Companies care about user engagement, and that is driven by two major things: transactional notifications, and easy access. Apps provide both, while the web is a second class citizen on mobiles. Consider that web apps still cannot send In-App Notifications and can’t perform In-App Purchases. So, even if I do create a kick-ass web app, I would have to rely on — wait for it — SMS to deliver notifications to my users. I would have to rely on people manually typing in numbers in order to invite people, so viral spreading won’t be so great either. In short, even if we wanted to create a mobile web app instead — and we do — the ecosystem will select for the native apps in the long run.
And Apple, at least, is keeping things that way on purpose. Consider this dig at Google by the master himself, Steve Jobs — a few years ago:
He was saying “for some reason” but really the reasons for choosing apps over web are enabled largely by these platforms themselves. Because they are more locked-down, they won’t allow too much integration, and it’s harder to get web apps to catch on.
That said, three years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there’s a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like WordPress for blogs or Git for version control.
Shameless plug: Qbix (my company) has been hard at work the last 3 years building an open, web-based platform that takes advantage of PhoneGap (Cordova) and emerging containers like MacGap and now WinJS! Write once, deploy anywhere, as a social app with contacts / roles / permissions / notifications / etc. working across all devices and integrated. So developers can focus on building the app and get best practices for virality and engagement (without annoying people) out of the box.
And Apple, at least, is keeping things that way on purpose. Consider this dig at Google by the master himself, Steve Jobs — a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd-xXfIEpE
He was saying “for some reason” but really the reasons for choosing apps over web are enabled largely by these platforms themselves. Because they are more locked-down, they won’t allow too much integration, and it’s harder to get web apps to catch on.
That said, three years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there’s a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like WordPress for blogs or Git for version control.
Shameless plug: Qbix (my company) has been hard at work the last 3 years building an open, web-based platform that takes advantage of PhoneGap (Cordova) and emerging containers like MacGap and now WinJS! Write once, deploy anywhere, as a social app with contacts / roles / permissions / notifications / etc. working across all devices and integrated. So developers can focus on building the app and get best practices for virality and engagement (without annoying people) out of the box.
http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...
http://platform.qbix.com