Ask HN: Why do people say that mobile apps are dying?
Granted, I hear this mostly by people in "web3" but is this true? What is your experience, because I think that we're still just getting started with what's possible in the mobile apps space.
It just isn't an attractive place for developers. Companies (especially large ones that dominate the top50 charts) see their mobile apps as costs so they don't really care about making money there.
"Utility apps" (messengers, banking apps, etc.) do OK if the user must use them. All other types of apps are competing against the few big social apps and games that are more than adequate for most users.
It's easy to get people to click "Login with Google". It's much harder to get them to click "Install".
It's strong enough that apps are a part of the marketing strategy, especially if it involves digital purchases. Sites are good for previews, apps for monetization.
It could well be different for US, which is iOS heavy, or the HN crowd which prefers to avoid Google.
Americans are more likely to have a credit card, including minors. In developing countries, a lot of people still transfer money via an ATM. A housewife might go to the store, reload $25 into her phone, use only $5 of that for calls, and the rest is transferred into Google Play credit to buy e-books or in app purchases.
This was the typical user acquisition strategy - get people into the app, then have a site with deeplinking for sharing stuff to the public, like what Instagram and TikTok does. This is no longer valid today.
The average mobile app gets opened 1 time. People have enough apps on there phone, they don't go browsing in the app store for the new new thing anymore.
It doesn't mean that people won't use apps, but the selling feature of your product being an app has no meaning any longer.
For almost all companies, it's table stakes, if you expect people to use your app on the go.
When Uber came out, being able to leverage the tech in a mobile app is what made the app possible. So that was a huge selling point of the company.
There is almost no new capabilities in phones today that allow new experiences.
So, yes, people will still develop apps. Apps themselves are not dead. The web is not dead. Web3 will be a thing, and will change some of how these things operate, but for it to truly work, I think the average person won't understand the difference between their web3 apps and their mobile/web apps.
To some the lack of "forever going to be going to the moon" may seem like dead, to others it may seem very much alive and healthy without that.
I think it goes about in waves where people make mobile sites and think that's enough, then realize that the direct hardware and lifecycle access is actually pretty important after spending a few months wrestling with certain edge cases. And then go overboard with it.
The cycles might happen in different periods of time in different ecosystems, but they also seem to be anchored around technology.
There are a bunch of mobile apps that have no business being native apps (at least by modern sensibility). We are simply course-correcting all that nonsense back to the web.
There was this growing pain where mobile native apps provided a tangible improvement in UX (both in being more performant and by doing stuff that wasn't easily possible) over webapps. Devices were slow and web tech immature. Both those statements are now false(or at least less true). Unless you are interfacing with hardware, dealing with medical assurances, or pushing the boundary of 3D... you don't really need to be native. Webapps fit the mobile bill nicely and are more multiplatform. It just makes sense.
Of course this is just personal experience, but I was doing mobile before the iphone supported native and wrote one of the first native iphone apps.
I haven't used a "new" mobile app in quite a long time must be something to that as well