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Comment by klaustopher | Hacker News Reader

From some technical perspective, the author might be right ... But what he is totally missing is the user side.

When seeing an ad for a service on TV (which is where most of users are coming from if you are talking B2C businesses) or anywhere else, every user goes to the app store and enters the name of the service there. I have seen quite a few businesses try the "mobile website only approach" and as soon as they started real world ads (read: not online), they very quickly realized they needed to be on the app stores. Cordova[1] might be a solution for that problem but then you would have to write a Cordova app and not _just_ a mobile web site ...

So, completely disregarding the user story, the author might be right. But when your app is trying to reach end users, there's absolutely no way around the App Stores in the foreseeable future.

[1] https://cordova.apache.org/

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> every user goes to the app store and enters the name of the service there.

Do you have data for that? I've never seen anyone do that, and it hadn't even occurred to me to do it.

I'll see if I can find some research later that supports this.

But at the last places I used to work for that did B2C with apps, I know that during the times we ran TV or newspaper ads, the app installs increased exponentially while Google and Bing searches stayed almost the same.

I think at some point, we could feasibly reach a point in development where the website could also be the native app. In that case, the app store is essentially a self-contained browser, running the mobile site.

The reality of that situation right now is not pleasant. Some apps already do this (looking at you Wells Fargo) and the experience ranges from awful to passably ok.

Ignoring all of the technical hurdles for the moment, we should also stop to consider some of the real world implications of native apps. Does my calculator really need an internet connection? Couldn't I play flappy bird while in airplane mode? Even apps which depend on an internet connection to function (like an RSS reader) can still serve some functionality out of their caches when offline. But if the app itself is delivered as a mobile web page, those features won't exist.

The spec for webapps does allow them to function without an internet connection. It's extra work, but you can get it to work.

This is not true. See Service Worker and the older application cache fallback.

That's an absolutely absurd notion. Ads usually direct users to a URL, and every app I've ever been a part of got almost all of its converting download traffic from the website, not from an app store search.

Almost everyone knows what to do with an www address, enter it in google search! (smilie)

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