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I get where he's coming from, but I don't think it gets to the root issue: Why does everything need to be a "rich experience"? Note I didn't say app-like, bec

I get where he's coming from, but I don't think it gets to the root issue: Why does everything need to be a "rich experience"? Note I didn't say app-like, because many apps themselves are straightforward. If we don't make that distinction then we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He cites having to build "2 native apps" instead of one website, but that's only true if you ignore everyone who is not on recent versions of Android or iOS (certainly you're not going to support iOS < 5, right?). The web is no-install, ubiquitous and accessible in a way no platform has ever been and which is impossible for any proprietary platform ever to be, and is backwards-compatible. Given these strengths, the effort to bring app-like functionality to the web is well-founded, because difficult though it may be, the converse of bringing the web's benefits to native apps is just plain impossible. If when marketing wants to create these experiences we tell them to go native we're just shoveling the problem off to the poor native developers. The first step should be determining the value of said "experience", is it there to serve the user or is it there win awards?

Too 11y ago
The no-install, and especially the sandboxed environment, is an argument that hasn't been discussed much here yet but which i think is a big factor to take into account. Sure, device and browser compatibility is nice but really, being able to open a news site without having to share my contact list, my location and my photo album is what makes the web a no-brainer. If native installs could cater more for this scenario it could win some more ground, especially on windows, there you have no control at all over what goes into your machine. Android Play store and and Apples App store would also need to improve on this. They pretends to have support for it but the permission categories are all to vague, they are either all or nothing, and they have been abused to the point where nothing can be trusted any more.
- zokier 11y ago
  Java offered no-install sandboxed apps well before the webapp craze. But of course being based on Java made that attempt quite stillborn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start
  - sceutre 11y ago
    Well it still exists and is actually great for distributing Java desktop apps inside a corporate intranet. But it never caught on because it was a poor implementation of a dubious idea. It started up many hundreds of time slower that Flash, required you to context shift out of the browser, was pretty ugly, and obfuscated the fact it was getting unrestricted access to your machine behind confusing security dialogs. I think the underlying programming language was the least of its concerns.

Too 11y ago

The no-install, and especially the sandboxed environment, is an argument that hasn't been discussed much here yet but which i think is a big factor to take into account. Sure, device and browser compatibility is nice but really, being able to open a news site without having to share my contact list, my location and my photo album is what makes the web a no-brainer. If native installs could cater more for this scenario it could win some more ground, especially on windows, there you have no control at all over what goes into your machine. Android Play store and and Apples App store would also need to improve on this. They pretends to have support for it but the permission categories are all to vague, they are either all or nothing, and they have been abused to the point where nothing can be trusted any more.

zokier 11y ago
Java offered no-install sandboxed apps well before the webapp craze. But of course being based on Java made that attempt quite stillborn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start
- sceutre 11y ago
  Well it still exists and is actually great for distributing Java desktop apps inside a corporate intranet. But it never caught on because it was a poor implementation of a dubious idea. It started up many hundreds of time slower that Flash, required you to context shift out of the browser, was pretty ugly, and obfuscated the fact it was getting unrestricted access to your machine behind confusing security dialogs. I think the underlying programming language was the least of its concerns.