Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Couldn't disagree more. I greatly prefer native clients and will be way more inclined to use a service that offers/allows them. Here's why:

1) I don't like having all my eggs in one basket. I have multiple browser windows each with multiple tabs. Things simply get lost in the mix. My OS has always had a better task switching UI than my browser.

2) Web browsers crash. So do apps of course but the damage is localized. When a browser goes down hard I lose everything. Doesn't happen very often but definitely more often than a kernel panic.

3) Web apps tend to still be slow and clunky. For example I get scrolling lag on the G+ page. I would use it more often if I just had a G+ app available.

4) Native apps can be segregated. I don't really trust companies like FaceBook or Google not to spy on every bit of data they can find via my browser. It seems to be totally acceptable to them. Less likely to happen with native apps.

5) I want the best integration possible with my OS.

Couldn't disagree more neither.

1. OSes have poorer ways to manage more than 7 windows; things get lost quickly.

2. Native apps crash often. In Chrome, you usually just lose the current tab and reload and go to another functionality of the page easily.

3. Native apps tend to be slow and clunky especially when dealing with online data especially when you are mobile.

4. Native apps are definitely a bigger threat to privacy; They have more access to your hardware and OS.

5. I want the best integration possible with the Web.

In addition, (6) Different inconsistent releases across different OSes, (7) Native apps are usually poorer in functionality than web counterparts (8) Native apps are poorer in integration (sharing, social integration, pinning) (9) Native apps can't link (10) Native apps can't be searched and indexed - they are opaque silos (11) Native apps don't make their developers any money as of 2012 (12) Native apps are terrible way to allocate company resources for most online businesses - supporting min 3 releases on Apple, some on Android, WP, BB.. (13) Native apps get mainly coded by retarded development tools - Objective C, Java, C# - It is a hack to code with Ruby, Python, Haskell, or anything more pleasant - though some options exist (RubyMotion, rhodes) (14) ...

Isn't the browser a native app on every platform? So obviously a native app can do all the things that you say it can't do.

Could this discussion not degenerate into FUD and mudslinging, please?

Couldn't disagree more with what? The part where I say that Facebook have decided that a native app is good business sense and I trust that they're right?

At no time do I say it makes zero sense to develop a native app, ever. Just that sometimes it doesn't, that it's business, not a whim or a slight, and that over time those apps that can run in a browser, will.

Lots of room for debate over what constitutes an app that "can run in a browser," of course. But despite the title, I don't think what I wrote suggests that native apps are some kind of evil.

Items 1,2,and 4 are solved by running an app in its dedicated browser instance. There are simple tools for making containers like this.

4 is completely backwards. A native app has far more ability to spy on you, even to mutate data across your system, than a browser-sandboxed web app.

Also, you have no idea whether native apps are sending your data securely (without using something like Wireshark). With Web apps its trivial to check for HTTPS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com