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Why It's Important That the New Ubuntu Phone Won't Rely On Apps
tedlistens writes: To tackle the chicken-and-egg problem faced by the Windows Phone or Blackberry — you need an app ecosystem to gain market share, but you need market share in order to entice developers to your platform — Canonical, the creators of the free, open-source Linux-based OS Ubuntu, have taken a novel approach with their new phone, which will be launched in Europe next week: The phone — the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, made with Spanish manufacturers BQ — won't feature apps. Instead, it will have a new user experience paradigm called Scopes. These are "essentially contextual home-screen dashboards that will be much simpler and less time-consuming to develop than full-on native apps." For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two. The user experience, writes Jay Cassano at Fast Company, seems a lot more intuitive than the "app grids" that dominate most devices.
Cool spinmeistering, brah. But all I hear is someone making up excuses for why Ubuntu phone will have less developers and fewer apps than even Windows Phone. And that's no small accomplishment.
How will scopes resolve the lack of games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush? Or things like SnapChat or Whatsapp?
This space for rent.
Because websites aren't available offline, are much less responsive, have security and privacy issues, provide worse UX, and are less integrated with the hardware and system so can't provide polish that other apps can (such as sound muting if the user picks up the phone). Websites are ok if your purpose is to get up to date information, but they're a poor replacement for a real app.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A clot of places that I use have native apps and i find the web based version, even on mobile is faster than the app. also a lot of time the content is not updated on the app in real time as the website. This is true in a lot of sports news apps and other informational based apps. Games on the other hand are different.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
We won't have "apps", instead we'll have mini websites that kind of function like apps, but not really. But we won't call them apps so you can't complain that there are no apps.
Most things don't need native speed and work fine as websites.
Yes, most things may not. Many things do. For example, I go and visit a small town only about an hour away from where I live. For much of the trip there and while in town I have either no data connection or one that measures at best in the 10s of KBs. How exactly am I going to play my music/audio books, in those areas if not with a native app? Pretty sure a website is going to be very much help.
'When you want to listen to Nas's Illmatic you don't think "I want to fire up Grooveshark so I can listen to Illmatic." You just think "I really want to listen to the one of the greatest rap albums of all time right now."'
Not me. I do think "Should I fire-up Subsonic and pre-load a bunch of music for later off-line use or stream now from Pandora?" Apps give not only content but specific functionality for their use-cases.
Maybe I'm showing my age - but I prefer my apps to provide specific functionality rather than these sort of "mashups" where we just put a bunch of crap in front of the user and hope they find what they were trying to do.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
It sounds like these "scopes" are going to rely heavily on data usage. They must have truly unlimited data in Europe. I don't see this going over well in the United States.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two.
Right. The Unity/Amazon Shopping Lens - 'cause searching for something on my device isn't any different than searching for stuff on the web - or a vendor.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That's because most people just half-assedly slap together an "app" version of their web page that is usually dumbed-down and poorly optimized (if even at all). I've written about a dozens apps for myself to make certain websites I use better on my phone and even with the overhead of the having to parse the HTML for the bits of data I want, my apps are still faster and far more responsive and better to use than rendering the webpage in my browser. That also is probably due to the fact that I'm not having to run the gobs of javascript required for rendering the ads, web trackers, etc. as the browser does.
Yes, most things may not. Many things do. For example, I go and visit a small town only about an hour away from where I live. For much of the trip there and while in town I have either no data connection or one that measures at best in the 10s of KBs. How exactly am I going to play my music/audio books, in those areas if not with a native app? Pretty sure a website is going to be very much help.
The phrase "I live in the US" would have been a fine substitute for your example. Even if it's not true, it makes it much clearer. You can use that phrase and "crappy broadband" more or less interchangably.
Because websites aren't available offline, are much less responsive, have security and privacy issues,
The ignorance is strong with this one.
provide worse UX, and are less integrated with the hardware and system so can't provide polish that other apps can (such as sound muting if the user picks up the phone). Websites are ok if your purpose is to get up to date information, but they're a poor replacement for a real app.
You really haven't seen what the web platform is capable of these days, have you? I think the OP's point is sound. Realistically, I believe people get bored with installing apps, and at some point slow down with it. Also many previously installed sit around locally taking up resources auto-loading, auto-updating, and generally become even more of a security concern, as well as open up privacy issues that websites never could. The user doesn't visit the site? The software doesn't run.
Web apps, for a lot of scenarios can be just as good as natives apps, as well as just as invasive. When you run them.
Why do we even need native apps anymore?
To conserve battery life. Modern portable devices would be able to last for days of active use if they didn't run managed code with demand so much DRAM.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Can we still run it like a regular desktop machine? install KDE, use a keyboard, mouse and external display? I imagine not, but hope so!
The ignorance is strong with this one.
How is a website going to play the music stored on my phone when I have no Internet connection? Much less how I'm going to be able to stream music in such a case.
You honestly, are trying to ask how a web app would stream music, and get this... over the Internet? Also, regarding local playback of things like mp3's using web application development strategies, I'll let you google it.
You really haven't seen what the web platform is capable of these days, have you?
No, we have. People like you just highly exaggerate what it can do. If web apps were really that amazing, no one would be writing native apps anymore. Yet this isn't even remotely the case.
I understand, I really do. I know the history. Do you remember when Apple first announced that the iPhone would only use web apps? Have you used one from 2007? In retrospect, it seems like it would have turned out to be the worst of ideas. I wonder what Steve Jobs thought when presented with the idea that a nice curated store could bring everything under one roof... and get a 30% (or so) cut of the pie?
Today, web apps really are best for consumers, for the present (2015), and the future.
The HTML5 pdf viewer, audio player, image gallery and video player built into my Firefox OS phone all function offline.
True, they're "apps" but there is no concept of "native" where everything is a webapp.