The application paradigm is unsustainable | Hacker News Reader

The application paradigm is unsustainable

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This is a pet peeve of mine.

We were told that with HTML5 it would have been soon possible to use a browser to do almost anything (BTW 90% or maybe 95% of which was already doable before) and even the greengrocer around the corner (not really, just an hyperbole) wants me to install an app (which needs to come into two flavours/platforms, IOS and Android).

And now we have (just as we had before) an endless number of half-broken sites (in the sense that there are no two browsers rendering them exactly the same and the usual patches related to identify a specific browser and serving slightly different content are still everywhere) and ON TOP of that an endless number of very "vertical" or "strictly branded" apps.

An additional reason may revolve around the "walled garden" aspect of apps. vs. HTML 5 in a browser. The browser gives me, the end user, some level of control (adblock, user JS, etc.). An app. gives the creator of of the app all of the control. They get to force feed me advertisements via an app. that are much harder to block than if they used HTML5. They get access to much more tracking data with an app. than when an HTML5 page (although HTML is giving away the farm here too). All those aspects, plus others, further combine to push businesses in the 'app' direction so they can make money off of the attention.

My post used the term "application", but I could have written the same thing using the term "website" instead.

I don't think using 1,000 different websites is more sustainable than using 1,000 different applications. The same problems I listed apply in both cases.

We need to completely dissociate the client/interface from the service provider.

That may be a further step, but right now the difference (which I see as huge) is that a link/bookmark (that can actually be re-discovered in no time - if not saved - via Search Engine) takes a few bytes of the (precious, limited in size) storage of my device while the stupid app takes Kilobytes or Megabytes.

Moreover, whilst the site can be found 99.99% of times through a quick search on a search engine, the installed app cannot (unless I miss something) if you don't remember how the stupid icon/logo looks like.

In any case I see lots of people swiping pages and pages before - maybe - finding the stupid app they are looking for.

BTW, it is not an entirely "new" thing, on more traditional desktops each and every stupid program (actually its installer) will try to convince you to add an icon/shortcut on the desktop, I have seen desktops with (literally) several tens of such shortcuts, possibly more, each with a "distinctive" icon.

Android or IOS do the same, but due to the limited size of the screen you can have at the most - say - 16 or 25 icons per page, you need to swipe to the next page, visually scan for the icon, miss it, go ahead, go back, etc.

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