
Ask HN: Your Opinion on the Future of Mobile Apps? - timeandagain
Some context: I&#x27;ve been doing iOS app development for over nine years now, both doing client work and selling my own apps (with some moderate success). Earlier this year I&#x27;ve started working on a desktop app targeting roughly the same audience as Invision and the myriad other mobile app prototyping tools. Things are slowly progressing, and though I firmly believe in the usefulness of the tool I have in mind (provided I can pull it off successfully), I&#x27;m starting to have second thoughts about the future of the mobile app space in general.<p>My biggest points of concern:<p>- People have mostly stopped downloading apps from the App Store (games non-withstanding). Discoverability issues, inconvenience of a download, and some app fatigue are among the contributing factors, in my opinion.<p>- While every business needs a website, far fewer businesses need an app, since it&#x27;s much harder to make people [want to] install an app compared to visiting a website.<p>On the other hand, progressive apps look very promising in this regard, and I sincerely hope they take off on both Android and eventually iOS, with as much native capabilities available as possible. Frankly speaking, we need to get rid of the App Store as middleman, since it&#x27;s a huge bottleneck.<p>Also, I don&#x27;t know much about the state of enterprise-only apps - I presume they are faring better then consumer apps, though not sure to what extent.<p>Am I being too gloomy, and prospects are actually great for mobile in the next 5 years or so, or is it a dead-end in the mid-to-long term?<p>I would greatly appreciate your opinions and insights on the topic.<p>(edits: fixed a typo; added a small clarification)
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PaulHoule
i think the future is "messenger style" or chatbot apps as these avoid most of
the problems of app development because the "app" is a thin shim and almost
everything that matters runs on the server so you can update the product all
the time without updating the "app".

