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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but "2016 App" and "2007 App" are not monolithic design choices. If you can decompose those things, you can keep the important bits and throw away the peacocking.

Just a simple example: it's trivially easy to make large, flat shaded buttons on the web. That's going to be more familiar to younger users than native web buttons like those on HN.

However, there's also spending weeks to make a web button that animates smoothly from one container to another and has a SVG icon that morphs into another different icon with magic sparkles. Doing that on the web will require grossly perverting the DOM and all of the web interaction expectations.

A lot of the things we consider "Just 2016 App Things" are performances that native app builders have to do to give clients a reason to believe their $300/hour is well spent. No real value is produced except "design" awards for the shelf.

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> is largely just a thing that native app builders do to show off and give clients a reason to believe their $300/hour is well spent

I recall an article by Zynga (maybe in Gamasutra? Can't find it now) that talked about user retention in relation to "rewards." They said that it's essentially a pure win to make every single action a user performs reward them in some way. Not a big reward—not a "points in a video game" kind of reward—but at least a pretty sound and an unexpectedly smooth animation (vis. "magic sparkles.") These things do make a difference, and it pays (in a competitive niche) for your app to do them. Just like B2B apps are sold mostly on checkbox features, B2C apps are sold mostly on how pretty they look doing their job in the app-store video.

The talk juice it or lose, by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho, is all about this. Gotta be one of the best talks for anyone trying to make things interactive that also feel good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Wow, excellent talk. I'm generally wary of these kinds of cosmetic changes, but the game really did look and feel so much better at the end.

To argue the case of the middle ground, it's perfectly possible to give the impression of a well animated app without breaking HTML's layout and constraints everywhere. Simple, non-obtrusive animations can give your interface a ton of "app-like" weight, and avoiding the complexity makes it easier for browsers to render, and also generally less expensive to develop in the first place.

If it's possible to do it with the new CSS animations (which should be reasonably well accelerated on modern browsers) and gracefully degrade by... y'know, not having the animations play, that's probably the ideal compromise right there. If you start restructuring your DOM in the name of easier animations or flashier effects, you've gone too far.

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