
Are apps even that relevant anymore? - stokesyio
https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/are_apps_even_that_relevant_anymore
======
odshoifsdhfs
> Even now with my own projects, a well optimised mobile website beats an app
> most times.

I seriously doubt that, if my 8 core macbookpro has issues with half of the
web (event my own react projects of sizable complexity start to have issues),
doubt mobile devices don't. And I honestly can't speak for Android, but being
both and iOS and React developer, iOS performance in pretty much anything
compared to React is amazing.

Also, the second part, I have been doing research lately, and while the dev.to
or HN crowd says they visit the mobile websites, market research shows that
people spend around 90% of their time in apps versus 10% in mobile web, so
seem users find them relevant.

I know developers don't like 'closed' systems and love the web, but I (and
most people I know) personally prefer a app over a mobile experience 99% of
the time.

~~~
cblconfederate
> people spend around 90% of their time in apps versus 10% in mobile web, so
> seem users find them relevant.

Which apps? 50% of the time is spent in their most popular app, and 97% of the
time is spent in their 10 most popular apps. Considering that the top spots
are taken by fb/instagram/whatever, what's left for discovery? I'd argue that
the 10% spent on the browser is 99% of the discovery that users do, probably
via links from their favourite apps.

It seems the app space is way more overcrowded than the web.

~~~
maxharris
There are a lot of things you just can't do well on the web. I'm writing an
iPad drawing app that renders using Metal. It barely sips any power, while
doing a great deal more work than Electron apps like Slack do.

It was much easier for me to write without the limitations of the browser and
the web APIs getting in my way. Apple's APIs have a few warts, too, of course,
but they are easier to work around.

------
pwinnski
This was what Jobs initially claimed to want, and Apple several times acted to
enforce. For a while they were really negative on apps that were simply
wrappers around websites.

But the market spoke, and now Apple seems to be very much on the other side of
things along with nearly every company out there.

Some possible reasons: Bookmarks to websites get buried in long ever-growing
lists of bookmarks, while installed apps take up precious visual screen space.
Users are generally more tolerant of an app taking a couple of seconds to load
than a website, and less tolerant of subsequent navigation taking time, and
apps tend to match those expectations more closely than web pages. And maybe
apps still deliver functionality that websites can't, or can't as easily. Oh,
and an app, once downloaded, usually keeps working consistently, while
websites often are updated or completely disappear.

For whatever reason, people seem to prefer apps to websites, and I'm not sure
I see that changing much.

~~~
cglong
Almost all of those have been solved by Android's PWA implementation. I can go
to an enabled site and add it to my apps list. After that, it looks and acts
like any other app on the device [except that it doesn't take up any space on
my phone :)]

~~~
pjmlp
It might take if distributed as TWA, given that then it gets FFI access to
Android APIs. :)

However PWAs still fail short of stuff like 3D capabilities, given how limited
they are versus the actual APIs, e.g. WebGL 2.0 vs OpenGL ES 3.2.

------
sq_
I think that there are still certain classes of app that benefit strongly from
being native rather than just a web app.

To give an example, Christian Selig's Apollo iOS client for Reddit is
lightyears ahead of both the Reddit mobile website and the official Reddit iOS
app. By using the native iOS APIs and matching what people expect from
gestures on an iOS app, he's able to create an amazing experience for users.

~~~
bagacrap
That doesn't seem like the best example, since you just said his native app is
better than a native app. Perhaps he's just a better designer.

~~~
sq_
Fair point. What I was mostly trying to get across is that native mobile apps
can leverage UX/UI features not available to mobile web apps (hence the
comparison to the Reddit mobile web client).

Being/having a good designer definitely helps, but it seems to me that there
are serious benefits to not being constrained by whatever web browser the
platform you’re working on provides.

------
oblib
I have almost no apps on my iPhone, and rarely use it other than calls, text,
News, photos and maps. When I use it for web surfing, which is how I access
News, I use Firefox, not Safari.

As for myself, I decided from the start not to develop "apps" for iOS or
Android and instead keep building "web apps" instead. My apps are all business
tools so I really don't need any special access or permissions to make them
usable.

I will say LocalStorage sucks and I wasted too much time trying to make it not
suck. In the end I gave up so Apple's and others decisions to stomp on it
won't really affect me or my apps' users.

But Local-First assets and data management are something that developers will
have to demand and there seems to be little thrust for that right now. Still,
the shine is most certainly wearing off the hype developers were attracted by
for these platforms so we might start seeing some movement that direction soon
now.

I've been working on a local-first, offline-first, web app for desktop PCs
that uses CouchDB installed on the user's PC instead of a CouchDB in the
Cloud. Used this way with a web app CouchDB is somewhat akin to a sandboxed
runtime engine for web apps on the client side. And the increase in
performance of the app is quite noticeable. I think it's fair to say it runs
at near native speed.

Configured with service workers to run offline first the web app only checks
the server to see if any updates have been issued and if not it never sends
any data over the internet.

It's very easy to provide the user an option to sync their local CouchDB with
one in the Cloud, and they can turn that option on and off. When it's on they
can access their data with any device and "Live Sync" the data between the
Cloud CouchDB and their Desktop CouchDB.

Now, it's beyond my skills to develop it but it seems to me that a sandboxed
runtime engine for web apps on mobile devices would be a good thing for us
all. Of course, I don't think Apple and Google think so, but they do most
definitely depend on indie developers to entice people to use their devices.

~~~
mandeeeeeep
Have you used say gmail on web vs app, or youtube web vs app. You may not have
much of a need for a apps in your life or you are opting for an inferior
experience and making your life harder.

~~~
scarface74
The YouTube iOS app is worse than using their app. Their app doesn’t do
picture in picture and you click on an embedded video it takes you out of the
browser if you have it installed.

------
lupinglade
Please stop making terrible web apps - all these "revolutionary" re-invent-
the-wheel frameworks are not making things any better, they are still a major
pain to use and highly inefficient. Native apps will always have a better
experience for anything other than general web browsing/reading/searching.

------
Sloppy
The argument was, the web and its tech is too slow for phones, we need apps.

This is no longer true and apps are a pain in the rear when it comes to all
the integrations you have for mobile aware sites.

How can app content be crawled, don't ask it's a major pain. How do you track
usage like site clicks, ouch! How about integrations like commenting or site
support chat, good luck, there might be one for your app.

Not to mention the 30% vig to Apple and Google, or the lock-in.

Many thought apps would bring money back into what sites were giving away and
ok, it did -- for Apple and Google.

Can we please stop making "apps" now?

~~~
MrDresden
None of these points make any sense, so lets go through them one by one.

1\. First of I don't even understand what you mean here. Crawling the content
of your own application? Or you mean that all content should be crawlable by
others and if so, why should that be a given?

2\. Mobile analytical software has come a long way since the early days (I
know, I was there and am here now). There are suites available now that do
automatic click capturing out of the box, or you could simply roll your own
small viewhierarchy interaction listener and feed events from there. It is
honestly real easy to do when you know what you are doing.

3\. Like point 2, there is a ton of suites that cater to this aspect with
mobile first SDKs ready for use. There is also nothing wrong with rolling your
own (it is only real time messaging between two parties after all) or simply
send the user to your external web page's support chat when needed (not every
feature under the sun needs to be in the mobile app).

4\. Not all mobile apps run on subscriptions or fees that would be paid
through the Apple App Store. As an example I point to the whole field of
financial applications. And on Android you are free to do payments through
other means than the Google Play services, and thus not pay 30%. Yes it is a
inconvenience to the user, but it is possible (just like payments on a website
will usually take the user through a flow previously not used by him before,
instead of all webpage payments going through PayPal)

To conclude, I think there is plenty of room and velocity in the mobile
application space. And I think the same can be said about the web space. The
two can coexist, as each has aspects to it that superceed the others.

We just need to stop making slow, ad clogged, non mobile friendly web pages as
well as lowest bar, slow and insecure mobile applications.

[edit: minor spelling edits]

------
1123581321
Native apps are still more pleasant and performant enough that they make users
happier than mobile web apps and PWAs. Web apps have become better, so native
apps are not mandatory to achieve acceptable levels of performance, but at the
same time, the cost of developing and releasing a good native app has fallen,
so the utility of native relative to incrementally improving a mobile web app
is still quite good.

Developers may not like that this is the case, but I expect users will like
being provided a better experience for some time, and that we’re likely to see
companies develop natively for new platforms faster than native apps for
mature devices will be folded.

------
ThatPlayer
As long as iOS Safari still hasn't implemented push notifications, apps are
needed to fill that gap. Everything from a messaging to news, even a weather
app benefits from push notifications.

~~~
smichel17
If you're willing to give up some control over presentation, you can offer an
rss feed and users can subscribe to it with their app of choice. It's pull
rather than push, but it also saved you the trouble of maintaining an app.

------
cocktailpeanuts
There are many reasons:

1\. They want the distribution effect of the app store. You can go from zero
to king overnight if the app store features your product.

2\. Unless you're building a dumb wrapper around a CRUD backend app, most apps
need access to the state of the art API. Especially if you're aiming high,
chances are, you won't be able to find a new app idea without using the new
APIs because the old APIs have been experimented on by millions of developers
already.

3\. Apple has declared recently that they're going to cripple the browser
localstorage and cookies so everything gets reset if you don't use them for 2
weeks. I think they will do this more and more (it's also good for user
privacy so they do have a moral high ground)

~~~
schwartzworld
#2 is just wrong. lots of powerful apps do most of their work on the back end,
and lots more could just as easily be built with web apis.

------
api
I try avoid installing apps unless it's something I really want and the app is
far better than the web site. Apps these days are loaded with spyware. I
assume that any mobile app will track me as much as it can possibly get away
with. It's almost like voluntarily installing malware.

Web sites track too of course, but their capacity to do so is more limited. I
fully revoke location, camera, and microphone from the browser, so all it can
do is track me on the web and get a very rough idea of location via GeoIP.
Desktop apps can also track, but mobile offers a lot more intimate information
(especially location) and is constantly connected.

~~~
endemic
Yeah, native apps are basically a black box in terms of what data gets “sent
home.” At least with blockers such as uBlock Origin, scripts/requests directly
from known tracking domains are denied.

------
jbarnett2
The distribution alone in the App Store make it worth it. Websites traffic
dies down when you dont do anything but the App Store will consistently get
passive users viewing

------
gigel82
Such an oversimplified view of things... I guarantee at least 50% of apps
cannot be built with Web APIs alone (especially on iOS where Apple is
intentionally limiting Web API adoption to drive up their App Store revenues).

------
nicbou
As a consumer, apps are a privacy concern. Firefox lets me tightly control
what websites do, but apps can silently track me. They also often use
notifications to increase engagement. Apps often benefit the makers more than
the users.

As a maker, apps are a pain in the butt. I can get a website online in a few
minutes, and it stays there forever. Every app I've made is now gone because I
got tired of keeping up with app store requirements. I never made an iOS app
because I won't pay 100€ for the privilege.

------
muunbo
There are challenges retaining users and bringing them back to a webapp
instead of a native app. That being said I also am hugely in favour of web
apps because the likelihood of people visiting my site is higher than them
downloading my app. So user acquisition is easier but retention is hard. I do
like the idea of email notifications as a replacement for push notifications -
I think others such as Twitter/FB notifications could also work.

~~~
mandeeeeeep
Apple’s app clips and Googles instant apps are meant to fix that

~~~
yen223
Instant Apps was out since 2017. In the 3 years since, I don't think I've once
seen a prompt to install an instant app out in the wild, ever.

~~~
pjmlp
It is mostly used by games as modern version of demos.

------
jungletime
Privacy oriented apps like, "Signal" are more relevant than ever.

------
scoutt
I guess If I were to develop an app (free but with ads) for the browser then I
would be worried about ads blockers, that doesn't work if my app is a native
app.

~~~
mikestew
_that doesn 't work if my app is a native app_

It works if one’s ad blocker is pi-hole. To me it is one of the main features
of pi-hole: it blocks everything, not just web ads.

But your point is taken.

------
pjmlp
Most apps are just copy cats, the gold race is long gone.

------
dusted
Applications have never been more relevant. In my opinion, we should return to
native-only programs and have only semantic HTML in our browsers.

------
3327
No and apple needs to be broken up to permit innovation 3.0

