Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I believe that mobile browser will beat apps, like it did on desktop. Mobile browsers were unusable, sites were not mobile-friendly, devices were slow with tiny screens. Now those factors change and browsing websites on modern smartphone is much more usable. And it's likely that we will see shift from mobile apps to mobile websites in the near future.

View on HN

I try to find an app for things I regularly (daily) use. Some things have excellent apps which far surpass the web experience for me (like Reddit, Linkedin, Inbox, Skype) while others are crap (all HN apps I tried, including the paid ones, Hipchat (what a piece of...), almost all airline apps).

But when the experience of the app surpasses the web, it does so by such a stretch that when I start the web version on my desktop I close it again and take out my iPad. For me a company definitely only takes it's customers serious if they have smooth native apps as well as a smooth responsive web experience.

Not sure if you have an Android device...but have you tried the Yarn app (Hacker News)? It's the only HN app that is usable for me.

_This comment sent using Yarn for HN_

I have both Android & iOS; I just don't use Android too much but thank you for the recommendation, I will install it.

As a developer and consumer, I think that browsers are better for most use cases, where user interaction is simple enough and web technologies are more than up to the task.

But this technical consideration could be trumped by business considerations: making people pay for "mere websites" is more difficult than making them pay for apps, and if ad blocking really becomes mainstream, this could be enough reason for producers of even simple content to prefer apps - where they can have their free version with ads without having to worry about blockers.

You know I wonder if in the long term if blocking ads may improve the open web experience vs. native apps which may become cluttered with ads?

At least for most usable apps with ads there is the in-app option to switch them off. I don't mind that for an app that is good ; on the other hand, I would've paid for that app as well in the first place.

That... or maybe it could remove all professional content from the open web, and make it some kind of ghetto for those who can't pay for apps. I honestly don't know.

You just described most of what I see on 4chan and Facebook. But in a sense what you're saying has happened to a degree with paywalls. The really good content at say the New York Times, Financial Times and the like is behind paywalls at this point while low quality stuff like Huffington Post is free.

> The really good content at say the New York Times, Financial Times and the like is behind paywalls

For now, it's "soft" paywalls - they're still indexable by Google, and visible if you come from there.

I'm afraid that, in the near future, they could really become accessible only to those who can pay. And the quality of the free internet would instantly drop many notches.

That's my fear as well, although I've seen a decline in the market over the past few years. After the banner ad crash of '08 it became harder for indie bloggers to make a living. And another problem I see these days is that not only are banner ads paying badly, but money has flooded into the field to back winner-takes-all ventures like Vox or Buzzfeed. So it's hard for the little guy to even get pizza money at this point.

Well, we can only hope for the better...

Desktop apps for an average user were always a wild west with potential viruses: there was never a curated app store with reviews, which I believe is an advantage for an average user.

Additionally a large class of top phone apps is messaging, which has always been apps even on desktop: Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, Skype etc.

Also, why would I use maps.google.com on my phone instead of one click Google Maps app? Seems like torture to me.

> I believe that mobile browser will beat apps, like it did on desktop.

So now I have to "upgrade" my browser (which is basically almost a VM) that uses 1GB of RAM to run that To-do app over a series of tubes which are metered and analysed.

We've really done some progress here yeah.

On Firefox OS and to a large extent on the Ubuntu phone, most apps are web based apps.

Both of which have really tiny userbases and aren't desktop.

The point was that plen of apps already run like that. Doesn't really require a broswer upgrade. The Ubuntu phone is not especially highly specced.

That's what happened on the Desktop..

>like it did on desktop

It's pretty great that this happened. I'm so sick of using these pesky desktop applications. Just remind me, which web apps can I use for the following?

-Audio production

-3D animation

-Video editing

-CAD design

-Writing/debugging software

Audio production: https://soundation.com/

3D animation: https://clara.io/

Video Editing: https://www.wevideo.com/

CAD design: https://www.tinkercad.com/

Writing/debugging software: https://codenvy.com/

Now of course I expect we'll here the "but it misses feature X". I'm sure that's true. Next, someone will point out that generally, 80% of people don't need feature X, and the fact that it is online means it is many times more accessible. We've seen this over and over again.

Remember when everyone thought web based email couldn't possibly work for them because of feature Z? I'm sure that's still true, for a few people.

So can we skip that whole discussion?

But I don't know if the message we should get out of this is that the web wins, or than new ways of distributing functionality to more people cheaper wins.

Let's be clear - I was never suggesting the the web can't beat native. The op was stating that the days of native are behind us. It is strictly untrue.

> Remember when everyone thought web based email couldn't possibly work for them because of feature Z?

No, I've always used web-based email clients. Did a software developer really say this?

Back in the early days of webmail, when IE6 was new and we had 28.8k modems, someone almost certainly said that. 20 years ago we used Eudora, PINE, Netscape's mail client, or (if you were really unfortunate) Outlook Express.

Still use Thunderbird. All web clients suck, including Gmail.

Pine -> Mutt -> Webmail for me. Those desktop clients were(are?) horrible. For iPhone/iPad I do like Inbox though.

POP was horrible, IMAP made things much better, but the web clients had already won.

A modern desktop client is much better than a modern webmail client when it's available. It's interesting that desktop clients have been continualy improving, while web clients have been continualy getting worse.

Anyway, both have their use.

As far as the number of products used and time spent are concerned it is. Most of the growth in the software industry over the last decade or so had been on the web.

> https://soundation.com/

> https://www.wevideo.com/

They are built with flash, which is NOT what I would call using web techs. The fact that you couldn't tell the difference is interesting. Despite all the flash hate, there are valid use cases for it.

None of those hold up a candle to actual native programs.

Those are all very specialised types of apps for content creation. If those are the only examples that came to your mind, you pretty much proved the point.

So, you really believe that nobody, other than the use cases above, use native software? I only listed the software categories which I personally use...

I think he is exaggerating, but he does have a point. How many uses native applications for reading email today? More and more are also moving to the web for office applications.

Some areas are completely swallowed. In the 90s it wouldn't have been strange to have a native application for the weather, or to browse a digital encyclopedia. Those areas are now only on the web.

>How many uses native applications for reading email today?

Most people with a phone?

Valid point, but how many of those phone apps is just a webview wrapper? :p

No. He proved that only a specialized minority need specialized applications. For a majority of users the computer starts and ends with the web browser. The same thing will happen on mobile

A counter example:

How many people aside from specialists use the browser as their main "app"?

How many people use webmail, search and read info, use facebook/twitter, order stuff, use online map, look at internet junk?

The browser is the number one app on desktop without a doubt. The flexibility it offers is nothing short of incredible. You can cite specialist apps all you like, it doesn't change the fact that those apps are a niche right now on the desktop.

For anything that's processor intensive it's clear that apps will win, but flipping that think about the classic office bundle and how google moved that to the browser:

- Email

- Word Processing

- Spreadsheets

- Slideshows

Other than email, most of that office bundle has clear shortcomings compared to native apps.

Google didn't move email to the browser. Hotmail and Yahoo did.

And Google Apps hasn't displaced Office by and measure. Companies are still depending on and using standard SOE stacks which includes Office.

Maybe not at enterprise, but in my experience google apps have displaced office for smaller orgs and personal use. I haven't used Word or Excel in like 6 years now.

Those are all apps that actually need more access to the machine's resources. That's not really a comparable to what -most- apps in all of the major app stores do. Most of the apps in the app store are just for media consumption and generally the web version is better than the native app. See Facebook for example.

Media consumption v media creation I think is the distinct line that need to be crossed before a native app makes a whole lot of sense.

For audio production, iMaschine is a fantastic app and the main reason I stay with iOS. In fact, the $5 app was so good that I ended up buying the $200 Maschine hardware controller + desktop software for the seamless integration: create a track in iMaschine and it will export a file that you can open up on the desktop to apply advanced effects, additional voices, etc.

Also VLC player.

The thing is all those things will eventually migrate to the web. Right now the web has so much potential and those pieces of software have a small market and that market is pretty saturated.

Once we do everything we can do with the web then we will move into domains that have incumbents

I would say Facebook is much more useful to society then Audio Production.

The web is a cesspool. Its monetization is so twisted and unnatural, with individual users worth next to nothing. Companies engage in all sorts of dark patterns, tracking and other scummy bullshit to try to squeeze out an extra tenth of a penny per user. Hell, click on the link to this article and Amazon, LinkedIn, Google, and a dozen others all get to know what you just read!

I don't share the excitement about bringing this bullshit to apps. Maybe the web will improve: as websites become more sophisticated, customers will increase their expectations and start demanding better treatment. But this would require reversing the current trend.

Native apps can be even worse - they control all behavior to a more powerful degree. The bloat and battery & data drainage is why I install as few mobile apps as possible.

You didn't state on which mobile OS you have this experience ?

Android and iOS

It seems like a market pattern. When the market size become so big, value gets down to nothing, then yes businesses act this way.

> I would say Facebook is much more useful to society then Audio Production.

That's a bizarre value judgment to make, but social apps have different technical needs from multimedia apps:

Bandwidth to the cloud will never beat bandwidth to the local disk. And RAM.

For Writing/debugging software definitely check out Codeanywhere.com. I am the founder so would love your feedback if you haven't tried it out yet. Thanks :)

OnShape handles CAD in the browser pretty well.

https://www.onshape.com

You have a point. The mobile-browsing experience on my 3.5 year old Galaxy Nexus is horrible.

This is completely different on an iPhone 6, Galaxy S6, Nexus 6...

I am not helping it, even though I sometimes work as web dev.

On my devices, including desktop, web is for reading and watching movies.

If there is an application for what I am trying to do, it will be used instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com