Hacker News Reader

Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

My strong intuition is that the era of apps as centers of profit themselves is going to be short lived.

People are going to get tired of the gimmicky games. Content-oriented apps are going to be easier to code as HTML5. Big companies like Facebook will probably still find value in building native UIs but the number of apps actually making money via sales in the app store is going to dwindle off.

View on HN

I don't know, things actually seem to be trending the opposite. Who would have thought that people would spend so much time in facebook playing games that have seemingly no point.

I also disagree that HTML5 is any easier. After over 20 years of trying, it seems unlikely that browsers are ever going to converge on any kind of standard and even if they did there will probably always be people on a bad version.

Personally, I'm betting on a world with native front ends to REST web applications.

You may not be old enough to remember this, but this isn't the first time that games have been so dominant in popular culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.

Sound familiar?

Not really because people were paying for this. They don't have to pay to play scamville.

Facebook ironically does not build real native apps, they are just beautiful HTML wrappers. FB apps are an example of user experience regressions, as they were by far snappier two years ago.

Yeah I'm aware of that but from what I hear they have native apps in the works.

Of course, if even Facebook prefers to build HTML apps what are the odds that smaller companies are going to go to the extra trouble and expense of native?

If you go the 80/20 route, you'll only need an iOS anyway, and later on you can add an Android app - that's what they all do now, anyways. Perhaps that will shift to Android-first when everybody and his dog has a cheap Android phone (I hope not!).

Pseudo-native HTML apps are inferior, and people will notice it. I'm quite fed up with the FB apps on both iOS and Android because they spend more time with loading than the in-browser version. It's so bad that I actually considered if FB wants to drive people away from mobile so they click more ads in the browser - I don't think that's really the case though.

I think it very likely is the case. They can't put ads on the iOS app without giving Apple a cut so they are very likely making the App subtly worse as time goes by.

Will people notice it -- and leave the app? Or will a few geeks complain.

Ask Apple if paying attention to minute details (which the average user does not mention) has paid off in the long term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com