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Comment by shanselman | Hacker News Reader

Apps are the new CD-ROMs. The Web will win.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AppsAreTooMuchLike1990sCDROMsA...

All this "the web will win" is bad bad bad. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems like I am one of the few people left who actually cares about standalone apps which I can download to my harddrive and then even use in the case that a) i don't have internet connection b) the product was killed by the company or c) that the company itself still exist. Just think about the idea that all arcade machines like pacman were "cloudbased". I am pretty sure all those games would have been lost long ago and nobody would be able to pay them in mame today.

What I'd prefer to see is "the internet-harddrive based on a gitlike technology wins" (something like encrypted remote ZFS with full versioning and some additional database capability for metadata). Either I host this internetdiscs on my own or I just rent some space at some random provider. Or I do both and do automatic synchronisation between them for backup purpose. When it comes to most tasks, the only role the internet should play is to synchronize my data between all of my devices. I never want to be in the situation where I depend on a website of a flshy new startup which might be dead in a few months.

(I hope my intent is clear, I am on my phone right now and hate to type long texts this way)

Curious question. How many apps do you have that are not games and very niche that don't require an internet connection?

I tend to find that the most useful apps require a connection to login, refresh data, etc.

I did not say that apps should not use the internet at all! For updates, new content and so on some reliance on the internet is totally fine, I just hate apps which will not work offline altough there is no logical reason to do so. I uninstalled several singleplayer games just for this reason.

The only apps which I regularly use on my phone are:

- sms/messages

- email

- whatsapp

- webbrowser

- alien blue for reddit

- weather app

- look up contacts/phone numbers

- camera app / panorama app

- sudoko style puzzle game

- a simple app to track my spendings

- some other small single player games

So the first half of the list obvioulsy requires internet connection but the rest should be strictly offline except for updates and perhaps new content.

And I am not so much worried about my phone apps but more about programs which I need for work on my deal computer. Right now I am using Word/Office a lot but somehow I am afraid that in a few years there will only be some cloud based online version left.

But don't you really wish that your camera/panorama app were a webpage? Then you could use the same one across all of your devices, and you wouldn't need to install anything! And instead of doing local processing on your phone to stitch things, it could send the photos out to a datacenter for stitching and get a finished image back! And if you're out of cell range, maybe it could just cache any camera data and let you see the finished images later when you're back online. And it'd be great for disk space, because everything lives in the cloud and instead of saving videos locally you just have to wait for them to load and use a bunch of bandwidth every time you want to watch one.

Yeah, me neither.

I travel quite a lot with trains in southern Germany and the internet connection there is _bad_. So no, I don't want my camera app to be a webpage. Or if you hiking in the mountains and you want to make a paborama but you realize that there is no connection? Or i travel to asia for a few weeks but I can not access my camera webpage because roaming costs are too high? Or apple bought my favorite camera app and now the app/webpage is gone (I am looking at you, Snappycam)?

For a lot of applications it totally makes sense to augment its functionality by some internet connecticity, I am just against all apps/webpages which force me to be online even tough main functionality of this app would work without internet.

PDF reader and Kindle are probably my most used apps.

Priority Matrix does a good job working offline, even without an account.

I have an app called TripView. It gives public transport information and you can plan a trip using it. It does use internet for updating and real time information. But the main reason I use it is because It doesn't need an internet connection to work, unlike Google Maps or 131500.com.au.

Except the web has always been a Frankenstein mess for development and still is.

As someone with long experience in both fields back to the 8 bit days, I welcome the native renaissance.

has always been a Frankenstein mess

cough Android gargle

Or for that matter, rewriting your app for every phone platform.

> Or for that matter, rewriting your app for every phone platform.

Cordova, Qt/C++, Xamarin Mono, Unity, Cocos-2D-X, Titanium, ....

There are lots of alternatives to minimize duplicate native code. Plus it is not as if one doesn't need to write once, debug everywhere with HTML 5.

And how much of the apps written with such frameworks will feel remotely like a native app? How much of the frameworks you mention even support a reasonable amount of target platforms?

I don't disagree HTML5 has porting problems between devices & browsers. I'm just saying that native apps have more.

I can't speak for all of them but I use Xamarin at work, and it absolutely does translate to native look and feel for the app. Although once you get to the GUI layer, it's not much more than a thin C# wrapper for the native OS framework and you have to write a lot of platform specific code. But everything else is cross-platform. And you're coding in C# and not Objective-C (or Java), which is a more predictable and less verbose experience, at least for me, and I've made half a dozen apps using Objective-C.

I sure hope that the "native renaissance" is not entirely proprietary spamware. "Apps" need to die and real software needs to take its place.

I hope by native renaissance, you aren't referring to "only on Apple iOS"

"Yes, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is a mess and it's hard, but it won't always be." - Let's wait till then.

Web developers have been claiming forever that the web will take over and nobody will need apps or software outside of a browser, but is not close to becoming true yet on mobile. If you're considering making a poor web app or a poor native app, your time is probably better spent on the web app. Even if you're crafting an average app, it's probably a better use of your time to just get it working on the web. But the UX and speed that is possible in an exceptional native app is just not possible on the web today.

Airbnb absolutely benefits from having a fantastic app experience. Facebook and Twitter absolutely benefit from having exceptional apps. Google's iOS Gmail app isn't even a very good app (slow performance from being a web wrapper?) but it's still way better than using the web app in Safari. Basically if user experience and speed are a high priority and you are capable of making a decent app, the web is not a substitute for a native app.

There's actually nothing technical on any mobile platform preventing apps from linking together. The reason it's not done is that in-the-cloud companies prefer the intermediary links be done in the cloud where the data can be analysed (inter app analytics is big business), and users actually find it disconcerting or mildly confusing, when the cloud model is actually that much worse for them.

What amuses me about the "web will win" crowd is you don't have to dig very far to find they all have a radically different conception of what they mean by the web.

Well there is, and that's called 'They won't let you onto the App store if you link data between apps directly on the device'. Plus there's legitimate concerns about malicious behavior if you don't stay confined to your pre-determined sandbox. But this is one of my biggest annoyances as a developer, and I can't wait for a mobile device that will let me write scripts freely that allow me to directly interact with the file system and manipulate those files however I wish.

I don't see why trusting random strangers with data is a good default, in fact so good that it should be the only option. I don't see why anyone but advertising firms and the like would actually want such a future.

Access to user data and native vs. web are orthogonal concerns.

E.g., on iOS you don't have to give an app access to any data, but can still have the app installed -- access is a post-install, standardized dialog when the app requests permission.

Similarly you could easily invent web apis that would give access to data (like location, which already exists).

My point was that web applications would typically have access to more data per default, in a world with no native apps with all your applications in "the cloud" more of your data would likely also be in the hands of others. I don't think they are orthogonal concerns at all.

Regarding the Coding horror link here though, I do agree with the point about native applications that essentially are repackaged web pages.

Ah, I took your point to be completely the opposite! Oops.

Whether it's a native app or "in the cloud", I think most people want their data to be synched across devices, so you're going to have to trust somebody with it.

(Well, unless you're synching encrypted data, but maybe what we should all be doing, but I wouldn't hold my breath...)

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