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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

It's so much easier to deploy and update web apps: https://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field

The UI for webapps is worse than for desktop apps, but not degrades enough to compensate for the better deployment story. (For most apps.)

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This doesn't explain the mobile app boom then. There are more Windows desktop devices than all of all the Apple ecosystem. Also, there is a higher cost for webapps, since you need to host it on your own instance. If you want an easy deployment method you can use one of the package managers out there that make deployment and upgrading easy. Hell windows has winget and chocolaty now which make deployment and update easy.

Apple has hamstrung Safari so it's not capable enough to replace webapps (chiefly for notifications)

The nakedly predatory user-hostile nature of many large actors on the web really gave them no choice.

Do you think it's that or they'd prefer to get their 30% cut of transactions?

I think it's that. Remember that Steve Jobs didn't want third party apps on the iPhone and had to be talked into it.

Right, the original story was write web apps. So Apple has changed tunes on this topic before.

Steve Jobs is dead, and Apple's primary responsibility is to its shareholders, not its users. Subtly and pervasively hamstringing PWAs doesn't protect users. What would it even be protecting them from? PWAs that work well offline? No, it just coerces developers into writing native apps and distributing them through Apple's App Store instead.

While being locked in to a single app store without jailbreak isn't ideal, I'd rather have a native app on my phone than some lowest-bidder web app that downloads 10MB every time and runs terribly.

> doesn't explain the mobile app boom then

If my laptop is connected to the Internet, it's fast. That isn't as universally true on mobile. (Desktops are also more reliably connected to the internet when on.)

But the performance is worse. I point out the example of a small spreadsheet. Open it in Google sheets, and you are using 1/2 gigs+ in ram plus heavy cpu. Open it in a desktop app maybe you will use 20 to 30 mb of ram, and low cpu usage.

But many of us are not very heavyweight docs/slides/sheets users. For 95%+ of what I do just having a web experience on a browser that’s just a login away is an infinitely better experience than the old desktop days.

In general there’s plenty of performance to go around. For many things I don’t see a big difference between an M1 Pro MacBook and 6 yo machines.

> the performance is worse. I point out the example of a small spreadsheet. Open it in Google sheets, and you are using 1/2 gigs+ in ram plus heavy cpu. Open it in a desktop app maybe you will use 20 to 30 mb of ram, and low cpu usage.

Performance, measured in human units--e.g. time to load, refresh, et cetera--is fine. That's what ultimately matters. The customers are the humans. Not the machines.

How many people are willing to pay on Windows Desktop for apps vs iOS consumers?

Surprisingly a lot. Look at steam or epic games. If those platforms also advertised non game software, people would buy it.

Steam supports non-game software, but they haven’t managed to attract all that many sellers to their marketplace.

Steam does and people don’t though.

Anecdotally, most teams I know building mobile apps are using some sort of cross platform toolkits, unless native is really required. So you're kinda killing many birds with one stone.

Totally, I'm using Flutter for that reason. But I built a simplified SDK that can also be used from the back-end with any supported language. I'm planning on releasing an Open Source edition (which is the whole thing right now) soon: https://nexusdev.tools/

>the mobile app boom

Are these genuinely useful apps or cynical efforts to clone popular games/apps and monetize via ads? If the latter, volume says more about the business model than demand for novel functionality.

> This doesn't explain the mobile app boom then.

I feel that it doesn't make sense to expect the exact same transition desktop went through to happen on mobile, mobile is just different and has a different set of constraints.

Mobile is about discoverability and money. iOS users are more willing to pay for apps than any other platform, and every established business wants an app so they can be on more devices.

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