Ask HN: Where will mobile web apps be in 2-3 years? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where will mobile web apps be in 2-3 years?

6 pointskelleolsen6 comments

Today we have seen the announcement of Zend Studio 10 that lets PHP developers build iOS and Android apps. We also see platforms like PhoneGap.

In 2011 Techcrunch published that Facebook has more than twice as many visitors in their HTML5 app than on their native apps. I actually don't know how it is now!

But my question for you is, where will mobile web apps be in 2-3 years?

- Will it beat native apps? - Will native apps in the future be build with web languages? - How will we access mobile web apps in the future? Download through App Store and Play etc. or from the mobile browser?

The discussion with mobile web apps and native apps will never end, before we have the result. But what do you think?

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Tooling is not the problem, the problem is the browsers themselves. On the desktop browsers are updated very frequently, on mobile up until very frequently once-a-year updates were the norm. That's changing on the Android side. So far Chrome for Android hasn't shown to be disruption it was on the desktop, and I'm not sure Google is giving the team the same level of importance as they are on desktop (and Chrome OS).

Firefox has the best chance of being the disruptor, and they seem committed, but it's much harder to do it as a 3rd party browser on mobile for a couple of reasons 1) There is not, yet, consumer demand for 3rd party browsers. The default is accepted as the gateway to the web. 2) It's much harder to make a competitive 3rd party browser due to the APIs that are available. Firefox OS is a better experience than Firefox for Android for this reason.

The wildcard is still Chrome, in my opinion. It seems to me, as a 3rd party observer, that Chrome for Android is still a side-project for the Chrome team who are more focused on their own OS (can't blame them there) and their own app store. If Chrome, which is updated more frequently Android Browser ever did, starts to gain momentum it could be the push that is needed to bring mobile browsers to a place where they are an acceptable "native platform". Chrome still doesn't have a version of "home screen apps" like Mobile Safari has had forever and Firefox for Android now has, so it remains to be seen if that is even a goal of Chrome for Android.

I think native apps will continue to have significant advantages over the time frame you mentioned. The biggest reason is the following:

Steps to open the Facebook web app- 1) Click on browser 2) Type in Facebook.com 3) Sign in

Steps to open the Facebook native app- 1) Click on Facebook

HTML5 (and other web languages, but mostly HTML5) apps may be more prevalent in the future than they are now due to cross-compatibility advantages, but it is still difficult to use phone functionality in comparison to native code.

Your second scenario relies upon credential caching, or "saved logins", and is just as doable for an HTML5 app as it is for a client app.

Facebook still has credentials (vs. some apps that are tied to just the phone number or native Google account tied to the phone) and as such, still requires a login for that initial run, just as an HTML5 app does.

In that regard, it's possible that the non-Facebook app has an advantage in that they can use Google oAuth to authenticate the user which, on an Android phone, already contains an active session, so their login method can be even leaner than the Facebook app (until and unless Facebook changes something, or releases their own hardware).

I realize that but I for one clear my cookies/cache pretty regularly in my browsers while I hardly ever do so for my native apps. I may not be the majority, but my point remains that there is still a higher barrier to entry for browser-based apps.

Perhaps it was just a bad example, but your minority use case rivals my own, which is that I do not save credentials on my Facebook app.

Again though, if app_x implements login-less transactions, perhaps using phone number or phone SSID, or Google oAuth, then they're ahead of the Facebook app, login-wise.

I think Native apps will continue to dominate the market. Surely the power of HTML5 apps will come into play but performencewise native apps will overshadow them.

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