Why apps are not the future

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12/13/whyAppsAreNotTheFuture.html

by davewiner • 15 years ago

269 128 15 years ago

jgroome2• 15 years ago

I don't think anyone outside of the app-development ecosphere seriously thinks that the Web is dead. It's a pretty absurd thing to say.

k-mcgrady2• 15 years ago

I'm an app developer and I certainly don't think the web is dead. But I don't think apps are going to go away either. Both have their own use cases. And I think one of the biggest advantages of apps for developers has nothing to do with technology. It is the ecosystem. It is A LOT easier to make money with an app, sold through an app store, than it is to make money from a website. Especially on a mobile device where users don't want to type in lots of credit card information every time they visit a new website.

randomdata2• 15 years ago

As a web developer, I think it is dying, but not in the way you immediately think.

Modern websites are starting to resemble full-fledged applications. Built using entire MVC frameworks atop the Javascript runtime that abstract the underlying primitives, just like their native brethren. Today, from a programmer's standpoint, there is little difference between building a native and web application.

Every new browser iteration just brings tighter integration into the underlying system. There are no real web-specific technologies being introduced. We are reaching the point where the web serves little purpose other than a clumsy virtual machine. The natural progression will be to go full on virtual machine, like Java attempted to do many years ago, where HTML/CSS/etc is just another application on that virtual machine.

The idea of pointing a browser to an address to open an application will stick around, but I think the web parts, a program that renders interlinking hypertext documents, is dying – though certainly not dead yet.

bad_user6• 15 years ago

In the meantime Wikipedia is still the most useful product of the Internet and the biggest database of human knowledge. It's only surpassed in traffic by Google, Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo.

    the web serves little purpose other than a 
    clumsy virtual machine

That clumsy virtual machine can bring you Facebook.com on every mobile phone, regardless of the platform. And if good native apps are now available for Facebook, well, we are talking about Facebook.

r00fus• 15 years ago

> Modern websites are starting to resemble full-fledged applications.

So more of the code is going to the VM on the client... this pendulum swings back and forth.

What about efforts like Amazon Silk and Opera mini that encapsulate all the client logic in the cloud? Sure they may suck now, but in the future they may be more mature and standardized... thus the pendulum could swing back.

king_magic2• 15 years ago

"Visualize each of the apps they want you to use on your iPad or iPhone as a silo. A tall vertical building. It might feel very large on the inside, but nothing goes in or out that isn't well-controlled by the people who created the app. That sucks!

The great thing about the web is linking."

I'm not convinced. I see the "app" response to "linking" as being something like Windows 8 contracts. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if iOS and Android have something similar to contracts in the next 2-3 years. At least I would hope so!

I think that there are applications that make more sense to implement as a traditional app, and that there are applications that make more sense to implement as a web app. I don't see this changing anytime soon. I really don't.

AndrewDucker• 15 years ago

Well, Android has "Intents", which allow similar functionality, although not as much as "Contracts" if I understand correctly.

king_magic2• 15 years ago

I was actually not familiar with Intents. Good to know.

Spearchucker2• 15 years ago

Agreed. Being able to pin specific app pages or features [edit]on WP7[/edit] is another example of apps moving towards a linkable page paradigm. Both have merits, and both have scenarios in which they're more suited to their particular environment.

Case in point being anything that requires encryption. I've seen .js implementations, but the web adds so many other threats not faced by apps that could completely undermine its use (depends entirely on the ability of the developer).

thetrendycyborg• 15 years ago

You can link with apps. Intents do this.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Inten...

k-mcgrady2• 15 years ago

To an extent you can do this on iOS as well with URL schemes.

ch0wn• 15 years ago

That's what I thought of. The model of Intents is also a lot more powerful than simple web links, but Web Intents[0] are already on their way to fix that.

[0] http://webintents.org/

dwiel• 15 years ago

I agree with the sentiment of the op, however, I dont think you can ignore the fact that so many people are willing to spend a dollar or two on an app whereas paying for access to a web site seems relatively rare (outside of the business world).

toyg2• 15 years ago

Show me a (useful) website that costs less than $5 for lifetime access.

Many SAAS companies charge the same as an app, but per month, so you can't really compare it with a one-off payment.

rgbrgb3• 15 years ago

http://www.google.com/

falling• 15 years ago

http://www.pinboard.in/ The price has now risen above that level because it is successful, but it started lower. I think it qualifies for your request because the higher price in this case just demonstrates that the model has worked in this case.

(Pinboard's sign up price rises with the number of users)

My opinion is that the whole discussion on this topic is totally worthless and it's even starting to get annoying: all we see is articles saying “apps are dead, we should build on the web” and nobody doing it.

Even Google's – which should be on the front line championing the web – mobile web apps are crap. The best mobile web app, the only one that actually made me want to use that instead of an app because it worked very well and not out of principle was Twitter, until last week, then they broke scrolling like everyone else and now I hate it. Runner up is Facebook.

Why don't we see more people actually making mobile web apps instead of just writing articles about how other people should make them?

morganw• 15 years ago

> per month

You're right in general (I was surprised at the jump from free to lowest paid tier for Dropbox), but fastmail.fm is <$5 per year.

djKianoosh• 15 years ago

I think one potential answer to this is the ability for mobile/tablet apps to embed a browser inside the app. So you see this already with the twitter app on the ipad, when you click a link, it opens a browser in-app. The app makers don't reaaaally want you to leave, so the in-app browser is a nice compromise for them. And as a user, I like it. I don't necessarily need/want to leave the twitter app on my ipad. I just want to read the linked content real quick and jump back to the app. Works for me :)

hack_edu• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, the browser experience can vary drastically depending on the app linking out. Plenty just dont at all. You see a link, but clicking doesn't do much but let you copy the text, if you're lucky to even have that. It's frustrating and makes me tend to avoid links in most all apps.

Take Flipboard, and otherwise beautiful app that is the gold standard for future blockbuster apps; when you decide to open a link to a full article you will get stuck inside an awkward hardy-useful piece of Safari. Even if you click out, you efffectively lose your place in the flow of what you were browsing. This is an example of bad integration from the browser. Don't even get me started on the apps that come with built-in browsers that feel like a toynrather than a tool.

I want to read the linked content not necessarily real quick and return back, and trust that the experience will be as good as a native app. In a perfect world all Apps would be web apps.

DrJokepu• 15 years ago

Regardless whether the author is right or wrong, "I don't care" is not a valid way to dismiss a counterargument. It's an effective way to resolve cognitive dissonance however.

davesims6• 15 years ago

Linking is one of the things that I think Android got right over iOS. Google -- web company that they are -- smartly realized that their mobile OS platform needed to borrow metaphors from the web and attempted to do this with their Intent/Activity architecture.

The challenge here is the execution -- it's Java-heavy and unwieldy compared to <a href=...>, but the basic structure is there and allows for interesting interleaving of Activities from one app into another. I haven't yet seen a lot of discussion or adoption of Open Intents, but I think it's an interesting approach. It does, again, seem to suffer from an inheritance of Java's heaviness, and that may be a fatal flaw.

http://www.openintents.org/en/intentstable

Whether this approach succeeds in sustaining rich-client apps as web apps mature remains to be seen, but I do think it points to the fact that OP's criticism was a concern in the minds of Android's developers at the earliest stages.

themanr2• 15 years ago

Also possible on Android is for apps to register themselves as link targets for certain domains. For example http://www.github.com addresses can optionally open in the github app.

babebridou5• 15 years ago

You can specify your app as a receiver for as many authorities as you'd like, by the way, or even register your own schema. You can also declare your app as a content provider, which means that your app/service becomes a data source, just as the contact list, or the photo repository, and make that data available to others, defining your own private permissions, etc.

My app FairyPreview for instance (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...), is registered as an authority for the myriad link minimizers out there, so whenever you click on a minimized link in the Twitter app or anywhere apart from a browser, it will suggest my app for a faster preview instead of taking hours to load a webpage designed for a desktop browser hiding behind an unknown bit.ly link, itself disguised as a t.co, for example.

It's not perfect and it's very old, the code is from 2009, my very first attempt at playing with the cross-app link system, but it works pretty well still. I'm strongly thinking about opening the source code, since I don't make any money out of it (free, no ad, maybe 50 downloads :P), and there's plenty of improvements I'd love to do but don't have the time these days.

babebridou5• 15 years ago

While linking to other apps in Android is absolutely trivial and mostly painless (even considering it's java), the more tedious part is to implement the intent service itself. The "<a href=" example is the wrong one, since the call itself is practically a one-liner in java, whereas implementing the equivalent of a "Hello {{name}}, how are you since {{last-visit}}?" response would cause a hell of a lot more headache.

The API is solid though, the linking is done at a very low level, and to be honest when you get the hang of it, it's hard to let go of that awesome feature of the OS. I strongly support the use of RESTful IntentServices and ContentProviders, even if you don't open them to other apps, it's specifically the part that the Android OS got right. Opening them up for other apps to link to is a one-liner config change afterwards.

davesims6• 15 years ago

Agreed with most of your points except "mostly painless." Consider that an anchor tag is both presentation and event handler -- basically all necessary application logic -- in one line, and intuitively understood in its integration with URLs. The "one line" to start Intents in Android (usually at least two, and likely more, depending on how much other data you need to put in the Bundle or Extras or URL objects) is only the execution part, usually buried in the event handler which itself is attached to a View object which itself was defined in a layout.xml or some other visual declaration.

Heavy.

zuppy• 15 years ago

You can link apps in iOS too. You can do a simple test: open safari and type fb://feed and it will open the facebook app and go to your wall.

More: http://wiki.akosma.com/IPhone_URL_Schemes#Registering_your_o...

spiffworks• 15 years ago

How does iOS handle multiple apps registering for the same type of URL? In Android, I get a popup asking which app I want to use for this action, and an option to make that the default for future actions. Is there something similar on iOS?

davesims6• 15 years ago

Sure, you can open other apps and target applications with different link types, but you can't interleave functionality with nearly as much ease as in Android.

Any time you click a web link from an email, or a YouTube link from Safari you see this: the current app is backgrounded and there's no simple way for the two workflows to interact. This is a major difference between the two OS's and one advantage for Android, imo.

dredmorbius• 15 years ago

"Opening a URL in a given app" isn't all linking provides.

Linking also lets me take whatever content an app is displaying, isolate the URL, and share that externally from the app.

Current apps are link roach motels: your links check in (o hai 4sqr), but they never check out.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

This, I think, is the biggest advantage of the web, and why things on the web can go "viral" more than anything else.

No installed/downloaded app can go viral in the same way a web app can. The barrier to entry is vastly different between the two.

scrrr• 15 years ago

I think apps are here to stay, but just like in the Chrome browser they might be simply links to a web-app. So the title should read "Why native apps are not the future".

clintavo• 15 years ago

We keep having the same debates over and over. We've seen this before on the desktop. It started with apps that had to be written for both Windows and Mac. Then the web came along and, as bandwidth increased, many apps were able to be run as web apps, simplifying code maintenance and giving developers the ability to easily target multiple platforms. Apps that benefit from linking work better as web apps. Some types of apps, however, run better as native apps: things like games and Photoshop. So we ended up with both.

Mobile will follow the same track: we'll end up with both.

wvenable2• 15 years ago

The reason why this conversation is coming up again is that so many applications that are web applications on the desktop are more commonly accessed as native apps on mobile. For example, on iOS I use a native client for IMDB, my bank, Mint, Wikipedia, and so on. But on the desktop I use web sites for these services. There has been a shift back to native on mobile.

I agree that we'll end up with both but perhaps more importantly is that the difference between web and mobile will blur together even more.

politician2• 15 years ago

I think the real reason that you see apps on mobile devices is that an app puts an easy to use branded icon on the "desktop" instead of requiring the user to open a browser and navigate to the site. I don't think it has anything to do with lack of access to capabilities (e.g. Mint doesn't need access to my camera).

Try this thought experiment: What do you think would be the reaction from users and developers if Apple simply renamed Safari's "Add link to home screen" option to "Install App"?

equalarrow• 15 years ago

Totally agree.

This 'issue' only matters to developers. My mom or sister or any other non-developer would never make any of these claims. For them, it's all on the Internet. A web page is a web page and an app is an app. The thing that matters most is the connection to do something.

There's room for both and I get so tired hearing these pointless arguments..

tgrass• 15 years ago

It is easy for me to imagine a world that moves from the messy chaos of the web to the clean, self-contained, predictability of the app, and linking would be a mere ancillary concern.

Apps are the path of least resistance for the consumer.

mrich• 15 years ago

You gotta love IT.

On Windows there was perfect integration between apps after Microsoft added linking and embedding using COM/OLE. 2D/3D hardware acceleration was standard. Linux as a competing OS implemented most of this also. Then came the web, and after years of standardization we now have hardware accelerated 2D & 3D, near-native performance (albeit using a completely new toolchain) and most of the standard desktop things. We have gained platform independence and ubiquity. Now we have to reinvent everything on mobile devices.... Granted, most of it is already there. But I sure would love to see most new mobile apps implemented in HTML5, to make them work cross device as much as possible.

dextorious7• 15 years ago

I wouldn't call COM/OLE "perfect integration between apps" at all.

And no, "2D/3D hardware acceleration" was not standard for the majority of Windows applications out there, including the Windows desktop.

davesims6• 15 years ago

"I wouldn't call COM/OLE "perfect integration between apps" at all."

Oh come on, it was so simple! All you had to do was set up a ProgID and/or a GUID in the registry (no! not HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, silly!, HKEY_USER! Oh wait, you're right, it is HKLM...) and then implement IUnknown in your app and the register the interface when you installed your app...hopefully with Windows Installer, which makes all of this a simple 15-step process. There's only like, 25 different registry keys to keep track of and 12 layers of interfaces to implement.

It was perfect I tell you!

IanDrake2• 15 years ago

I think we've lost focus here. Web pages as apps are silly, but there are just things you can't do from a web page on a mobile phone, like interface with the camera, GPS, compass, local caching, etc... That's where apps come in (or should).

jlongster• 15 years ago

The only reason you can't do that from the web is because nobody's build the APIs yet. You can certainly do it from the web once they are available, and they are about to be:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

politician2• 15 years ago

PhoneGap exposes those features to JavaScript through Device APIs.

Spearchucker2• 15 years ago

Lol, was about to mention PhoneGap.

rmc2• 15 years ago

you can't do from a web page on a mobile phone, like interface with the

camera Not yet.

GPS Geolocation: http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

compass Slightly related, gyroscopes & device orientation http://slides.html5rocks.com/#slide-orientation

local caching Loads of ways to locally cache things: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#offline-storage-title

2½ out of 4. Not bad

billions2• 15 years ago

A Qualcomm tech showed me a picture taken from the web browser in android. Said should be out in a year

arethuza• 15 years ago

You can use an application to enable web apps to get access to images from the iPhone camera:

http://picupapp.com/

IanDrake2• 15 years ago

These are all excellent points. I'm sure we'll get there, but there's going to be major differences in browser compatibility for a long time (3+ years, I think).

I've been using PhoneGap for a while now. It'd be really cool if similar API's were available without the native wrapper.

BTW, the browser caching link is helpful, but I experienced some limitations with what's currently available... http://zikkir.net/tech/102558

babarock• 15 years ago

Linking is really the only feature I care about in the web. And it's not a negligible one. I'm tired of all the Flash animations, the AJAX updates or other fade-ins and shiny effects. It looks pretty, but I'm not connecting to a website to watch a fashion show, I'm really here for the content.

I wish we could go back to a more "HTML-only" oriented web. You still find some of those (usually with old Unix hackers or computer scientist) and they're amazingly enjoyable to read. Also, parsing them and running grep/sed/awk/... is a breeze. Am I crazy to ask for data I can manipulate easily?

mekoka• 15 years ago

I believe native and browser-based apps can and will coexist.

As a web developer, I've had my share of frustrations with the browser and I certainly would welcome a more flexible and feature rich alternative for some use cases.

To give an example, I can see native development overturn browser dominance in the manufacturing of Content Management Systems. For years these apps have been tied to browser technology and their usability and features have been limited because of it. Sure it makes them easy to deploy (all you need is a browser), but in exchange you get crappy wysiwygs, lack of remote access (ftp, ssh), image editing that sucks and a string of other annoyances that we've simply learn to accept out of convention.

But when you think of it, there's no reason it should be like this. Organizations typically only have a handful of people that require access to the admin panel. You could simply have them install a native client that communicates with the server via http, exactly like the browser does, but offers a much more elaborate API. The added bonus would be the possibility to easily delegate various other tasks to other tools (Unix style).

Other normal web users (consumers) can continue to access the frontend (as opposed to the admin panel) via browsers.

This is a future I can definitely embrace.

bad_user6• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I agree. Since I discovered Google Apps, I forgot about Microsoft Office.

Google Docs is always there. It may be a crappy experience on my Android, but I have access to content I wouldn't otherwise. Collaborative editing and sharing is really easy too - I don't have to ask other people to buy iPhones / iPads / Androids to get them up to task. They only have to have an email on which I send an invite. And sure you can make a better native app and I would appreciate one on my Android, however I remember how this one time I forgot my phone and borrowed the iPhone of a friend to access a really important document.

On the whole, web apps are more accessible. Native apps are a nice bonus to this experience, however if the core is not web-based, then it loses a lot of value.

dextorious7• 15 years ago

"""On the whole, web apps are more accessible. Native apps are a nice bonus to this experience, however if the core is not web-based, then it loses a lot of value."""

Well, that can be easily solved with native apps that also have a web counterpart, for desperate times (i.e in the middle of Tahiti without your laptop/mobile phone/tablet).

thespace• 15 years ago

Very basic but there is a way in iOS

http://iphonedevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-appl...

roc3• 15 years ago

Webapps need to better handle offline usage and poor network conditions. Until then, apps still have a huge leg up on mobile devices.

Mobile devices are battery constrained. Radios to provide data feeds are a big factor in battery drain. Interpreted languages increase battery drain. And network coverage is far from universal, to say nothing of download caps and cell network performance concerns.

Apps are preferred today because they're more responsive, they drain less power and they're generally usable offline and in dodgy network conditions. The web has many advantages over native applications, but until it gets better for mobile users, users are not going to get past the more-immediate shortcomings to care much about those advantages.

And given that we seem to have reached a point where potential battery life past 1 day of solid use is traded off for greater performance during operation, I don't see the battery/network situation changing much any time soon.

beatle• 15 years ago

it's also a lot easier for developers to make money from native apps (free distribution, no infrastructure needed) vs. web applications (requires a lot of traffic, infrastructure, servers, bandwidth, system administration, etc.).

zerostar072• 15 years ago

By the same argument, though, apps will be obsoleted as soon as the next battery technology arrives, because, let's face it, installing apps, updating and uninstalling is a ghost long dead. As soon as Apis to access camera, microphone etc come to the browser, who would choose to program native?

bulte-rs4• 15 years ago

> installing apps, updating and uninstalling is a ghost long dead.

So, when not installing native apps (which takes time) we add - in the case of e.g. the iphone - webapps (links) to our home screens. Which is faster than installing a native app. After that we 'endure' a longer loading time every time we start the app. And we still have to remove the icon from our home screen when we're done with it.

Mind you, I see the advantages of web apps; but this does not seem like any different from the native app use case; it seems a bit worse to me actually.

> who would choose to program native Performance junkies? graphically intensive app-developers (games?). Sure, we may have an 'opengl'-component to use in our webapps; but why the extra overhead?

roc3• 15 years ago

Aside from highly specialized tasks, or those leveraging media/interfaces that web apps don't yet have access to, I'd imagine that's quite possible; not unlike the situation on the desktop today.

I'm just not optimistic about that "next battery technology" arriving any time soon.

brk• 15 years ago

It depends on the purpose of the app.

There will still likely be carrier restrictions on bandwidth, and general connectivity issues. Open wifi is far from ubiquitous and many carriers still have poor coverage (AT&T has no usable signal in many parts of my house), not to mention situations like wanting to play a game or use an app while on an airplane.

Some kind of hybrid model may evolve instead. You install an "app" that is little more than a data cache and a skin/UI for the phones browser. In a connected scenario you are using the app in "web app" mode. In a situation when it can't connect, there is enough intelligence to rely on a local data store or something. It doesn't cover all scenarios, but might bridge the gap a little better.

MatthewPhillips5• 15 years ago

What do you find insufficient about Cache Manifest?

roc3• 15 years ago

Adoption.

groby_b• 15 years ago

You mean appcache? For starters, size restrictions.

bad_user6• 15 years ago

There are advantages and disadvantages to both - web apps are available anywhere you can find an Internet connection and browsers connected to the Internet are in practice more readily available than your device filled with native apps.

ericd• 15 years ago

I don't know about you, but the same phone travels in my pocket, so those apps are available to me 99% of the time. The available everywhere advantage of the webapp was a big deal because computers were heavy, and that's been diminished.

That said, some sort of standard interoperability between phone and laptop/desktop apps would be nice, and iCloud APIs seem to be a stab at that, but it's probably a pipe dream to hope that that will become universal. So maybe you're right.

billions2• 15 years ago

Apps are shaping into Native, Hybrid, and HTML5. Native will always own a) 3D & graphics, and b) frequent users. HTML5 is in the immediate future shaping to be a 'try before you download' the app. It will be dominant in one time use (web) apps. I am working on an HTML5 marketplace- PM me if you're curious

jollyjerry• 15 years ago

A friend brought up a good point the other day that the popularity of the iOS app store has actually pushed back on advances in web technologies on mobile devices. Because the sanctioned way to sell applications must go through Apple, less attention overall has been spent building mobile webapps. Also, since the hardware is also out of developer's control, there hasn't been a push to make native hardware available to the javascript.

Even with that, I do think that we're on the cusp of a big webapp revolution (again). With all these emerging JS frameworks (backbone, ember, derby, knockout, etc), and the modern and capable webkit powering so many mobile devices, developers will take note.

MatthewPhillips5• 15 years ago

Linking is nice but the real killer feature is that installing, updating, and opening a website happen at the same time. Apple, Google, and Microsoft can build their own linking mechanism, but I have to preinstall the app before the link will work.

Someone3• 15 years ago

Fixing that is not too hard. If you look at Mac OS X Lion, for instance, part of that already is in place (in a different domain). If you download a .xyz file and double-click it, the Finder will suggest looking for applications that can open .xyz files.

I think a logical extension would be that the system would automatically download free viewer apps instead. Add a seamless way to upgrade to the editor app, and you are all set (tangentially related: I think a thing like OpenDoc using that infrastructure could succeed in today's market)

MatthewPhillips5• 15 years ago

Could they download and install these viewer apps in a fraction of a second or two, because thats what a browser does. The web works on the basis of progressive enhancement so all the browser needs to fetch is one Html file which it can display to the user while it downloads all other resources. I don't see a native code matching that.

namank• 15 years ago

You know the people who make phone software are actually aware of this?

In Android, the concept of Activity and Intent serves to essentially promote this. Its not a solved problem by far, but work HAS been done in that direction. Rest assured, this work is only going to speed up from here.

After all, smartphones and tablets are marketed as consumption devices. The manufacturers would be hugely remiss if they didn't learn anything from the internet. And as we know, Steve Jobs and his industry descendants are anything but remiss.

This is not to say the OP are wrong. Web doesn't compete with apps, it supports them. The two are complementary paradigms, not competing.

taylorbuley• 15 years ago

Deep linking is perfectly possible in apps. The !# hasbang is ugly, yes, but the HTML5 History API corrects this with the ability to pushState, replaceState and popState without necessarily having to deal with hashes.

Moreover, this style of linking matters most with publicly available data. For private data, such as the stuff I'm working on storing in the browser with IndexedDB, having a public link isn't necessary for data that's not publicly available. I of course want to support browser history/links in full (see http://warpspire.com/experiments/history-api/ for an example of what's possible) but my point is that when apps are personalized there is not always a need for a link that can be shared across the web.

If I wanted to prognosticate about our web-based future I'd look beyond vanilla hyperlinking and at Web Intents instead.

richardburton• 15 years ago

Why does it have to be binary? Why does one school of thought have to lose in order for another to win?

Tichy• 15 years ago

Another thing I recently realized: if the trend is to store everything in the cloud. How long until we also store apps in the cloud? Oops, they are now web sites...

tikhonj• 15 years ago

Not just any websites, but websites locked down by Apple/Microsoft/whomever for your own good!

zeeed• 15 years ago

that's all well and good. the key is that you can sell an app easily given a unified interface. that beats everything that is being done on the web, hands down.

We have to understand that apps make money and that this is why people will have people write more apps, which will fuel the economy and (us) entrepreneurs. That someone will switch off the web at some point is somewhat unlikely and when the time comes, probably secondary.

iradik• 15 years ago

Apps allow content provides to hide their data and only share it in a highly controlled environment. It's very unweb like, but appears that controlling a scare resource is profitable.

marknutter• 15 years ago

I can think of more reasons:

- app discoverability sucks ass

- apps require updates

- app development is unnecessarily tedious and must be done x number of times for x platforms

- iOS apps need to be approved by Apple, and you have to play the game by their rules if you want to charge money for them

- apps lack basic features of browsers - no universal find, no back/forward buttons, no bookmarking of pages or states, no organizing apps into tabs, etc.

Let's be honest: not counting games, the vast majority of the native apps out there would work just fine (or better) as websites. Add API's like access to the camera and there's even less reasons to develop a native app.

Apps will be relegated to games and highly sophisticated interfaces, which if I had to guess probably represents around 10% of all the apps out there (heck, most of the games out there could probably be done in the browser).

sreitshamer• 15 years ago

He means iOS apps, not desktop apps, right? Desktop apps aren't "silos". The PC/Mac is a personal systems-integration device with mechanisms like pasteboards to transfer data between apps. Unfortunately iOS (so far) has very little of this.

Havoc• 15 years ago

>It pleases the money folk to think [...] That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.

Sadly I think those folks are right. Shiny things do appeal to average people above freedom, flexibility etc. Given enough people with both money and an interest in shiny things, apps will rule supreme.

dextorious7• 15 years ago

It's not like the flexibility to export you data in some format or the freedom to modify the code means anything to people --or like it should mean.

How about the freedom from baby-sitting your OS install and the flexibility to just use a nice, polished app and go on with your REAL work?

solipsist• 15 years ago

Has it ever occurred to you that the next generation technology might harness the advantages of both apps and the web?

That's the way innovation occurs. Incremental improvements. Referring back to past implementations. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Learning from both the good and the bad of technology.

When people bring up the debate of Apps vs. Web, it's equivalent to saying "Facebook vs. Google+ - which one will people use in the future? You either get the Facebook like button or Google circles. One or the other, but not both."

gambler• 15 years ago

How exactly will it happen?

mufumbo• 15 years ago

The web will prevail. It's just question of time.

Just be smart and make profit with the app fever while you can.

perfunctory• 15 years ago

> Why apps are not the future

They are not the future indeed. They are the present.

tcarnell• 15 years ago

Yep, completely agree with the article. For me an important difference between the 'web' and 'apps' is that generally speaking nobody builds mobile apps out of generosity or egalitarianism, ie to give something to the world for free - mobile app developers are in it for the money.

However, the openness and non-proprietary nature of the web seems to encourage people to be generous and share content and services.

How many open source mobile apps are there compared to really great open source web/pc software?

charlieok• 15 years ago

The URI (or now more correctly, IRI) is a Web concept that is just as applicable in native apps as it is in HTML/Javascript apps. Use it.

Why apps are not the future

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