Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product.

Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse.

I imagine it like a 3D printed plastic hammer. If I want a cheap toy for my kids maybe it's great, but if I'm putting a new roof on my house I want a real hammer, forged in steel, etc. You know, so that I can have the best tool for driving nails into wood. I don't care that it would be cheaper/faster to make a plastic hammer, I care about a tool that is great.

I know that properly executed and with enough processing power, maybe performance is a mostly non-issue, but in my experience mobile JS dev isn't there yet and it's not remarkably better this year than last.

I hope this Firefox OS thing works out for Mozilla, but until the perf issues are solved, it's not going to be too exciting.

> I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product.

I strongly disagree with your definition of "user experience". I believe that changing phones and having to install different apps, with different UIs, or possibly doing without one because the new phone doesn't have an equivalent, is a bad user experience.

This is my opinion as a user, not as a developer.

So, as a user, you don't change phones to one that forces you to do without your favorite apps, learn a new UI, and so on.

The fact that I need to worry about this at all is a bad user experience.

Because you expect to buy any product at any price and for everything to Just Work — fantasy.

You must have a really tough time renting cars.

Or using remote controls.

So you prefer an objectively worse experience across all two serious platforms in case you switch?

How often are you jumping between iOS and android that this is an actual, real concern?

I disagree that all web apps are "objectively worse". I use HackerWeb[1] because I believe it to be better than any of the Android apps I've tried..

[1]http://hackerwebapp.com/

To be perfectly fair, HackerWeb is the best web application I'm terms of cross platform performance I have ever ever seen.

Edit, wait oops I thought you meant http://hn.premii.com but HackerWeb is well done too!

"To be perfectly fair" implies that it shouldn't count. Does the Premii app demonstrate what can be done given the effort?

To achieve those results requires a lot of effort, and hardcore optimisation. Native coding gets you the same results, minus all that effort (as long as you're okay with targeting one platform), so yeah I was sort of saying it doesn't count IMO :)

That said, I'm building all my applications using web tools, Facebooks React allows for some amazing native performance, cross platform! If the views are decoupled enough, you can get two UIs with the exact same logic client and server side, with near native performance to boot.

Now it's not there yet, but it's super close, and once tooling is built up to tackle this use case with the new tech and architecture (client side), then I think it'll be a very big deal!

It seems to me that switching phones is .0001% of the user experience. Loading the app, tapping things to switch views quickly, etc is the vast majority.

Of course, many users don't think about lock-in until they buy a Roku and discover all those movies they bought on iTunes won't play on it, but I think about it every single time I install an app. That's why I prefer apps that don't burden me with the worry.

User using multiple applications on a single phone is quite a lot more common use case than user using single application on several phones. I'd opt for making the common use case consistent.

I think you're looking at it backwards: App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps. Consumers treat mobile apps like "gladware": they want cheap and disposable/replaceable. This plays very well with companies' desire for cheap production. Hence the steady march toward the commoditization of web app development and the "war" on native, especially in the mobile space.

I completely disagree with you. What's the evidence for this?

my experience is a combination of the two : consumers want (and have) cheap, disposable, well crafted quality apps.

I'd turn the question around: what's the evidence they want well-crafted apps developed with native SDKs or otherwise?

I don't think there is anything like evidence (in the scientific sense) for either position.

I do think the ratio of free to free+IAP to up-front-purchase apps supports my contention rather than the other--people get what they pay for, and they apparently don't want to pay very much for apps. To my mind, this means they don't want to pay for the development effort required to sustain well-crafted apps (or else they believe the development effort required to be either less than what it really is or else that it's overpriced).

This is of course a generalization; as such there are exceptions.

Whether or not people want to pay for apps or not has nothing to do with whether they desire polished apps. Most people don't know a thing about development and the effort required to create a good app, but do seem to appreciate quality.

I don't have good data on this either, but from personal experience here these apps have spread like very quickly through my circle of (iPhone-using) friends:

  Square
  Instagram
  Clear
  Snapchat
  Letterpress

These apps all have something in common, which is that their creators clearly put a lot of care into their products. Most of them still manage to be free, except for Clear.

During the Apple Maps debacle, none of my friends used Google's web app, but many downloaded the native app as soon as it was available.

I really don't understand how you can think that "App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps." If you're right, then how do you explain the success of Apple and the developer community surrounding Apple?

Apple's demographic and target market consists primarily of affluent consumers (high discretionary income) who have a history of spending more than the average consumer for products without regard to quality or functionality. They are not representative of "most consumers" by any measure.

I mostly agreed with you until "without regard for quality or functionality." Either way, apps are extremely inexpensive for the effort put into them compared to say, a cup of coffee. There are also a lot of free or ad-supported apps, which means that price is likely not the main differentiator between two apps. And if that's true, then what else can you use to evaluate an app but its usability?

Do you yourself value cheap and "disposable" apps more than well-crafted ones?

I believe there is always a niche for well-crafted apps. They might not always be the most popular, but often they have higher margins and more passionate users.

Also, companies like Evernote specifically do native apps because they offer a better experience and that leads to happier users, better conversion rates, and ultimately more money.

> the "war" on native, especially in the mobile space.

I actually think its the complete opposite. eg, Facebook, Linkedin

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/17/linkedin-mobile-web-breaku...

They tried web-based apps. They said the experience isn't what people expect as with native.

Why do people stop with this assertion? Why not ask why the experience isn't as good? Who controls the web experience on mobile? (Overwhelmingly) the same companies that control the OS. The web experience simply isn't as important to those companies. There isn't much competition driving the experience to get dramatically better.

This is exactly why Firefox OS exists. Because the web had become stagnant on mobile due to a lack of competition.

Really? I think it's because mozilla foundation is awash in money and egos and answerable only to itself.

Your first assertion is highly subjective, but compared to all the other mobile phone players I'd say it's laughable.

Your second is demonstrably false - both the Mozilla Foundation and its wholly-owned Corporation have awesome boards of directors, and from my experience (having worked and volunteered for Mozilla for many years) the leadership is extraordinarily sensitive to outside advice and criticism from people outside the organization as well as inside.

Mobile has incredibly high barriers to entry, and breaking into it is not easy nor simple, and is not going to happen overnight. However, moving mobile away from locked-in native platforms and onto open standards is a laudable goal in my opinion, as is making inexpensive, capable devices for the next billion people who are coming online.

Somehow I think the next billion people will get their devices with or without mozilla.

Unless Firefox OS is going to add additional APIs that make essentially make web applications proprietary I'm not sure what your point is. The problems with HTML5 development for mobile applications are well known and are the result of an impedance mismatch between the document model and the native controls that the user expects to use on the platform. Simply trying to replicate a native application rapidly introduces complexity which isn't helped by the generally slow performance of DOM interactions with javascript on slower mobile platforms.

Do you think that every vendor purposely downgrades the mobile experience(even vendors like samsung which don't have a reason to favor native vs. web apps)? It doesn't make sense to blame mobile safari, chrome, and ie mobile when google, apple and Microsoft put a lot of resources into their development.

Firefox OS is adding new platform APIs and developing them into web standards: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Reference#Firefox_O...

> Do you think that every vendor purposely downgrades the mobile experience(even vendors like samsung which don't have a reason to favor native vs. web apps)? It doesn't make sense to blame mobile safari, chrome, and ie mobile when google, apple and Microsoft put a lot of resources into their development.

They put far fewer resources into the web on their devices than they do the native sdk. For example, last year Google created "Project Butter" because people were complaining about touch performance on Android. There is no Project Butter for Chrome on Android, even though it has touch responsiveness issues too. Why? Because the former costs them sales of phones and the latter does not.

This is why Firefox OS is important. They are putting all of their resources into making the mobile web better which, hopefully, will lead to a better mobile web on other platforms as well.

I don't think consumers want cheap and disposable. They want faster and sexier, and they want to do what they're already doing, but better. That could mean cheap and disposable, that could mean more expensive but more solid. It also varies from customer to customer.

I don't think this is quite as clear-cut as you say it is.

As well, I think this march is a march fueled by developers, developers who are looking to do what developers are always looking to do: to make developing easier. I don't think it's external pressure fueling this move towards the web, it's developers desire to move towards a more universal/simple platform. If something else had come along before and been able to offer a better "universal runtime" than the web, we'd all be using that. But it didn't, so here we are, taking the path of least resistance.

>I think you're looking at it backwards: App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps. Consumers treat mobile apps like "gladware": they want cheap and disposable/replaceable.

No they don't. They might like them cheap, but they also want them good. Good apps sell more.

Treating your customers like they want cheapo bs is not a business model.

The iPhone was built on this concept in 2007, that applications on a phone should be accessible through a web browser alone. Apple re-thought that idea, but I wonder if mobile HTML5 would in a better place if they had not.

I suspect mobile HTML5 would suck if Apple hadn't started out expecting web apps to be the only option for third party developers. Where has all the alleged competition from android, palm, rim, and microsoft generated advances beyond the huge slew of stuff apple has done?

> Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse.

You see, this isn't an issue with the latest, incredibly fast phones. And all phones are getting faster, so this becomes less and less important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com