewfelix 15y ago
This is why Google is so keen on the browser market. Once we're able to run beautiful apps through the browser independent of the platforms, standalone apps start to look really un-attractive. IMO who-over dominates the browser market in 5-10 years time, dominates the mobile app market.
surfingdino 15y ago
"Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web" And that's a good thing. App developers have a much wider set of APIs to play with so they can do more while web app developers are stuck with whatever they had around 2005. There's been enormous progress on the back-end of web apps, but the browser side hasn't kept up.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  I remember tons of CD-roms which were just HTML, images , swf and java files. The same goes today for many of the apps that are sold on appstores, especially magazines and newspaper apps. The main reason seems to be that publishers can charge for the apps. On the web we don't really have an alternative yet, unless someone comes up with a brilliant, frictionless, secure and elegant web API for micropayments.
tcarnell 15y ago
Great insight, I mostly agree. And I am really crossing my fingers that HTML5 will quickly become a recognized app technology across all web platforms.
zerostar07 15y ago
Apps vs websites reminds of the TV vs VCR analogy. Yes you can use the VCR 24/7 but requires lots of maintainance. Sometimes it's just easier to turn the TV on no matter how bad the content.
kombine 15y ago
Well that's precisely the point. The advantage of the Web is its concept, not its implementation. URL is great, instant delivery of content is great. But the technology stack that Web is currently implemented with, i.e. HTML, JS and CSS is full of crap. Advocates for Web confuse the two: it's not HTML and JS that constitute the main advantage of Web, it's linking and sharing. And those technologies need to be replaced as soon as possible. Good that Google is trying to do something about it: Native Client and Dart.
robterrell 15y ago
Some of these complaints are side effects of Apple's implementation and not apps in general. Frequent updates are often used to churn an app for visibility on iTunes for better discoverability. Thanks to this, apps are updated for very minor reasons, and most people don't give a crap about minor updates. apps are still little islands of functionality that don't talk to each other That's not entirely true. Apps are only islands if you make them that way. Many iOS apps talk to each other using URL protocol handlers as an interchange mechanism. I just bought TextExpander Touch, and it works with over 120 other apps. There's some Twitter clients that do something similar. No question that this would be even better with more support for it in the OS, but it works now. I spent much of last year working on an HTML5 app. Maybe HTML5 will equal the app experience someday. But that day is not today.
- flyosity 15y ago
  Re: updating your app all the time for discoverability, on the flip side of that coin is that if you update your app frequently you'll also lose glowing 1.0 reviews frequently, to be replaced by the often-less-glowing 1.1 reviews. This is actually a large deterrent for many developers to ever release bugfix updates without new features because people are less prone to leave 5-star reviews on a new version that just fixes some small issues they may not have even noticed.
gte910h 15y ago
Installable applications are much easier for many people to pay for. This isn't limited to things that run on smartphones: Games that are installable are an easier sell than network games. In some ways, they SHOULD be easier to pay for, as they have a chance of sticking around and at least partially working if the company goes belly up.
Enlightenment 15y ago
Ha Ha...argumentments about Walled Garden Apps...how quaint...STFU and get back to work on your desktop/laptop at your day job.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
firefoxman1 15y ago
"Yes, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is a mess and it's hard, but it won't always be." Just wondering, since those are the only languages I know, but aren't programming languages for writing native applications (like C++) harder than, say, JavaScript?
ufuk 15y ago
I don't understand why not much has been said about Android on exactly this topic. The article complains mainly about two issues both of which are solved by the Android platform: 1) The keeping-applications-up-to-date problem has been addressed by the auto-update mechanism introduced by a market update for some time now. The apps are updated silently in the background without any user-interaction whatsoever. That's exactly what Chrome does for the web. If you keep Chrome open for decades then you web app will not upgrade either, at least not in the way you think it will. 2) The every-app-is-an-island problem is symptomatic of iOS since you are only allowed access as Apple sees fit. However, this is a solved problem on the Android platform through the use of Intents and the Back button which works as good as any web linking would.

163 points by joeyespo 15y ago

Haven't heard a better metaphor for apps yet. Long live the web. In all my infinite wisdom, I tried out a few apps from google chrome. And gave them permission to see what websites I view. Does anyone know if that goes away once I uninstall said app, or is there any extra mucking about and cookie removal I should take care of to make sure feedly isn't following me everywhere, even after it's uninstalled?

jaredsohn 15y ago
You should be okay. Once you uninstall a Chrome extension and close all tabs (since code could have been injected into them), there won't be any code related to it running on your machine. It is still theoretically possible that while a Chrome extension was running that it updated state (via a cookie or otherwise) on webpages you were visiting, so perhaps clearing cookies could be helpful, but I'm not aware of this happening.

marknutter 15y ago

I posted this comment in another thread about apps, but too late for it to really get any responses: - app discoverability sucks ass - apps require updates - app development is unnecessarily tedious and must be done x number of times for x platforms - iOS apps need to be approved by Apple, and you have to play the game by their rules if you want to charge money for them - apps lack basic features of browsers - no universal find, no back/forward buttons, no bookmarking of pages or states, no organizing apps into tabs, etc. Let's be honest: not counting games, the vast majority of the native apps out there would work just fine (or better) as websites. Add API's like access to the camera and there's even less reasons to develop a native app. Apps will be relegated to games and highly sophisticated interfaces, which if I had to guess probably represents around 10% of all the apps out there (heck, most of the games out there could probably be done in the browser).

huxley 15y ago
There were a small number of great CD-ROMs back then. The Voyager Company did as much as was possible given the crappy hardware that existed. Anyhow, I could come up with an equally harsh assessment of web apps as you did of native apps: * web app discoverability sucks (seriously how much money is spent on SEO?) * web apps constantly change on you or disappear when the shop is bought out * web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims * you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web (let's see how Stripe works out long term before we declare victory there) * many apps lack basic features like site-wide search, working back/forwards buttons, working bookmarking due to bad Ajax use, incoherent and inconsistent UI, etc. Now, I happen to like web app development better than native app development, but I'm not a big fan of triumphalism in any of its stripes. Heck, the vast majority of websites out there would work just fine (or better) as paper brochures or a rolodex. The web will continue changing and evolving and the browser will only be one of many ways that it will be consumed. Native apps will be integrated with web services more and more over time. Apple has done a spectacular job of monetizing small apps, Google is building a good infrastructure for ad-sponsored apps, I wouldn't discount their long term potential.
- randomdata 15y ago
  "I happen to like web app development better than native app development" I find the distinction to pretty blurry, myself. If you look at Cappuccino, you could practically search and replace a few tokens and have your code natively compile in Cocoa. As web applications become more complex, proper separation of concerns, like MVC, starts to become important. Once you do that, as seen with Cappuccino and echoed in many other frameworks like SproutCore Backbone to name a couple more, the process starts to very closely resemble native development. We now have the web browser playing double duty. We want it to be a hyperlink document viewer and we want it to be a platform for applications. Personally, I would like to see the browser be only a platform for applications and let the hyperlink document viewer be one of the many applications you can run in the browser.
- bad_user 15y ago
  seriously how much money is spent on SEO? Smart companies and individuals don't spend much money on SEO, as most white-hat practices require long-term focus and black-hat practices can get you erased from the Internet. You can't do anything unless you're doing marketing, however marketing must be part of the product and can't be outsourced. With that said, web apps go viral faster than anything else, that's because there's no barrier to entry. You don't have to be a member of the iPhone users club to try out links. web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims Compared to multi-platform development for OS X, iOS, Android, Symbian, WinMo 6, WinMo 7, Windows 7, Windows 8, Blackberry, Samsung Bada, Linux ; it's heaven like. you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web Except Paypal or a bank are NOT in the same market as you are. They also don't control the platform you operate on. They couldn't suddenly one day decide that your product should be part of the OS, making their own alternative. If you're getting screwed by Paypal, you're only losing some money. However, if you're getting screwed by Apple, you lose your product and business model.

webisbest 15y ago

I think that people are more likely to pay for an app then for a website.. maybe that is why, Apple, Google & Microsoft are pushing apps instead of pushing the web..

prawn 15y ago
I think your first point is fair, but those giants are pushing them because they can easily install themselves as gateway and take a fat cut.
Getahobby 15y ago
Then somebody will come out with a free app that does the something or better than the paid app. Lather, rinse, repeat. Blah.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
This is a good point, and touches on what calebbrown said above, that apps are concrete, which makes it easier to pay for (psychologically). Perhaps the powers that be recognize this, or perhaps it's just a matter of the biz end of then interent starting to trend towards paid material. Money drives motivation here. This scares me a little, because it tells me we really are going to move into a world of apps....

calebbrown 15y ago

I think apps are popular because they are more concrete than the web. A user knows where an app starts and ends and they know what icon they need to touch to get there. Websites are far more ethereal and it isn't as clear when you've left one site and landed on another. And it's much harder remembering how to get there. Case in point: how many people type 'facebook' into google and click the first link instead of entering 'www.facebook.com' into the address bar.

peterwwillis 15y ago

'APPS' AND 'THE WEB' ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FUCKING THINGS!!! Do you realize you're comparing a crippled, poorly-designed gadget with a distributed, massively networked system for browsing documents and information? 'Apps' do not work like 'the web' because they're not supposed to work that way. They're supposed to be static, stable, simple, reliable, offline, well-tested, usable. 'The web' is literally thrown together like so many ingredients in hobo chili. 'An app' is a Bonsai tree. Unfortunately, most people spend all their time tweaking the chili and spend absolutely no time pruning their bonsai. God, I hate making these comparisons. I'm sorry for being angry, but it's getting sickening just reading the titles for weird articles like these that make no sense.

webisbest 15y ago
so many apps do what the web can already do
- TylerE 15y ago
  That's true, but on the other hand, there are many apps that are pleasure to use where a web site is a pain in the ass. The android gmail app comes to mind.

dlsspy 15y ago

I wish this were true. Those 1990s CD-ROMs were useful when I wasn't connected to a network. My iPad has 32GB of space (about 50 CD-ROMs), two cores each faster than any computer in the 1990s plenty of RAM, etc... It wants to be used like a thin client web browser thing. What a horrible waste.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

I just tried viewing this fellow's website through an iPad and an iPhone, and am pleased to report that he had the native good sense to make sure his site didn't look like garbage on a mobile device before singing the praises of the mobile web. However. This good sense is far from universal, yet. When I browse the web on my mobile device, I stumble across a lot of pages that look as if they've never been viewed on a mobile browser - or, worse, that seem to think I'm using a mobile browser from 2003. Many other sites still use Flash - it will probably be another five years before the last one of those gets the memo that Apple mailed four years ago. And even the sites that have a mobile design often use stock frameworks like OnSwipe, which I find to be an effective commercial for native apps or, for that matter, unstyled plain text. In short, it's too early in the web's counterattack to deem it effective. For at least another year, that app icon is more valuable than a hyperlink, because it provides evidence that at least one programmer has spent at least five minutes looking at the app on a mobile device before signing off on it.

shanselman 15y ago
Thanks, I'm a responsive design fan and worked hard on that. Thanks for noticing. :)

MrMan 15y ago

This "insight" is why WebOS was such a good idea. Entertainingly written though.

scrod 15y ago
Clearly. WebOS has proven the author correct with its stunning success in the marketplace.

brisance 15y ago

One thing that web apps lag behind now is the "micropayments" thing. The eponymous "in-app purchase" is a damn sight easier for the end-user to understand and use ("Do you wish to purchase 99 potions for US$0.99?" Yes/No button). Because the App Store already has your card on file, they can do this with minimal friction. Same goes for Amazon.

akg 15y ago

This reminds me of the dichotomy that Apple and Microsoft faced when developing their empires. There are two major camps I think: one that ties in hardware + software (native apps) and one that relies on software with disregard to the underlying hardware (the web). It's really tough to say what the clear winner is. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. AFAIK, Apple has always bet the bank on the first approach and it's done well for them. History would seem to suggest that the first approach provides a richer end user experience where as the latter provide ubiquity. I'm not sure which will win out in the long-run.

cellis 15y ago

Keep in mind there are ton of mobile apps that do things that shouldn't require web access. I'm often in areas with spotty coverage, yet still need to use some of the following: camera apps flashlight calculators document editors / todos games It seems like in these debates people are confusing HTML based browsers with internet connectivity. Internet connectivity is all that matters. The hypertext web browser, on smartphones, is looking rather obsolete from a performance standpoint.

notatoad 15y ago
webapps don't require web access. localstorage and application cache apis are widely supported.

jaequery 15y ago

Yeah, apps were cool in the beginning, like when you first bought your iphone. But after you've installed like 10+, the novelty wears off and all the apps feels like a scam junk yard.

jermar 15y ago

Native apps have their place and so do web apps. One major benefit of native apps on iOS is consistent user experience. This is because a lot of apps use standard UI elements and navigation. I tend to feel more at home in native iOS apps than a mobile version. I still don't understand how discovery is any worse for native apps. On the web most people use search engines to find an app? App stores have search too. Plus, search engines usually find apps on app stores. If anything this makes discovery better for the native app.

Apocryphon 15y ago

Tangent: how does developing for webOS compare to developing for the mobile web?

scrod 15y ago

>As browsers get smarter native apps will introduce new interaction models, hardware accesses and new features. Those will get folded into HTML 9, then HTML 10 and the cycle will continue. So in other words, the latest web technology will always be lagging behind. Yeah, that's pretty obvious. But the sad thing is we're comparing two already horribly flawed systems. No one in their right mind should be arguing in terms of a locked-down, Disney-fied, compartmentalized experience versus a slow, infuriatingly clumsy and intermittently-available simulacrum of the same thing. We need to own our own devices and create, modify, and deploy our own software on our own terms. (And please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that the ability to browse to any given URL can constitute these freedoms in any materially useful way.) To publicly ask for anything less is so lacking in imagination and ambition as to be criminal; it serves only to reinforce the pathetic productivity-destroying dichotomy seemingly being forced upon us.

playhard 15y ago

Why the fuck there is a debate over apps vs webs going on lately?? web,app or desktop is a medium and way to provide your service to users/customers.. You choose the medium depending on solutions u provide.. u do location based service on apps and u cannot do it well in web.. Each platform has its own advantage/disadvantage. it depends on users you target, solution you provide. i dont know why there is a debate?? is web developers vs native platform developers and their concern about their future,the root cause of this debate??

bonaldi 15y ago

HTML/JS is up to running Doom now? Is that the best example? It puts it 17 years behind native. The article also says the water level is rising -- which is true, but why assume native is standing still? On the contrary, I see native APIs evolving far more quickly because of the huge competition in mobile platforms. iOS has gone from 1.0 to 5.0 while HTML5 has been in gestation. Native is a moving target, and HTML isn't catching up, let alone surpassing.

andrewfelix 15y ago

This is why Google is so keen on the browser market. Once we're able to run beautiful apps through the browser independent of the platforms, standalone apps start to look really un-attractive. IMO who-over dominates the browser market in 5-10 years time, dominates the mobile app market.

surfingdino 15y ago

"Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web" And that's a good thing. App developers have a much wider set of APIs to play with so they can do more while web app developers are stuck with whatever they had around 2005. There's been enormous progress on the back-end of web apps, but the browser side hasn't kept up.

zerostar07 15y ago
I remember tons of CD-roms which were just HTML, images , swf and java files. The same goes today for many of the apps that are sold on appstores, especially magazines and newspaper apps. The main reason seems to be that publishers can charge for the apps. On the web we don't really have an alternative yet, unless someone comes up with a brilliant, frictionless, secure and elegant web API for micropayments.

tcarnell 15y ago

Great insight, I mostly agree. And I am really crossing my fingers that HTML5 will quickly become a recognized app technology across all web platforms.

zerostar07 15y ago

Apps vs websites reminds of the TV vs VCR analogy. Yes you can use the VCR 24/7 but requires lots of maintainance. Sometimes it's just easier to turn the TV on no matter how bad the content.

kombine 15y ago

Well that's precisely the point. The advantage of the Web is its concept, not its implementation. URL is great, instant delivery of content is great. But the technology stack that Web is currently implemented with, i.e. HTML, JS and CSS is full of crap. Advocates for Web confuse the two: it's not HTML and JS that constitute the main advantage of Web, it's linking and sharing. And those technologies need to be replaced as soon as possible. Good that Google is trying to do something about it: Native Client and Dart.

robterrell 15y ago

Some of these complaints are side effects of Apple's implementation and not apps in general. Frequent updates are often used to churn an app for visibility on iTunes for better discoverability. Thanks to this, apps are updated for very minor reasons, and most people don't give a crap about minor updates. apps are still little islands of functionality that don't talk to each other That's not entirely true. Apps are only islands if you make them that way. Many iOS apps talk to each other using URL protocol handlers as an interchange mechanism. I just bought TextExpander Touch, and it works with over 120 other apps. There's some Twitter clients that do something similar. No question that this would be even better with more support for it in the OS, but it works now. I spent much of last year working on an HTML5 app. Maybe HTML5 will equal the app experience someday. But that day is not today.

flyosity 15y ago
Re: updating your app all the time for discoverability, on the flip side of that coin is that if you update your app frequently you'll also lose glowing 1.0 reviews frequently, to be replaced by the often-less-glowing 1.1 reviews. This is actually a large deterrent for many developers to ever release bugfix updates without new features because people are less prone to leave 5-star reviews on a new version that just fixes some small issues they may not have even noticed.

gte910h 15y ago

Installable applications are much easier for many people to pay for. This isn't limited to things that run on smartphones: Games that are installable are an easier sell than network games. In some ways, they SHOULD be easier to pay for, as they have a chance of sticking around and at least partially working if the company goes belly up.

Enlightenment 15y ago

Ha Ha...argumentments about Walled Garden Apps...how quaint...STFU and get back to work on your desktop/laptop at your day job.

deleted 15y ago

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firefoxman1 15y ago

"Yes, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is a mess and it's hard, but it won't always be." Just wondering, since those are the only languages I know, but aren't programming languages for writing native applications (like C++) harder than, say, JavaScript?

ufuk 15y ago

I don't understand why not much has been said about Android on exactly this topic. The article complains mainly about two issues both of which are solved by the Android platform: 1) The keeping-applications-up-to-date problem has been addressed by the auto-update mechanism introduced by a market update for some time now. The apps are updated silently in the background without any user-interaction whatsoever. That's exactly what Chrome does for the web. If you keep Chrome open for decades then you web app will not upgrade either, at least not in the way you think it will. 2) The every-app-is-an-island problem is symptomatic of iOS since you are only allowed access as Apple sees fit. However, this is a solved problem on the Android platform through the use of Intents and the Back button which works as good as any web linking would.