8 ms·

Mobile apps will only be considered once core web service works well on mobile

45 points by dave1010uk 14y ago

nathan_long 14y ago
Excellent policy.
potatolicious 14y ago
I disagree - native apps aren't somehow an extension of websites, they address a different use case altogether. The two examples brought up should never have been apps (and if apps were built, someone is doing something very wrong) because they were never regular-use services. How often do you book a driving exam or look up city regulation? There are use cases where you don't want a website-first approach. Instagram would never fly as a mobile site, nor would Facebook, nor Twitter. When you're building something you're expecting users to hit multiple times a day, the native experience is far better. The reverse is also true: if your product is not something that people will be hitting every day, don't build an app for it and stop wasting time.
- danielh 14y ago
  The question was not whether native apps generally make sense, but whether "the government should also be investing heavily in mobile apps?" And I think that the policy to focus on mobile web first is sound for that use case.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    > "but whether "the government should also be investing heavily in mobile apps?"" And that depends entirely on use case. A generalized "web first before native" seems misguided. If this was, for example, a schedule app for the tube, a weather service, or any such thing that users would can be expected to use daily, then an app IMO makes more sense than a website.
    - clicks 14y ago
      I'm still not sure about that, I still tend to equate native apps to native apps as you traditionally saw them on desktop or laptop computers when considering downloading them. People love hoarding things, and downloading them with the "I'm going to be super efficient with this new tool!" thinking when in fact they barely even touch it after having downloaded it. My brother's iphone now has I think 6 full pages of apps... and I'm pretty sure a lot of times he spends more time searching for the app he's looking for than he would have to spend simply opening up chrome and typing in the URL. I'm also worried that if you give these companies access to your phone by going native they're going to continue getting sneakier and sneakier to try to get your attention in artful ways to ultimately sell you stuff (or sell your information to others). The power lies with the user if he sets the boundaries, and indeed, I believe he would be best served by making the decision of keeping the web on the web. My question is: how can we make the web experience better, so it can meet the native experience headway? How much time will it take to get there until the web experience is truly comparable or better than the native experience?
      - rayiner 14y ago
        With bandwidth capped wireless, the push in the future is going to be less web apps and more native apps for things you need to do on a regular basis.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      It would probably be better just to expose weather and tube schedule information as JSON and allow third party developers to use it. AFAIK this already happens to some extent.
      - potatolicious 14y ago
        Sort of. I'm all for open access and government data behind APIs, but it also leads to some level of unfairness. In NYC for example the MTA has opened subway schedules and (on some lines) live arrival estimates via API, which has led to an explosion of commercial applications. So taxpayers have to either pay a private entity for access to public data, or download scummy "free" apps and have it hoover up their private data. Opening up APIs should not preclude the government from building its own frontends, in whatever format makes sense.
- unhammer 14y ago
  Twitter? Their web-app is awesome. I don't use the other examples you mentioned, so I wouldn't know, but I don't see what a native Twitter app would give me. For me, having Twitter as something other than a web page seems completely backwards, since the main thing I do on Twitter is scroll, and click links. That open in a browser.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    I agree pretty completely but Twitter does an awful job of "notifying" you of things on their web app, or on their website even. There are days that I'll be on Twitter.com throughout the day and not notice mentions, replies etc until I look at my phone on the way home and see the app's notifications.
- WickyNilliams 14y ago
  I exclusively use the facebook mobile web app. The native app used to be much slower and have less features than the web incarnation. The speed issues were apparently remedied by going 100% native (it was hybrid before?) but I've never felt the need to go back. And I guess the web app will always be ahead of native in terms of features given that it's probably in lock-step with the desktop web app? I find your argument a little off though. If native is so important for regular use services why is there no desktop facebook app? Yes, faster connections, but these days I have no problem in 95% of situations getting a good mobile connection.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    > "If native is so important for regular use services why is there no desktop facebook app?" I had a longer post written out, but it felt disjoint and fails to address the core point, which is: Mobile browsers are extremely, absurdly, obscenely bad compared to their desktop counterparts That's pretty much the only reason apps exist. I also used the Facebook webapp exclusively for a while - when the "native" app was so bad that it out-sucked the iPhone's craptastic browser (a major feat, if I may so). Since then they've made a lot of improvements and I've gone native again. To be somewhat simplistic, there isn't a desktop Facebook app, because you'd be hard pressed to beat the quality of experience you get from a desktop browser in the first place, especially when we're talking strictly about the mouse+keyboard world. If mobile browsers ever stopped sucking, the app market would shrink to a tiny fraction of its current size overnight. To be more specific, there are a bunch of problems: - Touch detection is mediocre compared to native. A mouse click is a pretty binary situation and easy to judge - a finger is harder and involves more soft factors. Currently both the state of the art iOS and Android browsers will routinely miss clicks. The Surface browser stands out as particularly bad. To extend this a bit: if you find yourself building even relatively complex native mobile UIs you'll inevitably start handling some low-level touch events yourself. The human finger is an imprecise instrument and once you go beyond the "touch this big button, then touch that big button" UI you will have to do some work to help your users do what they intended. This level of control is currently unavailable to websites, though this may exist in the future (I sure as hell hope it does). - Caching behavior is plain awful. We have tabbed browsing, but we don't actually have tabbed browsing. On my PC I have an abundance of HDD and RAM, I have dozens of tabs open and I can return to any of them instantaneously - this is a huge part of the usefulness of the web. On mobile I can pop over just a couple more tabs and it's already dumping my cache, and returning to a previous tab means a complete reload of everything, across the network. Switching tabs on a mobile browser is frequently an awful experience - one much, much worse than the counterpart of switching apps. Furthermore, mobile users use apps like they use tabs on desktop: many at once, with the expectation of seamless, instant resumes when switching. This mode of usage is completely absent on any phone browser available now, though the marketing material may insist otherwise. - Lack of platform-specific interactions. There is, practically speaking, only one interaction available to mobile apps: the click/tap. A huge part of why smartphones even took off was the extended way in which you can interact with your device - swipes, pinches, rotates, in addition to "clicks". You "can" implement these in webapps, but the performance is almost universally atrocious (see: Google Maps mobile web) and unreliable. Web apps on mobiles stick out like sore thumbs because they almost always mean a substantial narrowing of interactivity in a way that's very user-visible. So yeah, tl;dr: mobile-native exists because mobile-web is a pale, pasty shadow of desktop-web.
- xmodem 14y ago
  If you read the full article, you'll find this: The 5 questions civil servants should ask before contemplating asking for an exemption are: 1. Is our web service already designed to be responsive to different screen sizes? If not, why not? 2. What is the user need that only a native/hybrid app can meet? 3. Are there existing native/hybrid apps which already meet this user need? 4. Is our service available to 3rd parties via an API or open data? If not, why not? 5. Does meeting this need justify the lifetime cost of a native or hybrid app? I think this is a good set of questions for a government to ask before deciding to develop an app.
programminggeek 14y ago
This is a stupid policy. Mobile apps are as much about distribution as anything. People like them, they download them, they understand them. For example, it is 100% easier to find an app on the app store than it is to type in a website url. Also, apps stay on your home screen, web sites don't, unless you bookmark them, which most end users don't even know you can do. So, um... why are we fighting what users want and like to use?
- perpetuated 14y ago
  Because the Government Digital Service are, for the most part, ideologues. Disagree though I may with much of their policy, it's novel that a Government department actually have drive and direction. Love their line of F/OSS, but they've done nothing with it, other than Gov.uk. I can't see them accepting pseudonymous pull requests, though.
  - FourthProtocol 14y ago
    F/OSS is great for gov.uk. It's a very bad idea anywhere else. There's no government department I've encountered that doesn't rely on Active Directory, and there are a lot of projects where F/OSS is being pushed and then abandoned.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I'm not sure that apps are easier to find than sites, I find google web search much easier to use than the google play app search for example. Plus I know that when I see a .gov.uk website that I am definitely dealing with a government system. If I see an app on the store called "UK Tax App" or whatever it's less obvious whether this an official app or something pretending to be. You could probably bridge the "home screen" gap by simply producing an app for each platform that just starts the default browser to some particular site. Probably good enough for most cases. There's also the cost angle. Since the government is supposed to be inclusive they shouldn't really favour one particular mobile ecosystem over another. So they are likely going to have to produce apps for iOS , Android (and test on a lot of versions/devices) as well as Windows phone and potentially Ubuntu phone, Firefox OS etc in the future. And they have to keep all these in reasonable lockstep regards features etc. The most cost effective way to do this is to use the web which is the best cross platform system out there.
mbesto 14y ago
Our position is that native apps are rarely justified. True, but they don't explain why. The reality is it doesn't make sense for a native app to exist that doesn't constantly and consistently engage with your customer. The mobile environment is about speed to consuming content/information (or games). The argument for the native app is that the process (and therefore invested time) of downloading an app should outweigh the speed at which the functions and use of app are gained by having a native app. In other words, if it takes me 5 minutes to download the app, it should take X% less time to get to information that I want compared to the loading times, loggin in, etc of a browser based app.
harryf 14y ago
What a huge missed opportunity. Think of the data a government could gather on its citizens with an enlightened app policy! Or the tax app that sends you rude push messages when you're late with your return. And what better way to report you neighbor for letting their dog poop in the park than an Instagram-style feedback app? Jesting aside, there are reasons to be happy about their no-app policy
- anon1385 14y ago
  I don't understand your point, perhaps I'm missing the joke. >Think of the data a government could gather on its citizens with an enlightened app policy! The web is full of services that track users. UK government sites are already using Google Analytics[1] and thus sending data about users to companies in foreign countries so they can track them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921
tomelders 14y ago
I'd say the people behind the new Gov.uk website are single handedly killing the notion that government can't do things as well as the private sector. They're doing "web" right, whereas most private sector UK firms (including design/development agencies) are doing "web" wrong. Very wrong.
- anon1385 14y ago
  Sure if 'doing "web" right' means sending my personal information to private companies based in a foreign countries when I visit government web pages [1]. This may be the Silicon Valley/libertarian idea of the web done right, but it isn't mine. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    What would be the alternative? They probably need some form of analytics in order to iterate and make the site better. The alternative would be to spend time and money developing their own. Besides most of the information in analytics is simply which pages you viewed and when, it's not like they are sending all of your tax data to google.
omonra 14y ago
I think this is a great policy - for the reason that government should provide same service to ALL citizens regardless of what phone they happen to own. Equality of access is paramount - other technical considerations are secondary. If they were to create an app, it would most likely be an Iphone app (judging from experience of how these things work - whatever the cause). It would come with a disclaimer "We'll have the Android app as soon as possible". Meanwhile the Windows app may never come. So here immediately majority of people with mobile phones are unable to access the service - because they happen to have a 'wrong' phone. Since every smartphone comes with a web browser, every user will be able to access the service.

45 points by dave1010uk 14y ago

Excellent policy.

I disagree - native apps aren't somehow an extension of websites, they address a different use case altogether. The two examples brought up should never have been apps (and if apps were built, someone is doing something very wrong) because they were never regular-use services. How often do you book a driving exam or look up city regulation? There are use cases where you don't want a website-first approach. Instagram would never fly as a mobile site, nor would Facebook, nor Twitter. When you're building something you're expecting users to hit multiple times a day, the native experience is far better. The reverse is also true: if your product is not something that people will be hitting every day, don't build an app for it and stop wasting time.

danielh 14y ago
The question was not whether native apps generally make sense, but whether "the government should also be investing heavily in mobile apps?" And I think that the policy to focus on mobile web first is sound for that use case.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  > "but whether "the government should also be investing heavily in mobile apps?"" And that depends entirely on use case. A generalized "web first before native" seems misguided. If this was, for example, a schedule app for the tube, a weather service, or any such thing that users would can be expected to use daily, then an app IMO makes more sense than a website.
  - clicks 14y ago
    I'm still not sure about that, I still tend to equate native apps to native apps as you traditionally saw them on desktop or laptop computers when considering downloading them. People love hoarding things, and downloading them with the "I'm going to be super efficient with this new tool!" thinking when in fact they barely even touch it after having downloaded it. My brother's iphone now has I think 6 full pages of apps... and I'm pretty sure a lot of times he spends more time searching for the app he's looking for than he would have to spend simply opening up chrome and typing in the URL. I'm also worried that if you give these companies access to your phone by going native they're going to continue getting sneakier and sneakier to try to get your attention in artful ways to ultimately sell you stuff (or sell your information to others). The power lies with the user if he sets the boundaries, and indeed, I believe he would be best served by making the decision of keeping the web on the web. My question is: how can we make the web experience better, so it can meet the native experience headway? How much time will it take to get there until the web experience is truly comparable or better than the native experience?
    - rayiner 14y ago
      With bandwidth capped wireless, the push in the future is going to be less web apps and more native apps for things you need to do on a regular basis.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    It would probably be better just to expose weather and tube schedule information as JSON and allow third party developers to use it. AFAIK this already happens to some extent.
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      Sort of. I'm all for open access and government data behind APIs, but it also leads to some level of unfairness. In NYC for example the MTA has opened subway schedules and (on some lines) live arrival estimates via API, which has led to an explosion of commercial applications. So taxpayers have to either pay a private entity for access to public data, or download scummy "free" apps and have it hoover up their private data. Opening up APIs should not preclude the government from building its own frontends, in whatever format makes sense.
unhammer 14y ago
Twitter? Their web-app is awesome. I don't use the other examples you mentioned, so I wouldn't know, but I don't see what a native Twitter app would give me. For me, having Twitter as something other than a web page seems completely backwards, since the main thing I do on Twitter is scroll, and click links. That open in a browser.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I agree pretty completely but Twitter does an awful job of "notifying" you of things on their web app, or on their website even. There are days that I'll be on Twitter.com throughout the day and not notice mentions, replies etc until I look at my phone on the way home and see the app's notifications.
WickyNilliams 14y ago
I exclusively use the facebook mobile web app. The native app used to be much slower and have less features than the web incarnation. The speed issues were apparently remedied by going 100% native (it was hybrid before?) but I've never felt the need to go back. And I guess the web app will always be ahead of native in terms of features given that it's probably in lock-step with the desktop web app? I find your argument a little off though. If native is so important for regular use services why is there no desktop facebook app? Yes, faster connections, but these days I have no problem in 95% of situations getting a good mobile connection.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  > "If native is so important for regular use services why is there no desktop facebook app?" I had a longer post written out, but it felt disjoint and fails to address the core point, which is: Mobile browsers are extremely, absurdly, obscenely bad compared to their desktop counterparts That's pretty much the only reason apps exist. I also used the Facebook webapp exclusively for a while - when the "native" app was so bad that it out-sucked the iPhone's craptastic browser (a major feat, if I may so). Since then they've made a lot of improvements and I've gone native again. To be somewhat simplistic, there isn't a desktop Facebook app, because you'd be hard pressed to beat the quality of experience you get from a desktop browser in the first place, especially when we're talking strictly about the mouse+keyboard world. If mobile browsers ever stopped sucking, the app market would shrink to a tiny fraction of its current size overnight. To be more specific, there are a bunch of problems: - Touch detection is mediocre compared to native. A mouse click is a pretty binary situation and easy to judge - a finger is harder and involves more soft factors. Currently both the state of the art iOS and Android browsers will routinely miss clicks. The Surface browser stands out as particularly bad. To extend this a bit: if you find yourself building even relatively complex native mobile UIs you'll inevitably start handling some low-level touch events yourself. The human finger is an imprecise instrument and once you go beyond the "touch this big button, then touch that big button" UI you will have to do some work to help your users do what they intended. This level of control is currently unavailable to websites, though this may exist in the future (I sure as hell hope it does). - Caching behavior is plain awful. We have tabbed browsing, but we don't actually have tabbed browsing. On my PC I have an abundance of HDD and RAM, I have dozens of tabs open and I can return to any of them instantaneously - this is a huge part of the usefulness of the web. On mobile I can pop over just a couple more tabs and it's already dumping my cache, and returning to a previous tab means a complete reload of everything, across the network. Switching tabs on a mobile browser is frequently an awful experience - one much, much worse than the counterpart of switching apps. Furthermore, mobile users use apps like they use tabs on desktop: many at once, with the expectation of seamless, instant resumes when switching. This mode of usage is completely absent on any phone browser available now, though the marketing material may insist otherwise. - Lack of platform-specific interactions. There is, practically speaking, only one interaction available to mobile apps: the click/tap. A huge part of why smartphones even took off was the extended way in which you can interact with your device - swipes, pinches, rotates, in addition to "clicks". You "can" implement these in webapps, but the performance is almost universally atrocious (see: Google Maps mobile web) and unreliable. Web apps on mobiles stick out like sore thumbs because they almost always mean a substantial narrowing of interactivity in a way that's very user-visible. So yeah, tl;dr: mobile-native exists because mobile-web is a pale, pasty shadow of desktop-web.
xmodem 14y ago
If you read the full article, you'll find this: The 5 questions civil servants should ask before contemplating asking for an exemption are: 1. Is our web service already designed to be responsive to different screen sizes? If not, why not? 2. What is the user need that only a native/hybrid app can meet? 3. Are there existing native/hybrid apps which already meet this user need? 4. Is our service available to 3rd parties via an API or open data? If not, why not? 5. Does meeting this need justify the lifetime cost of a native or hybrid app? I think this is a good set of questions for a government to ask before deciding to develop an app.

programminggeek 14y ago

This is a stupid policy. Mobile apps are as much about distribution as anything. People like them, they download them, they understand them. For example, it is 100% easier to find an app on the app store than it is to type in a website url. Also, apps stay on your home screen, web sites don't, unless you bookmark them, which most end users don't even know you can do. So, um... why are we fighting what users want and like to use?

perpetuated 14y ago
Because the Government Digital Service are, for the most part, ideologues. Disagree though I may with much of their policy, it's novel that a Government department actually have drive and direction. Love their line of F/OSS, but they've done nothing with it, other than Gov.uk. I can't see them accepting pseudonymous pull requests, though.
- FourthProtocol 14y ago
  F/OSS is great for gov.uk. It's a very bad idea anywhere else. There's no government department I've encountered that doesn't rely on Active Directory, and there are a lot of projects where F/OSS is being pushed and then abandoned.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
jiggy2011 14y ago
I'm not sure that apps are easier to find than sites, I find google web search much easier to use than the google play app search for example. Plus I know that when I see a .gov.uk website that I am definitely dealing with a government system. If I see an app on the store called "UK Tax App" or whatever it's less obvious whether this an official app or something pretending to be. You could probably bridge the "home screen" gap by simply producing an app for each platform that just starts the default browser to some particular site. Probably good enough for most cases. There's also the cost angle. Since the government is supposed to be inclusive they shouldn't really favour one particular mobile ecosystem over another. So they are likely going to have to produce apps for iOS , Android (and test on a lot of versions/devices) as well as Windows phone and potentially Ubuntu phone, Firefox OS etc in the future. And they have to keep all these in reasonable lockstep regards features etc. The most cost effective way to do this is to use the web which is the best cross platform system out there.

mbesto 14y ago

Our position is that native apps are rarely justified. True, but they don't explain why. The reality is it doesn't make sense for a native app to exist that doesn't constantly and consistently engage with your customer. The mobile environment is about speed to consuming content/information (or games). The argument for the native app is that the process (and therefore invested time) of downloading an app should outweigh the speed at which the functions and use of app are gained by having a native app. In other words, if it takes me 5 minutes to download the app, it should take X% less time to get to information that I want compared to the loading times, loggin in, etc of a browser based app.

harryf 14y ago

What a huge missed opportunity. Think of the data a government could gather on its citizens with an enlightened app policy! Or the tax app that sends you rude push messages when you're late with your return. And what better way to report you neighbor for letting their dog poop in the park than an Instagram-style feedback app? Jesting aside, there are reasons to be happy about their no-app policy

anon1385 14y ago
I don't understand your point, perhaps I'm missing the joke. >Think of the data a government could gather on its citizens with an enlightened app policy! The web is full of services that track users. UK government sites are already using Google Analytics[1] and thus sending data about users to companies in foreign countries so they can track them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921

tomelders 14y ago

I'd say the people behind the new Gov.uk website are single handedly killing the notion that government can't do things as well as the private sector. They're doing "web" right, whereas most private sector UK firms (including design/development agencies) are doing "web" wrong. Very wrong.

anon1385 14y ago
Sure if 'doing "web" right' means sending my personal information to private companies based in a foreign countries when I visit government web pages [1]. This may be the Silicon Valley/libertarian idea of the web done right, but it isn't mine. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127921
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  What would be the alternative? They probably need some form of analytics in order to iterate and make the site better. The alternative would be to spend time and money developing their own. Besides most of the information in analytics is simply which pages you viewed and when, it's not like they are sending all of your tax data to google.

omonra 14y ago

I think this is a great policy - for the reason that government should provide same service to ALL citizens regardless of what phone they happen to own. Equality of access is paramount - other technical considerations are secondary. If they were to create an app, it would most likely be an Iphone app (judging from experience of how these things work - whatever the cause). It would come with a disclaimer "We'll have the Android app as soon as possible". Meanwhile the Windows app may never come. So here immediately majority of people with mobile phones are unable to access the service - because they happen to have a 'wrong' phone. Since every smartphone comes with a web browser, every user will be able to access the service.