In the “web vs. apps” debate for online publishers, apps are on a run | Hacker News Reader

In the “web vs. apps” debate for online publishers, apps are on a run

niemanlab.org

34 pointsdnetesn13 comments

From the post: "Smartphone owners “use an average of 24 apps per month but spend more than 80 percent of their [in app] time on just five apps.”"

So you want to be one of those 5 apps, maybe being into the other 19 is acceptable. There isn't space for everybody.

I'd like to know how many web sites smartphone owners look at every day. My unsupported by data gut feeling is that there is more space there: bookmarks are not more manageable than apps but web sites can be discovered and accessed from other sites and even linked from within apps (think FB). I won't recommend going app only. Example: Techcrunch has both and I don't think they would ditch the site. Anybody from TC here?

I dare to say that apps are for frequent readers, probably not all of them.

The notion the entire Internet will narrow down to 10 or 20 non-gaming apps, is obviously absurd. There's clearly vastly more room on the Web. It's going to stay that way.

Take a simple example. Quora, Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, eHow, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, WikiHow, How To Geek, WebMD, Instructables - and about 87 other sites people turn to via Google for information or answers.

There's zero chance a person is going to use all of those in the form of apps. However over the course of time, I've used every single one of them via Google search results (some a lot more than others). On the Web, those services have a lot of real value; were they just apps, probably at least half of them would not exist.

It seems like an assumption has been made that those 24 apps are the same across all users. I take this to be a characterization of a typical user, not a histogram of app popularity.

Gawker and Buzzfeed are building some new apps--so what? We have no idea if they will succeed. That hardly counts as "on a run."

I don't use a single native app for news. Not even aggregators like Flipboard who wrap it up with fancy animations. For me and my friends it's web all the way.

Not sure about others though, I could be an outlier but I'd rather assume not.

I get the "apps for utilities" , but "apps for content"? I just cannot see people bothering to download an app for every website they visit and personally i never have . Data for this?

If it's content that I access regularly (BBC News/Guardian/Twitter/Facebook), then I'll have the app. For other content consumption, I'll use the web.

What I don't understand is why, for organisations whose primary purpose in life is content, it's even much of a dilemma. Putting together a simple web page or a simple app to serve up identical content different ways should really not be a huge amount of work.

If you want your app or site to really stand out from a usability perspective - like Flipboard - then I can understand it. But Flipboard's product is primarily its UI, not its content. For the Beeb and The Guardian, all I want is a reasonably functional app, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a free framework for 90% of what you need on Github for that.

The mobile web is a poverty zone. If you want content that is convenient, native (or at the very least a well-done HTML5 hybrid implementation) is necessary.

My 20 most-used apps:

7 by Google - Chrome, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Calendar, Translate

4 by Facebook - WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram

4 by start-ups - Netflix, Dropbox, Skyscanner, Meetup

3 utilities - Camera, Jota text editor, Avia

3 Netherlands essentials - 9292, nu.nl, NPO

In case of Facebook, nu.nl (News site) and Translate, I actually prefer the mobile site, because their apps are too restrictive and suck at text. I think that's typical for text content apps.

Interestingly, it appears most apps that I use regularly started out as websites that became an app when they were successful, stable products.

Netflix and Dropbox are startups? I know less about Skyscanner and Meetup, but I have a hard time calling Netflix a startup anymore.

Haven't the script already won over the app? Instead of downloading and installing each app, you import / require the modules needed.

There's one huge advantage with apps though, that they are easier to make money from.

My hate for the overuse of "app", isn't a good number of them just web wrappers?

Well, they are downloadable from their respective app stores. Therefor they are apps.

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