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Comment by Iftheshoefits | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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 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.

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.

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?

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