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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.
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.
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)