Are Web Apps An Insult To Users? | Hacker News Reader

Are Web Apps An Insult To Users?

stateofcode.com

18 pointsnephics18 comments

In a free market, the needs/wants of the consumer eventually overrides the desires of the producers. Sometimes it takes a long time, but it always happens eventually. Walmart is an excellent case study in why it's great to be a consumer in today's economy but sucks to be a worker.

When the consensus is "yeah, thick apps are better for users but web apps are cheaper to build and deliver," we can safely say thick apps will eventually win out.

For some reason this article rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's because I feel like the author is using a link bait title to "teach me" something that already seems pretty obvious. The whole question answer setup is annoying.

The title suggests that this article is about user experience when it really feels more like a rehash of pick 2: fast/cheap/quality.

1) Reasonable Time To Market (fast)

2) Flawless user experience (quality)

3) Big Reach (Cheap: big payoff for time/money invested)

What happens when desktop App Stores (e.g. Mac App Store) start taking hold as the primary delivery platform for the desktop? Will they erode some of the benefits of web apps on the desktop?

When development and deployment are easier, the end user will benefit from more frequent updates, fixes and new features.

I agree that native apps are the way to go in a perfect world. And yes, we are developing for the users. However, you are over simplifying the issue. Depending on the type of development you are doing you may also be doing it for the money. So when you are determining HOW to deploy your product you must take into consideration the costs of developing specialized native apps vs browser-wrapped apps. You should also consider the impact it'll have on your user base. Are they going to still use your product if it's non-native? Sometimes the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

*edit: grammar

Exactly.

Not many organizations are going to have the time, money or expertise to make native apps for all the platforms popping up. With some CSS media queries you can have one web app that works on PCs/laptops, iPhones, android phones, iPads, Blackberrys, Palms, Windows phones, etc. Or you can try to build and maintain native apps for 10+ platforms to serve the same audience.

I have to agree with the article. Native apps "feel" better. I think some users feel uncomfortable with going to a web browser on their phone to use an app. Feels fragile and brittle. Like they might accidently close a tab or hit refresh and lose all their data or something. How do I get to it? Where is it in my bookmarks? How many people know about and use Home Screen Web Apps?

I think solutions like PhoneGap is the best of both worlds. Users get their "native" app. Developers get to keep their web app.

Except PhoneGap is not really the best of both worlds. Users prefer native apps because of the quality and consistency of the user interface frameworks available to developers. If you're building your app with HTML/CSS and deploying it within a PhoneGap container, you don't have access to UIKit to build your interfaces, you're still rolling your own which leads to huge inconsistency, not to mention it's within a UIWebView which is much slower than native components.

Just because the app is in an executable and not a URL doesn't mean it's a "native" experience for the end-user.

Why isn't this the case on the desktop?

Isn't it? What do you mean?

I was referring to this comment:

> Users prefer native apps

Why don't they on the desktop?

I think they do, for a lot of things at least. There certainly are some things that desktop users prefer in a browser (I see way more desktop users using Facebook in a browser than via a native app, even though native apps exist), but if I think of the apps that I see people using day-to-day, there's a huge swath that aren't in a browser and it's not clear to me will be in the foreseeable future.

I mean, browser-based email has gotten really good... yet there are still a ton of people that use native email clients. Hell, I and lots of other people even use a native Twitter app on our computers - if there's anything that seems replaceable with an in-browser app, it's Twitter.

Replacement of many native office/productivity/image/media apps with in-browser apps seems a long way off to me. And it's not just because HTML doesn't yet fully provide rich/"native-feeling" capabilities, it's also that people don't want to run all their apps in rectangular browser tabs — maybe OSes will evolve to not be as app centric so that all of a user's in-browser apps won't be organized under a single icon in their dock/taskbar (though I wouldn't bet on it), but I don't see a lot of movement toward that. I wouldn't be shocked if 20 years from now everything's HTML, but it sure doesn't seem like it'll happen in the next 5.

yeah, cause every interface built using UIKit is somehow magically consistent and high quality

If it's easier for a developer to make interesting things, that can translate into a better user experience as it means more interesting things will get done. That (mobile) webapps sacrifice a bit of usabilty for ease of development and portability doesn't mean that users don't derive real value from their existence.

Developing with a cross-platform kit like PhoneGap solves most of the issues here. You'll develop for multiple platforms simultaneously, and can tie into the native capabilities of the platform when necessary.

PhoneGap is pretty sweet, but I found it a little too sluggish for my needs. I switched to Appcelerator Titanium. Like PhoneGap, it's a FOSS package that lets you write cross-platform code in Javascript, except that it compiles the JS to native code. It feels much snappier to me.

I agree with the sentiment of this but sometimes it seems like webapps are faster than native apps. Also, I wonder if Facebook's Project Spartan will change this paradigm

Does anyone have the text of the page? It is not loading for me here.

It's back up now.

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