

For Mobile Apps, It’s 1996 All Over Again - tomh-
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/19/mobile-apps-1996-all-over-again/

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chapel
While I agree that the apps market is a huge new thing, I really don't think
it is going to continue to take off with no end in sight. We are in
unprecedented times, and I think looking at any prior history really doesn't
do it justice. But the notion that apps are taking over the internet is
somewhat backwards, internet adoption as a whole is up as well, and fervently
increasing.

The big change here is that more and more people are adopting smart phones,
and smart phones happen to be app focused. Once the web on the phone is even
better, e.g. when companies can build 1:1 web:app experiences, you will see
less apps.

On a side note, the whole iOS explosion is going to tail off, there are only
so many people that buy apps, and it is not a majority that push that market.
I think when you compare iOS to Android app purchase rates, you find iOS in a
screaming lead if all things else were equal. There are a lot of reasons for
this, but I feel it is more related to who the people buying the devices are.
The people buying Androids (the massive amounts now) aren't nerds/geeks like
everyone seems to think. No, they are regular people that would have got a
feature phone but jumped into the Android platform. Where as iOS users are
usually people that have been using smartphones for a while, or even iPod
Touches that upgraded to the phone experience.

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muhfuhkuh
"On a side note, the whole iOS explosion is going to tail off, there are only
so many people that buy apps, and it is not a majority that push that market."

Last admob stats survey says 50% of iOS users bought at least 1 paid app a
month.

"No, they are regular people that would have got a feature phone but jumped
into the Android platform."

And, those people won't buy a 99 cent game or utility app? Somehow I doubt
that. I think if anything, it's a psychological barrier that prevents them.

Back in 1996, we didn't trust the web. We heard these crazy stories about
hackers being able to blow up your monitor by just sending you a file, and
some having their whole identity completely wiped out like in "The Net" with
Sandra Bullock. As such, ecommerce wasn't really that big in those days. Fast
forward to today, where Amazon is galactically large and people only go to the
store to physically touch a product before buying it on Amazon or Zappos or
Newegg.

The same is going to happen to smartphones and app stores. Once google
checkout is seamless enough to purchase as easily as the App store, you can
possibly see 50% of Android users purchasing an app a month. And, no matter
how you slice it, 50% in this space is a BIG number.

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Getahobby
Most of the argument should be native apps versus browser based apps and
history really has answered this for us even though we are talking about a
different client in the form of a smartphone.

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rsandhu
Right, but the desktop web apps typically did not require any access to
hardware devices such as the webcam. If they did, Flash solved that problem
and we all know what direction that model is heading into.

Mobile apps are interesting because of the access to GPS, camera,
accelerometer etc. Until all hardware is accessible through HTML5 providing an
excellent UX, the app trend will continue in my view.

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stevenwei
Not to mention the performance penalty you'll pay by trying to process that
data (camera images, video feeds, accelerometer data) in Javascript.

Some types of apps might work okay as a mobile web app (Facebook comes to
mind), but there are definitely many native apps that simply aren't feasible
to do in HTML5.

Can you imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app? Yeah, I didn't think
so.

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code_duck
Of course I can imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app. Perhaps not
at this moment, but within 5 years? And what about technologies like NaCl? It
is shortsighted to take such a view of applications that exist within a
browser.

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rsandhu
In 5 years? Well that is an eternity in the mobile space and you are probably
right, there is likely going to be a shift to a standard approach to app (web
or native) development. What if a virtual machine such as the JVM existed for
both Android and iOS was standard/consistent enough to write cross platform
apps?

This topic is very popular amongst hackers lately. I find the web developers
in particular resist the native app trend, to avoid Objective-C (iOS) and Java
(Android). Typical web developer lives in Javascript and a chosen high level
language (Ruby, Python) on the server side.

~~~
Getahobby
Writes once, run everywhere has been promised forever and delivered never.

