As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site.
Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome.
My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind the privacy considerations.
I'm not sure whether it's my imagination, but this seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past year or two, and is no longer limited to apps from shady no-name companies. Apps from reputable companies used to try to have some plausible reason related to your actual use of the app for a notification, but lately Yelp and Hotwire have just started brazenly spamming ads unrelated to any activity. So I uninstalled those two, and am now much more resistant to installing new ones.
On Android, at least, you can disable notifications on a per-app basis. Press and hold on a notification, touch the icon that appears, and uncheck the notifications checkbox on the next screen.
I remember reading about this a while ago; not sure how widely implemented this feature is
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
poorly maintained or non-efficient backend that didn't take note of whether the user receive a push or not leads to this problem. It's not the app problem itself totall
This is a common misconception (also concerning desktop OS "bloat").
As long as those apps are not running at the same time and competing for CPU resources, they could have 100000 apps installed and no issue at all.
Especially with sandboxing and automated resource management in iOS (probably Android too, but not too familiar with it).
It feels like using different apps is like using separate "browser profiles" for each website, which is possibly what I want--it's so difficult to compartmentalize on mobile browsers. So things at least seem isolated to a greater extent than using the same web-browser for everything?
1. An Icon on my Springbroad, so i can easily view it whenever I want to.
2. It should be butter smooth and dont warm my pants after reading. ( i.e lots of CPU cycle. )
Native Apps does better in both department. And whenever users gets a choice most would likely prefer the App version. HTML5 or Web has definitely improve, and it could or will do better then the web if we dont have the Ads constantly loading in the background. ( Ad blocker is another topic )
I guess atavist already have their group of loyal customers it makes sense for them to change.
Personally I see the article mostly complain about the Distribution and Discovery Problem. And some App Store Approval process.
1. You can have an icon for web apps
2. That's only true if the web version is crappy and overloaded with ads and trackers. A decently designed
I prefer mobile web for publications, because it's just a link that doesn't impact my phone. The native integration usually only brings annoyances, like unwanted notifications or sucking the battery to fetch articles I may not read.
Apps are for applications. For content, nothing beats the web.
Exactly. I don't want to read your article over your own dedicated app, I already have a perfectly good browser...
...BUT! I also hate applications made as webpages, because no one can perfectly hide the fact it's not native. In webapps, UI pretty much always lags somewhere, breaks down completely under spotty Internet connection, or does something weird because there's no way for webapp to replicate every aspect of expected UI functionality of user's phone.
3. It should working without a network connection, unless there's an over-riding need
That was there, certainly, but what I read most was the resource cost of covering many platforms, something I completely empathise with.
Or when you want to own your own data, or work offline…
So no, the web cannot do pretty much anything with content and data. The web can do very, very little with content & data, it is just often enough coverage for passive things like articles.
Not on mobile. Due to serious, oft-encountered performance issues, the web remains crippled on mobile compared to native.
By "native" I'm referring to apps where the UI is rendered natively as opposed to being rendered in a `WebView`.
React Native is bending the rules here but it is important to note that it is divergent from the web platform and convergent with the native platforms.
- Companies that publish content that gets linked to and shows up in google search results should mainly be web based.
- Companies that are about about getting stuff done (Gmail, Uber, banks, etc) are the ones who benefit the most from native apps.
With the Apple iOS App Store you are isolated from your users, it is very difficult and nearly impossible to build a list and keep in touch with them in a meaningful way. I am sure there are cases where this isn't true, but I think I can say this is probably the case for the vast majority of apps out there.
By being on the web it is your business, your platform and your users. Not Apple's (or whoever).
And, yes, depending on your niche, building an audience could be very difficult. Guess what? The vast majority of apps on the app store fail. I think we might actually be able to say success on the web might actually be easier.
GQ has a digital app or I can use iOS news stand. This was not a great experience as each issue took at least 20 minutes to download a gig of content. Of course, once the content is there the experience is rich and fantastic.
Based off my experiences, I really think a mobile web experience is best for reading magazines. Only the page I'm interested in would load and I shouldn't have to take up a whole gig of precious space to read an issue.
Just my two cents.
So I'm sticking with native apps where it makes sense.
Having said that, for the type of site this actual post is discussing, eh... web is probably just fine. Go ahead and use it... I have no issue with the linked article, but some of the people discussing this here and other places seem to be nudging this into a discussion about "mobile web is ready to replace all native apps", which IMO is a ridiculous statement.
That's really one of my pet peeves. I don't like installing apps just to read an article. A good mobile site is much preferable in my opinion. But I've started a little bit later than most to the smart phone game and I'm a little bit quirky - so that may be just me.
If a mobile browser behaved like an appstore (Search for website, See results, Click to Install, i.e. bookmark), you would have the same behavior, downloads, and most people would not be able to tell whether they are using an app, web app, or website.
http://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/
Unfortunately, the two largest mobile platforms (iOS and Android) don't have native support for these specs yet. And I'm not sure if they ever will properly support them since they'd probably prefer to keep the free developer lock-in they get with their native app platforms.
In the mean time though, you can use projects like Manifold JS to create Cordova-based polyfills for those platforms:
http://updates.html5rocks.com/2015/03/increasing-engagement-...
There is a trend in Indian startups to abandon the web altogether and go "app only", among other reasons it defeats the entire purpose of the Internet as we know it, kudos Atavist!
They have a beautiful digital magazine that doesn't need to live in a native app -- and had no compelling reason to.
When we started building our smart news app ( more info at https://recent.io/ ) we considered creating a non-native web app and took a few steps in that direction. But we rely on touch gestures a lot, require no keyboard input except for searching, update news recommendations minute-by-minute, and wanted to appear in the app stores, so we went down the iOS and Android paths instead.
It is the worst publishing process I have ever seen. sluggish certificates, keys, provisionning profiles, iOS lack of retro-compatibility, apple lack of communication on what the major versions are changing and apple lack of judgement when reviewing apps with guidelines that are changing every day.
Frankly I don't even understand how can developers enjoy working on developing apps for iOS it is lackluster in every part.
The major versions (and minors) are thoroughly documented in API diffs, the IDE suggests what to modify according to your platform target.
The review guidelines are basically changing for the major versions, accordingly to the new tech introduced, and most of them are dictated by common sense. If something goes awry the review team is available to discuss with you. Good luck getting an Android app reinstated if it is taken down.
The certificates are a pain in the ass, no way around that, but the rest of the platform makes up for this, the tools and language(s) are way easier to use.
The amount of apps, that this phone can download from App Store, whether running iOS 3 or 4, is exactly zero (yes, even those that were available in the past, cannot be downloaded).
My brother has for exact the same purpose the original HTC G1, running Android 1.6. That phone can download every single app from the Play Store, that was made available when the phone was supported.
Now, on the other hand, I have to say, this kind of thing always bums me out. For a news distribution service, it does not matter so much I suspect, but in-general, the trend of putting more and more of the functionality I rely on daily into a web browser is distressing. Web browsers, despite all the innovation and work that has gone on lately, are still an enormous attack surface with the most significant likelihood of security breach (especially given that the rise of javascript has led us all to the point where we are almost allowing arbitrary code execution from untrusted sources on every page visit). Not to mention that web browsers were founded on the notion of conveying content, not functionality; HTML is a markup language (with <canvas> and JS and HTML frameworks, that's not so concrete anymore), it was not meant to host alternatives to the power of native applications.
I often find myself wishing for the ability to use a text-based web browser and have "The Web" still work, but those days are mostly long-gone[1] till I finally get around to writing my own browser[2] (which seems like it should not be a necessary step just to be able to interact with a simpler Web).
I suppose I am just tilting at windmills at this point (and, as I said, this post is not really aimed at atavist since I think content-delivery is a perfect niche for being web-only). Ah well, a user can dream, I suppose…
Did you run metrics to find out how many people are going to miss offline?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
http://caniuse.com/serviceworkers
There's also the Application Cache, which has been fully supported in the stable versions for a while now.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Using_the_...
http://caniuse.com/offline-apps
And of course, FF for Android has an "Add to Homescreen" button too.
Yes, there are a number of apps that cache some data locally, but I believe they're in the minority. Even casual games have to check in with a database and retrieve a couple datapoints about your progress, your in-app purchases, and what powerups are available to you.
Surely the mobile browsers can do that too?
Icon on the home screen and finding the "app" on the store is what most users need (basically bookmarks).
See: Snapchat Discover & Facebook Instant Articles.
If desktop and laptop users access your content/game/social network/whatever from a web page, it's probably best to have mobile users access it that way, too.
And I don't buy their justification for going down the app route in the first place: "But by the middle of 2011, six months after we launched in our app, more than half of installed web browsers were still not HTML5 compliant."
Who cares? The app only targets iOS, so as long as mobile Safari rendered it, they were fine. And most of us here know that the app would be a pretty thin wrapper round a webview.
I suspect the real reason for going down the app route is because back in 2011 all the marketing types were screaming "WE MUST HAVE AN APP!!!1!!"
News International made the same mistake with "The Daily", which (probably) cost them over $60M.
I mean since you're going to fully go web, I don't see the problem in this. It's all JavaScript anyway, unless you want to start playing with the hardware APIs.
Yeah you would have to write some of the UI layer differently, but I think it isn't that much. You can wrap your own UI components to use Android/iOS/Web internally.
It's possilbe that if the design changes are only on the javascript side that the app could just download those instead of them having to be sent for review.
So you have all these apps that were built by someone who has no idea on how to architect them. The company has already spent so much just getting it out the door that they refuse to rewrite it.
Native mobile dev is great. You just need to have good mobile developers run your team.
I don't think expecting a new audience just because you have an app is reasonable. I'd be interested in seeing how many new users they generate with just the mobile web site - I suspect that ultra loyal existing readers may take the time to bookmark their site and come back, but would be very surprised if their overall usage doesn't decline.
yet, there isn't a single "amazing" case of webapp. ( the same for xamarin, phonegap, cordova, name_your_cross_app_development_here )
i call it laziness to learn how to code native apps.
the only cross development that works, is for games ( almost all top 10 mobile games are in unreal or unity ( or cocosx ) )
Text content? Turns out the web is great, and you don't get much benefit from going native.
Highly interactive, multiple control, local database content? Turns out web sucks at it on mobile devices.
