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Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? As you mentioned, the unique inputs seemed to have temporarily blinded us to real progress we've made with the web. Why can't web-based apps accept all these inputs as well?

The other big problem we have is that we're stuck with this idea of having cute little icons to launch things. Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they?

Edit - Would someone care to explain their downvotes? Surely HN users wouldn't think to use a downvote to express that they just disagree, right?

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> Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they?

That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL.

People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK.

The reasons for this are simply technical ones.

I think Palm & WebOS were on the right track by making their native apps still based on web technnologies. As far as I know there weren't any mobile inputs that those apps couldn't handle. Blaming limitations on tech seems silly. The decision was a business one.

Besides that, why take away the ability to create webbased apps? Could we not have the option if I know I don't care about any of the fancy stuff. There are so many apps out there these days which are just shells of an app with a WebView inside. It feels a bit ridiculous to have to buy Apple hardware to make a shell and then use our preferred dev environment to develop the site/internals of the app.

You're talking about 2011 storylines.

There were plenty of discussions about HTML5 vs native mobile apps. Big companies like Google and Facebook extolled HTML5, partly because they needed leverage against Apple's stronghold over the dominate ecosystem. So yes, the decision was a business one to begin with.

Then when reality didn't fit their agenda they've all since switched positions in 2012. Facebook rebuilding their iOS app with Obj-C, for example, to be as fast as possible. So then the decision ultimately became a technical one.

Maybe it'll flip flopped around soon. We did go through a period in the 90's when CD drives came out and everyone rushed in to deliver as much multimedia content on CDs as possible before that industry died and gave way to the ubiquity of the Internet.

In the future, smart phones are the CDs.

You can just write web apps for the iPhone, even today. And yes, you can create an icon in Speongboard so that it looks just like a native app. That's how I use Google Maps on my iPhone.

    >I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea?

Native apps weren't a good idea for innovative reasons or to push boundaries of what's achievable, they were a good idea for business reasons: vendor and platform lock in.

And yet web apps don't seem to solve vendor lockin either; see Facebook, Twitter and most recently (and poignantly) Google Reader. And before you mention that people were able to move from Google Reader to something else, you might want to consider it was because it was based on an open protocol (RSS) that wasn't tied to either native or web.

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