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How Mobile Apps Are Reinventing the Worst of the Software Industry
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, says the mobile app ecosystem is getting out of hand. 'Your platform now has a million apps? Amazing! Wonderful! What they don't tell you is that 99% of them are awful junk that nobody would ever want.' Atwood says most companies trying to figure out how to get users to install their app should instead be figuring out just why they need a mobile app in the first place. Fragmentation is another issue, as mobile devices continue to speciate and proliferate. 'Unless you're careful to build equivalent apps in all those places, it's like having multiple parallel Internets. "No, sorry, it's not available on that Internet, only the iOS phone Internet." Or even worse, only on the United States iOS phone Internet.' Monetization has turned into a race to the bottom, and it's led to worries about just what an app will do with the permissions it's asking for. Atwood concludes, 'The tablet and phone app ecosystem is slowly, painstakingly reinventing everything I hated about the computer software industry before the web blew it all up.'"
A whole new paradigm. You just don't get it! There's no down side etc. etc.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You don't need to guess what app is going to do with these permissions, you just assume it will abuse it, because it has no reason not to. What missing is ability to push back against unreasonable permission requests without having to root your device. Both Apple and Google dropped the ball on this.
98% of the functionality of these apps could have been done in a web page in '98.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Google's fault for not allowing the USER to have control over permissions, I should allow the permissions, not the app.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I suppose 98% of the rest 2% can be done today in HTML5. :)
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Firefox OS is trying to fix much of this.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firef...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
The Web is the most successful platform of all time and we're leading the pack on bringing a the Web platform to mobile in a way that's integrated rather than fractured like the existing app store models.
Developers need to further promote current and future web browser standards so we can have all the fancy functionality of the apps in a web page.
As a developer, why would I want to do that? Lots of people will pay for an app. Almost no one will pay for a web page.
98% of the functionality of these apps could have been done in a web page in '98.
Exactly this. I'm so sick of going to some special interest forum, only having the page hijacked by, would you like to install our app. Wtf. Apps are becoming like web urls, but not as convenient.
46137
There's an old saying: To gain knowledge, add something every day; to gain wisdom, get rid of something every day. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to work (where does the wisdom come from?), but clearly you can choke your life if you accumulate too much stuff.
And that's really true for mobile apps, which can choke your phone. Two years ago my wife's phone (Android 2.x) became unusable, and I discovered that she had installed five or six dozen free apps, and many of them had installed service daemons. (Why do workout tracking apps, cookbook apps, or lightweight games need daemons?) She made an effort to purge down to just the apps she needs.
Even if you assume that the phone can handle all the apps, they still add chaff for you to sort when you are looking for the app you actually want to run.
P.S. Jeff Atwood's rant was good, but he missed one of my pet peeves: I will click on a news story link in a blog or Slashdot or something, and the linked site will pop up a banner: Hey! Don't you want to install and use our mobile app? Why no, web site I have never heard of before, I really don't want to download and install your app. I just want to read the one story, and at the moment I'm reconsidering even that.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
What missing is ability to push back against unreasonable permission requests without having to root your device.
Apple did a great job with iOS in that regard - not at launch, but at this point it's pretty good. You are asked AT THE TIME THE APP TRIES TO ACCESS a resource like your photo library, contacts, location etc. if you want to allow it.
If you change you mind later, you just go into privacy settings and control access to any of those items to shut down access by apps you might suspect are misusing things (or you know they are, as can be the case with push notifications)
I agree with your point, but Apple has done a good job so far in helping users push back to whatever degree they desire.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, big software decided that the PC needed to become a television. Otherwise they would fail in their attempts to get your ass back on the couch.
By then, the PC was too far gone, because the heathens were actually building their own operating systems and programming languages! The horror! We might lose control of the demographics!
They needed a replacement for the PC, so they invented the smartphone. The smartphone is inferior to the PC in almost every way:
1. Slower processor
2. Less memory
3. Almost no storage
4. Slow, shitty, unreliable web access
5. Can't be physically networked with anything at all ever
6. Smaller screen
7. Atrocious, shitty, primitive, clumsy touch interface
8. Can't easily make use of any existing peripheral: printer, mouse, larger monitor, external storage, network
9. Fuckall battery life
10. Massively expensive on a capability-to-price ratio
11. Annoying royal pain-in-the-ass noisemaker
12. Makes everyone look like a jackass staring at it
Naturally, the general public, after being fed a thin gruel of third-rate marketing hype, decided to pitch 30 years of advancement overboard and charge-card their new tamagotchis by the Chinese freighter-load. They gleefully accepted the shitty web browsing, shitty interface and shitty battery life because they could compile monuments of narcissism in the form of 1000-entry selfie albums.
But that's not the best part!
You see, now that the manufacturers have TOTAL CONTROL of the platform (which is something they desperately wanted with the PC but couldn't engineer, despite Microsoft's roaring campaign of evil in the 1990s) they can tell you what programming language to use, what kind of apps to write and how much money you can make from them.
They have won. If you make apps, you are a defacto unpaid employee of Apple and/or Google doing exactly what you are told under pain of being kicked off the platform forever.
The rest of you spend all day staring at a 2x3 screen. I think we know what that makes you.
The results were rather predictable. Real programming and real programming languages have been largely exterminated. The idea of writing C on a development-centered operating system with a full suite of modern capabilities is dismissed by ignorant immature amateurs in favor of some kind of flimsy broken scripting language or worse.
Programmers have no real access to the hardware. Your code is trapped forever, and is useless anywhere else, since its built only for that platform's API. Its also pretty much guaranteed to be obsolete in three years because there will be no hardware to run it.
So we've made the software, the hardware and the developers disposable, and all the money goes to the phone makers, who are the only ones allowed to make anything of any real value.
The whole country staring at a screen which only displays what they want it to display. (The Internet is next)
Exactly the way they wanted it.
The proliferation of unnecessary apps on tablets and phones. There are maybe 2-3 dozen businesses and sites I interact with enough each year to warrant their own app. The rest I interact with infrequently or they're not a high enough priority (e.g. Slashdot) that I need to be constantly updated to their latest offering and features (e.g. Beta).
The web browser model works really well for these low-priority interactions. I install an app on my computer for the important stuff (financial management, photo editing, code development, word processor, etc). But for all the not-so-important stuff, I install one app - a web browser. The browser then lets me make bookmarks to all those different low-priority sites.
But in their zeal to monetize and get a hold of your data, most companies have crippled or entirely eschewed the mobile browsing experience in favor of their own custom app. Many sites detect my browser is on Android and redirect me to crippled or dysfunctional mobile versions of their sites, when my phone is more than capable of using their full site. The result is whereas I have about 40 programs installed on my laptop and about a thousand bookmarks, I have over 250 apps installed on my phone and only a dozen bookmarks. Management of those apps is starting to become unwieldy as every day a half dozen of them report that they need to be updated.
I yearn for the days when all the less important stuff was just a bookmark in my browser. The browser was like a hub, and the connections between me and these less-important sites were like spokes. The hub-spoke model vastly decreased the number of spokes at my end. But by favoring or requiring dedicated apps in mobile space, these companies/sites have increased my workload and overhead by forcing me to maintain a lot more direct routes to their business/site.
To paraphrase something a friend once said to me: "There was a time between 'AOL keyword [thing I'm interested in]' and "Search the App Store for [thing I'm interested in]' when the internet was a pretty cool place.
Often it is done in HTML5 too, by the same people. I've uninstalled several websites' apps because the apps were actually less featureful, slower, and buggier than just using the website in a mobile browser. A common organizational reason for this is when the mobile app was contracted out to a third party dev shop as a one-off. When it first came out, it might've been on par or better than the mobile site. But then it never gets updated, because it was just an outside contract job, while the website is actually maintained and quickly surpasses the bitrotting mobile app.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ask me for each individual thing, ask me each time.
I thought such "mother may I" behavior was exactly what Apple's Mac commercials made fun of. (Cancel or allow?) Condition people to just click OK, and they'll OK anything, no matter when or on what platform.
Are more willing because it is a rarity to have a well-designed mobile page that has the same functionality as an app
I very much disagree. People are unwilling to pay for even good quality web content. They are quite happy to pay for crappy apps. It is not about giving people "quality", but about giving them a sense of ownership.
Elegance is always defined by the lack of complexity, not by the addition of it.
Not necessarily. You can have something that is both elegant and complex. It's just more difficult to pull off. While as a rule of thumb you are correct that simpler does more often result in something elegant, elegance is not defined by simplicity. The two are independent concepts.
That said I do tend to like Colin Chapman's philosophy of "simplify, then add lightness". Minimalism can be a very beautiful thing.
Well why not own an iPhone then? What the hell is the point of having a smartphone unless you can take advantage of the world of applications?
Because iPhone owners can't "take advantage of the world of applications". For one thing, if I switched to an iPhone, I'd lose access to Wi-Fi network cataloging and troubleshooting apps like MozStumbler and WiFi-Where, which Apple forbids in the App Store because it refuses to provide the required public API. For another, if I switched to an iPhone, running apps I developed myself would cost $748 extra for the first year for a second computer and a certificate and $99 extra for each additional year to renew the certificate.
The fun isn't over until you can get a quarterly subscription to a stack of DVDs or USB jump drives or something containing "100,000 of the best [platform] Mobile Apps" delivered to your door for the low, low price of $125 per quarter.
The smartphone is inferior to the PC in almost every way:
Really? It fits in my pocket, lasts longer on battery than my laptop, it weighs (far) less, it is a phone, I can take pictures with it, it doesn't require a mouse or keyboard to be useful, I can use it to navigate places where I can't take a PC, I can take it places I would never take a PC, I don't have to worry (much) about malware, it wakes up instantly, I can run with it and listen to music while running, it has sensors like accelerometers that aren't very useful on a PC and certainly never are standard. "Inferior in every way"? Pul-leeeze.
BTW most of your points about why it is "worse" are either complete nonsense or only make sense if you foolishly think that a smartphone should be a PC. If you want to use a PC, go right ahead. No one is standing in your way.
(oh and if you're thinking of making some snarky "drink the cool-aid" remark, just go ahead and stuff it)
It's not just the software industry it's the hardware one too.
In the PC market open standards beat out closed propriety hardware a long time ago. With the Desktop PC we enjoyed the ability to connect nearly any peripheral regardless of the manufacturer of the device or the PC. Hardware was modular and pieces could be upgraded or replaced with ones from just about any other manufacturer. Because of standards across the hardware alternative software could be installed other than what the manufacturer originally included.
I realize that much of this modularity would be difficult or impossible to implement in a cellphone-sized device. However, Imagine switching between Android, Maemo or Windows8 as easily as you can switch between Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc... on a desktop! Proprietary chips and locked bootloaders make this pretty much impossible. How about being able to plug just any USB (or similar bus) device into your phone and actually expect it to work?
You are relentlessly confusing my comparison. I am squarely comparing the PC to the smartphone. Not phones to other phones.
Your primary excuse seems to be that a smartphone, which is slower and less advanced than a PC, is "good enough." If that were true, then the PC would have stopped advancing in 1998.
Your other excuse is that "people are buying them" therefore they are good, which is pure dumbass.
When the smartphone was invented, there were more than one billion PCs on the planet. The notion that normal people weren't using computers before smartphones is also pure dumbass.
I vehemently disagree with the idea that smartphones are computers. Smartphones are elaborate televisions, and the "software" they make available is simply repeated attempts at building a channel-changing interface.
That is not making computing more available to the normal user. Education makes computing more available.
Smartphones do not allow users to compute anything. They cannot create or build anything. They cannot think with the aid of a smartphone. They simply point and grunt and a new picture appears. They are screens upon which are displayed colorful, annoying ads. Nothing more.
There's a technical term for that: television.
Yeah, most of these apps are just facades for what can be done with a browser but they also have built in tracking and other tools to scavenge more data off of your mobile device than a browser would usually allow. To be honest, I believe that is the big reason for all these little do-nothing apps that have popped up especially the immensely popular "ring tone apps" in the Google Play Store for example. Yes we've had the same kind of annoy/malware for desktop apps that embed Firefox, IE etc. but the installation process is a bit more involved than going to a play/app store and clicking install. I'd also liken it to what's happening on SourceForge with this new Dice installer crapware that puts other shit on your system. It's not only bad practice but it also makes me distrust the software I'm trying to install. Google does the same kind of things with Chrome / Google Drive etc. and even after you uninstall them you'll still find little updaters and other crapware that Google leaves around that you have to manually go and remove.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I suppose 98% of the rest 2% can be done today in HTML5. :)
Yup, just as long as you are willing to give up any sense of decent UI, performance, etc. Mobile devices are shockingly bad at rendering HTML at a good rate, and I'm yet to see a HTML5 page that properly scales to different screen sizes, has good information density, or works properlly offline.
That's not to say these things aren't possible, but I have to assume that they are very hard because nobody seems to be doing them.
No
Then it's not a computer. It's a television.
After that, the question becomes why is it so important to Apple, et al. to take computing away from their customers? They didn't (and still don't) do it on the Mac. Why are they so insistent that it be taken away on mobile?
And it's not costs, because it costs more to lock the machine down than it does to leave it open.
Why was everyone so quick to toss the PC overboard? Why is everyone so quick to toss the web overboard? Simple. They can't control them. But they can control the phone, and that's why they want you to prefer it: so they can control you.
Steve was right that the iPhone doesn't need apps because it has the web and people should be writing web-apps.
Well, he was mostly right. 90% of the Apps out there could be web-apps and you wouldn't need to have two versions (iOS, Android) and I could access them from the desktop.
Instead, the opposite happened: Every other stupid forum tells me to install its app. Where... I can read the forum. Uh, what? When you tell me on your forum to install your app so I can do what I am already doing before you interrupted me with that stupid pop-up then someone somewhere had his brain turned off or he would've realized how utterly stupid that is.
It's like stopping me in front of the grocery shelf in your supermarket to hand me a flyer that tells me that if I go to your supermarket, I can buy groceries there. Uh, yes, dumbo?
The problem is the insanity called advertisement agencies. These people are not selling your product to your customers as they are trying to make you believe. Their product is not your product and their customers are not your customers. Their product is advertisement and their customer is you. As long as you will pay for it, they will sell you any crap they can get away with. And so they will happily repackage the website, forum or whatever else you already created and sell it back to you. And for some reason, people are dumb enough to pay for their own product.
We can only hope that sanity will win in the end and product managers the world over start to kick out these parasites. I, for one, consider a pop-up telling me to install an app that allows me to view the website that I am already viewing as a surefire sign that your company is too stupid to spend money on. Or in simple terms: Want to drive me off? Tell me to install your app.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org