

The Mobile Browser Is Dead, Long Live The App - chiachun
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2014/04/02/the-mobile-browser-is-dead-long-live-the-app/

======
ckoglmeier
Forbes, as usual, churning out horrendously written and poorly thought through
articles.

Time spent is a poor way for anyone to evaluate a market or even a single
product. It could mean anything from "wow this product is amazing, let me stay
on it all day" to "wow this product sucks, and I can't find anything but I
need to so I'm going to spend 3 hours on it finding what I need".

Its an even worse choice to then extrapolate that metric into high level
prognostications about what does/doesn't matter in the space.

Mobile Web has a role for consumers and companies. Mobile apps, like packaged
software of the past, also have a role for consumers and companies. The value
is in understanding why they have different use cases and building software
that delivers value to users for what they need right now.

But hey, if this poorly written article resonates with you, feel free to
listen. And the rest of us will laugh at you all the way to the bank.

------
jpswade
Apps are great right now because they are better than most of the web apps.

However, they aren't the future, because:

\- Web apps are always up-to-date, no updating necessary

\- Web apps are stored in the cloud, not on your device

\- Web apps work on any device/platform, apps need to be written for each

\- Web apps are there on demand, instantly, while vendors cannot expect you to
download an app for every website, company and product.

Look at what Google is doing with the Chromebook and look at devices like the
Synology where the best feature is the Web app interface served from the
device itself. This is the future, the "Internet of Things".

~~~
matt_heimer
Not really a compelling argument. If I invert your benefits they still read
like benefits.

Mobile Apps are the future because:

\- Mobile apps allow you to keep the version you have, updating when desired

\- Mobile apps are stored on your device

\- Mobile apps are customized to your device and can take advantage of all its
features

\- Mobile devices provide a browser for things that shouldn't ever be an app
to being with.

I hope web based apps are the future but I think it will be for different
reasons.

\- The promise of Java, they won't be written in Java but just like Java the
idea that you can write portable applications is very powerful

\- Not being locked into an app store. App stores will still exist for
discovery and monetization reasons but being able to run an app by visiting a
URL will allow for all the things that companies like Apple won't allow.

~~~
liotier
> Mobile apps allow you to keep the version you have, updating when desired

Do you really believe that the user is actually in control of the upgrades ?

> Mobile apps are customized to your device and can take advantage of all its
> features

Having to code specifically for each device sounds like a benefit to you ?

~~~
MrScruff
_Do you really believe that the user is actually in control of the upgrades ?_

On iOS at least, it's (by default) a manual process to update an app.

 _Having to code specifically for each device sounds like a benefit to you ?_

Benefit for the _user_ , yes.

~~~
fidlefodl
_> Benefit for the user, yes._

I would agree with that if everyone _(companies)_ actually did that, but they
don't. Often they pick the popular platforms, or choose frameworks that allow
for a single codebase and output a often subpar UX App, or just don't make the
app to begin with.

Making it harder for a company to give the end user the product, even if an
arguably _better_ product, is not always a win for the user.

~~~
MrScruff
I see your point, but were I making a decision about what platform to use to
build a mobile presence, I would focus on what provided the best user
experience. Not what gave me the greatest initial coverage.

If you can be successful on iOS or Android first, you'll probably then have
the resources available to develop for the other platforms as well.

------
manuletroll
Awesome, now even more sites will try and force me to download their shitty
app when all I want is to read a fucking article! No wonder no one uses the
mobile web when every other site does stuff like that.

~~~
andyidsinga
exactly! ..but people making those sites will eventually learn how to make a
better web sites that fits into the phone. "performance" advantages of apps vs
mobile sites will go away ( imho )

------
marknutter
So Facebook, Messaging, and Gaming apps make up 58% of mobile usage statistics
and suddenly the mobile browser is "dead"? Mobile browsers have never been a
strong target for gaming and won't be until Apple allows WebGL to run in
Mobile Safari. What I take from this is that Facebook still dominates people's
online activities and that most people spend most of their time playing Candy
Crush Saga on their phones. This article is link-bait, nothing more.

~~~
MrScruff
I'd be surprised if the lack of WebGL is what's holding back mobile browser
based games. I would imagine it's the relative difficulty in monetizing them
vs the app store.

~~~
matt_heimer
And I wonder if it is on purpose to keep the lock-in.

But strangely in Windows 8.1 (not phone yet) you can make Windows store apps
using WebGL and JavaScript. FireFox OS also support WebGL.

------
erikb
I feel the same. As a developer I'd like to just develop HTML5 Apps and be
done with it. But as a user I always, ALWAYS, prefer an App over the website,
even if both do the same thing. I don't know why but HTML5 Apps don't feel as
easy, responsive, fast and integrated as the average Android App. I always
feel a little tighten up when being in the browser, even the App is designed
exactly for my screen size. Therefore I also decided that if I develop
something for the phone it must be a native App.

~~~
scrumper
This might be heresy round here, but I make the same argument for desktop as
well. For one example, my native apps use a consistent application menu
framework provided by my OS, yet every time I'm in a browser app I get a
completely different experience, with no commonality between different
vendors. There's poor integration of copy/paste; no integration with the file
system; a 'back' button that nukes the whole app; keyboard shortcuts that
kinda sorta work, but only if they don't step on the browser's own... It's
like using DOS applications all over again.

Until web apps can run in a first-class embedded Javascript runtime with equal
access to the OS's native frameworks, web apps are going to continue being
second class citizens. Part of me thinks they're only popular now because
developers like working on them.

~~~
mwcampbell
I think that if Mac had been the dominant desktop platform, native desktop
apps would still be more popular. For one thing, Mac emphasizes UI consistency
more than Windows; observe that even Microsoft Office and the (now abandoned)
Windows Live Essentials desktop apps don't use native Win32 controls. For that
matter, even a lot of Windows utilities don't use standard Win32 coontrols for
everything; Microsoft has an internal GUI toolkit called DirectUser that is
used in various forms across several MS products. And this brings me to a
reason why native Windows apps aren't popular among developers today: lack of
a single good native GUI solution. Win32 is plain ugly, and shows its age.
Windows Forms was stillborn, as Joel Spolsky said in "How Microsoft Lost the
API War". WPF may be good for .NET apps, but Microsoft doesn't use it in their
flagship products; that's hardly a vote of confidence. And now there's
WinRT/Metro, which is cool... if you want to ignore the large installed base
of pre-Win8 users. Is it any wonder that so many developers just decided to
use web technologies instead?

------
perlpimp
thing is that mobile web has not yet integrated into mobile platform per-se.
Apps have access to far more features of the OS than web pages. I think if
browsers would be able to expose and integrate web-apps something that can be
a blend of an app and webservice then one will see how limited and stupid
using isolated app is.

Open services promote integration and availability of things you want to do..
for example I can't instapaper an article in my safari browser, I am sure I
could've fixed that if there'd been a layer of script language between OS apps
and web apps. It is only a sliver but it has been annoying me quite a bit. If
the mobile ecosystem will be scriptable and integratable then one can make web
be a first class citizen on the mobile. For now browser is a pretty crummy way
to do web on a mobile device. Screen is too small, value added features are
only available to apps only. Maybe for a good reason - technological one,
battery and security(those are the problems to solve). Yet I would like to
program my alarm clock from the web and have it send me some news for the time
when I got up ... something like that (I am brain storming here)

2c

~~~
Iftheshoefits
What you're talking about isn't "a sliver." Given the underlying architecture
of the various mobile OSes (FireFox OS excluded, perhaps--I don't know enough
about it to say), it's actually quite probably a very big task.

I'm sure there are masochistic people who write code for browsers who'd love
to maintain the browser-API abstraction over _N_ OS API implementations. I'm
not so sure there is a sufficient number of them to get such a task off the
ground. It's not some trivial matter of simply implementing something like an
HTTP-based API.

------
borplk
Ah, these articles really make me feel uneasy.

I prefer this mindset instead:

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

~~~
sehr
Rdio & Google Maps would be absolute blasts to work with if that's how they
were built.

~~~
borplk
Google Maps are for Googles to build. The problem arises when every one wants
to build fancy applications that serve no real purpose. I prefer to see some
"utilitarianism" in the web.

~~~
sehr
Agreed, I just took your comment as an all or nothing approach mybad.

------
iLoch
I disagree; web apps are just warming up. Native apps are still the go-to for
a seamless experience, but I think that will change. As devices develop
greater fragmentation continues (now seeping into the iOS echo system by the
looks of it) apps will need to get better at being responsive. Web apps have
already figured out a lot of the challenges surrounding responsive design, and
will continue to do so. Once devices become powerful enough that there's no
significant difference between web and mobile things will change dramatically.
I see Google being the next to adopt native HTML5 and JS (after Microsoft's
lesser known adoption in Windows Phone and Windows 8). Google's support for
native web apps will put pressure on Apple and they'll go the same way.

~~~
cnaut
I can definitely see Google merging Chrome OS with Android

~~~
chinpokomon
They're under the same umbrella now too. I personally think that will be a
central theme in Android 5. Imaging how you'll be able to run Chrome packaged
apps on you PC, tablet, phone, and Chromebook, with the same application and
data stored in the cloud, synchronized everywhere. You only have to look at
the changes they made in KitKat to see that Android is destined to become
ChromeOS for mobile devices.

------
aphexairlines
That graph shows 68% of the time in games, facebook, chat, and music/video.

The remaining 32% is split between 14% in the browser and 18% in apps. That's
not the same thing as the mobile browser being dead.

~~~
erikb
You can also choose between m.fb.com and the FB app. There are also HTML5
games for the phone, you can also use web IRC clients for chat etc. But people
just don't! People use the apps, which is exactly what the article is saying,
or not?

------
shmerl
I think the author didn't exactly understand what Marc Dillon meant by saying:

 _> but I understand the utility of having applications. But they contribute
to a tunnel vision of what a smartphone can do. They provide a good user
experience, but poor integration. A smartphone is smart if it helps users day
to day_

He didn't mean it to contrast native applications vs browser based ones. He
meant it to contrast standalone / non integrated native applications vs
integrated experience where the user doesn't see it as "working with
application A", but sees it as "doing task A". Native vs Web wise, Jolla's
Sailfish is actually heavy on the native side.

 _> The methodology of Android and iOS is the dominant viewpoint._

It's a not a reason to copycat it and to be a follower rather than a
disruptor. Sailfish and FirefoxOS don't follow a lot of aspects of the
established iOS and Android approaches and it's a good, not a bad thing.

------
bbuffone
My opinion is there has been a failure of IT to realize that mobile is
completely different from everything else and we continue to leverage desktop
technology in the mobile world.

Apps work best because they do not carry baggage of the desktop world with
them. People have the freedom to build specifically for mobile with mobile
tools.

There are no two bigger movements that contribute to this than: Responsive
Design and the Mobile first.

Responsive Design implies that mobile is just different from desktop based on
the display size and that you can design a single interface that can work for
both. Both of these ideas are completely wrong.

Mobile First implies designing for mobile and then desktop is the best
approach but this can never work as both platforms will suffer from inferior
implementations.

\----

Setting the ship back on course would take us building "Mobile Only" with
mobile only frameworks, by dropping the ones that were created in the desktop
era.

------
fidotron
The more damning thing is the web is rapidly becoming poor people and
geekland, with apps becoming where the middle and upper classes are consuming,
so the value is moving heavily towards appland.

It's been clear for a while that monetising apps is easier than the web,
though the discovery problem is intense.

What I've not seen, and would be interesting, is how different this is for iOS
and Android users. i.e. do iOS users spend more time on apps vs in browser
than Android users?

~~~
chiachun
One argument caught my attention in the article is that the HTML5 approach of
Firefox OS is not working.

Actually I prefer the HTML5 approach, but as you said, monetising apps is
easier than the web. I believe this is the key issue here.

------
zabraxias
I love these article titles especially since I love getting my tech news from
forbes the way I love my mechanic's baked goods. Apps have their place and the
browser is not going away. If anything "The browser is dead...long live the
mobile OS". I would cite reasons why I think this but I'll claim the same
opinion piece rights media seems to enjoy lately.

------
jonbeebe
Why can’t the “future” be one with both web apps and native apps? (e.g. like
how it is now)

They both have their up-sides and down-sides, but which is best usually
depends on the context in which they are being used, and if nothing else, user
preference.

I don’t see why one has to “win” per-say … it seems to me like the future is
big enough for both to thrive :)

------
cnaut
One of the biggest reasons that native apps are getting more usage than mobile
web apps is the existence of an app store. There is no central distribution
center for web apps making discovery difficult. The process of getting a
mobile web app pinned is not easy enough compared to a native app.

------
bnolsen
The reason: web pages suck, and they increasingly suck worse and worse with
more and more javascript and crap getting thrown in. I wish the simplification
required to make a web app that is usable on mobile would find its way back
into the web pages themselves.

mobile versions of websites are pretty much a joke. I can't stand what amazon
does when I try to visit with opera (forces it to mobile). Makes it pretty
unusable.

------
ilbe
Can we just discontinue submissions from forbes, wsj, bloomberg, theguardian,
wired, and techcrunch?

~~~
Dirlewanger
Then we're left with 90% shitty blog posts that are a variation of "Why I do X
and you should too", 10% actually interesting stuff from other sources.

~~~
ilbe
Good point, I held back on mentioning such blogs, I'd definitely support
filtering those out too.

