

Mobile apps must die - namzo
http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/mobile-apps-must-die

======
natesm
Sorry that this isn't related to the article text at all, but I have been
noticing this _a lot_ recently. It's a web design thing. It's about margin-
left.

Have one that isn't zero.

Please. I don't want to resize my browser (currently 925px, which is
reasonable) to make your content readable.

This is what I'm talking about: <http://i.imgur.com/Dlcgg.png>

~~~
rjd
You might want to do yourself a favor and move your browser width out a bit
more.

940 is a commonly used width content for many grid based frameworks. That 940
doesn't include an internal margin, instead it is handle by an external 10px
margin taking the whole width upto 960px.

Check out 960.gs for their framework, but they aren't alone in those figures,
because of the way it subdivides.

~~~
tesseract
Sorry, but I want web designers to do me a favor and make sites that, even if
they don't look perfect, at least don't horribly break in my ~860px wide
browser window. Which, I feel compelled to point out, is a full 100px wider
than an iPad in portrait.

Actually I would rather use a browser width of 600-700px, as that would fill
around half the width of my 13" laptop screen, and be more typographically
optimal in terms of not requiring as much horizontal eye scanning, and not
stretching out paragraphs into 2 or 3 line horizontal stripes. But there are
too many websites out there that assume I have a giant monitor and a browser
window that's maximized to fill it.

~~~
rjd
Well for users with fringe case scenarios such as yourself most modern
browsers have client side style sheets.

As for the iPad... it scales websites to fit its format, so I'm not sure what
the issue if there.

------
rjd
I can't help but be suspicious this is a propaganda push to try and move
people off devices competing with MS.

I never read .net magazine even when I had a subscription, theres something
about the tone of the magazine that rubs me up the wrong way, and its in this
article as well.

Not sure how to describe it but I always get a feeling like I'm dealing with a
shady street vendor and I have to watch every moment to make sure I'm not
being conned. Like buying off pikeys in the UK, you just know something isn't
legit.

~~~
astrodust
If the Windows Phone platform was doing famously, you can bet there'd be an
article touting exactly the opposite. '"C# and XNA are vastly superior to
HTML5", says industry expert.' would be the pull-quote.

~~~
stan_rogers
Don't confuse .net Magazine with Microsoft's .NET platform (or anything to do
with it). ".net" has been around quite a bit longer than ".NET", and has
always been a web-centric publication.

~~~
rjd
Actually I must admit I thought it was an MS publication, I'm sure I was
getting it with my MSDN subscription... I'm even thinking I may even have the
wrong magazine now I'm not sure...

The MS evangelists I dealt with where A+ characters so I guess they just threw
it in as a bribe to butter me up and I was foolish enough to snap up free
goodies without question...

EDIT: MS do infact make a magazine called .Net Magazine, I was totally
confused by another magazine with the same

------
ary
_Maybe_.

Why is it so hard to imagine a world where we have both? I don't use Google's
dedicated iOS app because www.google.com happens to load just fine in Mobile
Safari. I _do_ use the iOS Maps application because maps.google.com doesn't
work as well as I'd like in the aforementioned browser.

We have to let go of this notion that for _web apps_ to win, _mobile apps_
have to lose (or vice versa). [1]

[1] [http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/08/06/when-apple-and-
microso...](http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/08/06/when-apple-and-microsoft-
made-amends-sort-of-video/)

~~~
nigelsampson
I think this is a problem that surrounds us in tech, that we approach
everything with the notion of "for x to win, y must lose".

------
scottjenson
I think I'm paying a price for having a linkbait title. I don't honestly think
this is a web vs native issue at all. I think that native has had too much
power and that apps 'must die' as they suck up all the oxygen. It blinds
people from seeing alternatives. That's my point, we have to be able to
explore alternatives and the current native app silo approach will make JIT
interaction impossible.

As to the people on this thread that think JIT interaction is a privacy
nightmare, i never said these things would install automatically, this has to
offer itself when the user requests it, i.e. I want to look at THIS bustop
now. All I'm talking about is reducing the pain threshold to getting to
functionality. That's all. It's not as sinister as you make it sound.

~~~
kolinko
Ah, a good old "you don't agree with me, therefore you must be blind"
argument. No - other people aren't blind, they just disagree with you.

Webapps are fine in very few scenarios (like the movie poster one you
mentioned), but for quite many they are lousy. For example, most games &
productivity tools perform far better when on the device. And these are the
best selling apps.

Finally, the first argument of your post, about the app organisation.. Really?
In case of the iPhone there are three ways to access each app. First there is
the home screen, and I agree that it becomes messy when dealing with >50 apps.
BUT there is also an app search and the "recently opened" list - these make
the whole "app organisation" thing a non-issue. I guess the same goes for
other mobile platforms.

Besides - you're trying to tell us that mobile apps are easier to organise? I
either have to type in the whole address (so it's slower than using the built-
in app search), or google the app name (even slower & requires net access), or
choose it from my bookmarks (which is basically the same as the home screen).

------
Detrus
If there's a reasonable conclusion to be made from app overload it's that apps
must die. Web, desktop and mobile apps, the way they're presented are a pain
for the end user. He has to think in terms of apps, not in terms of
functionality.

Apple's Siri is a good example. You're using many apps simultaneously through
one interface - calendar, weather, alarms, maps, etc. You don't have to worry
about how someone decided to bundle functionality into apps, you just access
the functionality.

If this new genre of apps appears it doesn't sound like the user experience
will be improved.

------
gte910h
I don't really see his conclusion following from his statements.

Also, what phone doesn't have a search feature now to find the app you're
looking for?

~~~
Apple-Guy
Agree. The article believes SMS has higher value than optimized mobile apps.
Quite a goofy thought (or maybe the person doesn't have a phone that is
passable for anything besides SMS).

~~~
Xlythe
(Cheap) SMS was compared to (expensive per-minute) calling, as an example of a
technology that caught on even though its use wasn't easy. (The phone keypad
being unwieldy for typing long messages because every 3 letters is grouped
with a single number)

------
drivingmenuts
> too much trouble to organize & maintain

I disagree. That's a solved problem. The App Store and Android Market both
notify when there are updates and it's very painless to apply them.

The real problem is discovery. Apple and Google both set the precedent for
crapware while building up their markets and it hasn't gotten any better. What
we need is access to curated collections outside the respective app stores.
This won't happen until Apple unbinds their iDevices from the App Store and
Android goes a bit further.

> apps magically appearing on your phone

There is no way that anyone can make that sound at all reasonable. Security &
privacy demand that, at a minimum, the user be allowed to reject the
installation of a native app.

The privacy-destroying aspects of what he describes are beyond terrifying.

------
Xlythe
A QR Code and a simple mobile website, isn't that what the author is asking
for? Stores or areas offering something to a crowd (Where sharing a physical
code with everyone seems inefficient) can set up a WiFi network and redirect
users to the store's website.

------
taverr
Apps essentially exist because of the limitations of the mobile OS - or,
rather, the browser of the mobile OS - to access web content. As the web is
changing and mobile devices are progressing (from a hardware and software
perspective), apps are really becoming redundant unless they are embedded as
part of the natural interface. Certain pieces of functionality make sense to
keep "app-ified", but others i think will converge to become part of natural
interfaces, much like what has happened to twitter with iOS5 and facebook
across all mobile OS's.

------
diminish
A wonderful article, which must awaken some dreamers; majority of mobile app
developers just lose time in hope of earning money through mobile app sales,
because their revenues dont cover their lost time and development costs.

Mobile app development is fragmented, cumbersome, ugly and I bet in few years
most apps will be abandoned. In addition most apps I bothered to try were not
even worth the download. People will stop buying apps at some point, and
unfortunately a lot of development effort will be lost.

------
famousactress
_Google has publicly said that if they just reduce the load speed of the
Google.com home page by TENTHS of a second, usage noticeably improves._

Anyone have a link for this claim? I'd be really interested in reading more
about what GOOG found... I probably missed a flurry of remarkable discussion
around this that I'd love to catch up on.

~~~
rimantas
[http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-
site-f...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-
fast.html)

More numbers: [http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-
performa...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performance-
optimization/)

------
kolinko
A terrible, terrible article.

\- App organisation problem If there are too many apps on the device for the
user to handle, there are other solutions. For example sorting them by how
often they are used (iPhone does this already on the task bar)

The rest of the article is even worse...

------
nirvana
Imagine an article that asserted "Desktop apps must die!" to be replaced by
web apps, naturally.

Sure, organizing mobile apps is a pain. I agree. But I can't tell you the
number of times I've known there was a website that had some web app, and had
a heck of a time trying to find it.

URLs, in people's minds, are very ephemeral... while apps are more tangible in
a way.

I think for some applications the web delivery mechanism will be superior,
while for other applications, native apps will always be superior.

Is the Facebook iPhone app a web app or a mobile app, or a hybrid? Facebook
gives people the choice.

~~~
suivix
Search is replacing the need to know URLs or even the names of apps. I use
command + space all the time on my Macbook Air to open apps. I use Google
Chrome and never enter in URLs... I type in a few letters of the site I'm
looking for, and the browser is intelligent enough to fill the rest in.

~~~
freejack
I think this only solves part of the problem. Apps need to become addressable
in order for discovery to properly work. I think its a great startup
opportunity. I wrote a longer thought on this at my blog earlier tonight -
[http://www.byte.org/2011/10/10/mobile-apps-need-more-than-
go...](http://www.byte.org/2011/10/10/mobile-apps-need-more-than-google-they-
need-their-own-dns/)

