The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/09/mobile-web/

by evo_9 • 15 years ago

78 80 15 years ago

lukasb• 15 years ago

“There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

Write once, run anywhere. Why didn't anyone think of this before?

cryptoz• 15 years ago

What are those 7 languages, anyway? The guy has a strong point he can make without exaggerating. If you want to capture > 90% of the mobile market, I think you only need Objective C and Java.

josephcooney• 15 years ago

Or C#, thanks to the MONO guys...

johnrob2• 15 years ago

I can think of 6 frameworks: iOS, Android, WP7, Blackberry, Palm OS, Meego.

anonymoushn• 15 years ago

If you want the rest of the smart phone market, you'll need a C++/QT app, another Java app, and a .Net app. Conveniently, you can #include lua.h in all of these (except maybe BlackBerry) and end up only writing the UI code in the native language.

natesm2• 15 years ago

Ah yes. Write once, mediocre everywhere. Let's strive for that!

dmix2• 15 years ago

Javascript working on multiple platforms (browsers) isn't quite a new concept is it?

Sure IE6/7 had poor JS performance but IE7 is nearing death and performance of on mobile browsers is increasing rapidly (as well as CPU performance).

johnrob2• 15 years ago

Ultimately, whoever writes the checks gets to decide what to strive for. If you can afford to hire a developer for each platform, great. Otherwise HTML5 is a compelling alternative.

extension2• 15 years ago

Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Yes, we can finally relegate this obsolete dinosaur to the dustbin of history once we faithfully replicate every aspect of it.

tikhonj2• 15 years ago

Just like how DVDs fundamentally do exactly the same thing as VHS tapes, with a couple of minor differences?

extension2• 15 years ago

DVDs didn't have to struggle to become as good as VHS. They started out better.

NHQ2• 15 years ago

Moreover Yahoo as the dinosaur slayer !

jarek3• 15 years ago

I don't think we'll be replicating the "can only run on only one OS" aspect of it, among others.

codyrobbins2• 15 years ago

No. Somebody please stop this guy. After reading this I feel about him like the machines must have when they sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor.

Web apps are to native mobile apps as Java apps are to native desktop apps: ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience.

With some notable exceptions I think they can be a pragmatically motivated stopgap step (in regards to either bottlenecks in time or money) on the road to building a full native app. But saying simply that because they cost less time or money to produce as a sole justification for creating them, and ignoring all their shortcomings, is like suggesting everyone buy a circa-1998 Samsung flip phone instead of an iPhone simply because you can get one on eBay for $5. It doesn’t matter, because the flip phone sucks and the iPhone doesn’t—economics aren’t the only factor to consider.

If you need any more proof, remember what happened when the iPhone originally launched and there was no support for building native apps. Apple’s professed solution was for app functionality to be provided by mobile-optimized web apps. There was literally a sustained caterwaul by developers and users alike for the ability to create native apps on the platform, so much so that Apple did a complete 180 on their original stance.

dmix2• 15 years ago

> ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience

That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear.

Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly. It's still in alpha stages.

When building mobile apps has matured and if they still have the performance and UI issues, then I might agree. But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores.

glhaynes• 15 years ago

That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear.

It's also like the arguments made against Java 10 years ago. :) I agree with you - it's not yet clear whether web technologies will significantly replace native for mobile or not. Even if they eventually end up doing so, that appears far enough out that I can't imagine making any decisions based on that right now.

codyrobbins2• 15 years ago

I think the current popularity of web apps over desktop apps is driven by two different motivating factors: social and centralized storage.

The nature of the Web makes it well suited to building social apps on top of it. It would be hard to build social apps on an application layer that didn’t transcend physical platforms, because then there would be platform-induced delineations between the social groups that could congregate.

But the other motivating factor is that web apps by definition are a centralized container for the data you put into them. You use Freshbooks and you can access your invoices from anywhere. I think this will become far less important as cloud-storage-on-the-desktop services like iCloud mature and largely eliminate this advantage of web apps. Given this, don’t you think think we’ll actually start seeing a resurgence of non-social desktop apps that would previously have been built on the Web for centralized storage reasons?

brigade• 15 years ago

"used to"?

I certainly haven't stopped making this argument for web vs. desktop apps, as it has yet to be solved. If it even can be solved (mainly the UI/UX issues; performance probably will eventually approach "good enough" for a given app.)

commanda• 15 years ago

>But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores.

Conversely, would you say that a kid in grade 5 who has bad scores is going to have a great job when he grows up, just you wait and see? We can only judge the mobile web as a platform (if one can even say that it is one platform and not many) by what it offers on mobile handsets today, not by what we hope it will one day become. Also, we can't judge it by hoping that one day, all the mobile browsers will conform to the WC3's standards, because we know how good a job today's desktop browsers do at quickly becoming standards-compliant.

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear.

And it still holds true in many cases. Microsoft Outlook, in many ways an example of both great and horrible desktop software, still holds the email client majority: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/

Web apps are great when you get along with the designer's UI decisions. When you have a fast network connection (that's improved with specific web apps and offline modes, but it's by no means generally applied). When the servers are working well.

Mobile apps share the same advantages and disadvantages, but they're multiplied tremendously. I lose my mobile signal in most stores I go into, for example, and on an awful lot of secondary roads throughout the Northwest.

drewcrawford• 15 years ago

> Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly.

Your argument assumes that building good web applications is merely a function of tools. It's not.

We have a performance-per-watt wall, plus a heat wall, plus a weight wall in mobile hardware.

There is a reason that Apple is pushing C-based development without as much as a garbage collector, it's not just the stubbornness of Jobs. It's because a dynamic language with state-of-the-art VMs struggles hard to do basic smooth animations on current-gen mobile hardware, and will continue to struggle, for at least the next five releases of Nitro.

You're going to need something like a battery revolution to build the mobile web app panacea that you want.

fpgeek• 15 years ago

One significant difference between Java apps and web apps is that, unlike Java, the platform vendor has huge incentives to keep improving your runtime (the browser).

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

Web apps don't have to be as "good" as native apps to succeed. They just have to be good enough. Remember that web mail exploded in popularity in the late 90s. Do you remember what the experience was like on Yahoo Mail in 1999? Full page refreshes on dial-up modems to see a single email. Yet people swarmed to Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and the like.

calebmpeterson• 15 years ago

I realize you're referring to Swing Java apps, and I won't argue on their behalf for a second. However the SWT library is a dream of a native toolkit experience if you're writing a client app in Java. It's fast, does a good job of working across a wide variety of platforms (Win32, Cocoa, GTK, and I think Motif), and is extremely well documented.

anotherthrwaway• 15 years ago

Get used to these kinds of comments. There's a large contingent of people on HN who don't understand that higher level languages (say, Java) are not a complete replacement for C/C++. The same people are behind the "HTML5+Javascript ought to be enough for anybody" mentality.

pacomerh• 15 years ago

The problem here is that these articles are very extremist. There are many native apps that can easily be done as web apps (cost and time effective), but not all of them. You can't choose one platform and just say it's the best choice overall.

jamesu• 15 years ago

Sometimes i wish more people would care more about making good products rather than the next buzzword middleware stack which solves everything.

tikhonj2• 15 years ago

Calling the internet a "buzzword middleware stack" is underplaying the fundamental differences between the web and native apps.

Even now making a web app as opposed to a native app does not necessarily preclude quality; as mobile web browsers and technologies mature, web apps are going to afford developers more and more quality.

If I wanted to make a quality app to reach even just both Android and iPhones, I would effectively have to implement it twice--first in Java and then in Objective-C, using different libraries throughout. With a web app, I could write it once. Of course, maintaining browser compatibility and overcoming potential shortcomings of current browsers probably means it would take me longer to write the web app to a similar level of quality than either the Android or iPhone app; however, it would almost definitely not take longer than both put together. Thus, I would have more time to add quality to my web app--and less maintenance headaches--than I would just supporting both Android and iPhone natively (not to mention other platforms like Blackberry or Windows Phone).

Ultimately, I think it's the people who just want to make quality products that can reach a large audience who should care about web apps.

lordmatty• 15 years ago

The guy talks about tired analogies, whilst making one that looks positively sleep deprived in his headline and conclusion!

v21• 15 years ago

I'm sympathetic to what he's saying. It is painful to develop lots of separate platforms.

But I work making games. And so this promised land is still way over the horizon. We're only just getting to the point where a HTML5 game can be notable as anything other than a tech demo on the desktop. It'll be another few years before we reach that point for mobile.

sien• 15 years ago

Indeed.

But a lot of mobile apps are not like games. They are adaptations of web sites for a particular mobile device. This is where what he is saying surely makes a lot of sense. Really, apps like twitter should be able to be done with HTML5.

But more involved applications like games make sense to be native applications.

politician• 15 years ago

But even games are written in standardized frameworks like OpenGL and DirectX, with DirectX being the winner at the moment. Unless you're talking about Flash games where, uh, Flash is the standardized framework.

It seems that standardized frameworks aren't the problem, performance is. So what's your take on hardware acceleration, canvas, and WebGL?

5hoom• 15 years ago

Agreed.

There are always going to be classes of applications that need every bit of performance they can squeeze out of their host platform, and will be written native to that platform.

Web apps are very useful things, but this "native code is dead" line has been touted before and it was wrong then too.

peterwwillis• 15 years ago

I feel like anyone who makes an argument that Node.js is "the future" is making the same case that a polluted natural environment is "the future". A horrifying vision of what could be reality unless we make it better.

Friends don't let friends make a career out of programming in JavaScript.

phatbyte2• 15 years ago

Really ? JS is an amazing language, much better then say PHP. And trust me, there are people building careers out of PHP. JS correctly used can do amazing things.

stevenwei• 15 years ago

Everything will be relegated to the 'dustbin of history' given a long enough time period, it's a completely meaningless statement.

CDs were quite useful for many years, before they were replaced by newer, superior technologies. Mobile apps are currently the best way to deliver the best user experience on mobile devices.

In the future this may change, but that should not be particularly surprising to anybody given how quickly technology improves.

krosaen• 15 years ago

Desktop apps eventually got replaced by web apps because it is more convenient to access the app from anywhere - from any computer, not necessarily because web apps were easier for developers. Now with mobile apps developers are hoping for the same thing to happen again but this time, users don't have the same pull - they always have their phones with them. I'm not going to log onto a mobile terminal at the library to check my email or run some app. To look at it from the other side, if omnigraffle was always available to you as a native app, as your app with your settings, with all of its slickness, would you want a web based alternative?

NHQ2• 15 years ago

I would love to see browser become the primary interface for everything interweb (speaking as a web app developer). But this article would be more believable and reassuring if native mobile browser makers would make with filling the native functionality gap already. I mean access to contacts, cameras, mic, phone, bluetooth, file system, everything. They don't even offer all those yet on the desktop. The browser vendors are so far behind their own potential.

But: I think ChromeOS will be a big deal some day.

phatbyte2• 15 years ago

Wasn't someone from Wired who said that mobile apps were going to replace web apps, and so the web as dead ??

And now, we have Yahoo saying "no no no, web is the way to go, look at us !!".

Quite frankly, this type of discussions sucks and are totally irrelevant. Let the market decide, don't be a palm reader, as you might end up with your palm in your face.

joejohnson• 15 years ago

I bet that mobile apps will be overtaken by web apps in about 5 years.

azov• 15 years ago

> tools that make web apps look and behave more like native apps [will somehow help web apps kill native apps]

You can't kill anything by trying to imitate it.

Especially when you have constraints that ensure that your imitation will always be lagging behind in terms of features and performance.

Web and mobile apps simply offer different tradeoffs between reach, features, and development costs and, as such, have every reason to coexist.

jasongullickson• 15 years ago

If you want to make this true, go out and actually build a web app so bad-ass that what it does can't be outdone by a native application.

Until then, stfu.

bphogan4• 15 years ago

The motivating factor I've seen is the fact that somehow, people got it in their head that in order to be legitimate, the "app" has to be in the App Store. This is one reason why we have a mobile app, which offers nothing we couldn't already do with jQuery Mobile. We're not using the accelerometer. We're displaying data.

But "being in the app store" is more important to our users right now.

michaelpinto• 15 years ago

You can knock apps all you like but what Jay Sullivan hasn't done is to give us a clear reason why we need Firefox as a mobile browser, or even why it's so much better than Chrome. Firefox was a breath of fresh air in a world that was owned by IE, but it seems to have lost a core focus. And ironically the one browser my friends keep talking about on mobile platforms is Opera...

slipperyp• 15 years ago

I think a couple interesting things are happening.

It's becoming more obvious to everybody that good mobile applications are not cheap. This isn't news, but I think the fact that it's widely understood is new within the past year or so.

Also, supporting multiple platforms tends to linearly multiply costs.

Also, good web based mobile apps are getting "more possible" with new technologies so there are reactions kind of like what this author seems to be saying is a done deal. The idea that mobile apps are dead is totally absurd. I mean, ask anyone on Android who's used maps.google.com on their phone (which is totally amazing) whether they have uninstalled the Google Maps app - it's just not happening.

There are two things that are important that the author seems to be ignoring - first is the fact that developing a good mobile web based app isn't easy or cheap either. The costs of supporting a gajillion mobile device web browsers and form factors won't multiply directly with the number of platforms out there, but there will be many, many platform/browser/form-factor specific bugs and annoyances to deal with. Second is the fact that regardless of how awesome canvas / mojito / etc. all get, afaik there is no model in the future where mobile web-based apps have an ability to do something like interact with the local data sitting on the device in other formats (like people / calendar) or with other devices that the mobile app developer can take advantage of (bump / beam). Rich interactions like that can let the mobile app developer build a much cooler experience.

bobwaycott• 15 years ago

This article lacks anything serious to consider, and strikes me as far too close to being link-bait. Judging by the contents, its title is, at best, an ignoratio elenchi. It should have been entitled, "Mobile Web Apps Will Save Developers Time Compared to Native Apps".

The article espouses little more beyond the offerings and appeals of companies making yet-to-be-proven predictions about what the future of mobile apps will be, in an effort to secure and advance their business's goals and existence. These goals are not the goals of the users, who will ultimately decide what the best platform for mobile apps is--not on its technical merits, but on its ease of giving them the shortest and most pain-free path from want/need to procurement. The only mention of the users is in saying they can hardly tell the difference between a native or web app--and that completely depends on what type of app they are comparing.

Smartphone popularity among the general public skyrocketed as a result of the App Store. The mobile app didn't rise to such sexy heights because we developers were out there salivating over creating HTML apps for smartphones. It rose because consumers finally had a good way to find a fun or useful app with a simple search of a (usually) simple app name. No more remembering URLs. No more bookmarks. No more, "Was it .com or .net?" Just a simple tap-to-install process resulting in a recognizable icon they could flick to and launch with their thumb. The App Store and the mobile app model gave consumers a very easy to understand and re-use paradigm for finding and using apps.

I've enjoyed the development and rise of the web since I was a kid. I've been excited by web application development, watching web apps get ever closer to offering what can be done in a native desktop application in both features and usability. Plenty of web apps are better than their desktop alternatives (or don't have any).

However, the web still has not solved the biggest problems the App Store model solved for both developers and users--and users are what matters when it comes to keeping developers building and making money.

I doubt I'm the only user who frequently forgets the URL of a site, product, web app, or what-have-you that I want to find/use when I want to find/use it, and I've got a pretty good memory (though I suppose I'm not entirely objective). Users don't have to worry about that on their phones--where they more-often-than-not remember an app by not just its name, but its name in association with its icon. Problem solved.

Moreover, and more importantly, the web (in its desktop-based incarnation) has struggled in so many visible, obvious, and personal ways (for devs/companies) when it comes to the one thing that matters most--getting users to pay to use your shit. Users on the web have an implicit expectation that websites are free (hello newspapers?). And I think that's what made the web what it is today. With mobile apps, there is, imho, a much lower implicit barrier to payment than the web has ever been able to obtain for itself. Problem solved.

What's the web platform for making money? Oh, right ... we already know ... advertising. Everywhere. Yuck.

grudolf• 15 years ago

It's easy when you split the app in frontend and backend, but how to tackle an app that has to run disconnected and survive phone reboots?

seclorum• 15 years ago

As a recent convert to moai (http://getmoai.com), which is a Lua-based cross-platform environment for game development, I have to say this: hogwash.

Cross-platform, easy to use, deliverable as a download for offline use, publishable on the web: a moai project already delivers what this guy is blowing hard about. Its not going away just because he says so. In fact, the future is here already - put your app on the cloud, let users decide if they want to install it locally or not.

The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history

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