I don't even bother installing apps anymore, I don't have time to research whether or not they are going to abuse my privacy or have some horrendous TOS. I got my core 10 apps and haven't bought a new one in a year.
> I don't even bother installing apps anymore, I don't have time to research whether or not they are going to abuse my privacy or have some horrendous TOS.
I'm going out on a limb but I'd wager you're not exactly representative of the general userbase for which apps are developed.
A few years ago, Flipkart was the leading e-commerce portal in India, and Amazon was a poor third, behind Snapdeal[1]. At some point in March 2015, Flipkart (and their fashion portal, Myntra) decided to go "app-only" on mobile[2], i.e., if you went to their website using a mobile browser, you would get shown a large interstitial to install their app, and nothing else. There was no option to proceed with their mobile website. Flipkart also gave away exclusive discounts for people downloading their app.
People rebelled. A lot of people rebelled. No one wanted to install their app to comparison shop. People just went to the Amazon site and bought whatever they wanted, knowing that at most, there would be a minor difference in price. Shopping on Amazon's site using a mobile browser was a breeze compared to Flipkart. The whole app-only strategy was a disaster.[3]
Flipkart admitted their mistake[4], and decided to re-instate their mobile website in November the same year. But the damage had been done. By August 2016, Flipkart had lost its leading place in the Indian e-commerce space to Amazon[5]. They never recovered, and to this day, they're still playing catch-up.
Not everything in the entire debacle can be attributed to Flipkart's app-only strategy. Undoubtedly, there are others aspects - like Amazon's prime being better than Flipkart's version, etc. But the app-only strategy definitely contributed significantly to Flipkart's uncrowning, and provided Amazon the much-needed entry point to becoming the market leader.
As a heavy user of Myntra's app, I also have to say that their app is one of the biggest reasons why I keep coming back to them. The app is wonderfully designed, highly functional, and fast. The UX is uniform and the filtering options are top notch. Far better than anything the competition can offer
Do they ask their opinion? No one asks my opinion on software/hardware and I'm the only software engineer anyone in my milieu knows at all. But even setting aside how we evaluate the anecdotes that usually warrant that claim, as far as impact goes, HN users generally sport middle class backgrounds or better; the larger population has neither met nor really considers the opinions of a software engineer and typically mobile apps, and ones which don't have their user's best interests in mind, are lowest common denominator for a target since they're interested in reaping as much information as possible. It seems easier for a layman to just install whatever apps on their phone than to consider fielding an educated opinion. HN users may just like the idea of appearing important
If you slice the demographic data finely enough, everyone is a member of a tiny minority.
My non-technical retired mom also only uses about ten apps, for basically the same reasons, although she doesn't have the vocabulary and jargon we have to succinctly explain the same concepts. AFAIK its the same for my wife, aunt, and sister (different people, LOL) who mostly use Facebook app, being middle aged women.
The total number of mobile app downloads in 2017 – 197 billion (a forecast)
That's an average of about 50/user, with an 80%+ abandonment rate, and a median all but certainly far lower.
How many Android apps are there now? Well, by June of 2017 it reached 3 million Android app mark! The current rate of its growth is more than 1,300 apps a day.
This is not a good thing.
..despite the sea of choice for mobile apps available for both iOS and Android, in real life people tend to use on a daily basis only a few. Here is how much exactly – 10 apps a day on average or 30 apps on monthly basis.
The more time I spend working with studies and research data, the more I'm starting to realize that a lot of it [numbers] is complete and utter nonsense.
197 billion app downloads? You don't have to be a researcher to know that the number is a "little" far-fetched. And maybe I'm delusional to the fact that might be possible. After all, I have only ever used Android and only with the default apps it comes packaged with. Other than the exception for WhatsApp and Messenger.
But honestly, in the markets that I work with, I see such blown up statistics that it makes me throw up on the inside. E.g. In 2018, 20% of all web searches are done using voice (assistant, Siri, smart speakers, etc.), and by 2020 that number is "going to be 50%".
Holy macaroni... I can already picture the dystopian reality where people walk around airports all talking to their phones just to look something up.
All that aside, mobile apps suck! I prefer a well-designed mobile website over an app at any time of the day.
>197 billion app downloads? You don't have to be a researcher to know that the number is a "little" far-fetched.
Is it? I'm a highly technical user, CS degree and all, 20 years experience, and I still downloaded around 20-25 apps last year. Of those, I kept like 4-5 on the phone, but the downloads are still there.
~3 billion * 20 = 60 billion app downloads already. And younger people are not as mission driven ("need to find an app for a specific task") and picky as me. Add to that casual apps and games, where people can download a new one every week (I rarely play games).
>But honestly, in the markets that I work with, I see such blown up statistics that it makes me throw up on the inside. E.g. In 2018, 20% of all web searches are done using voice (assistant, Siri, smart speakers, etc.), and by 2020 that number is "going to be 50%".
Yeah, that sounds like just BS PR from from SEO article pushing for some voice related product or service. Absolutely there are those too.
Well, I have over 40 non-Google apps, and I had to download them all again when I got a new phone last year (which I rarely do, but many switch every couple of years). And I probably downloaded and uninstalled 8 or 10 more - when I want do do something new, I often try a bunch of apps before settling on one. Also, some apps follow the model of using a "virtual app" as a key to unlock paid features, so that's two downloads for a single app.
well according to the article Google Store app numbers peaked in early 2018 so it might not be as unrepresentative as you think. Time is a zero sum game and there are only so many apps all of us can install no matter how enthusiastic we are.
I was curious about that so I followed through the link and saw there was a jump down of a million, and upon googling it, it seems that Google did a purge this spring. It doesn't have to do with users or developers but just Google doing a clean-up.
I would take that even further and venture a guess that 99% of HN readers are not representative of the intended general userbase of 99% of the apps for ios/android.
My personal guess is even more far-fetched but I think the ratio between useful and useless native apps reached 1/100 very, VERY fast after the industry successfully implemented wiring money as a feature. That was the one thing, even bigger than successfully implementing ads.
> 99% of HN readers are not representative of the intended general userbase of 99% of the apps for ios/android.
Not that I agreed with the website vs. app debate, but with all respect, that "userbase of 99% of the apps" was likely made up by those people who would also begs for bigger keyboard on their phones so they can send SMS a bit faster back in 2006.
This comment implies (like Fords: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd say better horses") that this 99% of customers are some backwards dwelling people who don't know the way forward (in your example, the no-keyboard touch screen).
But webapps are not some novel development they're not aware of. They are what existed before apps and during apps, and exists still, and people still spend most of their time on mobile apps.
People will spend their time on anything they feel useful to them, not the "mobile app".
I think you've been mislead by the current situation where everybody is using apps on their phone. But really, the "mobile app" it's just another thing that is attractive to them.
If you lock somebody in a room with only a TV inside, eventually that person will turn on the TV and start watching, even the TV only plays China Central Television channel one (FYI: It's boring like hell).
It's basically the same effect, the only twist here is that people chose to be addicted to their phones.
I disagree with the 99% estimate, I too take the same approach, and recommend the same to those who will listen. I would venture that number to be at least 80%
So you are saying that out of the 3B smart phone users in the world 600M will never install a app ever because they fear the abuse of their privacy or some horrendous TOS?
A non trivial number of people don’t realize you can install apps. I know several non tech 65+ iPhone users the vast majority don’t use any app not installed on the phone.
Young kids seem to install apps all the time, but parents quickly learn not to let them spend any money on in app purchasing.
>A non trivial number of people don’t realize you can install apps. I know several non tech 65+ iPhone users the vast majority don’t use any app not installed on the phone.
Those don't matter much for the concerns of TFA, as they're unlikely to use some new fangled web app either...
Yes. Lurking around the app store of your device and installing random apps is a behavior for first-time users of the platform. Back during 2010 to 2015, almost everyone was a first-time user of the platform. From now on, downloading random apps is a job for ever younger audiences.
Yes, I see and it's not binary like there's people who download random apps or not and there's people who are young or not, it's just that the numbers are clearly going in specific directions really fast.
I just bought a new iPad and one of the first things I looked for was apps that utilize the AR frameworks etc. if you are just gonna stick to the web it’s hard to take advantage the full power of your new device.
Yes because it's new and awesome and I'll probably do the same when I get an AR compatible device but it's not the reason we get the device. We get the device to install the apps we already like because we have stuff to do that we already started. Mostly. But especially for older audiences.
Luckily this is really not a problem in practice on iOS. Main reason I switched after years of frustration with Android. I use a ton of apps and the worst offender for background use is Hangouts of all things (I guess not surprisingly). So I guess I’m giving up a little bit of battery life but it’s really just one poorly designed app (I do not use hangouts nearly enough to justify its share of background draw)
True, but that implies that someone here is after the money of these users, rather than educating them and providing them with the best (safest) options.
On the other hand HN users influence is much greater than their numbers because many of them are doing tech support for family and tech advice for friends.
I figure most things don't need an app unless they are trying to take more data anyway. Anything telling me to install an app whose mobile experience is fine already is very fishy to me. I'm looking at you, Reddit.
> Anything telling me to install an app whose mobile experience is fine already is very fishy to me. I'm looking at you, Reddit.
So much this.
To add insult to injury, reddit intentionally degrades the site's experience in mobile devices with tons of dark patterns pushing users to their shady mobile app.
I've noticed this too. On top of that, they nag you consistently to install the app. They have an option to disable the nagging. However, even with this option disabled, they still nag you via ads and every time you refresh the page it blinks a distracting "use app" animation at the top right. Reddit is in a downward spiral and I have no problem discontinuing the use of a web site I have been using for over a decade. I've done it before.
>Anything telling me to install an app whose mobile experience is fine already is very fishy to me.
Facebook is my #1 example of this.
The app bloated up like it's primary purpose was to take up space on your phone. So I removed it and used the mobile website.
At first you had to refresh the page to get new messages. No big deal, but a bit annoying.
Then they updated and didn't even need to refresh the page to get an update to the thread you were in.
Then a few years back they decided you can't get messages in the mobile website, you must use their app. Later I learned about mbasic.facebook.com and have to switch to that when friends message me.
Interesting, iOS has pretty locked down default settings and prompts you when an app tries to access most sensitive data. I think I’d generally prefer mobile apps from a privacy perspective because I don’t have to worry about things like cookies as much.
That's a good point, and maybe my hesitance to use these apps comes from ignorance about what data they have access to. It's just them being so pushy about it really makes me skeptical. Perhaps users are less likely to leave Reddit if they are viewing from the app? Richer ad content? More ad content? Notifications?
I have to disagree with you here, even from a social media perspective. Namely, with apps that leverage hardware at a high rate such as the camera features of Snapchat and Instagram.
I agree that reddit might not need an app in the same way, but I'm sure there are ways they could improve their user experience by further leveraging mobile hardware in ways that don't relate to tracking.
Reddit lives on ad revenue. Mobile web reddit is not in fact incredibly optimal which is why a bunch of third party apps exist. These third party apps make it impossible to show ads save for promoted posts which people don't seem to like. Thus the official reddit app.
I prefer "Reddit is Fun" which seems to load faster than mobile web reddit and notify me on comment replies.
> Reddit lives on ad revenue. Mobile web reddit is not in fact incredibly optimal which is why a bunch of third party apps exist.
That's a problem that reddit creates for itself as it purposedly degrades the site's experience on mobile devices with tons of dark patterns to try to push users to install the company's official mobile app.
A primary reason why I don't switch to the app version for websites I visit (like Reddit, occasionally) is that I miss the ad and tracking blocker features I get in my browser.
Twitter had this some problem and went with the same solution of cutting out 3rd party apps. This is the age old piracy debate relived. People aren't using 3rd party apps because they want to skip ads, they are using them because they provide better functionality/user experience. Companies stupidly allow a 3rd party to take over all of their market share on mobile, and then make up complaints when they finally get around to making their own app.
I migrated to the mobile app after discovering the site. I find the app greatly increases the readability of the site by adding just a few more colors, some icons for particularly popular threads, and a palatable dark mode.
> Think of it like this: If Hacker News required a fat client to function on your desktop, would you actually be here at all?
HN essentially is a service that provides only a couple of text views to list and read submittions and their discussions, and requires zero processing or interaction. That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client.
If however we were discussing an application that required significant data processing, access to your personal data, or even access to photo ir video input... You'd hardly be able to implement something with HTML+CSS.
Case in point: twitter is very usable as a website but instagram is not.
What functionality are you referring to? The only one I can think of is photo editing. It’s not that difficult to make a photo editor in the browser. The only problem is performance. It would’ve been harder when Instagram was originally launched.
Instagram is perfectly usable as a website, at least on an iPhone. I guess some features might be missing, but the core stuff is there: browsing, adding photo, filters, stories.
Add a file input -> the users taps it -> ios asks if they want to use an existing photo or take a new one -> take a new photo. Result on android may differ.
I don’t use Instagram so can’t check the code, but I would guess they use something like
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture>
Which does what you’d expect on a mobile device (launch the camera) but behaves differently on desktops (opens a file upload dialog). They may have decided that this behavior would confuse users.
> That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client.
That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter that making a fat client for HN isn't necessary; that's completely beside the point. You're looking for reasons to ignore the stated premise of an analogy rather than accepting that the premise would be true.
It's like this. Say you were beginning to explain how network services work with an anecdote: "Say you need to go to the market to get a carton of milk." Suddenly your listener stops you and says, "But I don't like milk."
If your response to the above paragraph is, "But I don't know how network services work," then, congratulations, you can look forward to an exciting career in either comedy or politics, depending on whether or not you were serious.
Can you please not post flamewar-style comments to HN, regardless of how wrong or provocative you find another comment? We're trying for better than this here.
Ok, jumping in here. So yes, HN doesn't 'need' a full app, but the functionality difference between this site and Reddit isn't that great. So why, pray tell, does Reddit nag me every time I visit on mobile?
It certainly isn't that the app provides functionality that isn't avaliable through the browser, but somebody decided that it was worth spending development time and nagging users over. So yes, there are things that can't be implemented through the browser and require an app, but it's incorrect to state that nobody develops an app unless they absolutely need to.
I would suggest that quite a few people write mobile applications because their managers tell them to do it. This is totally independent of whether the use case requires a mobile application.
Given that all websites are running code on your device, that seems like a distinction with a very small difference. The question is what has the better sandbox to protect yourself. The web is definitely better but somehow I still get tracked across sites and shown "relevant" ads. Mobile apps are also fairly well sandboxed and yet some apps that need your permission to do something useful also use that permission to do evil.
As web applications get more powerful, they will become a greater and greater source of the issues that currently plague mobile apps.
Most mobile apps are really just glorified websites that don't need anything above and beyond the web sandbox. But they're going to ask for those permissions anyway, because when an app is the only way to use a sufficiently popular service, people will grant them.
It is much easier when being nice is enforced by a third party - in other words, the webpage might have an interest in taking all your cycles, but the browser app has an interest in the opposite (battery life and whatnot). So far, this seems to work well - for all the gripes of FB Messenger taking all the CPU and requiring every permission in the known universe, the FB mobile web gets adequately sandboxed by the browser.
(I am aware that the Android app model has also promised some sandboxing, but apparently even in a low-permission mode, the protection seems to be rather anemic)
On the web I can install ublock origin, privacybadger, and a vpn. Even if you ignore the phone's personal data aspect that's a 99% improvement over mobile.
Yes, drastically. Wikipedia and Hacker News don't have access to the contents of my phone or desktop, just as they don't have access to the contents of my home or mailbox.
Apps I use at least several times a week (often multiple times a day). Leaving out some that I use but where there are likely many good options (e.g. TOTP authenticator apps, alarm clocks, calculators, etc.) and "any color as long as it's black" options like GMail and Youtube.
Apps of particular note that people could easily have missed are at the top of the list. Hope I kept lines short enough.
- TripLog Mileage in plug-to-start mode;
- Bouncer (auto-remove permissions from apps after you close them);
- DroidEdit Pro (multitab text and code editor);
- Join by Joaoapps (Pushbullet alternative);
- Meteogram Pro from cloud3squared (Weather widget);
- SMS Backup+ from Jan Berkel (pushes to GMail with label);
- Nine (multi-account Exchange client);
- Firefox (plus "Dark Background and Light Text 0.6.10" and uBlock Origin);
- Firefox Focus for untrusted links (no default browser set = always prompts);
- Microsoft OneNote, Office Lens and OneDrive;
- PocketCasts;
- Textra (for SMS) and Signal;
- Nova Launcher Prime plus Will Windham's Vintage icon pack;
- Swiftkey keyboard;
- LastPass;
- TimeClock Connect Pro from Spotlight Six;
- Ultimate To-Do List from Custom Solutions, but I recently dropped ToodleDo so this may drop away.
Personal Capital (finance), WhatsApp, Slack, Overcast (podcasts), Kindle, Dark Sky (hyper accurate weather app), Google Authenticator, Lyft, RENPHO (my smart scale’s app), 1Password
Everything else is very situational and totally optional.
Mine: Firefox, WhatsApp (for family) & Telegram (friends and groups), andOTP instead of Google authenticator, New Pipe instead of YouTube, FBReader, Orgzly (notes), Phonograph for music and trying to move to LessPass for passwords.
Interesting... googled Dark Sky, tried out their web app, will probably download the mobile app. The original article's thesis seems to be on to something :)
I have found Dark Sky is great in populated areas (NYC, Denver, Houston), but Wunderground seems to do better outside of the metros (Lower Hudson River Valley, Catskills, Adirondacks -- you can probably tell where I live and work, now).
I've found the best data comes from the nearest/best doppler radar(s). Often this is one of the local tv broadcast stations. Obviously this radar data is licensed to various weather service providers but are usually owned by a broadcast television network operator.
I really like Weather Undergrounds local stations. Being able to see that a location at the top of a hill in town is a couple degrees cooler or windier than one down the street has proven to be really useful when decided to bring a jacket or not. That said Dark Sky's UI is top notch and the data seems to be pretty solid as well.
Where I live (Oslo, Norway), the predictions of Dark Sky and Weather Underground are both less accurate than just making an uneducated guess based on how the weather has been developing the last couple of days. I guess they work better in North America
In my part of North America, you can do better than any weather forecasts that I've ever seen by simply predicting that tomorrow's weather will be pretty much the same as today's. And all forecasts beyond three days are essentially worthless.
This is my position as well. Unless your app is going to provide substantial features over your website or operating system like functionality. I'm not even going to try it out.
I don't go to new websites anymore either. Just like I have a handful of core apps, I have about he same number of websites I visit. I think the only webapps I use are Workflowy (love it) and Slack (hate it).
Workflowy has updated their app for Android and it's really good!
I'm a pretty heavy user of it, and it was a godsend to have a nice official Android client that works well. Make use of the web lots on the desktop but it's probably 50/50 desktop/mobile. Love them both .
The only two things workflowy is missing is (1) being able to embed pictures and (2) being able to hyperlink to other nodes to make it act like a graph. It'd be the absolute perfect tool if it had that.
I only use it on the desktop and there I use it in the browser. They have a desktop app but it isn't very good.
Embedding pictures sounds like a nice idea, but I can't imagine how they could do it and have it look good. If I were them, I probably wouldn't add images.
I kind of hope they resist the urge to keep adding features to Workflowy. It feels done to me and I like simple, focused tools.
This doesn't express how a mobile app is essentially worse than a website - it only highlights how apps devs are doing it wrong and how mobile platforms vendors don't do their job preventing this.
Apps vendors should be discouraged from abusing access permissions, users should be warned if they probably do (in a visible and practical way) and be allowed to control them.
When a user clicks to install an app the system shows what rights does the app want and only gives choice to allow everything or just cancel. Instead it should disable everything by default, let the user turn particular permissions on explicitly and still install the app even if the user won't allow anything. It's the app vendor job to handle the cases when app can't access something.
As for TOSes - I doubt I understand why these should even be allowed by a platform. All the reasonable TOS terms are obvious and can be implied: the user can use the app for whatever is not illegal, the vendor can use whatever data the user enters the ways actually needed for the app to do its direct job (+ in non-personalized statistics calculation perhaps) and no other way.
> Instead it should disable everything by default, let the user turn particular permissions on explicitly
That would be great for power users but it wouldn't work for "the average dumb user" since they would just enable every permission when asked to do so if they don't know what it means and how it could be abused. And power users already have that in Android forks designed for them. (I can't speak for iOS.)
> All the reasonable TOS terms are obvious and can be implied
That's your definition of reasonable. With a rule like this a platform would kill off both freedom- and privacy-minded software as well as spyware (the general trackery), thus pissing off almost everyone who cares about those kinda things.
I think I never had more than 10 apps installed on a smartphone since like 2008. Not for privacy or security concerns, I just never had any use for more than a few core apps and always used the browser for the rest.
I am very, very sparing about installing apps. However, I'm even MORE cautious about browsing to websites, unless I can disable all client-side scripting.
At least I can firewall apps to mitigate any abuse they may engage in. That's much harder to do with websites.
Sounds like a miserable way to browse the web. Why not just isolate your browsing in a VM and trash it when you’re done?
I’m not security expert but seems to me if you clicked on something malicious, it costs you nothing as you’re not really exposing anything. Obviously don’t do your banking, etc on the same VM then go clicking around warez sites
It's not miserable at all -- in fact, I personally think that it makes most websites better. If a website can't operate without JS, then I just don't use that site. No loss to me.
VMs are another reasonable approach. I don't do that, though, because it's more hassle than it's worth to me.
> if you clicked on something malicious
That's not my primary concern. My primary concern is really to stop bad behavior that is very common across all websites (tracking, etc.)
you can get the add-on for Firefox mobile also. It can be a hassle for the lazy user, but the addon will provide visibility into scripts, cookies and services used by websites.
Most scripts are blocked by default which dramatically improves page load times and privacy.
