5 ms·

Is there a good reason not to believe that mobile will eventually swing to HTML, for the same reasons that desktop apps yielded to web apps?

by gruseom 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dirkdk 14y ago
in due time, not really. However, as mobile is a very much evolving platform, for the next few years native code will have earlier access to new features before html through additional api's has.
Silhouette 14y ago
In general, I don't think desktop apps have yielded to web apps. Web apps have worked well for projects that are essentially simple front-ends to a database or simple content distribution systems, which admittedly represents a very significant part of the software industry. These tools inherently require some sort of client-server system, so there's no architectural overhead there that you weren't going to have anyway. Also, with web apps you get cross-platform portability very cheaply, and you get zero-effort deployment instead of trying to deal with installation/upgrades of software on say Windows where the plot was lost long ago and no-one has ever restored sanity. However, when you come to doing anything that requires non-trivial interactions or non-trivial processing, web apps are often still decades behind the state of the art for mature desktop applications. No-one does serious graphics work, or mathematical modelling/simulation, or FPS gaming in web apps today. I suspect we never will, because we'll develop (rediscover?) how to build such applications with a specialised thin client and/or how to push out and maintain software with a native thick client more effectively long before we bastardise a text mark-up language and its friends well enough to write serious software as web apps in general.
- gruseom 14y ago
  Of course you're right that some domains (e.g. graphics) are harder than others, but you might be overstating your case. Surely Gmail requires "non-trivial interactions". And why not mathematical modelling/simulation? — you can access a lot more computational power on servers. And how often does one hear of a startup making new desktop software? I like your point that we might figure out how to get desktop deployment right sooner than how to adapt the web to do all these things. But nearly all the innovation has been pointing in the other direction. Also, such a deployment technology would face formidable institutional barriers.
  - timburks 14y ago
    The Gmail native iOS app is really nice, so the flow of innovation isn't consistently pointing towards the web. But part of the answer to getting "desktop deployment right" is sandboxing. In essence, the native app platforms are making operating systems more like web browsers, while projects like Mozilla and Chrome are trying to turn web browsers into operating systems.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Surely Gmail requires "non-trivial interactions". Yes and no. GMail is arguably one of the most successful and mature web apps out there, but at the end of the day you're still just reading mail, clicking a few places to change how information is presented, and typing a bunch of text. None of this requires a lot of real-time assistance as you navigate the information, context-sensitive UI, or task-specific controls beyond regular menu/toolbar/icon kinds of things, for example. And why not mathematical modelling/simulation? — you can access a lot more computational power on servers. Well, I think that point is debatable if you're doing serious modelling more than occasionally. The kind of processing power required makes it cheaper to buy your own high-end systems than to use commodity cloud-provided facilities very quickly, and for the same reason I suspect it would be difficult to offer such services economically in SaaS form. Also, real time graphic visualisations in web apps are still far slower and less sophisticated than what you can achieve natively with modern graphics cards, at least for now. If you're watching a couple of pretty graphics in an analytics tool, that doesn't matter. Even some basic 3D work is starting to get interesting with technologies like WebGL arriving. But for real-time rendering and navigation of global weather patterns or the design of a cruise ship? I don't see that being done remotely any time soon. And how often does one hear of a startup making new desktop software? I'm not sure how often one hears about start-ups doing something is a very useful metric, really. The culture on HN is particularly biased towards that field, but in reality there are millions of programmers out there working on desktop software. New bespoke desktop applications are being written for businesses all the time, and likewise tools, toys, games and more are written by small software shops for individuals all the time. But nearly all the innovation has been pointing in the other direction. Really? I'd say the mobile "app store" model and the Linux "distribution" model have both been very successful at getting native software deployed onto users' systems, too. It's just a shame that we still have horrible deployment practices and dependency management on most desktop platforms, much of it due to the stagnation of desktop OS architectures and the continued use of strategies that were originally designed to cope with limited resources but that have been obsolete for years now.
- chrisringrose 14y ago
  I think we will see FPS gaming and high-performance apps as web apps. And very soon. Try this FPS demo: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread (It's not made by a game development team, but tech nerds at Mozilla, showcasing what new HTML5 tech can do. A real game company could go nuts with this.) Also... Desktop apps have died. Apart from high performance apps, the top 10 successful tech businesses in the last 10 years have been web apps. Imagine Facebook launching as a desktop app. You buy a CD at Target, and install it, connect, and type in the app to communicate. It's a laughable idea.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Try this FPS demo It's an interesting demo, but all it really proves as far as viability goes is that today's web apps could keep up with what id and co were producing on the desktop more than a decade ago. There is a long way from that to running a AAA quality FPS in-browser. Apart from high performance apps, the top 10 successful tech businesses in the last 10 years have been web apps. I'm curious about what measure you're using there. Looking at the data from the Fortune Global 500 for 2012[1]: The most profitable tech companies are mostly in hardware and/or consultancy: Apple, IBM, Samsung... The only primarily software company that keeps up with Apple is Microsoft, coming in at numbers 3 and 4 respectively (both at 20-something billion USD in profits). The top primarily web company is Google, coming in at number 18 with under $10B, still nothing to be sneezed at of course but in no danger of walking away with the prize any time soon. The web company you mentioned, Facebook, isn't in the same division in financial terms. Nor are the likes of Salesforce.com or the assorted darlings of the web app world. Imagine Facebook launching as a desktop app. You buy a CD at Target, and install it, connect, and type in the app to communicate. It's a laughable idea. Why can't I just do what I do with most other desktop software today: buy it on-line, download the installer, and run it? [1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/
    - chrisringrose 14y ago
      The FPS demo is just that: a demo. It's not made by a game company. It's not made by iD. It's a demo made to run on as many desktops as possible, unlike anything by iD, which pushes graphics to the limit. Graphics are your issue with this demo? A game company can make an HTML5 FPS with amazing graphics. There is no reason why they can't. To clarify: the top 10 successful new tech businesses. And not necessarily financially, but that have the most impact. Also, this is a discussion about software. Sure, IBM has made a ton of money compared to Facebook. They have long-term contracts with governments and businesses worldwide; making money for IBM means waking up tomorrow. But they're boring. They're the successful company that makes all the screws; vital to the world, hugely profitable, but boring. I'm talking about new tech software companies you've actually heard of, and use their service every single day. When anyone talks about new startups, they inevitably mean a web-based company. Okay, so Facebook launches as a downloadable EXE? What about Amazon, or Twitter? Everyone has to install it to use it. There has to be a Mac version, and a Linux version. Then the iOS and Android versions. Everything is native apps. This is a terrible ideal world you live in.

Is there a good reason not to believe that mobile will eventually swing to HTML, for the same reasons that desktop apps yielded to web apps?

by gruseom 14y ago

Is there a good reason not to believe that mobile will eventually swing to HTML, for the same reasons that desktop apps yielded to web apps?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dirkdk 14y ago

in due time, not really. However, as mobile is a very much evolving platform, for the next few years native code will have earlier access to new features before html through additional api's has.

Silhouette 14y ago

In general, I don't think desktop apps have yielded to web apps. Web apps have worked well for projects that are essentially simple front-ends to a database or simple content distribution systems, which admittedly represents a very significant part of the software industry. These tools inherently require some sort of client-server system, so there's no architectural overhead there that you weren't going to have anyway. Also, with web apps you get cross-platform portability very cheaply, and you get zero-effort deployment instead of trying to deal with installation/upgrades of software on say Windows where the plot was lost long ago and no-one has ever restored sanity. However, when you come to doing anything that requires non-trivial interactions or non-trivial processing, web apps are often still decades behind the state of the art for mature desktop applications. No-one does serious graphics work, or mathematical modelling/simulation, or FPS gaming in web apps today. I suspect we never will, because we'll develop (rediscover?) how to build such applications with a specialised thin client and/or how to push out and maintain software with a native thick client more effectively long before we bastardise a text mark-up language and its friends well enough to write serious software as web apps in general.

gruseom 14y ago
Of course you're right that some domains (e.g. graphics) are harder than others, but you might be overstating your case. Surely Gmail requires "non-trivial interactions". And why not mathematical modelling/simulation? — you can access a lot more computational power on servers. And how often does one hear of a startup making new desktop software? I like your point that we might figure out how to get desktop deployment right sooner than how to adapt the web to do all these things. But nearly all the innovation has been pointing in the other direction. Also, such a deployment technology would face formidable institutional barriers.
- timburks 14y ago
  The Gmail native iOS app is really nice, so the flow of innovation isn't consistently pointing towards the web. But part of the answer to getting "desktop deployment right" is sandboxing. In essence, the native app platforms are making operating systems more like web browsers, while projects like Mozilla and Chrome are trying to turn web browsers into operating systems.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Surely Gmail requires "non-trivial interactions". Yes and no. GMail is arguably one of the most successful and mature web apps out there, but at the end of the day you're still just reading mail, clicking a few places to change how information is presented, and typing a bunch of text. None of this requires a lot of real-time assistance as you navigate the information, context-sensitive UI, or task-specific controls beyond regular menu/toolbar/icon kinds of things, for example. And why not mathematical modelling/simulation? — you can access a lot more computational power on servers. Well, I think that point is debatable if you're doing serious modelling more than occasionally. The kind of processing power required makes it cheaper to buy your own high-end systems than to use commodity cloud-provided facilities very quickly, and for the same reason I suspect it would be difficult to offer such services economically in SaaS form. Also, real time graphic visualisations in web apps are still far slower and less sophisticated than what you can achieve natively with modern graphics cards, at least for now. If you're watching a couple of pretty graphics in an analytics tool, that doesn't matter. Even some basic 3D work is starting to get interesting with technologies like WebGL arriving. But for real-time rendering and navigation of global weather patterns or the design of a cruise ship? I don't see that being done remotely any time soon. And how often does one hear of a startup making new desktop software? I'm not sure how often one hears about start-ups doing something is a very useful metric, really. The culture on HN is particularly biased towards that field, but in reality there are millions of programmers out there working on desktop software. New bespoke desktop applications are being written for businesses all the time, and likewise tools, toys, games and more are written by small software shops for individuals all the time. But nearly all the innovation has been pointing in the other direction. Really? I'd say the mobile "app store" model and the Linux "distribution" model have both been very successful at getting native software deployed onto users' systems, too. It's just a shame that we still have horrible deployment practices and dependency management on most desktop platforms, much of it due to the stagnation of desktop OS architectures and the continued use of strategies that were originally designed to cope with limited resources but that have been obsolete for years now.
chrisringrose 14y ago
I think we will see FPS gaming and high-performance apps as web apps. And very soon. Try this FPS demo: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread (It's not made by a game development team, but tech nerds at Mozilla, showcasing what new HTML5 tech can do. A real game company could go nuts with this.) Also... Desktop apps have died. Apart from high performance apps, the top 10 successful tech businesses in the last 10 years have been web apps. Imagine Facebook launching as a desktop app. You buy a CD at Target, and install it, connect, and type in the app to communicate. It's a laughable idea.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Try this FPS demo It's an interesting demo, but all it really proves as far as viability goes is that today's web apps could keep up with what id and co were producing on the desktop more than a decade ago. There is a long way from that to running a AAA quality FPS in-browser. Apart from high performance apps, the top 10 successful tech businesses in the last 10 years have been web apps. I'm curious about what measure you're using there. Looking at the data from the Fortune Global 500 for 2012[1]: The most profitable tech companies are mostly in hardware and/or consultancy: Apple, IBM, Samsung... The only primarily software company that keeps up with Apple is Microsoft, coming in at numbers 3 and 4 respectively (both at 20-something billion USD in profits). The top primarily web company is Google, coming in at number 18 with under $10B, still nothing to be sneezed at of course but in no danger of walking away with the prize any time soon. The web company you mentioned, Facebook, isn't in the same division in financial terms. Nor are the likes of Salesforce.com or the assorted darlings of the web app world. Imagine Facebook launching as a desktop app. You buy a CD at Target, and install it, connect, and type in the app to communicate. It's a laughable idea. Why can't I just do what I do with most other desktop software today: buy it on-line, download the installer, and run it? [1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/
  - chrisringrose 14y ago
    The FPS demo is just that: a demo. It's not made by a game company. It's not made by iD. It's a demo made to run on as many desktops as possible, unlike anything by iD, which pushes graphics to the limit. Graphics are your issue with this demo? A game company can make an HTML5 FPS with amazing graphics. There is no reason why they can't. To clarify: the top 10 successful new tech businesses. And not necessarily financially, but that have the most impact. Also, this is a discussion about software. Sure, IBM has made a ton of money compared to Facebook. They have long-term contracts with governments and businesses worldwide; making money for IBM means waking up tomorrow. But they're boring. They're the successful company that makes all the screws; vital to the world, hugely profitable, but boring. I'm talking about new tech software companies you've actually heard of, and use their service every single day. When anyone talks about new startups, they inevitably mean a web-based company. Okay, so Facebook launches as a downloadable EXE? What about Amazon, or Twitter? Everyone has to install it to use it. There has to be a Mac version, and a Linux version. Then the iOS and Android versions. Everything is native apps. This is a terrible ideal world you live in.