For Mobile Apps, It’s 1996 All Over Again | Hacker News Reader

For Mobile Apps, It’s 1996 All Over Again

techcrunch.com

40 pointstomh-15 comments

While I agree that the apps market is a huge new thing, I really don't think it is going to continue to take off with no end in sight. We are in unprecedented times, and I think looking at any prior history really doesn't do it justice. But the notion that apps are taking over the internet is somewhat backwards, internet adoption as a whole is up as well, and fervently increasing.

The big change here is that more and more people are adopting smart phones, and smart phones happen to be app focused. Once the web on the phone is even better, e.g. when companies can build 1:1 web:app experiences, you will see less apps.

On a side note, the whole iOS explosion is going to tail off, there are only so many people that buy apps, and it is not a majority that push that market. I think when you compare iOS to Android app purchase rates, you find iOS in a screaming lead if all things else were equal. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I feel it is more related to who the people buying the devices are. The people buying Androids (the massive amounts now) aren't nerds/geeks like everyone seems to think. No, they are regular people that would have got a feature phone but jumped into the Android platform. Where as iOS users are usually people that have been using smartphones for a while, or even iPod Touches that upgraded to the phone experience.

"On a side note, the whole iOS explosion is going to tail off, there are only so many people that buy apps, and it is not a majority that push that market."

Last admob stats survey says 50% of iOS users bought at least 1 paid app a month.

"No, they are regular people that would have got a feature phone but jumped into the Android platform."

And, those people won't buy a 99 cent game or utility app? Somehow I doubt that. I think if anything, it's a psychological barrier that prevents them.

Back in 1996, we didn't trust the web. We heard these crazy stories about hackers being able to blow up your monitor by just sending you a file, and some having their whole identity completely wiped out like in "The Net" with Sandra Bullock. As such, ecommerce wasn't really that big in those days. Fast forward to today, where Amazon is galactically large and people only go to the store to physically touch a product before buying it on Amazon or Zappos or Newegg.

The same is going to happen to smartphones and app stores. Once google checkout is seamless enough to purchase as easily as the App store, you can possibly see 50% of Android users purchasing an app a month. And, no matter how you slice it, 50% in this space is a BIG number.

I’m not sure whether you are right about iOS and Android demographics. I think that first of all, both Apple and Android manufacturers are selling way too many devices for nerds to be any significant proportion of the market. Neither iOS nor Android seem very nerdy to me. I would even go so far as to argue that the demographics for both platforms are probably very similar.

Most of the argument should be native apps versus browser based apps and history really has answered this for us even though we are talking about a different client in the form of a smartphone.

Right, but the desktop web apps typically did not require any access to hardware devices such as the webcam. If they did, Flash solved that problem and we all know what direction that model is heading into.

Mobile apps are interesting because of the access to GPS, camera, accelerometer etc. Until all hardware is accessible through HTML5 providing an excellent UX, the app trend will continue in my view.

Not to mention the performance penalty you'll pay by trying to process that data (camera images, video feeds, accelerometer data) in Javascript.

Some types of apps might work okay as a mobile web app (Facebook comes to mind), but there are definitely many native apps that simply aren't feasible to do in HTML5.

Can you imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app? Yeah, I didn't think so.

That is pretty much why I said "most". There are some legitimate native apps out there. You named one.

Of course I can imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app. Perhaps not at this moment, but within 5 years? And what about technologies like NaCl? It is shortsighted to take such a view of applications that exist within a browser.

And in 5 years where will native apps be?

Yes, they'll be even faster; but the question is whether that performance will still be in demand in 5 years (over, time-to-market, say).

Native apps haven't been in demand on the desktop for a while, and smartphones are getting faster all the time. It seems that will be dual core, 1 GHz this year. How long before performance becomes a non-issue?

Quad core this year. Saw it on Mashable the other week.

http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/qualcomm-snapdragon-2011/#

Quad core is inevitable, it's just a question of when. They say 2012 for the chips in that article; but not when for devices using it. Dual core devices are scheduled early this year.

They also mention 2.5GHz - the big issue is power usage. I guess you you can turn off 3, and underclock when not needed.

In 5 years? Well that is an eternity in the mobile space and you are probably right, there is likely going to be a shift to a standard approach to app (web or native) development. What if a virtual machine such as the JVM existed for both Android and iOS was standard/consistent enough to write cross platform apps?

This topic is very popular amongst hackers lately. I find the web developers in particular resist the native app trend, to avoid Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android). Typical web developer lives in Javascript and a chosen high level language (Ruby, Python) on the server side.

Writes once, run everywhere has been promised forever and delivered never.

I think there is also a veil of saftey / easiness through using native apps through an app store for the lay user. It is purchased through apple and is physically on your phone and has a nice little icon on your background. It is "apple approved" so it is safe. You don't have to go through safari to some random site. I think phonegap was trying to solve this by wrapping websites within their framework but I don't know how much traction they have gotten.

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