Are apps even that relevant anymore?

> Even now with my own projects, a well optimised mobile website beats an app most times.

I seriously doubt that, if my 8 core macbookpro has issues with half of the web (event my own react projects of sizable complexity start to have issues), doubt mobile devices don't. And I honestly can't speak for Android, but being both and iOS and React developer, iOS performance in pretty much anything compared to React is amazing.

Also, the second part, I have been doing research lately, and while the dev.to or HN crowd says they visit the mobile websites, market research shows that people spend around 90% of their time in apps versus 10% in mobile web, so seem users find them relevant.

I know developers don't like 'closed' systems and love the web, but I (and most people I know) personally prefer a app over a mobile experience 99% of the time.

This was what Jobs initially claimed to want, and Apple several times acted to enforce. For a while they were really negative on apps that were simply wrappers around websites.

But the market spoke, and now Apple seems to be very much on the other side of things along with nearly every company out there.

Some possible reasons: Bookmarks to websites get buried in long ever-growing lists of bookmarks, while installed apps take up precious visual screen space. Users are generally more tolerant of an app taking a couple of seconds to load than a website, and less tolerant of subsequent navigation taking time, and apps tend to match those expectations more closely than web pages. And maybe apps still deliver functionality that websites can't, or can't as easily. Oh, and an app, once downloaded, usually keeps working consistently, while websites often are updated or completely disappear.

For whatever reason, people seem to prefer apps to websites, and I'm not sure I see that changing much.

I think that there are still certain classes of app that benefit strongly from being native rather than just a web app.

To give an example, Christian Selig's Apollo iOS client for Reddit is lightyears ahead of both the Reddit mobile website and the official Reddit iOS app. By using the native iOS APIs and matching what people expect from gestures on an iOS app, he's able to create an amazing experience for users.

I have almost no apps on my iPhone, and rarely use it other than calls, text, News, photos and maps. When I use it for web surfing, which is how I access News, I use Firefox, not Safari.

As for myself, I decided from the start not to develop "apps" for iOS or Android and instead keep building "web apps" instead. My apps are all business tools so I really don't need any special access or permissions to make them usable.

I will say LocalStorage sucks and I wasted too much time trying to make it not suck. In the end I gave up so Apple's and others decisions to stomp on it won't really affect me or my apps' users.

But Local-First assets and data management are something that developers will have to demand and there seems to be little thrust for that right now. Still, the shine is most certainly wearing off the hype developers were attracted by for these platforms so we might start seeing some movement that direction soon now.

I've been working on a local-first, offline-first, web app for desktop PCs that uses CouchDB installed on the user's PC instead of a CouchDB in the Cloud. Used this way with a web app CouchDB is somewhat akin to a sandboxed runtime engine for web apps on the client side. And the increase in performance of the app is quite noticeable. I think it's fair to say it runs at near native speed.

Configured with service workers to run offline first the web app only checks the server to see if any updates have been issued and if not it never sends any data over the internet.

It's very easy to provide the user an option to sync their local CouchDB with one in the Cloud, and they can turn that option on and off. When it's on they can access their data with any device and "Live Sync" the data between the Cloud CouchDB and their Desktop CouchDB.

Now, it's beyond my skills to develop it but it seems to me that a sandboxed runtime engine for web apps on mobile devices would be a good thing for us all. Of course, I don't think Apple and Google think so, but they do most definitely depend on indie developers to entice people to use their devices.

Please stop making terrible web apps - all these "revolutionary" re-invent-the-wheel frameworks are not making things any better, they are still a major pain to use and highly inefficient. Native apps will always have a better experience for anything other than general web browsing/reading/searching.

The argument was, the web and its tech is too slow for phones, we need apps.

This is no longer true and apps are a pain in the rear when it comes to all the integrations you have for mobile aware sites.

How can app content be crawled, don't ask it's a major pain. How do you track usage like site clicks, ouch! How about integrations like commenting or site support chat, good luck, there might be one for your app.

Not to mention the 30% vig to Apple and Google, or the lock-in.

Many thought apps would bring money back into what sites were giving away and ok, it did -- for Apple and Google.

Can we please stop making "apps" now?

Native apps are still more pleasant and performant enough that they make users happier than mobile web apps and PWAs. Web apps have become better, so native apps are not mandatory to achieve acceptable levels of performance, but at the same time, the cost of developing and releasing a good native app has fallen, so the utility of native relative to incrementally improving a mobile web app is still quite good.

Developers may not like that this is the case, but I expect users will like being provided a better experience for some time, and that we’re likely to see companies develop natively for new platforms faster than native apps for mature devices will be folded.

As long as iOS Safari still hasn't implemented push notifications, apps are needed to fill that gap. Everything from a messaging to news, even a weather app benefits from push notifications.

There are many reasons:

1. They want the distribution effect of the app store. You can go from zero to king overnight if the app store features your product.

2. Unless you're building a dumb wrapper around a CRUD backend app, most apps need access to the state of the art API. Especially if you're aiming high, chances are, you won't be able to find a new app idea without using the new APIs because the old APIs have been experimented on by millions of developers already.

3. Apple has declared recently that they're going to cripple the browser localstorage and cookies so everything gets reset if you don't use them for 2 weeks. I think they will do this more and more (it's also good for user privacy so they do have a moral high ground)

I try avoid installing apps unless it's something I really want and the app is far better than the web site. Apps these days are loaded with spyware. I assume that any mobile app will track me as much as it can possibly get away with. It's almost like voluntarily installing malware.

Web sites track too of course, but their capacity to do so is more limited. I fully revoke location, camera, and microphone from the browser, so all it can do is track me on the web and get a very rough idea of location via GeoIP. Desktop apps can also track, but mobile offers a lot more intimate information (especially location) and is constantly connected.

The distribution alone in the App Store make it worth it. Websites traffic dies down when you dont do anything but the App Store will consistently get passive users viewing

Such an oversimplified view of things... I guarantee at least 50% of apps cannot be built with Web APIs alone (especially on iOS where Apple is intentionally limiting Web API adoption to drive up their App Store revenues).

As a consumer, apps are a privacy concern. Firefox lets me tightly control what websites do, but apps can silently track me. They also often use notifications to increase engagement. Apps often benefit the makers more than the users.

As a maker, apps are a pain in the butt. I can get a website online in a few minutes, and it stays there forever. Every app I've made is now gone because I got tired of keeping up with app store requirements. I never made an iOS app because I won't pay 100€ for the privilege.

There are challenges retaining users and bringing them back to a webapp instead of a native app. That being said I also am hugely in favour of web apps because the likelihood of people visiting my site is higher than them downloading my app. So user acquisition is easier but retention is hard. I do like the idea of email notifications as a replacement for push notifications - I think others such as Twitter/FB notifications could also work.

Privacy oriented apps like, "Signal" are more relevant than ever.

I guess If I were to develop an app (free but with ads) for the browser then I would be worried about ads blockers, that doesn't work if my app is a native app.

Most apps are just copy cats, the gold race is long gone.

Applications have never been more relevant. In my opinion, we should return to native-only programs and have only semantic HTML in our browsers.

No and apple needs to be broken up to permit innovation 3.0