14 ms·

The Decline of the Mobile Web

266 points by goronbjorn 13y ago

rschmitty 13y ago
Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?
- Dirlewanger 13y ago
  Yes, you are, along with most users here. But it's not stopping companies from wanting to control UX entirely though a mobile application. One of the reasons for this is that in general, mobile webpage performance is complete ass. A thorough but by-no-means complete diagnosis of the problem can be found here: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
  - rafamvc 13y ago
    More control of UX sounds the reason people used Flash before web 2.0.
  - digitalengineer 13y ago
    TL;DR? Anyone recommend a fast frondend set? HTML5 boilerplate or Bootstrap, or...?
    - rimantas 13y ago
      You don't get fast by adding frameworks, you get fast by removing them.
      - digitalengineer 13y ago
        Ha ha correct of course. It's all about the budget though. Quick and affordable equals frameworks.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  Nope, I don't want that either. I also don't want every mobile webpage I visit to use some slow janky JavaScript framework to emulate native app behavior either because in my experience the user experience for those are universally worse than just trying to be a relatively normal web page (perhaps with some media queries for image sizes, etc) and letting the mobile web browser do its thing.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - rainedin 13y ago
    I have limited mobile/smartphone/app experience. It feels that Desktop apps are sorely neglected. Spotify for example feels really ancient, a weird UI for such a popular product. I only assume the mobile versions are more logical and easier to use. I wouldn't want to immitate the desktop versions. So I read your comment as somethnig like the immitation of Apple's cover flow. And yes in that way I agree. Do you think it's the lack of standardisation of menuing/navigation/paging in web pages/sites that isn't helping matters?
- bertil 13y ago
  No, most users are like you and wonder why every bank, florist, fast food chain, ISP has an app (that generally doesn’t do what you’d expect it to do). Even tailored Analytics solutions have apps. However, creating an app is not decided by those users directly: it’s a small and simple project by HN standards, one that most middle-to-large company has felt compelled to attempt to look cool, but it remains too difficult for most users who’d prefer synergies. That's why I have (and alas, need) 15 airline apps, but actually would prefer to have only two that could handle everything much better: Kayak and Apple’s Passbook.
- izend 13y ago
  I prefer the reddit native app than the website reddit.com on my iphone 5, in my opinion navigation is faster and the information is presented more clearly.
  - cannuk 13y ago
    Hmm, I am the opposite. Infact, the reddit mobile site is one of the few mobile web apps I use on a daily basis.
  - rainedin 13y ago
    It would be a good to compare apps to sites. The only app I installed on the Blackberry (my brief foray into smartphones...), was the independent app (newspaper), and I preferred accessing news through that than the website. A very simple interface that let me get to news quickly. I could even download the news up front over WIFI and then read it on the train without a data connection. But then I don't want to have to download an app for every news outet. So you start thinking perhaps there should be a general news app and so on. One general app feels a little more managable.
- wvenable 13y ago
  Apps are usually better in every way than web sites (I'd love a good HN app for my iPhone). If I visit a site frequently, I'd want an app for it. But for infrequently used sites, the hassle isn't worth the benefit.
  - gsands 13y ago
    http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ great HN mobile webapp for phone, made with html5
    - wvenable 13y ago
      I tried it and the experience is pretty weak compared to say Alien Blue for Reddit.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  Indeed. But you could probably break these pages into app categories -- "things I read (flipboard, reader apps), things I look at (flickr, instagram), things I watch (youtube), etc." I personally love apps that are stupid simple and stupid straightforward. You know, like melon ballers: they do precisely one thing, but they do it so incredibly well, you don't understand how you got along without one before. Melon baller apps.
- apercu 13y ago
  No, I use the web whenever I can. I use apps only for very specific functions (music player, audiobook player [that is tied to the library system or i would simply use the audio player], maps). Why download, upgrade, share memory space on my device for apps when I'm pretty sure I can't really trust the creators with my data anyway?
- danabenson 13y ago
  Not at all: http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/ http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  I think I have more apps on my phone than I ever visited sites with it. If I want to navigate on the web, I'll use a desktop. Only if I can't, and in that order, I'll try a laptop, tablet, or phone. The interface gets worse the more portable the device is, and at the phone extreme my usage is quite restricted to small apps, with few, to-the-point functionality or simple games.
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  Nagging me to install the app before I've even seen the site is a sure way to get me to leave and never return. If you simply must toss up one of those uber-annoying "Please install our app! PLEAAAAAAAAASE!" popovers, at least do me the courtesy of letting me look at a couple of pages on the site first. How am I supposed to know that I want your app when I haven't even seen your site? Otherwise my answer is going to be not just "no" but "HELL, NO!"
  - mistermumble 13y ago
    Agree. http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-dont-want-your-fucking-app-dot-tumblr-dot-com/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-dont-want-your-fucking-app...
- rainedin 13y ago
  That and the apparent insecurity, or my own personal lack of understanding of application security that puts me off of even owning something like an Android device. For now I'm more comfortable with web pages. It's difficult enough managing bookmarks. I'd feel hemmed in with apps on a smartphone, if I had to order icons, select and install applications. I don't think I could be bothered. Having said that it has pretty much always been about the software. If I was compelled enough, I'd take the rough with the smooth.
Ologn 13y ago
> It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Many mobile websites are broken. On a mobile phone, both websites and "mobile websites" are broken. If anyone is looking for a money-making idea, here's a website I use all the time - http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm On my desktop it takes me five seconds to use. On my Android HTC One it takes me maybe five minutes to use. If someone made an equivalent Android app, or a functional mobile web site of course I'd use it. Actually - I'm an Android programmer and could do it myself, but am busy with other things at the moment to do it singlehandedly. That is just one web site. Many web sites I use are designed for the desktop, and work horribly on smartphones. No wonder people go running for apps when the functionality pops up in one.
gz5 13y ago
If app is the best hire for the job then so be it. Ditto web when it is best. However the two dominant gatekeeper paradigm is scary.
dodders 13y ago
The Flurry stats [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-Six-Years-into-the-Mobile-Revolution http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-S...] show 32% of user time is spent gaming; 17% on facebook; 9.5% on messaging and 4% on youtube - that's 62% for those of you keeping count. That doesn't look like the end of the mobile web - that just looks like people spending a lot of time gaming and on facebook.
- eli 13y ago
  Indeed, I think it depends a lot on the task. It's a little dated now, but a Pew study found people overwhelming consume news from websites versus apps: http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/01/app-vs-browser-debate/ http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/01/app-vs-browser-debate/ I also trust data from Pew considerably more than from Flurry.
- ecma 13y ago
  I also wish they'd have included a better breakdown than two annual data points. The 6% change is approximately a 10 minute differential which may be significant but may not be at all depending on historical data and the finer trends.
IpxqwidxG 13y ago
In my opinion mobile web is yet to arrive, we have just gotten HTML5 standards finalized only about an year ago. While native has had roughly seven years lead when it comes to providing quality online experience, web apps can beat native easily. And no it's not that web apps or web development or talent for mobile web development is limited or is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is usually the vendors and support of standards in the existing breed of mobile browsers that destroy the web experience. For example, Apple introduced this shitty non-standard swipe gesture feature on iPhone Safari/iOS7 that breaks so many things: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a-way-to-disable-the-swipe-back-and-forward-functionality-in-sa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a... But I think this will change with more competition among tablets and mobiles. IMHO, it is normal for the web to catch up a little later; but when it does native will find it hard to breath.
- mmahemoff 13y ago
  The "HTML5 will catch up" argument is a common fallacy. It assumes native apps are standing still, when in fact they are moving rapidly forward. If anything, the gap continues to grow. The web isn't even in their cross-hairs, there's just so much effort for each native platform to keep surging ahead of the others. If you think Android and iOS are "done", consider where they are headed and you can see they are barely getting started. Consider input such as speed, physical gestures, breathing, brain activity. All manner of form factors. Integration with the "real world" such as Nest and Square. Wearables, cars, home appliances ... Whatever early-stage web APIs exist for these things are vastly, tragically, fragmented across the various HTML5 runtimes. The "other web", that of HTTP and REST and JSON and cloud services, is a freaking wonder of engineering and a giant productivity boost to developers of any client. But the UI side of the web is continuing to trail for now. Competition among tablets and mobiles will help native apps as much as it will help the web.
  - IpxqwidxG 13y ago
    Yes, but the growth aspect will move away from new native apps to new web apps as soon as 'UI side of the web' stops trailing too far. I agree with you that the competition will push either sides forward, but by how much at each end? - that is the question.
fidotron 13y ago
I'm of the view this is a lot of fuss about nothing. Big deal if people prefer apps over the "open" web. The reality is a large number of people use the likes of MSN and Yahoo as web home pages, and unless you were linked to from them they were unlikely to find you. The app launcher situation is an improvement over that. The big problem is that dipping your toes into something via a website (assuming you don't hit an auth wall) is easier than finding then downloading an app. Besides, a lot of these "web" apps are just things like Facebook or G+ which are no more open to scraping or any of the other supposed benefits of an open web than your average iOS or Android mobile clients are. The web has morphed into an unholy mix of the worst qualities of everything else.
- msvan 13y ago
  It's not a scrapeability problem; it's a freedom problem. The article mentions this. Why should the app stores decide what can and cannot be on our phones, and why should they add a 30% tax on everything that is published on mobile? There are a lot of claims that the tech industry is disrupting the big music and books businesses, for the benefit of consumers, but these new players are acting like the middlemen they are replacing. The web reduces the distance between content consumers and producers, cutting out the middleman. It's not a perfect solution. Standards are greatly influenced by commercial interests. But it's better than a locked-down app store oligopoly.
  - gitah 13y ago
    Apple and Google gets to act as middle men because their app store provides value to the end user. Users are free to use the mobile browser on their phones but most of the time native apps are a better experience. And guess who develops the framework and tools to create these value-adding native apps. This is the free market at work.
    - unclebucknasty 13y ago
      >This is the free market at work The free market sometimes leads to a not-so-free market, which is ultimately bad for consumers. This is the entire reason there is anti-trust law.
jsnk 13y ago
I wrote about this problem here (http://serv.github.io/blog/2014/02/20/unfortunate-state-of-mobile-web/ http://serv.github.io/blog/2014/02/20/unfortunate-state-of-m...). Mobile Web sucks because there's an incentive problem. No one really has strong incentive to make mobile web better. Performance issues are largely an effect of this root incentive problem. (edited from "cause" to "effect") - Users have a strong preconceived notion that websites on mobile just suck compared to native apps. - Management allocates less financial and developer resources into mobile web because users prefer native app strongly. - Developers time and effort are stretched thin for web because management focus more on native app teams. The mobile web will continue to lag behind native app for a while.
- milesskorpen 13y ago
  Your assessment seems to suggest this is a perception issue. But even the best mobile websites really are second-tier to solid (not even top tier) native apps. And as smartphones become more and more sophisticated sensor platforms, this will become even more problematic.
  - angryasian 13y ago
    >But even the best mobile websites really are second-tier to solid (not even top tier) native apps. This goes back to his original point , no one really has strong incentive to make mobile web performance better. The two primary gatekeepers (apple, google) are benefiting hugely from their app stores in terms of profit and pushing their agenda.
  - untog 13y ago
    And as smartphones become more and more sophisticated sensor platforms, this will become even more problematic. Not if mobile browsers keep up with these more sophisticated platforms. The problem (as the OP outlined) is that there are decreasing incentives people like Apple to keep improving their mobile browser. They hold the keys, and they want apps.
    - fidotron 13y ago
orky56 13y ago
Discovery, usage, and feedback are all more polished in native apps rather than on mobile web. Mobile web is the wild west in terms of experience and more of a stepping stone until you get frustrated enough to download the app or ditch that service altogether if they don't have a native app. Mobile web has lost many of its benefits due to some very distinct reasons. Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins Ease of discovery? Native wins Ideal user experience? Native wins Mobile web is lagging behind for good reason.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  > Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins HTML5 offline storage should let a mobile-oriented site store a fair bit of data offline, to avoid having to go out and fetch everything anew all the time. It's just that few web developers design that way b/c we've all been spoiled by desktop users' broadband connections. > Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins My Galaxy S3 lets me set bookmarks for sites on the home screen (and anywhere else in the launcher I would wish to). > Ease of discovery? Native wins Slogging through ten million clones in an app store counts as easy discovery? OK. > Ideal user experience? Native wins I'm not sure about that. We heard the same noise during the 2000s about how users were going to prefer "rich client" apps to in-browser apps, because the rich client apps would be able to respect their platform's native look and feel. And then it turned out that "I can access it from anywhere without installing anything" was something they cared about a lot more.
  - carsonreinke 13y ago
    However, most people have their phones on them everywhere, so no need to worry about the "anywhere".
  - orky56 13y ago
    Those are all very fair points. Although devs and tech consumers may be able to accomplish these things, the typical consumer doesn't understand or care about these things. Dixon's article was focusing more on the end user side of things and it's very clear what the demand is.
pistle 13y ago
web/app is not zero sum. There is a wide overlap in functionality, but if the experience via mobile browser is sufficient, users won't care. They may even enjoy not having to curate yet another app. App Pros: Engagement lock-in Richer experiences (performance, native advantages) App Cons: Dev costs Fragmentation costs Dependency on ecosystem(s) App release cycle + cross platform synchro of dev efforts
- vladnyc 13y ago
  It seems the pros are on the user side. If the users don't care than probably more developers will target native and leave mobile web to responsive non app sites.
- jbigelow76 13y ago
  Agreed. I used to be much more strident about pushing open web over native apps. But my opinion has changed, I think of the open web as the APIs behind both the apps and browsers.
stevewilhelm 13y ago
Mobile websites can not send push notifications, use location information, receive iBeacon broadcasts, etc. To provide a state of the art user experience on mobile devices, you need to write an app.
- untog 13y ago
  They can use location information. And gyroscope and accelerometer. The issue is that apps are diverting attention - otherwise mobile browsers might have implemented push notifications for pages by now. Firefox OS does it, and Safari on desktop has notifications. It's close, but no-one is shouting at the manufacturers to push it over the line.
  - bennettfeely 13y ago
    HTML5 is catching up though, the Device orientation API, getUserMedia API, Notification API, etc. bring native app functionality to websites.
    - untog 13y ago
      Right but what incentive does Apple have to implement that spec?
  - bryanlarsen 13y ago
    Push notifications would be great. one example. Flowdock has a great web site that works great on mobile. Their Android app used to be a stinking POS. They then rewrote it to replace the Web View with native to get a different POS. If browsers just supported notifications I could use their web site rather than their app POS.
njohnw 13y ago
It's difficult to reconcile the Flurry stats with the fact that most blogs / publishers are seeing a higher percentage of their traffic come from mobile web (>50% in many cases). One reason could be that their stats don't include mobile web usage within apps (i.e. FB / Twitter). That discounts a lot of my own browsing behavior.
- gopher1 13y ago
  Also, as someone pointed out in the comments of the article, if you count video games in the "time spent in apps", then really it's the gaming consoles and devices that are losing out, not mobile websites, so the discrepancy between web and apps is overstated. As always, look at the data for your own website/service before deciding which path to take.
bertil 13y ago
I fully appreciate the problem with not interoperable application and the large benefits of a fully URIed web; however, making progress in usability requires a flexibility that this scheme doesn’t match, hence the success not just of mobile apps, but Ajax before them -- success that occasionally went back to its origin and reassigned URI throughout (thank you GMail). However, one thing is not true in what he says: > Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic Yes, indeed, but so do websites; portalisation, or more simply the shear number of sites people visit spontaneously is not less than the number of apps they use regularly: three to five versus a dozen. There is a problem at the lower end of that spectrum: while the sites big enough overall to make an be maintained it are actually more common than apps that can do the same, users tend to spend an almost exclusive share their time in said ten-to-fifteen apps, and that challenges discoverability, i.e. the renewal of that class. That’s where the issue is, not in how many apps cover 80% of usage, or how many first letters people type before their browser auto-complete the rest. (On that, I wonder how much the lack of success of Readability has to do with starting with the same letter as Reddit)
ThomPete 13y ago
What I am more interested in is whether the usage of the mobile web is on a decline in absolute numbers or only relative to apps. Anyone got the numbers for that? Also this might be a stupid question but are Safari and Chrome considered apps in this context? I.e. do they count as app usages or web usage?
coffeecodecouch 13y ago
The problem is that the large majority of people, even the youth of today[0], are incredibly un-tech savvy. Unless your website or game is packaged into a simple app you just can't rely on people to visit it or even find it in the first place. [0] http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
- frik 13y ago
  Yes, that's exactly the problem. Kids that are born in the 90ies and younger see computer "gadgets" as given. They don't try to play around with it and discover its functionality. They just play casual games on smartphones and video consoles. They hate computer science classes in school, etc. And as a result they are incredibly un-tech savvy. But it's also the elder generation (60+) that just bought their first computer device (smartphones/tablets).
gdubs 13y ago
Really need more data on this besides a set from flurry -- I'm not convinced that mobile web is declining just from that one graph... (Especially since flurry is aimed at app developers.)
ChuckMcM 13y ago
It seems 'mobile apps' are like Flash was in the 90's, basically a way to take full control over the UX to achieve some particular goal. Given the preponderance of such apps it seems as if home screens are due for a make over that looks more like iPod music libraries than 'desktop.' Basically something which supports dozens if not hundreds of apps on a device.
- platz 13y ago
  Somewhat reminds me of the text-based menu systems of early graphical mobile phones.
- 001sky 13y ago
  Also the data is tied to the id
- diminish 13y ago
  Time spent is a very tricky measure, and OP is making the mistake of taking it too seriously. Games, social/chat, video, especially porn always take more time than anything else, and mobile apps are enjoying their time...
- _random_ 13y ago
  It also reminds of bookmarks in a browser. Kind of a choice between rapid availability and smooth experience.
- stonogo 13y ago
  The entirety of current web design practice is taking full control over the UX. Gone are the days when you sent a GET and got an html document back, the most interactive element of which was a textarea box. The other reason flash was a pain, incidentally, was because it was easy to bog down a client computer with overzealous flash stuff... just like the current tendency to use javascript to do all your rendering and computation clientside -- exactly when more people than ever before are browsing on pocket devices with far less horsepower than traditional computing devices.
  - 13y ago
ljak 13y ago
I usually discover web content through social sites like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. On mobile, such sites have built-in browsers, and I suspect that most "app" traffic is actually of this nature.
julien 13y ago
"This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken." Huh, is that surprising? They break their mobile sites and expect people to still use them more than apps? This is self fulfulling: if you make a sucky website, people will NOT use it. Make a wonderful mobile site and people will not care about your apps.
bigethan 13y ago
We recently rewrote our mobile website to be a much more modern experience ( http://m.trulia.com http://m.trulia.com ). Our ability to easily deploy and test ideas while behaving almost exactly like our iOS / Android apps is quite powerful. It's also added a lot to the value of a web visitor, which is important given the SEO nature of our content. In general, I agree with the sentiment that the mobile web is only now getting it's feet under it. My main concern is that Apple/Google prefer app improvements over improving their browsers.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  I just went to m.trulia.com on firefox on android on HTC One 4GLTE and got sent to the "Download our free app" (in orange button). When I clicked on Continue to mobile Site at the top (green), The site was dirt slow loading photos of a bunch of homes. (granted, my network sucks where I am... but that's the point: bad network)
perlpimp 13y ago
when you will be able to integrate web into mobile OS then we will be talking. Mobile just in a browser window is unexciting and cumbersome. Mobile Internet, I wouldn't call it so much the web but more like integrated experience can bring so much more to the mobile platform. but it would take another Apple with Steve Jobs to implement it(IMO). Basically it is unploughed field and investment need is of investment of epic proportion of research and monetary kind. The whole look and feel of mobile OSes has to change. Mobile Internet is kind of boring when it is contrained to just one of little boxes on the screen, if mobile has access to OS services that would another thing. my 2c
whatts 13y ago
Agree in general. This is worrisome. However, (1) is most probably exaggerated. On mobile, you have an unbelievably broad selection, this will never become an oligopoly. But big players will get bigger. Anyway, Firefox OS may become a promising alternative, althought it comes with some of the same downsides.
KaiserPro 13y ago
Part of the reason why people prefer "apps" to mobile websites is speed. Mobile website, infact normal websites are large, clunky and not designed for fingers, or high latency.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
The mobile web experience is just not good enough yet. But we've seen this pattern multiple times over the past 15+ years, the open web by its very nature needs time to catch up. It doesn't mean that the current state of affairs is final. It took the open web over a decade to start making proprietary "rich media" solutions like Flash obsolete. These things take time. Open web will never be at the lead of innovation, it just provides the foundation for it. Also, most mobile apps still use the web to be networked. The browser is not the web.
protomyth 13y ago
Which is easier to code: a mobile app or a mobile website? The tools are much better for the mobile app and it is much easier to do cool stuff. Plus the testing time is much quicker. Path of least resistance and biggest wow.
- joshfraser 13y ago
  I don't agree that mobile apps are easier to build than mobile websites. Certainly not for anyone with a background in building for the web.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    Which particular development tools do you use that are easier than the mobile equivalents?
    - mavdi 13y ago
      I find HTML/CSS works very well with Android screen size chaos. Also when coding iOS I have to drastically switch context between a web based backend and a frankenstein language(s?) from 80s.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
kayoone 13y ago
Reality is that the mobile web experience currently is worse than native mobile apps. No matter how much you want "open", or how much faster your latest web-mobile framework is, right now people still prefer the app experience. That might change, but i suspect it will take some time.
- diminish 13y ago
  5" or larger iphone may change US iphone users attitude on app vs web decision..On my tablet and 6" phablet I avoid apps as much as I can.. Since I disagree with you I'm curious of your smartphone size..
  - kayoone 13y ago
    I want the mobile web to succeed as much as the next guy here, i am just talking about the general smartphone using population. But even for me, things like twitter/facebook/youtube are just a better experience in app form.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  I sometimes wonder why is anyone surprised that a programmable hypertext medium has a worse UX than an OS-native general-purpose interactive UI stack when you try to implement general-purpose interactive apps? The Web also bears the burden of having grown up in the desktop keyboard and mouse environment. It's going to be at least as hard to touchify the Web as it is to touchify Windows.
JacksonGariety 13y ago
Down for anyone else? [an error occurred while processing this directive]
dylanlacom 13y ago
One thing that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned are app updates. Updating apps is a pain for the user and a bottleneck for devs. This alone seems like a compelling reason to choose mobile web over native.
wahnfrieden 13y ago
Cached URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdixon.org/2014/04/07/the-decline-of-the-mobile-web/&es_sm=91&strip=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdi... (It's erroring out in production.)
- evmar 13y ago
  Here's the text-only cached URL (your link wouldn't load for me because it was blocked on stylesheets or whatever) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdixon.org/2014/04/07/the-decline-of-the-mobile-web/&es_sm=91&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdi...
sriramyadavalli 13y ago
The key issue is that mobile apps tend to be task oriented. A lot of web companies (like FB) are not transitioning into app studios by breaking down a monolithic site into set of mobile apps that deliver a single feature/accomplish a single task. If the open web were to be redefined along those lines, I dont see why users wont use that.
chrisdevereux 13y ago
Even if apps totally won, it wouldn't mean that the mobile web lost. 100% mobile app usage wouldn't imply 0% mobile web usage. Someone might spend way more time in Facebook.app than Safari.app, but within that, they might spend most of their time on pages linked to from their Facebook feed.
harrystone 13y ago
So the Eternal September is going to end after all.
adventured 13y ago
It's deeply ironic that much of Silicon Valley spent the 90's obsessed that Microsoft would become the gate-keeper to the Internet and or Web, and be able to levy a toll accordingly. And here we are, with Silicon Valley as the gate-keeper instead.
marknutter 13y ago
cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fk-RAMhr0VUJ:www.cdixon.org/2014/04/07/the-decline-of-the-mobile-web/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fk-RAMh... And text: People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop: And more of their mobile time using apps, not the web: This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing. Moreover, there are signs that it will only get worse. Ask any web company and they will tell you that they value app users more than web users. This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Resources are going to app development over web development. As the mobile web UX further deteriorates, the momentum toward apps will only increase. The likely end state is the web becomes a niche product used for things like 1) trying a service before you download the app, 2) consuming long tail content (e.g. link to a niche blog from Twitter or Facebook feed). This will hurt long-term innovation from a number of reasons: 1) Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic that favors the status quo over new innovations. Popular apps get home screen placement, get used more, get ranked higher in app stores, make more money, can pay more for distribution, etc. The end state will probably be like cable TV – a few dominant channels/apps that sit on users’ home screens and everything else relegated to lower tiers or irrelevance. 2) Apps are heavily controlled by the dominant app stores owners, Apple and Google. Google and Apple control what apps are allowed to exist, how apps are built, what apps get promoted, and charge a 30% tax on revenues. Most worrisome: they reject entire classes of apps without stated reasons or allowing for recourse (e.g. Apple has rejected all apps related to Bitcoin). The open architecture of the web led to an incredible era of experimentation. Many startups are controversial when they are first founded. What if AOL or some other central gatekeeper had controlled the web, and developers had to ask permission to create Google, Youtube, eBay, Paypal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Sadly, this is where we’re headed on mobile.
habosa 13y ago
I think Facebook is an instructive example here. They tried for a long time to make their native app (for Android, anyway) just a wrapper over the mobile web client, but they could never get the performance all the way there. They went native and have seen great results. They resisted as long as they could but eventually the products had to diverge. I'd say 80% of developers who choose native do so for performance, and 20% do it because the app store and home screen placement is better for branding and content discovery than just sticking up your website on a server somewhere. I think there's room for some sort of hybrid product but I'm not sure what it would look like. Maybe a mobile browser with super-aggressive caching (like not even a HEAD request for JS and CSS) and the ability to improve performance for the foreground page to the point where it's near-native. I'd use that for the mobile websites that I use less frequently, and continue to download the native apps for the things I use every day.
- marknutter 13y ago
  Facebook comes up a lot in these discussions and it's important to provide some context. Facebook's HTML5-first strategy pre-dated the launch of the original iPhone. In the first native mobile app they were simply rendering the mobile facebook site in a UIWebView. There are so many better ways to do HTML5 and HTML5/native hybrid apps these days. Check out the Basecamp app, for instance. It's every bit as good as Facebook's mobile app but it makes heavy use of HTML5.
  - elwell 13y ago
    Agreed. Check out this attempt with the Sencha Touch Framework from a couple years ago: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
    - bsaul 13y ago
      This demo from sencha touch has always seemed dubious to me. I remember having coded extremely basic mobile web app with this framework and having had layency issues from almost day one. My guess is that what they are doing with their framework to get to this result is pretty far from a normal use.
marknutter 13y ago
Open your phone and take note of the apps it has installed on it. How many of those apps are basics CRUD wrappers? Phones will only continue to get faster but these types of apps will stop pushing the envelope at some point. There's only so many fancy transparent swiping swooshing crap you can add to an app before you start to detract from the experience. At some point, mobile web apps will be just as performing as most native apps (we may already be there) at which point people will start to balk at the ridiculousness of having to write 3+ versions of the same damn CRUD app
pbreit 13y ago
I don't think it changes the numbers too much but do these numbers consider web usage inside apps like Facebook and gmail? Apps have an enormous advantage when it comes to acces to the device like photos, camera, address book and notifications.
mavdi 13y ago
I'm all for web apps but I have to admit, when I'm using an app frequently I always download the native app. In most cases it's just a better, faster and smoother experience.
jaunkst 13y ago
We are missing important metrics here. Mobile is getting more short intervals of usage. We are connecting more often throughout our day were we otherwise would not access a desktop. We need to consider the baseline of usage historically to project a more accurate vector of platform use. Are we just using the internet more in general? My bet is yes. This data is basically incomplete.
applecore 13y ago
We'll see a third platform emerge in the next few years that combines the best of native apps and the mobile web. It will probably be based on cards as the unit of interaction.
- charliemagee 13y ago
  Yes! Time to relearn HyperCard.
cpprototypes 13y ago
Security could become a big factor in web vs native. For example, I don't trust the facebook native app. I've used both the web and native versions and the native version is smoother and better. But I don't trust facebook. There's a lot of personal information on mobile phones these days and I don't want facebook accessing that data. For me, using the web version is much safer. And random apps on the app store from unknown developers? I trust those even less. I may install one if the list of permissions is very restricted and reasonable. But I don't like spending time looking at the permissions and trying to figure out if it's ok. Another example is banking apps. I remember there was news a while ago that many banking apps were not handling passwords properly. If I use the web, I can see the SSL lock icon, inspect the certificate, and know that it's properly handled. I can't do that for a native app.
- err4nt 13y ago
  Same thing for me - I uninstalled Facebook's app after hearing about how LinkedIN's new app was grabbing people's contact list without their knowledge. Fool me once…
- malka 13y ago
  XPrivacy[0] is the way to go. Require root though. Should be natively included in Android imho [0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.xprivacy.installer&hl=fr https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.x...
just2n 13y ago
Maybe it's because you don't typically see an "app" that is just completely unusable on your device. When the vast majority of simple websites (not even applications) have terrible experiences on mobile web browsers, is it really any surprise that users prefer using an app that at least puts effort into being usable? HN and at least 80% of the linked articles I read on my commute have terrible mobile interfaces. I really don't see the "performance" argument. It's unlikely anything you build natively is going to compete with a browser's raw HTML/CSS performance. That's something they do incredibly well. And really, that's all a static blog needs to be. I don't need your comments. I don't need your ads. I don't need your HTTPS. I don't need your massively broken up application that requires a GET for every asset on the page (and the 20+ JS files you've decided not to package together, none of which is needed). I don't need your parallax effects, your hover/click listeners, your scroll events, your damn lightboxes, or your image rotators. At the end of the day, I don't use the mobile web very much. It's not because mobile web sucks. It's because nearly everything on the mobile web sucks.
- methodover 13y ago
  More than anything else, I wish simple web pages were vogue. Complex web pages are a pain to maintain. They're a huge liability, really. And there's really no need for them to be so complex. The only reason I can see is people who have little understanding of how web pages are constructed are usually the ones in charge of designing them. ... Maybe I should transition over to web design.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tieTYT 13y ago
I think this article is about web sites, but if you're a game developer, it feels like google and apple are actively trying to kill off the web option, or at least don't care about it. It's easy to find complaints about how audio is terrible in HTML5 on mobile devices, but its been that way for years. I still don't think you can play two sounds simultaneously on mobile safari (eg: background music and a sound effect).
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Audio has also been spotty on Linux for years. I know that at least Chrome can play 2 sounds at once (music + sound effects in a game)...
Ingon 13y ago
While performance is often cited as the main reason for having a native app, I think that one of the biggest reasons to prefer native apps is usability. More concretely I can see the following: - A web app/site is often an app within an app. This means that what usually works as an interface to this device is no longer true, or rather different. The gestures are different, how the app is treating them is different and so on. - On the performance side the web apps suffer from UI delivery problem - the site must deliver both the app it self and the data for which you use this app. A native app have to work with the data only, and its not restricted to be always connected with the web. - Another reason is that although the same on the surface mobile is actually shifting our usage patterns. Our usage is far less consistent, more spaced out, under more conditions and with smaller screens. The native apps work well here because their components are thought out to work under these conditions and of course tested for this. - Finally because of the usage patterns we see some native apps more versed to cover specific use cases. This differs from the mobile web which just have everything the normal web has, but tested to work on mobile. Some of this points of course can be tackled by html5 wrapped web apps. But this approach comes with own set of limitations and problems - we are compromising on both openness and performance sides. So while I want the mobile web to work, for now I think that native apps are winning.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Your browser can cache a web app to be used offline. Plenty of Chrome apps are packaged this way. Firefox also has an option to do this, and Firefox OS can work without an internet connection. An HTML5 app is just source code obtained from a website that's run through a VM, and may or may not connect to a back-end (usually does though). The problem isn't the web, it's how many web developers choose to use it. If you want to really know how powerful the web is, check out many of the WebGL demos and game demos out there...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
altcognito 13y ago
Or... people don't make mobile specific websites, they make a website that adapts to mobile and label it responsive. Also, I don't goto the web for anything I would do with an app generally speaking. Camera, calendars. The device makers don't have a huge incentive to improve web browsers either, they have a store in which they want to take a piece of your earnings.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
vivekjain10 13y ago
While I'd love to see web replace native apps, I don't see that happening in the near future. With the kind of innovation happening in the mobile space (iBeacon, Android Wear, Background Fetch etc.) it's probably impossible for the web to keep up. But there is certainly a bubble in the app space which will bust sooner or later. Not sure what will be the next big thing though. Web does not seem like a candidate.
chibicode 13y ago
Seems relevant: "App-pocalypse Now" by Jeff Atwood http://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/
faddotio 13y ago
I think this is the price we pay for hewing to the party line of only permitting non-breaking incremental changes on the Web. Would this still be the case if Web development wasn't a broken matrix of browser and OS versions powered by a language which people are constantly trying to paper over with abstractions? (Seriously, it's like a person you'd only have sex with as long as you'd put a paper bag over their head.)
- eloisant 13y ago
  That's the price to pay for having an open platform indeed. Several players, and none of them control the platform. But that's the whole point of the web. If it was broken into 2 platforms, each fully controlled by a company, we would see quicker innovation. But then we'd have all the drawbacks of apps, so what's the point?
AznHisoka 13y ago
I think OP is living in a bubble. I don't use more than a few apps everyday, and I do almost 90% of my online reading in my desktop. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a computer at work. The only time I have to poke around with my smartphone is after work, and a hour of that is spent in a subway with no online connection. I mean, I guess if you have FU money, don't work for the man, and travel to wherever you want with WiFi, sure, you probably spend more time poking with apps than you do in a desktop.
EGreg 13y ago
Companies care about user engagement, and that is driven by two major things: transactional notifications, and easy access. Apps provide both, while the web is a second class citizen on mobiles. Consider that web apps still cannot send In-App Notifications and can’t perform In-App Purchases. So, even if I do create a kick-ass web app, I would have to rely on — wait for it — SMS to deliver notifications to my users. I would have to rely on people manually typing in numbers in order to invite people, so viral spreading won’t be so great either. In short, even if we wanted to create a mobile web app instead — and we do — the ecosystem will select for the native apps in the long run. And Apple, at least, is keeping things that way on purpose. Consider this dig at Google by the master himself, Steve Jobs — a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd-xXfIEpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd-xXfIEpE He was saying “for some reason” but really the reasons for choosing apps over web are enabled largely by these platforms themselves. Because they are more locked-down, they won’t allow too much integration, and it’s harder to get web apps to catch on. That said, three years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there’s a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like WordPress for blogs or Git for version control. Shameless plug: Qbix (my company) has been hard at work the last 3 years building an open, web-based platform that takes advantage of PhoneGap (Cordova) and emerging containers like MacGap and now WinJS! Write once, deploy anywhere, as a social app with contacts / roles / permissions / notifications / etc. working across all devices and integrated. So developers can focus on building the app and get best practices for virality and engagement (without annoying people) out of the box. http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platform/ http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor... http://platform.qbix.com http://platform.qbix.com
increment_i 13y ago
The web may or may not be in decline, but why worry about it? Clients that consume services (be it web browsers, or apps or whatever) have always been in a state of flux. The web was hot, now apps are, then something else will be, then something else after that, ad infinitum. It sucks for developers, but then again things have always kinda sucked for developers.
clarky07 13y ago
As an app developer, I like this trend. More time on mobile and more time in apps. Both good things for me. That being said, I think the more time in apps vs mobile web might be a bit misleading. How many apps out there have webviews taking you to the web for various reasons? I can only imagine this time is counted as app time for the graph in the article, but it's really web time for all intents and purposes. And frankly, I think that this is a much better user experience in a lot of ways. the facebook native app is much better than the web version is and even really could be (at least at this point). Much of what happens in that app though is clicking on websites to random articles around the web, and that is done in a webview inside the app. I like the app over the website, and i definitely don't want it to kick me out to safari while I'm in the app. This is a good ux, but I think it skews the data in this article. How many other apps have similar functionality? All that being said, I strongly prefer the experience of native apps over the web, but I'm only interested in using the app if it's something I'm going to use all the time. If I need your site 1 time ever, I'm not wasting time downloading the app. If I use it every day, I absolutely would rather have an app. For everyone saying "Hell no I don't want your app", I suspect the above is actually true for a significant majority of people. 1 time use people don't want app. Repeated use people do want app.
chuckledog 13y ago
The web was originally a means to collaboratively publish helpful documentation stacks and research papers. It was and still is rooted in "document objects", not apps and certainly not monetization. To recoup the costs of authoring these help files, we have to rent out real estate in the margins. Apps predated this model in more or less the same form we currently find them, with monetization inherent in the distribution model. If native apps are dominating web pages in some medium e.g. portables and wearables, maybe that means the audience of that medium isn't inclined to create links or author documents, so isn't well served by the web model there. Specialized apps will tend to serve their specific needs better, especially if they can be monetized easily. There will always be a place for the web, and for the dedicated app. "Web apps" were and are a bit of a hack, although often a very useful one. Creativity can be channeled into all of these media, and the barriers to entry are lowering for all of them. It's a great time to be online. As long as IP remains ubiquitous, I imagine there will always be a market outside of the AOLs, Apple Stores, Google Stores etc.
colemorrison 13y ago
So I keep seeing this point: "Web applications on the desktop are way ahead of where they used to be. In a few years, it'll be the same for mobile web apps... they'll catch up to the native performance." But this always seems to overlook another question... "Where will native desktop and mobile apps be in a few years?" I have no doubt that mobile web apps will catch up to the performance of CURRENT native apps. However, I absolutely doubt they'll be up to par with the native standard of their time. Web apps progress, but so do native. Worse of all (best of all?) it puts users into the habit and comfort of native and makes the standard for web increase.
mleach 13y ago
I spend an hour a day on Twitter during my Caltrain commute. I click on links that open up a UIWebView and read articles on the web. Does that count as one hour in an "app"? In reality, it's more like 20% in the app and 80% following shared web links.
LeicaLatte 13y ago
The web is a chaotic mess and deserves the ignorance. We can't agree on standards and propagate such shortcomings and much more to the user. We have distracted ourselves with crap like browser wars, popup ads, "enable javascript for this page to work" for too long a time. I don't see why we have to put our users through the web, just because its easy for us to develop or deliver for it. Consumers have taken to apps like never before. Asking them to regress is stupidity. Take the simplest case of loss of internet connection. Browsers and browser apps continue to be terrible when your million dollar "UX" is replaced with an irresponsible "Page cannot be displayed" and no concept of offline experience. Fuck browsers and mobile web. Please let's not go back.
TomAnthony 13y ago
There is a point here that many websites don't need an app, but have them as part of a fad. However, on the flip side as wearable tech becomes more and more prevalent (think Google Glass, but also things like Jawbone), it make a lot of sense that more and more of our internet usage goes via these interfaces which are inherently non-web.
- cshipley 13y ago
  I've coded for google glass, and I don't think our internet usage will go via wearable things -- at least not ones like glass. Information displayed needs to be understandable at a glance and relevant to the very here and now. Usable real estate is extremely limited in glass and interaction is limited to voice, simple gestures against the right frame, and GPS/accelerometer. So doing interaction with any amount of complexity gets frustrating and annoying very quickly.
z3t4 13y ago
The web is for information. It was not made to emulate desktop or mobile applications. That said. Information can mean many things. And there will be hybrids. You can do offline apps in HTML+CSS+JS right now, but it's a PITA: var a = document.createElement("a"); a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("hacker news"); a.setAttribute("href", "https://news.ycombinator.com/"); https://news.ycombinator.com/"); If your app contains information, it's best suited for the www. But if it only contains a canvas, it's more suited as a native app.
chippy 13y ago
The key word here is "web" Web - interconnections, links. You don't get that with apps.
blueskin_ 13y ago
This is both bad and good. Good: It might stop the rot of websites turning their whole site into a mobile version with fat-finger buttons and massive text, if websites become the means of interacting for people with real computers again. Bad: Apps are a far bigger security risk, and prevent casual interaction (i.e. following a link onto something, then going somewhere else) - having an app means you're in a selfcontained site and are kept there until you close the app and open another.
normloman 13y ago
Sure, mobile apps will replace web apps. Way better performance. But who's gonna download an app to read a wikipedia article? The web ain't just apps people. It's supposed to be for documents.

266 points by goronbjorn 13y ago

rschmitty 13y ago

Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?

Dirlewanger 13y ago
Yes, you are, along with most users here. But it's not stopping companies from wanting to control UX entirely though a mobile application. One of the reasons for this is that in general, mobile webpage performance is complete ass. A thorough but by-no-means complete diagnosis of the problem can be found here: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
- rafamvc 13y ago
  More control of UX sounds the reason people used Flash before web 2.0.
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  TL;DR? Anyone recommend a fast frondend set? HTML5 boilerplate or Bootstrap, or...?
  - rimantas 13y ago
    You don't get fast by adding frameworks, you get fast by removing them.
    - digitalengineer 13y ago
      Ha ha correct of course. It's all about the budget though. Quick and affordable equals frameworks.
georgemcbay 13y ago
Nope, I don't want that either. I also don't want every mobile webpage I visit to use some slow janky JavaScript framework to emulate native app behavior either because in my experience the user experience for those are universally worse than just trying to be a relatively normal web page (perhaps with some media queries for image sizes, etc) and letting the mobile web browser do its thing.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rainedin 13y ago
  I have limited mobile/smartphone/app experience. It feels that Desktop apps are sorely neglected. Spotify for example feels really ancient, a weird UI for such a popular product. I only assume the mobile versions are more logical and easier to use. I wouldn't want to immitate the desktop versions. So I read your comment as somethnig like the immitation of Apple's cover flow. And yes in that way I agree. Do you think it's the lack of standardisation of menuing/navigation/paging in web pages/sites that isn't helping matters?
bertil 13y ago
No, most users are like you and wonder why every bank, florist, fast food chain, ISP has an app (that generally doesn’t do what you’d expect it to do). Even tailored Analytics solutions have apps. However, creating an app is not decided by those users directly: it’s a small and simple project by HN standards, one that most middle-to-large company has felt compelled to attempt to look cool, but it remains too difficult for most users who’d prefer synergies. That's why I have (and alas, need) 15 airline apps, but actually would prefer to have only two that could handle everything much better: Kayak and Apple’s Passbook.
izend 13y ago
I prefer the reddit native app than the website reddit.com on my iphone 5, in my opinion navigation is faster and the information is presented more clearly.
- cannuk 13y ago
  Hmm, I am the opposite. Infact, the reddit mobile site is one of the few mobile web apps I use on a daily basis.
- rainedin 13y ago
  It would be a good to compare apps to sites. The only app I installed on the Blackberry (my brief foray into smartphones...), was the independent app (newspaper), and I preferred accessing news through that than the website. A very simple interface that let me get to news quickly. I could even download the news up front over WIFI and then read it on the train without a data connection. But then I don't want to have to download an app for every news outet. So you start thinking perhaps there should be a general news app and so on. One general app feels a little more managable.
wvenable 13y ago
Apps are usually better in every way than web sites (I'd love a good HN app for my iPhone). If I visit a site frequently, I'd want an app for it. But for infrequently used sites, the hassle isn't worth the benefit.
- gsands 13y ago
  http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ great HN mobile webapp for phone, made with html5
  - wvenable 13y ago
    I tried it and the experience is pretty weak compared to say Alien Blue for Reddit.
dclowd9901 13y ago
Indeed. But you could probably break these pages into app categories -- "things I read (flipboard, reader apps), things I look at (flickr, instagram), things I watch (youtube), etc." I personally love apps that are stupid simple and stupid straightforward. You know, like melon ballers: they do precisely one thing, but they do it so incredibly well, you don't understand how you got along without one before. Melon baller apps.
apercu 13y ago
No, I use the web whenever I can. I use apps only for very specific functions (music player, audiobook player [that is tied to the library system or i would simply use the audio player], maps). Why download, upgrade, share memory space on my device for apps when I'm pretty sure I can't really trust the creators with my data anyway?
danabenson 13y ago
Not at all: http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/ http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/
marcosdumay 13y ago
I think I have more apps on my phone than I ever visited sites with it. If I want to navigate on the web, I'll use a desktop. Only if I can't, and in that order, I'll try a laptop, tablet, or phone. The interface gets worse the more portable the device is, and at the phone extreme my usage is quite restricted to small apps, with few, to-the-point functionality or simple games.
Turing_Machine 13y ago
Nagging me to install the app before I've even seen the site is a sure way to get me to leave and never return. If you simply must toss up one of those uber-annoying "Please install our app! PLEAAAAAAAAASE!" popovers, at least do me the courtesy of letting me look at a couple of pages on the site first. How am I supposed to know that I want your app when I haven't even seen your site? Otherwise my answer is going to be not just "no" but "HELL, NO!"
- mistermumble 13y ago
  Agree. http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-dont-want-your-fucking-app-dot-tumblr-dot-com/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-dont-want-your-fucking-app...
rainedin 13y ago
That and the apparent insecurity, or my own personal lack of understanding of application security that puts me off of even owning something like an Android device. For now I'm more comfortable with web pages. It's difficult enough managing bookmarks. I'd feel hemmed in with apps on a smartphone, if I had to order icons, select and install applications. I don't think I could be bothered. Having said that it has pretty much always been about the software. If I was compelled enough, I'd take the rough with the smooth.

Ologn 13y ago

> It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Many mobile websites are broken. On a mobile phone, both websites and "mobile websites" are broken. If anyone is looking for a money-making idea, here's a website I use all the time - http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm On my desktop it takes me five seconds to use. On my Android HTC One it takes me maybe five minutes to use. If someone made an equivalent Android app, or a functional mobile web site of course I'd use it. Actually - I'm an Android programmer and could do it myself, but am busy with other things at the moment to do it singlehandedly. That is just one web site. Many web sites I use are designed for the desktop, and work horribly on smartphones. No wonder people go running for apps when the functionality pops up in one.

gz5 13y ago

If app is the best hire for the job then so be it. Ditto web when it is best. However the two dominant gatekeeper paradigm is scary.

dodders 13y ago

The Flurry stats [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-Six-Years-into-the-Mobile-Revolution http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-S...] show 32% of user time is spent gaming; 17% on facebook; 9.5% on messaging and 4% on youtube - that's 62% for those of you keeping count. That doesn't look like the end of the mobile web - that just looks like people spending a lot of time gaming and on facebook.

eli 13y ago
Indeed, I think it depends a lot on the task. It's a little dated now, but a Pew study found people overwhelming consume news from websites versus apps: http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/01/app-vs-browser-debate/ http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/01/app-vs-browser-debate/ I also trust data from Pew considerably more than from Flurry.
ecma 13y ago
I also wish they'd have included a better breakdown than two annual data points. The 6% change is approximately a 10 minute differential which may be significant but may not be at all depending on historical data and the finer trends.

IpxqwidxG 13y ago

In my opinion mobile web is yet to arrive, we have just gotten HTML5 standards finalized only about an year ago. While native has had roughly seven years lead when it comes to providing quality online experience, web apps can beat native easily. And no it's not that web apps or web development or talent for mobile web development is limited or is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is usually the vendors and support of standards in the existing breed of mobile browsers that destroy the web experience. For example, Apple introduced this shitty non-standard swipe gesture feature on iPhone Safari/iOS7 that breaks so many things: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a-way-to-disable-the-swipe-back-and-forward-functionality-in-sa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a... But I think this will change with more competition among tablets and mobiles. IMHO, it is normal for the web to catch up a little later; but when it does native will find it hard to breath.

mmahemoff 13y ago
The "HTML5 will catch up" argument is a common fallacy. It assumes native apps are standing still, when in fact they are moving rapidly forward. If anything, the gap continues to grow. The web isn't even in their cross-hairs, there's just so much effort for each native platform to keep surging ahead of the others. If you think Android and iOS are "done", consider where they are headed and you can see they are barely getting started. Consider input such as speed, physical gestures, breathing, brain activity. All manner of form factors. Integration with the "real world" such as Nest and Square. Wearables, cars, home appliances ... Whatever early-stage web APIs exist for these things are vastly, tragically, fragmented across the various HTML5 runtimes. The "other web", that of HTTP and REST and JSON and cloud services, is a freaking wonder of engineering and a giant productivity boost to developers of any client. But the UI side of the web is continuing to trail for now. Competition among tablets and mobiles will help native apps as much as it will help the web.
- IpxqwidxG 13y ago
  Yes, but the growth aspect will move away from new native apps to new web apps as soon as 'UI side of the web' stops trailing too far. I agree with you that the competition will push either sides forward, but by how much at each end? - that is the question.

fidotron 13y ago

I'm of the view this is a lot of fuss about nothing. Big deal if people prefer apps over the "open" web. The reality is a large number of people use the likes of MSN and Yahoo as web home pages, and unless you were linked to from them they were unlikely to find you. The app launcher situation is an improvement over that. The big problem is that dipping your toes into something via a website (assuming you don't hit an auth wall) is easier than finding then downloading an app. Besides, a lot of these "web" apps are just things like Facebook or G+ which are no more open to scraping or any of the other supposed benefits of an open web than your average iOS or Android mobile clients are. The web has morphed into an unholy mix of the worst qualities of everything else.

msvan 13y ago
It's not a scrapeability problem; it's a freedom problem. The article mentions this. Why should the app stores decide what can and cannot be on our phones, and why should they add a 30% tax on everything that is published on mobile? There are a lot of claims that the tech industry is disrupting the big music and books businesses, for the benefit of consumers, but these new players are acting like the middlemen they are replacing. The web reduces the distance between content consumers and producers, cutting out the middleman. It's not a perfect solution. Standards are greatly influenced by commercial interests. But it's better than a locked-down app store oligopoly.
- gitah 13y ago
  Apple and Google gets to act as middle men because their app store provides value to the end user. Users are free to use the mobile browser on their phones but most of the time native apps are a better experience. And guess who develops the framework and tools to create these value-adding native apps. This is the free market at work.
  - unclebucknasty 13y ago
    >This is the free market at work The free market sometimes leads to a not-so-free market, which is ultimately bad for consumers. This is the entire reason there is anti-trust law.

jsnk 13y ago

I wrote about this problem here (http://serv.github.io/blog/2014/02/20/unfortunate-state-of-mobile-web/ http://serv.github.io/blog/2014/02/20/unfortunate-state-of-m...). Mobile Web sucks because there's an incentive problem. No one really has strong incentive to make mobile web better. Performance issues are largely an effect of this root incentive problem. (edited from "cause" to "effect") - Users have a strong preconceived notion that websites on mobile just suck compared to native apps. - Management allocates less financial and developer resources into mobile web because users prefer native app strongly. - Developers time and effort are stretched thin for web because management focus more on native app teams. The mobile web will continue to lag behind native app for a while.

milesskorpen 13y ago
Your assessment seems to suggest this is a perception issue. But even the best mobile websites really are second-tier to solid (not even top tier) native apps. And as smartphones become more and more sophisticated sensor platforms, this will become even more problematic.
- angryasian 13y ago
  >But even the best mobile websites really are second-tier to solid (not even top tier) native apps. This goes back to his original point , no one really has strong incentive to make mobile web performance better. The two primary gatekeepers (apple, google) are benefiting hugely from their app stores in terms of profit and pushing their agenda.
- untog 13y ago
  And as smartphones become more and more sophisticated sensor platforms, this will become even more problematic. Not if mobile browsers keep up with these more sophisticated platforms. The problem (as the OP outlined) is that there are decreasing incentives people like Apple to keep improving their mobile browser. They hold the keys, and they want apps.
  - fidotron 13y ago

orky56 13y ago

Discovery, usage, and feedback are all more polished in native apps rather than on mobile web. Mobile web is the wild west in terms of experience and more of a stepping stone until you get frustrated enough to download the app or ditch that service altogether if they don't have a native app. Mobile web has lost many of its benefits due to some very distinct reasons. Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins Ease of discovery? Native wins Ideal user experience? Native wins Mobile web is lagging behind for good reason.

smacktoward 13y ago
> Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins HTML5 offline storage should let a mobile-oriented site store a fair bit of data offline, to avoid having to go out and fetch everything anew all the time. It's just that few web developers design that way b/c we've all been spoiled by desktop users' broadband connections. > Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins My Galaxy S3 lets me set bookmarks for sites on the home screen (and anywhere else in the launcher I would wish to). > Ease of discovery? Native wins Slogging through ten million clones in an app store counts as easy discovery? OK. > Ideal user experience? Native wins I'm not sure about that. We heard the same noise during the 2000s about how users were going to prefer "rich client" apps to in-browser apps, because the rich client apps would be able to respect their platform's native look and feel. And then it turned out that "I can access it from anywhere without installing anything" was something they cared about a lot more.
- carsonreinke 13y ago
  However, most people have their phones on them everywhere, so no need to worry about the "anywhere".
- orky56 13y ago
  Those are all very fair points. Although devs and tech consumers may be able to accomplish these things, the typical consumer doesn't understand or care about these things. Dixon's article was focusing more on the end user side of things and it's very clear what the demand is.

pistle 13y ago

web/app is not zero sum. There is a wide overlap in functionality, but if the experience via mobile browser is sufficient, users won't care. They may even enjoy not having to curate yet another app. App Pros: Engagement lock-in Richer experiences (performance, native advantages) App Cons: Dev costs Fragmentation costs Dependency on ecosystem(s) App release cycle + cross platform synchro of dev efforts

vladnyc 13y ago
It seems the pros are on the user side. If the users don't care than probably more developers will target native and leave mobile web to responsive non app sites.
jbigelow76 13y ago
Agreed. I used to be much more strident about pushing open web over native apps. But my opinion has changed, I think of the open web as the APIs behind both the apps and browsers.

stevewilhelm 13y ago

Mobile websites can not send push notifications, use location information, receive iBeacon broadcasts, etc. To provide a state of the art user experience on mobile devices, you need to write an app.

untog 13y ago
They can use location information. And gyroscope and accelerometer. The issue is that apps are diverting attention - otherwise mobile browsers might have implemented push notifications for pages by now. Firefox OS does it, and Safari on desktop has notifications. It's close, but no-one is shouting at the manufacturers to push it over the line.
- bennettfeely 13y ago
  HTML5 is catching up though, the Device orientation API, getUserMedia API, Notification API, etc. bring native app functionality to websites.
  - untog 13y ago
    Right but what incentive does Apple have to implement that spec?
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  Push notifications would be great. one example. Flowdock has a great web site that works great on mobile. Their Android app used to be a stinking POS. They then rewrote it to replace the Web View with native to get a different POS. If browsers just supported notifications I could use their web site rather than their app POS.

njohnw 13y ago

It's difficult to reconcile the Flurry stats with the fact that most blogs / publishers are seeing a higher percentage of their traffic come from mobile web (>50% in many cases). One reason could be that their stats don't include mobile web usage within apps (i.e. FB / Twitter). That discounts a lot of my own browsing behavior.

gopher1 13y ago
Also, as someone pointed out in the comments of the article, if you count video games in the "time spent in apps", then really it's the gaming consoles and devices that are losing out, not mobile websites, so the discrepancy between web and apps is overstated. As always, look at the data for your own website/service before deciding which path to take.

bertil 13y ago

I fully appreciate the problem with not interoperable application and the large benefits of a fully URIed web; however, making progress in usability requires a flexibility that this scheme doesn’t match, hence the success not just of mobile apps, but Ajax before them -- success that occasionally went back to its origin and reassigned URI throughout (thank you GMail). However, one thing is not true in what he says: > Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic Yes, indeed, but so do websites; portalisation, or more simply the shear number of sites people visit spontaneously is not less than the number of apps they use regularly: three to five versus a dozen. There is a problem at the lower end of that spectrum: while the sites big enough overall to make an be maintained it are actually more common than apps that can do the same, users tend to spend an almost exclusive share their time in said ten-to-fifteen apps, and that challenges discoverability, i.e. the renewal of that class. That’s where the issue is, not in how many apps cover 80% of usage, or how many first letters people type before their browser auto-complete the rest. (On that, I wonder how much the lack of success of Readability has to do with starting with the same letter as Reddit)

ThomPete 13y ago

What I am more interested in is whether the usage of the mobile web is on a decline in absolute numbers or only relative to apps. Anyone got the numbers for that? Also this might be a stupid question but are Safari and Chrome considered apps in this context? I.e. do they count as app usages or web usage?

coffeecodecouch 13y ago

The problem is that the large majority of people, even the youth of today[0], are incredibly un-tech savvy. Unless your website or game is packaged into a simple app you just can't rely on people to visit it or even find it in the first place. [0] http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

frik 13y ago
Yes, that's exactly the problem. Kids that are born in the 90ies and younger see computer "gadgets" as given. They don't try to play around with it and discover its functionality. They just play casual games on smartphones and video consoles. They hate computer science classes in school, etc. And as a result they are incredibly un-tech savvy. But it's also the elder generation (60+) that just bought their first computer device (smartphones/tablets).

gdubs 13y ago

Really need more data on this besides a set from flurry -- I'm not convinced that mobile web is declining just from that one graph... (Especially since flurry is aimed at app developers.)

ChuckMcM 13y ago

It seems 'mobile apps' are like Flash was in the 90's, basically a way to take full control over the UX to achieve some particular goal. Given the preponderance of such apps it seems as if home screens are due for a make over that looks more like iPod music libraries than 'desktop.' Basically something which supports dozens if not hundreds of apps on a device.

platz 13y ago
Somewhat reminds me of the text-based menu systems of early graphical mobile phones.
001sky 13y ago
Also the data is tied to the id
diminish 13y ago
Time spent is a very tricky measure, and OP is making the mistake of taking it too seriously. Games, social/chat, video, especially porn always take more time than anything else, and mobile apps are enjoying their time...
_random_ 13y ago
It also reminds of bookmarks in a browser. Kind of a choice between rapid availability and smooth experience.
stonogo 13y ago
The entirety of current web design practice is taking full control over the UX. Gone are the days when you sent a GET and got an html document back, the most interactive element of which was a textarea box. The other reason flash was a pain, incidentally, was because it was easy to bog down a client computer with overzealous flash stuff... just like the current tendency to use javascript to do all your rendering and computation clientside -- exactly when more people than ever before are browsing on pocket devices with far less horsepower than traditional computing devices.
- 13y ago

ljak 13y ago

I usually discover web content through social sites like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. On mobile, such sites have built-in browsers, and I suspect that most "app" traffic is actually of this nature.

julien 13y ago

"This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken." Huh, is that surprising? They break their mobile sites and expect people to still use them more than apps? This is self fulfulling: if you make a sucky website, people will NOT use it. Make a wonderful mobile site and people will not care about your apps.

bigethan 13y ago

We recently rewrote our mobile website to be a much more modern experience ( http://m.trulia.com http://m.trulia.com ). Our ability to easily deploy and test ideas while behaving almost exactly like our iOS / Android apps is quite powerful. It's also added a lot to the value of a web visitor, which is important given the SEO nature of our content. In general, I agree with the sentiment that the mobile web is only now getting it's feet under it. My main concern is that Apple/Google prefer app improvements over improving their browsers.

chris_mahan 13y ago
I just went to m.trulia.com on firefox on android on HTC One 4GLTE and got sent to the "Download our free app" (in orange button). When I clicked on Continue to mobile Site at the top (green), The site was dirt slow loading photos of a bunch of homes. (granted, my network sucks where I am... but that's the point: bad network)

perlpimp 13y ago

when you will be able to integrate web into mobile OS then we will be talking. Mobile just in a browser window is unexciting and cumbersome. Mobile Internet, I wouldn't call it so much the web but more like integrated experience can bring so much more to the mobile platform. but it would take another Apple with Steve Jobs to implement it(IMO). Basically it is unploughed field and investment need is of investment of epic proportion of research and monetary kind. The whole look and feel of mobile OSes has to change. Mobile Internet is kind of boring when it is contrained to just one of little boxes on the screen, if mobile has access to OS services that would another thing. my 2c

whatts 13y ago

Agree in general. This is worrisome. However, (1) is most probably exaggerated. On mobile, you have an unbelievably broad selection, this will never become an oligopoly. But big players will get bigger. Anyway, Firefox OS may become a promising alternative, althought it comes with some of the same downsides.

KaiserPro 13y ago

Part of the reason why people prefer "apps" to mobile websites is speed. Mobile website, infact normal websites are large, clunky and not designed for fingers, or high latency.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

The mobile web experience is just not good enough yet. But we've seen this pattern multiple times over the past 15+ years, the open web by its very nature needs time to catch up. It doesn't mean that the current state of affairs is final. It took the open web over a decade to start making proprietary "rich media" solutions like Flash obsolete. These things take time. Open web will never be at the lead of innovation, it just provides the foundation for it. Also, most mobile apps still use the web to be networked. The browser is not the web.

protomyth 13y ago

Which is easier to code: a mobile app or a mobile website? The tools are much better for the mobile app and it is much easier to do cool stuff. Plus the testing time is much quicker. Path of least resistance and biggest wow.

joshfraser 13y ago
I don't agree that mobile apps are easier to build than mobile websites. Certainly not for anyone with a background in building for the web.
- protomyth 13y ago
  Which particular development tools do you use that are easier than the mobile equivalents?
  - mavdi 13y ago
    I find HTML/CSS works very well with Android screen size chaos. Also when coding iOS I have to drastically switch context between a web based backend and a frankenstein language(s?) from 80s.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

kayoone 13y ago

Reality is that the mobile web experience currently is worse than native mobile apps. No matter how much you want "open", or how much faster your latest web-mobile framework is, right now people still prefer the app experience. That might change, but i suspect it will take some time.

diminish 13y ago
5" or larger iphone may change US iphone users attitude on app vs web decision..On my tablet and 6" phablet I avoid apps as much as I can.. Since I disagree with you I'm curious of your smartphone size..
- kayoone 13y ago
  I want the mobile web to succeed as much as the next guy here, i am just talking about the general smartphone using population. But even for me, things like twitter/facebook/youtube are just a better experience in app form.
Zigurd 13y ago
I sometimes wonder why is anyone surprised that a programmable hypertext medium has a worse UX than an OS-native general-purpose interactive UI stack when you try to implement general-purpose interactive apps? The Web also bears the burden of having grown up in the desktop keyboard and mouse environment. It's going to be at least as hard to touchify the Web as it is to touchify Windows.

JacksonGariety 13y ago

Down for anyone else? [an error occurred while processing this directive]

dylanlacom 13y ago

One thing that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned are app updates. Updating apps is a pain for the user and a bottleneck for devs. This alone seems like a compelling reason to choose mobile web over native.

wahnfrieden 13y ago

Cached URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdixon.org/2014/04/07/the-decline-of-the-mobile-web/&es_sm=91&strip=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdi... (It's erroring out in production.)

evmar 13y ago
Here's the text-only cached URL (your link wouldn't load for me because it was blocked on stylesheets or whatever) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdixon.org/2014/04/07/the-decline-of-the-mobile-web/&es_sm=91&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdi...

sriramyadavalli 13y ago

The key issue is that mobile apps tend to be task oriented. A lot of web companies (like FB) are not transitioning into app studios by breaking down a monolithic site into set of mobile apps that deliver a single feature/accomplish a single task. If the open web were to be redefined along those lines, I dont see why users wont use that.

chrisdevereux 13y ago

Even if apps totally won, it wouldn't mean that the mobile web lost. 100% mobile app usage wouldn't imply 0% mobile web usage. Someone might spend way more time in Facebook.app than Safari.app, but within that, they might spend most of their time on pages linked to from their Facebook feed.

harrystone 13y ago

So the Eternal September is going to end after all.

adventured 13y ago

It's deeply ironic that much of Silicon Valley spent the 90's obsessed that Microsoft would become the gate-keeper to the Internet and or Web, and be able to levy a toll accordingly. And here we are, with Silicon Valley as the gate-keeper instead.

marknutter 13y ago

cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fk-RAMhr0VUJ:www.cdixon.org/2014/04/07/the-decline-of-the-mobile-web/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fk-RAMh... And text: People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop: And more of their mobile time using apps, not the web: This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing. Moreover, there are signs that it will only get worse. Ask any web company and they will tell you that they value app users more than web users. This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Resources are going to app development over web development. As the mobile web UX further deteriorates, the momentum toward apps will only increase. The likely end state is the web becomes a niche product used for things like 1) trying a service before you download the app, 2) consuming long tail content (e.g. link to a niche blog from Twitter or Facebook feed). This will hurt long-term innovation from a number of reasons: 1) Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic that favors the status quo over new innovations. Popular apps get home screen placement, get used more, get ranked higher in app stores, make more money, can pay more for distribution, etc. The end state will probably be like cable TV – a few dominant channels/apps that sit on users’ home screens and everything else relegated to lower tiers or irrelevance. 2) Apps are heavily controlled by the dominant app stores owners, Apple and Google. Google and Apple control what apps are allowed to exist, how apps are built, what apps get promoted, and charge a 30% tax on revenues. Most worrisome: they reject entire classes of apps without stated reasons or allowing for recourse (e.g. Apple has rejected all apps related to Bitcoin). The open architecture of the web led to an incredible era of experimentation. Many startups are controversial when they are first founded. What if AOL or some other central gatekeeper had controlled the web, and developers had to ask permission to create Google, Youtube, eBay, Paypal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Sadly, this is where we’re headed on mobile.

habosa 13y ago

I think Facebook is an instructive example here. They tried for a long time to make their native app (for Android, anyway) just a wrapper over the mobile web client, but they could never get the performance all the way there. They went native and have seen great results. They resisted as long as they could but eventually the products had to diverge. I'd say 80% of developers who choose native do so for performance, and 20% do it because the app store and home screen placement is better for branding and content discovery than just sticking up your website on a server somewhere. I think there's room for some sort of hybrid product but I'm not sure what it would look like. Maybe a mobile browser with super-aggressive caching (like not even a HEAD request for JS and CSS) and the ability to improve performance for the foreground page to the point where it's near-native. I'd use that for the mobile websites that I use less frequently, and continue to download the native apps for the things I use every day.

marknutter 13y ago
Facebook comes up a lot in these discussions and it's important to provide some context. Facebook's HTML5-first strategy pre-dated the launch of the original iPhone. In the first native mobile app they were simply rendering the mobile facebook site in a UIWebView. There are so many better ways to do HTML5 and HTML5/native hybrid apps these days. Check out the Basecamp app, for instance. It's every bit as good as Facebook's mobile app but it makes heavy use of HTML5.
- elwell 13y ago
  Agreed. Check out this attempt with the Sencha Touch Framework from a couple years ago: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
  - bsaul 13y ago
    This demo from sencha touch has always seemed dubious to me. I remember having coded extremely basic mobile web app with this framework and having had layency issues from almost day one. My guess is that what they are doing with their framework to get to this result is pretty far from a normal use.

marknutter 13y ago

Open your phone and take note of the apps it has installed on it. How many of those apps are basics CRUD wrappers? Phones will only continue to get faster but these types of apps will stop pushing the envelope at some point. There's only so many fancy transparent swiping swooshing crap you can add to an app before you start to detract from the experience. At some point, mobile web apps will be just as performing as most native apps (we may already be there) at which point people will start to balk at the ridiculousness of having to write 3+ versions of the same damn CRUD app

pbreit 13y ago

I don't think it changes the numbers too much but do these numbers consider web usage inside apps like Facebook and gmail? Apps have an enormous advantage when it comes to acces to the device like photos, camera, address book and notifications.

mavdi 13y ago

I'm all for web apps but I have to admit, when I'm using an app frequently I always download the native app. In most cases it's just a better, faster and smoother experience.

jaunkst 13y ago

We are missing important metrics here. Mobile is getting more short intervals of usage. We are connecting more often throughout our day were we otherwise would not access a desktop. We need to consider the baseline of usage historically to project a more accurate vector of platform use. Are we just using the internet more in general? My bet is yes. This data is basically incomplete.

applecore 13y ago

We'll see a third platform emerge in the next few years that combines the best of native apps and the mobile web. It will probably be based on cards as the unit of interaction.

charliemagee 13y ago
Yes! Time to relearn HyperCard.

cpprototypes 13y ago

Security could become a big factor in web vs native. For example, I don't trust the facebook native app. I've used both the web and native versions and the native version is smoother and better. But I don't trust facebook. There's a lot of personal information on mobile phones these days and I don't want facebook accessing that data. For me, using the web version is much safer. And random apps on the app store from unknown developers? I trust those even less. I may install one if the list of permissions is very restricted and reasonable. But I don't like spending time looking at the permissions and trying to figure out if it's ok. Another example is banking apps. I remember there was news a while ago that many banking apps were not handling passwords properly. If I use the web, I can see the SSL lock icon, inspect the certificate, and know that it's properly handled. I can't do that for a native app.

err4nt 13y ago
Same thing for me - I uninstalled Facebook's app after hearing about how LinkedIN's new app was grabbing people's contact list without their knowledge. Fool me once…
malka 13y ago
XPrivacy[0] is the way to go. Require root though. Should be natively included in Android imho [0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.xprivacy.installer&hl=fr https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.x...

just2n 13y ago

Maybe it's because you don't typically see an "app" that is just completely unusable on your device. When the vast majority of simple websites (not even applications) have terrible experiences on mobile web browsers, is it really any surprise that users prefer using an app that at least puts effort into being usable? HN and at least 80% of the linked articles I read on my commute have terrible mobile interfaces. I really don't see the "performance" argument. It's unlikely anything you build natively is going to compete with a browser's raw HTML/CSS performance. That's something they do incredibly well. And really, that's all a static blog needs to be. I don't need your comments. I don't need your ads. I don't need your HTTPS. I don't need your massively broken up application that requires a GET for every asset on the page (and the 20+ JS files you've decided not to package together, none of which is needed). I don't need your parallax effects, your hover/click listeners, your scroll events, your damn lightboxes, or your image rotators. At the end of the day, I don't use the mobile web very much. It's not because mobile web sucks. It's because nearly everything on the mobile web sucks.

methodover 13y ago
More than anything else, I wish simple web pages were vogue. Complex web pages are a pain to maintain. They're a huge liability, really. And there's really no need for them to be so complex. The only reason I can see is people who have little understanding of how web pages are constructed are usually the ones in charge of designing them. ... Maybe I should transition over to web design.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tieTYT 13y ago

I think this article is about web sites, but if you're a game developer, it feels like google and apple are actively trying to kill off the web option, or at least don't care about it. It's easy to find complaints about how audio is terrible in HTML5 on mobile devices, but its been that way for years. I still don't think you can play two sounds simultaneously on mobile safari (eg: background music and a sound effect).

Mikeb85 13y ago
Audio has also been spotty on Linux for years. I know that at least Chrome can play 2 sounds at once (music + sound effects in a game)...

Ingon 13y ago

While performance is often cited as the main reason for having a native app, I think that one of the biggest reasons to prefer native apps is usability. More concretely I can see the following: - A web app/site is often an app within an app. This means that what usually works as an interface to this device is no longer true, or rather different. The gestures are different, how the app is treating them is different and so on. - On the performance side the web apps suffer from UI delivery problem - the site must deliver both the app it self and the data for which you use this app. A native app have to work with the data only, and its not restricted to be always connected with the web. - Another reason is that although the same on the surface mobile is actually shifting our usage patterns. Our usage is far less consistent, more spaced out, under more conditions and with smaller screens. The native apps work well here because their components are thought out to work under these conditions and of course tested for this. - Finally because of the usage patterns we see some native apps more versed to cover specific use cases. This differs from the mobile web which just have everything the normal web has, but tested to work on mobile. Some of this points of course can be tackled by html5 wrapped web apps. But this approach comes with own set of limitations and problems - we are compromising on both openness and performance sides. So while I want the mobile web to work, for now I think that native apps are winning.

Mikeb85 13y ago
Your browser can cache a web app to be used offline. Plenty of Chrome apps are packaged this way. Firefox also has an option to do this, and Firefox OS can work without an internet connection. An HTML5 app is just source code obtained from a website that's run through a VM, and may or may not connect to a back-end (usually does though). The problem isn't the web, it's how many web developers choose to use it. If you want to really know how powerful the web is, check out many of the WebGL demos and game demos out there...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

altcognito 13y ago

Or... people don't make mobile specific websites, they make a website that adapts to mobile and label it responsive. Also, I don't goto the web for anything I would do with an app generally speaking. Camera, calendars. The device makers don't have a huge incentive to improve web browsers either, they have a store in which they want to take a piece of your earnings.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

vivekjain10 13y ago

While I'd love to see web replace native apps, I don't see that happening in the near future. With the kind of innovation happening in the mobile space (iBeacon, Android Wear, Background Fetch etc.) it's probably impossible for the web to keep up. But there is certainly a bubble in the app space which will bust sooner or later. Not sure what will be the next big thing though. Web does not seem like a candidate.

chibicode 13y ago

Seems relevant: "App-pocalypse Now" by Jeff Atwood http://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/

faddotio 13y ago

I think this is the price we pay for hewing to the party line of only permitting non-breaking incremental changes on the Web. Would this still be the case if Web development wasn't a broken matrix of browser and OS versions powered by a language which people are constantly trying to paper over with abstractions? (Seriously, it's like a person you'd only have sex with as long as you'd put a paper bag over their head.)

eloisant 13y ago
That's the price to pay for having an open platform indeed. Several players, and none of them control the platform. But that's the whole point of the web. If it was broken into 2 platforms, each fully controlled by a company, we would see quicker innovation. But then we'd have all the drawbacks of apps, so what's the point?

AznHisoka 13y ago

I think OP is living in a bubble. I don't use more than a few apps everyday, and I do almost 90% of my online reading in my desktop. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a computer at work. The only time I have to poke around with my smartphone is after work, and a hour of that is spent in a subway with no online connection. I mean, I guess if you have FU money, don't work for the man, and travel to wherever you want with WiFi, sure, you probably spend more time poking with apps than you do in a desktop.

EGreg 13y ago

Companies care about user engagement, and that is driven by two major things: transactional notifications, and easy access. Apps provide both, while the web is a second class citizen on mobiles. Consider that web apps still cannot send In-App Notifications and can’t perform In-App Purchases. So, even if I do create a kick-ass web app, I would have to rely on — wait for it — SMS to deliver notifications to my users. I would have to rely on people manually typing in numbers in order to invite people, so viral spreading won’t be so great either. In short, even if we wanted to create a mobile web app instead — and we do — the ecosystem will select for the native apps in the long run. And Apple, at least, is keeping things that way on purpose. Consider this dig at Google by the master himself, Steve Jobs — a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd-xXfIEpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd-xXfIEpE He was saying “for some reason” but really the reasons for choosing apps over web are enabled largely by these platforms themselves. Because they are more locked-down, they won’t allow too much integration, and it’s harder to get web apps to catch on. That said, three years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there’s a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like WordPress for blogs or Git for version control. Shameless plug: Qbix (my company) has been hard at work the last 3 years building an open, web-based platform that takes advantage of PhoneGap (Cordova) and emerging containers like MacGap and now WinJS! Write once, deploy anywhere, as a social app with contacts / roles / permissions / notifications / etc. working across all devices and integrated. So developers can focus on building the app and get best practices for virality and engagement (without annoying people) out of the box. http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platform/ http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor... http://platform.qbix.com http://platform.qbix.com

increment_i 13y ago

The web may or may not be in decline, but why worry about it? Clients that consume services (be it web browsers, or apps or whatever) have always been in a state of flux. The web was hot, now apps are, then something else will be, then something else after that, ad infinitum. It sucks for developers, but then again things have always kinda sucked for developers.

clarky07 13y ago

As an app developer, I like this trend. More time on mobile and more time in apps. Both good things for me. That being said, I think the more time in apps vs mobile web might be a bit misleading. How many apps out there have webviews taking you to the web for various reasons? I can only imagine this time is counted as app time for the graph in the article, but it's really web time for all intents and purposes. And frankly, I think that this is a much better user experience in a lot of ways. the facebook native app is much better than the web version is and even really could be (at least at this point). Much of what happens in that app though is clicking on websites to random articles around the web, and that is done in a webview inside the app. I like the app over the website, and i definitely don't want it to kick me out to safari while I'm in the app. This is a good ux, but I think it skews the data in this article. How many other apps have similar functionality? All that being said, I strongly prefer the experience of native apps over the web, but I'm only interested in using the app if it's something I'm going to use all the time. If I need your site 1 time ever, I'm not wasting time downloading the app. If I use it every day, I absolutely would rather have an app. For everyone saying "Hell no I don't want your app", I suspect the above is actually true for a significant majority of people. 1 time use people don't want app. Repeated use people do want app.

chuckledog 13y ago

The web was originally a means to collaboratively publish helpful documentation stacks and research papers. It was and still is rooted in "document objects", not apps and certainly not monetization. To recoup the costs of authoring these help files, we have to rent out real estate in the margins. Apps predated this model in more or less the same form we currently find them, with monetization inherent in the distribution model. If native apps are dominating web pages in some medium e.g. portables and wearables, maybe that means the audience of that medium isn't inclined to create links or author documents, so isn't well served by the web model there. Specialized apps will tend to serve their specific needs better, especially if they can be monetized easily. There will always be a place for the web, and for the dedicated app. "Web apps" were and are a bit of a hack, although often a very useful one. Creativity can be channeled into all of these media, and the barriers to entry are lowering for all of them. It's a great time to be online. As long as IP remains ubiquitous, I imagine there will always be a market outside of the AOLs, Apple Stores, Google Stores etc.

colemorrison 13y ago

So I keep seeing this point: "Web applications on the desktop are way ahead of where they used to be. In a few years, it'll be the same for mobile web apps... they'll catch up to the native performance." But this always seems to overlook another question... "Where will native desktop and mobile apps be in a few years?" I have no doubt that mobile web apps will catch up to the performance of CURRENT native apps. However, I absolutely doubt they'll be up to par with the native standard of their time. Web apps progress, but so do native. Worse of all (best of all?) it puts users into the habit and comfort of native and makes the standard for web increase.

mleach 13y ago

I spend an hour a day on Twitter during my Caltrain commute. I click on links that open up a UIWebView and read articles on the web. Does that count as one hour in an "app"? In reality, it's more like 20% in the app and 80% following shared web links.

LeicaLatte 13y ago

The web is a chaotic mess and deserves the ignorance. We can't agree on standards and propagate such shortcomings and much more to the user. We have distracted ourselves with crap like browser wars, popup ads, "enable javascript for this page to work" for too long a time. I don't see why we have to put our users through the web, just because its easy for us to develop or deliver for it. Consumers have taken to apps like never before. Asking them to regress is stupidity. Take the simplest case of loss of internet connection. Browsers and browser apps continue to be terrible when your million dollar "UX" is replaced with an irresponsible "Page cannot be displayed" and no concept of offline experience. Fuck browsers and mobile web. Please let's not go back.

TomAnthony 13y ago

There is a point here that many websites don't need an app, but have them as part of a fad. However, on the flip side as wearable tech becomes more and more prevalent (think Google Glass, but also things like Jawbone), it make a lot of sense that more and more of our internet usage goes via these interfaces which are inherently non-web.

cshipley 13y ago
I've coded for google glass, and I don't think our internet usage will go via wearable things -- at least not ones like glass. Information displayed needs to be understandable at a glance and relevant to the very here and now. Usable real estate is extremely limited in glass and interaction is limited to voice, simple gestures against the right frame, and GPS/accelerometer. So doing interaction with any amount of complexity gets frustrating and annoying very quickly.

z3t4 13y ago

The web is for information. It was not made to emulate desktop or mobile applications. That said. Information can mean many things. And there will be hybrids. You can do offline apps in HTML+CSS+JS right now, but it's a PITA: var a = document.createElement("a"); a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("hacker news"); a.setAttribute("href", "https://news.ycombinator.com/"); https://news.ycombinator.com/"); If your app contains information, it's best suited for the www. But if it only contains a canvas, it's more suited as a native app.

chippy 13y ago

The key word here is "web" Web - interconnections, links. You don't get that with apps.

blueskin_ 13y ago

This is both bad and good. Good: It might stop the rot of websites turning their whole site into a mobile version with fat-finger buttons and massive text, if websites become the means of interacting for people with real computers again. Bad: Apps are a far bigger security risk, and prevent casual interaction (i.e. following a link onto something, then going somewhere else) - having an app means you're in a selfcontained site and are kept there until you close the app and open another.

normloman 13y ago

Sure, mobile apps will replace web apps. Way better performance. But who's gonna download an app to read a wikipedia article? The web ain't just apps people. It's supposed to be for documents.