
The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? - miguelrochefort
https://medium.com/s/story/mobile-apps-will-disappear-soon-4b4e54f46eb8
======
KaiserPro
This is written by someone who lives in the "web eats everything" bubble. It
also neglects the apple store.

The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes,
will remain so. Unless you have decent caching, they are slow, difficult to
use, and generally annoying.

Why? firstly HTML/JS is a very slow presentation layer compared to native,
which means less battery. You still can't multithread, so any heavy lifting is
serverside, which means latency in anything other then decent bandwidth areas
(so no travelling for you....)

Secondly, and possibly most importantly, the GUI language of the native OS
doesn't exist, which means everyone re-designs every thing, making things much
much harder for end users, old people and hard of sight.

Consolidation has a point, but I suspect its the OS that will provide these
apps/function.

The data I have seen from the old company was this: people who installed our
news reader app were 4-8 times more engaged than the people who used our uber
mobile friendly and fast news site. Apps can be faster, handle offline/near
offline far better.

Apps are here to stay, until mobile web changes from a inefficient
presentation layer to something more like a windowing toolkit.

~~~
barrystaes
Sorry to say but from my perspective you seem to live in a bubble as well, to
use your words.

What apps do is add eas of install (app store), and usability (cache, use
device sensors, do some offline tasks)

For a webapp the installation is "Add to homescreen" on a webpage. It then
behaves like a native app, no address bar. Usability is tackled by modern
browsers that allow webapps started like this to: \- cache the entire webapp,
and some/all data it requests. \- run webworkers in background, (get push
notifications, etc) \- provide sensor access via APIs, (camera, etc) And to
conclude, todays webapps respond FAST. They do everything the same way a
native app does.

Ofcourse if your webapp does video transcoding or uses some specific OS
feature it might profit from being native. But even then, its unbelievable
easy to wrap your webapp in a shell that adds these functionality.

How do you think FB and other popular content consuming apps work nowadays?
You are basically looking at webapps rendered in a shell that provides the
_few_ APIs a browser doesnt yet have, like share button and contact/calendar
integration, to get/set data specific to/on your device.

~~~
jaegerpicker
Almost nothing you said here is true. Add to homescreen is a horrid broken
mess on iOS, caching is broken/bugging as hell on chrome and safari,
webworkers are really horrid battery drains and again don’t work on iOS.
Wrapping a native HTML5 mixed with native code results in a buggy, spaghetti
code mess of an app.

Also literally NONE of the biggest most popular apps are HTML5/native. FB,
Twitter, Uber, etc... are all native apps.

~~~
fabrice_d
Yes, Apple is good at keeping their web stack good enough for "regular" web
browsing but not feature full enough to compete with their native toolkits.
And of course, doesn't allow alternative implementations of the web stack on
their platform...

~~~
cft
That will be irrelevant in 7 years (time horizon in the article) since
Apples's device share will continue to dwindle relative to Android. It will be
the same as the historical OSX/Windows ratio. They already signaled that by
focusing on pushing up the price per phone versus the number of phones as
their stock price driver.

~~~
Terretta
Arguing “market share” as a headcount instead of, say, disposable income share
or % of mobile spend, is like arguing the 1% is irrelevant because they’re
only 1 in 100.

------
ohazi
Basically every flashlight app on Google Play contains adware or malware and
wants non-negotiable (thanks, Google) access to my contact list and files and
network. Same with many task managers and qr code scanners and other random
little apps and utilities.

Fuck that. I'll install Uber and an IM client or two, but that's it. No more
"that looks like it might be cool" apps for me. I've said this before - the
app ecosystem on Android is like software on Windows circa 2000.

I don't know what the story is in Apple-land, but Google did this to
themselves, and they deserve the oncoming fallout. Google Play has been a
neglected disaster for years.

~~~
psergeant
> I don't know what the story is in Apple-land

The walled garden is great and protects my privacy.

~~~
erikb
Please mark sarcasm at least with a ";)" otherwise many people might think you
mean what you say becaise they don't know that it's a ridiculous idea that a
big corp will come and protect each users privacy.

~~~
lazerwalker
Google's business model, in broad strokes, is selling user data to
advertisers.

Apple's business model, in broad strokes, is charging consumers premium prices
for hardware.

As long as Apple thinks the market values user privacy, they are economically
incentivized to provide privacy- and security-focused software features that
get people to buy their hardware over Android equivalents.

Is that an irontight guarantee? Of course not. Is it a (current) alignment of
incentives that means Apple is categorically more likely to protect privacy
than e.g. Google? Absolutely. That's also played out so far in practice,
between things like app security sandboxing and Apple's historical
unwillingness to help law enforcement decrypt encrypted backups — see e.g. the
San Bernardino shooter case.

~~~
Jyaif
More accurate description, with fewer words:

Google's business model, in broad strokes, is selling advertisement space.

Apple's business model, in broad strokes, is selling hardware.

------
manmal
As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of
insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been
around for some time and have not proven compelling.

Points 1 & 2 were invariants from the start. On the contrary, excellent and
fast on device search has enabled me to keep hundreds of apps, as long as I
remember their names or keywords. I have always argued that pure information
is better served as a single page website, and I have always told my clients
so.

Point 3 is interesting, but at some point the OS vendors will take steps
against that to maintain control. I also cannot see how shipping an app in
WeChat is fundamentally different from shipping it on the App Store, bare
technical details like programming language.

Point 4 is the one-sided observation of the centralize-decentralize circle
that is happening in all ecosystems. Once FAANG have purchased all the
startups and apps, people will crave for new ones. Governments will even
incentivize that.

I think the only thing that can kill on-device apps in the next years is PWAs
with WASM and friends (IF a central market place for PWAs develops). But Apple
and Google will have it let that actively happen; and development paradigms
might not even change that much, with Swift/Kotlin to WASM compilers in the
works.

------
pvinis
I have two points on this.

1\. The end has been here for some of us. But only for the apps the author is
talking about. And these apps are the whitelabeled generic restaurant menu
apps. If an "app" like that is not useful, who cares about it. If I need to
order from that restaurant, why not just use the ordering app that includes
that restaurant?

2\. He talks about apps in general and how we have 100 installed but use max
30, so the rest 70 are useless, so apps are dying. I don't agree. We might
have 100 and use 30. But I bet I have and use a different 100 and 30 than you,
and you from the person next to you. That doesn't mean the apps are dying.
That means there is diversity and choice. To me that's a plus for the
platform. Of course we can get to extremes, but I don't think apps are on the
way out.

In conclusion, I felt the post was "controversial" just for the sake of it.

~~~
rimliu
Yes, but these metrics web is dead already. I mean there are billions of the
websites and I only have five in my favorites.

The apps are dying and the year of the Linux desktop is just around the
corner. (I wonder what's the ration of Linux desktops in use vs. Android
phones in use, which are running Linux after all).

~~~
pjmlp
I always find ironically that these type of articles mention how hard apps are
to find and monetize and we should all go Web, as if the Web was wasn't that
in an even bigger scale.

Even PWAs and WebAssembly adoption means that the Web stack is getting more
app-like and less hypertext documents.

------
jmull
Poor Lance Ng. He has an article with a lot of attention, but it’s this silly
piece.

BTW, no one needs to read the article, but if you’re here I guess it’s
probably too late.

He’s actually arguing with his six-years-in-the-past self, who thought people
wanted lots and lots of pointless shovelware apps. He’s now realized this
isn’t the case, but has swung too far the other way and now sees no reason for
apps. I think most people realized all along apps weren’t good for everything.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t great for some things.

My favorite part is where one of his reasons the end is near is that people
only have 100 or so apps on their phone and only use ~30 regularly. Right.
Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

------
fit2rule
You know what rocks, and which doesn't get nearly as much attention these
days, vis a vis mobile app development?

Using a single game engine for real business apps, and then shipping those
apps on every platform the game engine supports.

Sure, you maybe have to do a bit more work to get a data entry field up on the
screen - but you only have to do it once and you've got the same, consistent,
agreeable (assuming you design it right) interface across all supported
platforms.

This isn't the same as using browser-based frameworks to accomplish the same
thing. What I mean is, a game engine that provides equal access to the
rendering and input event pipeline across the board.

Its the native-framework dance that is killing mobile apps. The time spent
grok'ing one Android SDK release, only to have to do it all over again just to
keep your app current and constant on the platform. To a lesser degree its the
same with iOS.

But, if you take sufficient responsibility for the engine such that you're
really targeting GLES and an event queue, you can produce amazing apps that
run everywhere.

This is the promise that needs to be fulfilled going forward. We don't need
more apps that just look the same, yet take up infinite resources and
attention just to stay in place. With a game-engine approach, app developers
can actually differentiate themselves again - and the good ones, the really
good ones, produce really good apps.

Think about this some time: the most-shipped, most-used apps on any of the
mobile platforms are those that, pretty much, eschew tight integration with
the vendor-provided frameworks and instead bring their own to the party. This
will get traction as more and more devs start to understand just how far you
can take your modern engine these days .. and those engines are becoming their
own OS in their own right, anyway ...

~~~
starbeast
Unity is a very good tool for this.

~~~
skohan
How much of unity’s runtime is optional? Bundling an entire game engine in
every app install sounds heavy

~~~
starbeast
Well, you can just use Unity's 2d engine if you want to make a flat
application.

------
dustinmoris
For years I haven't installed any apps but the absolute minimum. I don't have
an app for news, Facebook, Amazon, airlines, this, that, because of all the
reasons mentioned in the article. I read news on the mobile optimised
websites, I retrieve my flight ticket as a PDF in my inbox, I never like to
shop from my phone anyway (best done on a desktop when having a mental break
at work) and don't think Facebook offers anything that requires my attention
more than maybe once a couple weeks.

~~~
p4bl0
Completely agree. I do the same thing and even uninstall or deactivate
unecessary apps installed by default. As a result I have less app than my
phone can display on a single page of the app drawer even with good sized
icons, which is actually very convenient.

------
gitgud
So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto _platforms_
such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new
requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for
the sub-apps.

Eventually these platforms will bloat and bloat until they basically become
their own operating system.... then _tada_ we're back at the beginning...

~~~
EZ-E
> So the author proposes that most apps will be consolidated onto platforms
> such as wechat, messenger or aliexpress. With each new app, comes new
> requirements of the platform to produce better and more functional API's for
> the sub-apps.

This is actually happening in China to some extent.

I'm blown away that Apple and Google actually approves apps that run a mini-OS
inside them like WeChat/Alipay. I initially thought they would have rules to
kick these apps off their store. These mega-apps are able to run mini-apps
that effectively bypass any control from Apple/Google, the loss of control on
their end is maddening.

Google and Apple have no control over whether WeChat mini-apps respect their
respective App Store rules and guidelines for example. Also, WeChat got so big
that I wonder if they would even ban it from the app store if transgressions
are found. WeChat literally took control away from them.

Example : people install WeChat, from there install mini-apps that aren't
controlled by Google/Apple, and even can pay though third party apps :
Google/Apple don't get a piece of the cake like they would if you used their
IAP system.

~~~
gitgud
It is amazing how they are allowed to run these apps through the Play Store. I
remember a few years ago Google removed thousands of alternative "app store"
apps for the Play Store... Not sure how these are different...

------
lazerwalker
> Too many apps slow down your phone. They take up memory space, run
> background processes, and constantly check for push notifications even when
> not in use.

This is provably false on iOS, yeah? iOS's backgrounding model means apps that
aren't actively doing work don't "take up memory space". Apps that you never
open are quickly throttled from all forms of background processing on a pretty
aggressive timescale (I know this firsthand, it's been a major pain for one or
two specific apps I've worked on). Push notifications are, as the name
implies, a push service rather than a pull/polling service.

Unused apps _do_ take up storage space, but iOS 11 and newer automatically
silently delete apps you don't use, keeping the user's data and the app icon
around for when you open it again. In the settings UI where you can disable
it, this is explicitly framed as only saving you storage space, rather than
having performance benefits.

~~~
zeroname
Most users aren't on iOS, but even the ones that are probably have the
_perception_ that apps do stuff in the background that drains battery.

~~~
eugeniub
I've seen probably most of my iOS friends open the app switcher and kill every
single app after they're done showing me something. It's not worth it to try
to explain it to anyone because it's such an ingrained muscle memory now.

~~~
RandallBrown
My coworker, who is an iOS Developer, does this fully understanding it's
counterproductive. He just doesn't want to see any apps in the app switcher.

------
TeMPOraL
> _The idea was to make it easy for individuals and small businesses to create
> their own personal apps for social or marketing purposes._

> _The vision was that, one day, every legal entity (human beings and
> companies) would have its own mobile app. These apps would be dotted all
> over the internet, like physical properties on a map. Unfortunately, it
> didn’t happen._

Er, thank $deity that didn't happen. This is a vision that exemplifies the
sales-level delusions I've seen some times, of the "we'll sell lots of useless
shit and make boatloads of money" kind. It doesn't stop to consider that apps
need to provide value _to the users_ , and the technology context of a
smartphone puts constraints on what form that value can take. Gross. I'm happy
I've never heard of this vision in the past, as I wouldn't be nice to the
people preaching it.

------
me551ah
To be honest, I wouldn't like mobile going the html/js way at all. Html/js has
moved to desktop with electron and the results aren't that great. They take up
huge amounts of memory ( gmail web on chrome takes up 500mb of ram on my
machine, also slack is a noteworthy mention). Native desktop apps take up a
fraction of that memory. For the sake of accessibility we have significantly
sacrificed performance. I can't wait for webassembly to be widely adopted so
that the browser can move away from html/js. Google has a nifty tool called
ArcWelder which allows android apps to run in chrome. Apple has already
announced support for running iOS apps on Mac. I actually believe that the
reverse will happen and for more popular apps like fb, gmail etc people will
move back to using native , less memory hogging applications once they are
out.

~~~
SimeVidas
Never mind Electron. Soon it will become normal to install web apps on
desktop, directly from the browser—it will be basically a website rendered in
a separate window without any browser UI. That system will not have Electron’s
memory problems.

~~~
me551ah
Memory problems aren't inherent to electron, they are inherent to html/js apps
and you can also see that in chrome by opening up your task manager. Even
small websites with minimal content end up taking 100+mb in memory. It has
always been possible to install web apps from browser, chrome has supported it
since a number of years but they haven't caught on as much.

------
Animats
_" The vision was that, one day, every legal entity would have its own mobile
app."_

Yes, that was a classic bad idea. There were magazine apps which simply
contained JPEG files of all the pages. In both orientations, even. That was
both unnecessary [1] and annoying [2].

The successful apps are now all from the big players. We're past the "anyone
can sell an app" era.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1367/](https://xkcd.com/1367/) [2]
[https://xkcd.com/1174/](https://xkcd.com/1174/)

~~~
HillaryBriss
> We're past the "anyone can sell an app" era.

I think you've summarized the heart of the article here and I totally agree
with you.

When OP says "the end is near" I think we can interpret it to mean that it's
the end of the big growth era, the end of the era where that technology and
demand for expertise in that technology _dominates_ other technologies, the
end of the era where new companies and their technologists are wise to invest
their time in apps and learning apps.

The vast majority of apps (esp. android) make too little money to justify the
expense required to create and maintain. They're not profit centers. They're
loss centers.

------
EZ-E
I only agree with the third point the author makes

> Smaller apps will become part of social media and mobile wallet ecosystems.

I find actually unbelievable that Apple and Google didn't crack down on it yet
as it takes considerable control away from them. Through iOS's WeChat for
example, I can install and run mini-apps that effectively bypass any control
or review scrutinity away from Apple. Not to mention about how all payements
are processed thru these mega-apps, fully bypassing the in-app purchase
system.

Could Apple even ban some of these big offending Mega-Apps like WeChat at this
point? Probably not, as that would cripple their marketshare in China. So
meanwhile they effectively host a third party app store competitor... in their
app store.

~~~
zeroname
WeChat in China is more important than Facebook is in the US. That's why they
get away with it.

------
ricokatayama
The question isn't solely about tech, but how the mobile OS' wrap and deliver
the experience. Even with attempts like progressible web apps, we still have
the same approach and behavior to navigate on our mobile home, a central place
to launch a specific problem-solver. I don't think that we are going to change
this, but develop the pattern above this concept. That is what we already see
with the evolution of iOS on iPad or Chrome OS. Apple and Google respectively
could be inspired by different analogies, but instead, they are doubling down
on the new conceived standard brought the mobile phone.

------
brynlewis
This was obvious 10 years ago, so why have mobile apps been successful? What
has changed?

~~~
a_imho
Awareness?

------
jaegerpicker
This article is shortsighted to me. Is it the end of mobile apps? No of course
not, webapps are gaining features of native apps and will run more like a
native app. The real difference will be the app delivery method. Is it the web
or an App Store. An App is an App, if it’s written in Dart, Js, Swift, and C++
it doesn’t matter it’s still an app experience. That experience is
fundamentally better than the web page and still has all the downsides of an
app also. How we deliver the app experience may change but I don’t think it
will. Is there are difference for th emend user if they have 100+ shortcuts vs
100+ apps from the App Store? What we are seeing is a competive market where
you have to offer real value to attract users. No much different than the
current indie game market. It’s completely overwhelmed with numbers of options
and users are sticking with the top level of apps/games. Maybe the delivery of
apps changes but honestly I doubt that as discovery is much better in the App
Store.

------
eugeniub
> Chances are, if you take away the manufacturer’s pre-installed apps that you
> can’t delete, you have, at most, 100 apps.

I don't see how this can be the first point in arguing that the end of mobile
apps is near. Imagine saying, "The end of desktop apps are near, people will
only put up with 100 third-party apps on their computers these days!"

------
thrower123
I'm convinced that mobile devices are useless for anything but the most
trivial usages. Just last night I sat and watched my mother-in-law flail for
the better part of two hours trying to look up and then purchase some
replacement filters for her vacuum cleaner. What should have been relatively
simple on a real computer was torturous on a smartphone. Between the tiny
display, awful on-screen keyboard that is flaky and obscures most of what you
are looking at, clunky apps and busted mobile websites, it's just a rage-
inducing disaster.

Not to mention that if you are not on absolutely perfect WiFi, everything is
so slow and janky to load. It's just not acceptable that the bar is so low for
usability; I'm convinced that we've gone backwards to a significant degree,
and I'd much rather go back to the web that we had in 2008 than the one we
have in 2018.

~~~
ativzzz
These kinds of apps is exactly what the linked article is arguing against.
However, if a mobile app has worse usability than desktop then the company
failed to redesign their product experience for mobile. That or, their product
is simply not meant to be used on small screens at all.

------
sodafountan
What the author doesn't mention is that apps have become increasingly easier
to write as time has gone on. Not only do we have better native languages that
you can write apps with (Swift and Kotlin) but we have incredible cross-
platform tools as well in the forms of Xamarin and React-Native.

I've personally been working with React-Native over the past year and it's
just as easy as writing React code for the web (if you're using expo), once
people understand this it'll only be a matter of time before web-dev teams
adopt it. Historically the problems with app development is that it was a lot
harder than web development and often required you to learn a new language and
framework in order to get anything functional, this is no longer the case.

I'd actually argue that there will be more apps going into the future as the
technology needed to build them simplifies.

~~~
HillaryBriss
They're easier to write now, but still not easy enough: the vast majority of
apps earn too little revenue to justify their dev cost.

------
rchaud
Author seems to have missed a big reason for why apps will continue to
persist: they obscure data access permissions far better than browsers do. If
you install FB messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever, you will be asked
one time which permissions (location, microphone, contacts) you want to grant
it, and most people won't even review the list before hitting Install.

On the web, the browser dialog will ask you each time the app wants to access
any of these things, whereas on the app, it'll quietly continue the use the
permissions you granted it, and eventually you'll forget you signed off on
them in the first place.

Not to mention some particularly shameless actors will gimp their mobile web
functionality to ensure you use their app at all times (FB, Airbnb, others).

------
oh-kumudo
One thing this article gets right is that it is just going to be harder to
persuade users to download an App that only brings in marginal/augmented
functionality. I have about 1.5 screens of Apps installed, probably somewhere
near 30-50 apps in total, and use barely 10 of them fairly frequently as far
as I can recall.

Maybe it won't be too surprising that Google/Apple will announce something
similar to Wechat's mini-program, a lightweight application distribution
system that doesn't require a browser, nor installation to work. In fact,
Google's Instant App aren't that far from the above description, it is just a
matter of marketing effort to push it closer to users.

------
rexf
I don't agree with the overall premise that native apps will disappear. I
agree that certain apps, such as the static content Wix example, don't need to
exist.

I found the article unconvincing. The core argument is that native apps will
consolidate into larger social media apps as part of an in-app app? That may
be the case for China, but not the US. Even if that did happen in the US, that
means you are still building mobile apps (with another abstraction layer).

As long as native apps provide a better UI (as expected of native apps) &
continue to have access to OS APIs that the mobile browser does not, native
apps will continue succeed by providing a better experience.

~~~
Shaddox
So it would be like myspace but a mobile app?

------
olliej
Here’s the thing: a webpage will never be able to do a number of privileged
operations, for a very simple reason - visiting an arbitrary web page is not
controlled by a user, as any webpage can cause an automatic navigation to
another.

Installing an app acts as a user intent driven security boundary. Dialogs
coming up on random webpages is a buck-passing technique, as users cannot
discern a “safe” request from an unsafe one. This applies to technical users
as well - dialog fatigue, incorrect script inclusion, ads, etc. eventually you
can end up accidentally saying yes to the wrong dialogue and a random website
gets to download your contact list, etc.

------
pier25
The end? No.

But PWA websites will most likely kill many native apps. I use the Twitter PWA
and it works perfectly fine on Android.

------
casper345
Working with IoT (i.e. Beacon technology) HTML5 and even React Native, nothing
beats native code responsiveness. The need for "White label" apps may start
going away, but emerging technologies that rely on efficiency and speed should
be utilizing mobile app native environment.

------
gimmeDatCheddar
I remember when people were saying that the end is near for web apps since
mobile apps are going to eat everything. No one knows what will happen in the
next three to seven years. Best we can do is observe the market every year and
adjust course as necessary.

------
origami777
There are domains of problems that can be solved with the WeChat model. Money,
shopping, paying utilities, ordering food, etc, make sense to have in one app.
I don't know if I'd want my task planner or email/cal app in there.

~~~
Apocryphon
Congrats, you have then moved into a walled garden inside another walled
garden.

~~~
taobility
For Mini program in WeChat, they are independent with iOS or Android. So it
just inside one broader walled garden

------
smoser
Functionally yes, most apps could be mobile websites except for one thing:
Mobile users don’t use bookmarks. Mobile users use icons on the home screen.
It is easier for users to add an app to their home screen than a website.

~~~
butz
But you can add a website to your home screen too, and it will act like app.

------
TimesOldRoman
Blizzard would like a word....

------
monkeynotes
TLDR: Betteridge's law applies.

Fact is mobile apps will remain useful for as long as mobile devices occupy
the same space they do now. Maybe you don't have more than 100 apps installed,
but that does not equate to all apps being deemed useless. Different people
find different apps useful enough to install and continue using. I don't ever
see myself using a web-app alternative over my security camera app, or my
email app, and so on.

Fact is, native apps have their uses, but not all native apps are useful to
all people.

------
Insanity
"Betteridge's law" comes to mind when reading this.

We have some in-house apps, and it comes in handy to have control over the
device you are using and developing for.

In general though, I do think apps (from the app stores) are not installed as
much anymore as they once were. Anecdata, but I hardly install anything
anymore on my phone.

------
perpetualcrayon
App ecosystems help perpetuate oligopolies.

------
dvh
How can I read that article? Even web link gives me the paywall.

~~~
pvinis
It opened on the medium app on iOS for me, and I could read it.

~~~
dvh
Do you realize how ironic that is considering the title of article...

~~~
pvinis
I do. I just haven't taken the time to delete this app from my phone, as one
of the 70 I don't use.

------
theredbox
This is a very Western centric point of view. Even if most of the RN like apps
become "good enough" there will be a market for those apps that want to
differentiate with the sluggish good enough apps.

