I think Facebook is an instructive example here. They tried for a long time to make their native app (for Android, anyway) just a wrapper over the mobile web client, but they could never get the performance all the way there. They went native and have seen great results. They resisted as long as they could but eventually the products had to diverge.
I'd say 80% of developers who choose native do so for performance, and 20% do it because the app store and home screen placement is better for branding and content discovery than just sticking up your website on a server somewhere.
I think there's room for some sort of hybrid product but I'm not sure what it would look like. Maybe a mobile browser with super-aggressive caching (like not even a HEAD request for JS and CSS) and the ability to improve performance for the foreground page to the point where it's near-native. I'd use that for the mobile websites that I use less frequently, and continue to download the native apps for the things I use every day.
Am I in the minority that I don't want an app for every. bloody. webpage. I visit?
I wrote about this problem here (http://serv.github.io/blog/2014/02/20/unfortunate-state-of-m...). Mobile Web sucks because there's an incentive problem. No one really has strong incentive to make mobile web better. Performance issues are largely an effect of this root incentive problem. (edited from "cause" to "effect")
- Users have a strong preconceived notion that websites on mobile just suck compared to native apps.
- Management allocates less financial and developer resources into mobile web because users prefer native app strongly.
- Developers time and effort are stretched thin for web because management focus more on native app teams.
The mobile web will continue to lag behind native app for a while.
I'm of the view this is a lot of fuss about nothing. Big deal if people prefer apps over the "open" web. The reality is a large number of people use the likes of MSN and Yahoo as web home pages, and unless you were linked to from them they were unlikely to find you. The app launcher situation is an improvement over that.
The big problem is that dipping your toes into something via a website (assuming you don't hit an auth wall) is easier than finding then downloading an app.
Besides, a lot of these "web" apps are just things like Facebook or G+ which are no more open to scraping or any of the other supposed benefits of an open web than your average iOS or Android mobile clients are. The web has morphed into an unholy mix of the worst qualities of everything else.
Security could become a big factor in web vs native. For example, I don't trust the facebook native app. I've used both the web and native versions and the native version is smoother and better. But I don't trust facebook. There's a lot of personal information on mobile phones these days and I don't want facebook accessing that data. For me, using the web version is much safer.
And random apps on the app store from unknown developers? I trust those even less. I may install one if the list of permissions is very restricted and reasonable. But I don't like spending time looking at the permissions and trying to figure out if it's ok.
Another example is banking apps. I remember there was news a while ago that many banking apps were not handling passwords properly. If I use the web, I can see the SSL lock icon, inspect the certificate, and know that it's properly handled. I can't do that for a native app.
The Flurry stats [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109749/Apps-Solidify-Leadership-S...] show 32% of user time is spent gaming; 17% on facebook; 9.5% on messaging and 4% on youtube - that's 62% for those of you keeping count.
That doesn't look like the end of the mobile web - that just looks like people spending a lot of time gaming and on facebook.
> It is also why so many mobile websites are broken.
Many mobile websites are broken. On a mobile phone, both websites and "mobile websites" are broken.
If anyone is looking for a money-making idea, here's a website I use all the time -
On my desktop it takes me five seconds to use. On my Android HTC One it takes me maybe five minutes to use.
If someone made an equivalent Android app, or a functional mobile web site of course I'd use it. Actually - I'm an Android programmer and could do it myself, but am busy with other things at the moment to do it singlehandedly.
That is just one web site. Many web sites I use are designed for the desktop, and work horribly on smartphones. No wonder people go running for apps when the functionality pops up in one.
While performance is often cited as the main reason for having a native app, I think that one of the biggest reasons to prefer native apps is usability. More concretely I can see the following:
- A web app/site is often an app within an app. This means that what usually works as an interface to this device is no longer true, or rather different. The gestures are different, how the app is treating them is different and so on.
- On the performance side the web apps suffer from UI delivery problem - the site must deliver both the app it self and the data for which you use this app. A native app have to work with the data only, and its not restricted to be always connected with the web.
- Another reason is that although the same on the surface mobile is actually shifting our usage patterns. Our usage is far less consistent, more spaced out, under more conditions and with smaller screens. The native apps work well here because their components are thought out to work under these conditions and of course tested for this.
- Finally because of the usage patterns we see some native apps more versed to cover specific use cases. This differs from the mobile web which just have everything the normal web has, but tested to work on mobile.
Some of this points of course can be tackled by html5 wrapped web apps. But this approach comes with own set of limitations and problems - we are compromising on both openness and performance sides. So while I want the mobile web to work, for now I think that native apps are winning.
Maybe it's because you don't typically see an "app" that is just completely unusable on your device.
When the vast majority of simple websites (not even applications) have terrible experiences on mobile web browsers, is it really any surprise that users prefer using an app that at least puts effort into being usable?
HN and at least 80% of the linked articles I read on my commute have terrible mobile interfaces.
I really don't see the "performance" argument. It's unlikely anything you build natively is going to compete with a browser's raw HTML/CSS performance. That's something they do incredibly well. And really, that's all a static blog needs to be. I don't need your comments. I don't need your ads. I don't need your HTTPS. I don't need your massively broken up application that requires a GET for every asset on the page (and the 20+ JS files you've decided not to package together, none of which is needed). I don't need your parallax effects, your hover/click listeners, your scroll events, your damn lightboxes, or your image rotators.
At the end of the day, I don't use the mobile web very much. It's not because mobile web sucks. It's because nearly everything on the mobile web sucks.
The web was originally a means to collaboratively publish helpful documentation stacks and research papers. It was and still is rooted in "document objects", not apps and certainly not monetization. To recoup the costs of authoring these help files, we have to rent out real estate in the margins.
Apps predated this model in more or less the same form we currently find them, with monetization inherent in the distribution model.
If native apps are dominating web pages in some medium e.g. portables and wearables, maybe that means the audience of that medium isn't inclined to create links or author documents, so isn't well served by the web model there. Specialized apps will tend to serve their specific needs better, especially if they can be monetized easily.
There will always be a place for the web, and for the dedicated app. "Web apps" were and are a bit of a hack, although often a very useful one. Creativity can be channeled into all of these media, and the barriers to entry are lowering for all of them. It's a great time to be online. As long as IP remains ubiquitous, I imagine there will always be a market outside of the AOLs, Apple Stores, Google Stores etc.
I think this article is about web sites, but if you're a game developer, it feels like google and apple are actively trying to kill off the web option, or at least don't care about it. It's easy to find complaints about how audio is terrible in HTML5 on mobile devices, but its been that way for years. I still don't think you can play two sounds simultaneously on mobile safari (eg: background music and a sound effect).
The problem is that the large majority of people, even the youth of today[0], are incredibly un-tech savvy. Unless your website or game is packaged into a simple app you just can't rely on people to visit it or even find it in the first place.
[0] http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
web/app is not zero sum.
There is a wide overlap in functionality, but if the experience via mobile browser is sufficient, users won't care. They may even enjoy not having to curate yet another app.
App Pros: Engagement lock-in Richer experiences (performance, native advantages)
App Cons: Dev costs Fragmentation costs Dependency on ecosystem(s) App release cycle + cross platform synchro of dev efforts
Reality is that the mobile web experience currently is worse than native mobile apps. No matter how much you want "open", or how much faster your latest web-mobile framework is, right now people still prefer the app experience. That might change, but i suspect it will take some time.
Part of the reason why people prefer "apps" to mobile websites is speed.
Mobile website, infact normal websites are large, clunky and not designed for fingers, or high latency.
I fully appreciate the problem with not interoperable application and the large benefits of a fully URIed web; however, making progress in usability requires a flexibility that this scheme doesn’t match, hence the success not just of mobile apps, but Ajax before them -- success that occasionally went back to its origin and reassigned URI throughout (thank you GMail).
However, one thing is not true in what he says:
> Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic
Yes, indeed, but so do websites; portalisation, or more simply the shear number of sites people visit spontaneously is not less than the number of apps they use regularly: three to five versus a dozen. There is a problem at the lower end of that spectrum: while the sites big enough overall to make an be maintained it are actually more common than apps that can do the same, users tend to spend an almost exclusive share their time in said ten-to-fifteen apps, and that challenges discoverability, i.e. the renewal of that class. That’s where the issue is, not in how many apps cover 80% of usage, or how many first letters people type before their browser auto-complete the rest.
(On that, I wonder how much the lack of success of Readability has to do with starting with the same letter as Reddit)
I think this is the price we pay for hewing to the party line of only permitting non-breaking incremental changes on the Web.
Would this still be the case if Web development wasn't a broken matrix of browser and OS versions powered by a language which people are constantly trying to paper over with abstractions? (Seriously, it's like a person you'd only have sex with as long as you'd put a paper bag over their head.)
"This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken."
Huh, is that surprising? They break their mobile sites and expect people to still use them more than apps? This is self fulfulling: if you make a sucky website, people will NOT use it. Make a wonderful mobile site and people will not care about your apps.
It's difficult to reconcile the Flurry stats with the fact that most blogs / publishers are seeing a higher percentage of their traffic come from mobile web (>50% in many cases).
One reason could be that their stats don't include mobile web usage within apps (i.e. FB / Twitter). That discounts a lot of my own browsing behavior.
Cached URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cdi...
(It's erroring out in production.)
What I am more interested in is whether the usage of the mobile web is on a decline in absolute numbers or only relative to apps.
Anyone got the numbers for that?
Also this might be a stupid question but are Safari and Chrome considered apps in this context? I.e. do they count as app usages or web usage?
cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fk-RAMh...
And text:
People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop:
And more of their mobile time using apps, not the web:
This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing.
Moreover, there are signs that it will only get worse. Ask any web company and they will tell you that they value app users more than web users. This is why you see so many popups and banners on mobile websites that try to get you to download apps. It is also why so many mobile websites are broken. Resources are going to app development over web development. As the mobile web UX further deteriorates, the momentum toward apps will only increase.
The likely end state is the web becomes a niche product used for things like 1) trying a service before you download the app, 2) consuming long tail content (e.g. link to a niche blog from Twitter or Facebook feed).
This will hurt long-term innovation from a number of reasons:
1) Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic that favors the status quo over new innovations. Popular apps get home screen placement, get used more, get ranked higher in app stores, make more money, can pay more for distribution, etc. The end state will probably be like cable TV – a few dominant channels/apps that sit on users’ home screens and everything else relegated to lower tiers or irrelevance.
2) Apps are heavily controlled by the dominant app stores owners, Apple and Google. Google and Apple control what apps are allowed to exist, how apps are built, what apps get promoted, and charge a 30% tax on revenues.
Most worrisome: they reject entire classes of apps without stated reasons or allowing for recourse (e.g. Apple has rejected all apps related to Bitcoin). The open architecture of the web led to an incredible era of experimentation. Many startups are controversial when they are first founded. What if AOL or some other central gatekeeper had controlled the web, and developers had to ask permission to create Google, Youtube, eBay, Paypal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Sadly, this is where we’re headed on mobile.
Which is easier to code: a mobile app or a mobile website? The tools are much better for the mobile app and it is much easier to do cool stuff. Plus the testing time is much quicker. Path of least resistance and biggest wow.
Open your phone and take note of the apps it has installed on it. How many of those apps are basics CRUD wrappers? Phones will only continue to get faster but these types of apps will stop pushing the envelope at some point. There's only so many fancy transparent swiping swooshing crap you can add to an app before you start to detract from the experience. At some point, mobile web apps will be just as performing as most native apps (we may already be there) at which point people will start to balk at the ridiculousness of having to write 3+ versions of the same damn CRUD app
We recently rewrote our mobile website to be a much more modern experience ( http://m.trulia.com ). Our ability to easily deploy and test ideas while behaving almost exactly like our iOS / Android apps is quite powerful. It's also added a lot to the value of a web visitor, which is important given the SEO nature of our content.
In general, I agree with the sentiment that the mobile web is only now getting it's feet under it. My main concern is that Apple/Google prefer app improvements over improving their browsers.
I usually discover web content through social sites like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. On mobile, such sites have built-in browsers, and I suspect that most "app" traffic is actually of this nature.
The web is for information. It was not made to emulate desktop or mobile applications.
That said. Information can mean many things. And there will be hybrids.
You can do offline apps in HTML+CSS+JS right now, but it's a PITA:
var a = document.createElement("a");
a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("hacker news");
a.setAttribute("href", "https://news.ycombinator.com/");
If your app contains information, it's best suited for the www. But if it only contains a canvas, it's more suited as a native app.
As an app developer, I like this trend. More time on mobile and more time in apps. Both good things for me.
That being said, I think the more time in apps vs mobile web might be a bit misleading. How many apps out there have webviews taking you to the web for various reasons? I can only imagine this time is counted as app time for the graph in the article, but it's really web time for all intents and purposes.
And frankly, I think that this is a much better user experience in a lot of ways. the facebook native app is much better than the web version is and even really could be (at least at this point). Much of what happens in that app though is clicking on websites to random articles around the web, and that is done in a webview inside the app. I like the app over the website, and i definitely don't want it to kick me out to safari while I'm in the app. This is a good ux, but I think it skews the data in this article. How many other apps have similar functionality?
All that being said, I strongly prefer the experience of native apps over the web, but I'm only interested in using the app if it's something I'm going to use all the time. If I need your site 1 time ever, I'm not wasting time downloading the app. If I use it every day, I absolutely would rather have an app. For everyone saying "Hell no I don't want your app", I suspect the above is actually true for a significant majority of people. 1 time use people don't want app. Repeated use people do want app.
Really need more data on this besides a set from flurry -- I'm not convinced that mobile web is declining just from that one graph... (Especially since flurry is aimed at app developers.)
The mobile web experience is just not good enough yet.
But we've seen this pattern multiple times over the past 15+ years, the open web by its very nature needs time to catch up.
It doesn't mean that the current state of affairs is final.
It took the open web over a decade to start making proprietary "rich media" solutions like Flash obsolete. These things take time.
Open web will never be at the lead of innovation, it just provides the foundation for it. Also, most mobile apps still use the web to be networked. The browser is not the web.
I think OP is living in a bubble. I don't use more than a few apps everyday, and I do almost 90% of my online reading in my desktop. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a computer at work. The only time I have to poke around with my smartphone is after work, and a hour of that is spent in a subway with no online connection.
I mean, I guess if you have FU money, don't work for the man, and travel to wherever you want with WiFi, sure, you probably spend more time poking with apps than you do in a desktop.
Discovery, usage, and feedback are all more polished in native apps rather than on mobile web. Mobile web is the wild west in terms of experience and more of a stepping stone until you get frustrated enough to download the app or ditch that service altogether if they don't have a native app. Mobile web has lost many of its benefits due to some very distinct reasons.
Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins
Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins
Ease of discovery? Native wins
Ideal user experience? Native wins
Mobile web is lagging behind for good reason.
While I'd love to see web replace native apps, I don't see that happening in the near future. With the kind of innovation happening in the mobile space (iBeacon, Android Wear, Background Fetch etc.) it's probably impossible for the web to keep up.
But there is certainly a bubble in the app space which will bust sooner or later. Not sure what will be the next big thing though. Web does not seem like a candidate.
We are missing important metrics here. Mobile is getting more short intervals of usage. We are connecting more often throughout our day were we otherwise would not access a desktop. We need to consider the baseline of usage historically to project a more accurate vector of platform use. Are we just using the internet more in general? My bet is yes. This data is basically incomplete.
The web may or may not be in decline, but why worry about it? Clients that consume services (be it web browsers, or apps or whatever) have always been in a state of flux. The web was hot, now apps are, then something else will be, then something else after that, ad infinitum. It sucks for developers, but then again things have always kinda sucked for developers.
If app is the best hire for the job then so be it. Ditto web when it is best. However the two dominant gatekeeper paradigm is scary.
Or... people don't make mobile specific websites, they make a website that adapts to mobile and label it responsive.
Also, I don't goto the web for anything I would do with an app generally speaking. Camera, calendars.
The device makers don't have a huge incentive to improve web browsers either, they have a store in which they want to take a piece of your earnings.
The key issue is that mobile apps tend to be task oriented. A lot of web companies (like FB) are not transitioning into app studios by breaking down a monolithic site into set of mobile apps that deliver a single feature/accomplish a single task.
If the open web were to be redefined along those lines, I dont see why users wont use that.
Agree in general. This is worrisome. However, (1) is most probably exaggerated. On mobile, you have an unbelievably broad selection, this will never become an oligopoly. But big players will get bigger. Anyway, Firefox OS may become a promising alternative, althought it comes with some of the same downsides.
Even if apps totally won, it wouldn't mean that the mobile web lost. 100% mobile app usage wouldn't imply 0% mobile web usage.
Someone might spend way more time in Facebook.app than Safari.app, but within that, they might spend most of their time on pages linked to from their Facebook feed.
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:
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...
when you will be able to integrate web into mobile OS then we will be talking. Mobile just in a browser window is unexciting and cumbersome. Mobile Internet, I wouldn't call it so much the web but more like integrated experience can bring so much more to the mobile platform. but it would take another Apple with Steve Jobs to implement it(IMO). Basically it is unploughed field and investment need is of investment of epic proportion of research and monetary kind. The whole look and feel of mobile OSes has to change. Mobile Internet is kind of boring when it is contrained to just one of little boxes on the screen, if mobile has access to OS services that would another thing.
my 2c
It's deeply ironic that much of Silicon Valley spent the 90's obsessed that Microsoft would become the gate-keeper to the Internet and or Web, and be able to levy a toll accordingly.
And here we are, with Silicon Valley as the gate-keeper instead.
So I keep seeing this point:
"Web applications on the desktop are way ahead of where they used to be. In a few years, it'll be the same for mobile web apps... they'll catch up to the native performance."
But this always seems to overlook another question...
"Where will native desktop and mobile apps be in a few years?"
I have no doubt that mobile web apps will catch up to the performance of CURRENT native apps. However, I absolutely doubt they'll be up to par with the native standard of their time. Web apps progress, but so do native. Worse of all (best of all?) it puts users into the habit and comfort of native and makes the standard for web increase.
I don't think it changes the numbers too much but do these numbers consider web usage inside apps like Facebook and gmail?
Apps have an enormous advantage when it comes to acces to the device like photos, camera, address book and notifications.
Down for anyone else?
[an error occurred while processing this directive]One thing that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned are app updates. Updating apps is a pain for the user and a bottleneck for devs. This alone seems like a compelling reason to choose mobile web over native.
Seems relevant: "App-pocalypse Now" by Jeff Atwood http://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/
I'm all for web apps but I have to admit, when I'm using an app frequently I always download the native app. In most cases it's just a better, faster and smoother experience.
This is both bad and good.
Good: It might stop the rot of websites turning their whole site into a mobile version with fat-finger buttons and massive text, if websites become the means of interacting for people with real computers again.
Bad: Apps are a far bigger security risk, and prevent casual interaction (i.e. following a link onto something, then going somewhere else) - having an app means you're in a selfcontained site and are kept there until you close the app and open another.
We'll see a third platform emerge in the next few years that combines the best of native apps and the mobile web.
It will probably be based on cards as the unit of interaction.
There is a point here that many websites don't need an app, but have them as part of a fad.
However, on the flip side as wearable tech becomes more and more prevalent (think Google Glass, but also things like Jawbone), it make a lot of sense that more and more of our internet usage goes via these interfaces which are inherently non-web.
I spend an hour a day on Twitter during my Caltrain commute.
I click on links that open up a UIWebView and read articles on the web.
Does that count as one hour in an "app"? In reality, it's more like 20% in the app and 80% following shared web links.
Sure, mobile apps will replace web apps. Way better performance. But who's gonna download an app to read a wikipedia article? The web ain't just apps people. It's supposed to be for documents.
The web is a chaotic mess and deserves the ignorance. We can't agree on standards and propagate such shortcomings and much more to the user. We have distracted ourselves with crap like browser wars, popup ads, "enable javascript for this page to work" for too long a time.
I don't see why we have to put our users through the web, just because its easy for us to develop or deliver for it.
Consumers have taken to apps like never before. Asking them to regress is stupidity. Take the simplest case of loss of internet connection. Browsers and browser apps continue to be terrible when your million dollar "UX" is replaced with an irresponsible "Page cannot be displayed" and no concept of offline experience.
Fuck browsers and mobile web. Please let's not go back.
So the Eternal September is going to end after all.
The key word here is "web"
Web - interconnections, links.
You don't get that with apps.
Mobile websites can not send push notifications, use location information, receive iBeacon broadcasts, etc.
To provide a state of the art user experience on mobile devices, you need to write an app.
In my opinion mobile web is yet to arrive, we have just gotten HTML5 standards finalized only about an year ago.
While native has had roughly seven years lead when it comes to providing quality online experience, web apps can beat native easily. And no it's not that web apps or web development or talent for mobile web development is limited or is the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is usually the vendors and support of standards in the existing breed of mobile browsers that destroy the web experience.
For example, Apple introduced this shitty non-standard swipe gesture feature on iPhone Safari/iOS7 that breaks so many things:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a...
But I think this will change with more competition among tablets and mobiles. IMHO, it is normal for the web to catch up a little later; but when it does native will find it hard to breath.
It seems 'mobile apps' are like Flash was in the 90's, basically a way to take full control over the UX to achieve some particular goal. Given the preponderance of such apps it seems as if home screens are due for a make over that looks more like iPod music libraries than 'desktop.' Basically something which supports dozens if not hundreds of apps on a device.