Accepting Applications For Better Mobile News | Hacker News Reader

Accepting Applications For Better Mobile News

blog.parsely.com

19 pointsmosescorn19 comments

This points to something I've been talking about with college founders to be: when you think about building something for something you yourself use (i.e. a smartphone) - think about how YOU use that thing.

I would posit that most of what I and average mid-adopters use their smart phones for is mobile web and/or apps that exist on the web first. Mobile web, Google, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all web first or mobile web. Apps are great, but if you're building a native app first ask yourself: why? Is it because you think the App Store is the only place people find things on smartphones or do you NEED native functionality?

Geo-location/push notifications or massive speed upgrades are great reasons. Not saying there aren't great reasons. But the mobile web is an active fucking place y'all.

I'm just a lowly webapp developer, but geo-location is trivially easy in HTML5. Is there something I'm missing?

Not nearly as good as native for precise location. Although there's been some speculation that can be overcome, but yeah.

The geolocation API will be as precise as the information the device feeds it. There is no reason it shouldn't be as accurate as the native API. Unless the device doesn't want to provide a data feed to the browser API for some reason.

Huh? The HTML5 geolocation API will provide the exact same results that the native one will, especially if you use the enableHighAccuracy flag.

Not been my experience at all, but I am probably doing it wrong!

using getCurrentPosition() will have extremely variable results, but watchPositition() will return regular results as it gets more and more accurate.

I've been looking for a news app that I like for iPhone for a while now. The NYTimes app was my go-to, until they made it subscription only (I would happily pay for the app if they would just let me). I thought Flipboard held some promise, but I found it too gimmicky. Other news apps I've tried just didn't do it for me.

Honestly, most of the news I get on my phone comes from Twitter (well, Tweetbot to be more precise). When I want to hit up a news site, I go to Evening Edition (http://evening-edition.com).

I primarily use Tweetbot and Flipboard, both of which give you articles in a browser window. People are so acclimated to the way the web (currently) works, I think they prefer this dynamic. Reading an online article is more ingrained in us than arbitrary apps that come up with fancy interfaces for the content, when all we want is the content in a standard wrapper. Apps are still young, maybe some patterns will start to emerge in the interfaces that will change the OP numbers, but I have a feeling the pattern will be apps that point to browsers.

I think the Twitter part is the main reason that people are reading their news through browsers and not apps- it's all about the discovery.

Interesting that this has just been posted today, though- NYT have posted an experimental version of their HTML5 iPad app: http://app.nytimes.com. If they can bring people in through that, it could be the best of both worlds.

1. Tabs

2. Readability, Apple Reader, etc

3. AdBlock

When News companies get control of the native app, they use that control to fuck the user. The user prefers the browser where he is less fuckable.

I read a lot of news and I use Safari with Apple Reader for almost all of it. I've tried the mobile apps and they are often buggy on top of having many obnoxious properties.

I'm going to say the reason is more simple. Opening tabs is a nicer user experience than opening up one app after another.

Yes, yes, yes! Browsers, even mobile browsers which are still fairly rudimentary[1], have evolved a whole host of useful interactions like loading new tabs in the background to "fork" your session, using bookmarks and history to return to a previous state, back/forward/reload buttons, links that you can copy into email or other web pages, etc. These might not seem very interesting because we take them for granted these days, but it's really powerful that they work across every site and can be further customized on the client side by browsers or add-ons.

People complain that web apps don't behave "natively" and need to reinvent things that native apps get for free. This is true. But native apps also need to reinvent things like bookmarking and tabs that web apps get for free -- or in most cases they simply live without these things and people miss them without realizing it.

I like that some of the web's UI language like the back button is finding its way into operating systems like Android, at the same time that native app capabilities are finding their way into browsers. But browsers still have the edge in "advanced" navigation.

[1] disclosure: I'm a mobile Firefox developer.

This was talked about on HN before, but some of the problems/solutions mentioned about not just mobile news, but online news in general:

1. S/N (signal to noise ratio) of news aggregators.

2. Monetization: Sponsored posts? (Techmeme) Intrusive ads?

3. Mobile first: Think readability.com

4. Opportunity discovery: News to startup founders was leveraging emerging trends before others became aware of them.

5. Personalized news: I think personalization is the reason why zerply.com, dreamforge.me, vastrm.com are doing well right now.

Self-plug: I'm trying to solve the mobile news problem with http://dinopost.com but I need help. Anyone interested in working with me and applying to a future YC class with this? (Open to pivots).

Edit: Subscription box broken. Email me, addy in HN profile.

For a long time now I've wondered why newspaper groups don't come together and build a common walled garden tablet. Android tablets are starting to get very cheap, why not fork android, build your own "news" app store with some very basic rules e.g.

1) only news based services + perhaps twitter & facebook for sharing 2) no free content

Newspapers offer their customers the readers at a subsidised price maybe $19.99 or similar and adopt a "tablet" first doctrine for news.

Might be a way to get people to pay for news...

I can tell you why I use the NY times mobile site instead of the Android app on my Galaxy Nexus: the ads. The ad on the mobile app stays on the screen when you scroll the content. It's frequently an obnoxious color that distracts from the article. In the browser, the ads are similar but as you scroll down they leave the screen.

Simple, but it's enough to make me abandon their Android app.

Does browser access include with RSS feed accessing? Because news aggregators are clearly superior in this sense; why check 10 different apps when one can use 1 app to check the raw data that those other 10 provide?

"The ideal news reading app would collate content from multiple frequently read sites." By Jove! I think he's on to something. Someone call Dave Winer...

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