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Can Web Standards Make Mobile Apps Obsolete? (arstechnica.com)
nerdyalien writes: There's a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore, leaving broken or vulnerable versions in use long after they've been allegedly patched. Apps are also a lot of work for developers—it's not easy to write native apps to run on both Android and iOS, never mind considering Windows Phone and BlackBerry. What's the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser.
no
How many times is this going to be rehashed? Wasn't Java going to accomplish this 15 years ago? The web browser has turned into a VM - a very convoluted, inconsistent, difficult to develop for, hodgepodge mess of a VM. We've got WebGL and Web Audio API and all the HTML5 stuff (local storage, canvas rendering, etc, etc), and still it's a pathetic step-child of a "platform" to develop for compared to pretty much any proper platform. If "write once, run everywhere" is what you want, then sure, go for the lowest common denominator (HTML5 "apps") and you will end up with the end result of the lowest common denominator of performance and platform integration.
Better known as 318230.
no, that's not what FFOS is. FFOS takes web sites and packages them up as apps that are delivered through a store and they run locally on the device, something like Cordova apps. The story (and I ought to know because I wrote it) discusses actual mobile web sites, e.g.. m.slashdot.org as opposed to a Slashdot app. It's not hard to give the app experience by putting an icon on the screen and running the browser full-screen
Steve Jobs, 2007: You can build amazing Javascript Web 2.0 apps for the iPhone! We didn't make a SDK because you don't need one.
Steve Jobs, 2008: Okay here's your SDK
I hate upgrading my apps. I'm entirely willing to suffer security vulnerabilities and lack of new features in order to keep the user interface I'm used to and that works for me. In the case of Google Maps and Chat and almost everything else Google for example, new versions offer totally different functionality that often doesn't work for my use case anymore. I strongly suspect that there's a LOT of users like me...yeah, security vulns suck, but the time investment to keep everything up to date and relearn infrequently used applications is massive. I'd never get anything done.
No language choices, no reliable offline support (which should include installing app from an sd card if needed), no ability to downgrade the app or delay updates until problems are fixed. Plus massive performance, memory and functionality hit due to inflexibility and targeting lowest common denominator.
Web apps are the wild west with every site behaving differently in all but the basics, and then sometimes even the basics don't quite work. Even those who try to mimic a native app's look and feel never seem to get it right, leading to frustration as you then expect things to work in a specific way.
And if they aren't constantly updated that native look and feel mimicry then fails to keep up with the native platform thus defeating the whole point. For example, I've gone to a number of wordpress sites still using a "native" theme for iOS that hasn't matched the platform since iOS 6.
I don't know about everyone else, but IMHO the web browser is THE WORST platform to code for in existence. It amazes and depresses me how little has changed about client side web programming since IE4. Instead we have created these huge frameworks to try to hide the suck under an enormous pile of middleware. But still we are doing this fundamentally broken thing of shoehorning a language intended to describe formatted text documents (HTML) to instead describe a GUI for an application. This reminds me of IE4 and its web page dialogs.
If we truly are serious about having the web be an application platform then a new markup intended to describe cross platform application GUIs and a standard bytecode for the web is needed. Asm.js and enscripten or PNaCl both could be our new standard bytecode, both have pros and cons that I won't rehash. Honestly I'm not a huge fan of either one. But no one is trying to address the fact that HTML's layout system is designed for documents... Not for GUIs. We really need something like XUL or XAML made in to a web standard. I don't care about the politics of what language/tool we choose as long as its a good one thats open for all. I'm sick of the holy wars over tools and languages. That said JavaScript is garbage just like HTML and CSS for actual development and needs to be replaced with a sane language.
Apple tried it and failed.
Firefox tried and LOL failed.
Google tried it and is failing (how many chromebook users do you know?)
Nope, no one wants HTML, CSS and Javascript shitapps.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
it's not easy to write native apps to run on both Android and iOS, never mind considering Windows Phone and BlackBerry
apparently you haven't heard of Qt because it supports all of those platforms.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
in mobile battery life matters. That not only means efficient code, it also means code that plays nice with the OS to properly minimize mobile resources including memory and keeping apps in main memory. The reason apple iphones get away with smaller batteries and smaller memory sizes is that code bloat of java (dalvek).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
actually that is how iphone was before user generated apps. then they saw what was happening in android land and decided that it made more sense
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
But similarly, you haven't heard the average person talking about wanting native apps either.
Developers and tech bloggers haven't realised that they need to balance conflicting desires (universal availability and version uniformity vs offline access and access to local hardware/services/data) which would induce preferences either way. What you are seeing is the tech community noticing the features they are missing, building them, and throwing away the features they already have in the process, then repeating again in the other direction.
The average person has no idea about any of this, and doesn't care as long as they can still send selfies and cat emojis to their friends. If a native app allows them to do it, they will use that; if a web app does, then that's where they will go. As long as they can click an icon and send the picture, it's good enough for them.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I don't really want to sit here and type through everyghing, but here are a few reasons: for one thing, attachments don't download in the background. You have to click on the link and download the attachment. Google also limits the size of the attachment, and generally speaking the size is limited by web server configuration. Also, you don't really own the emails. I know someone that lost emails from her deceased father because she had waited too long to sign in. There is a lot of lag on webmail clients. Currently gmail will show me around 20 emails and it takes almost a second for the next page to load. I'm an extremely fast reader, and it does slow me down alot when looking for an email because in a native client I can just scroll freely. Generally speaking, pagination sucks and is rampant on the web. There is no 'preview pane' in gmail which also slows me down. There is a preview pane in Zimba which is what my provider uses, but there I can only see around 7 emails on a page and don't get me started on the lag or attachment size limit.
You're not going to make me go on are you?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Also, once I set up my email in a desktop application, I click the icon and I am there. with gmail I must click on the browser icon, navigate to the page, sign in, blah blah. Gmail doesn't get as much screen space as the native application because it is only allowed the space that the browser allows. this means that screen space is wasted because the browser wants to keep showing me controls like the back button which doesn't really apply to gmail. Also, I can't alt-tab from email to a web page now, I must click on a tab in the browser to switch which is frustrating as well. Drag and drop is handled by javascript and not the native OS, which means that you get interesting quirks whereby the browser decides it wants to select text instead of dragging. If I want to create a folder in gmail, there is no right click context menu so I have to hunt for the button that does that function. That doesn't just pertain to folders, there are a bunch of places I use the context menu.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I've been building web based software for 15 years and I've always only picked up on new "fad's" IF they actually improved what I was building. It has worked well for some customers but sadly, these days, everyone wants the latests thing even if it doesn't really fit the model or make the application better... There are so many simple tricks one can use to make a web interface easy to use, cross platform and fast (limiting the actual code the browser has to load and render, avoiding JS, jQuery and the like like the plague and such) but everyone want to use Laravel or Angular or jQuery when they don't really need to! The world is making things hard for it's self...
I call it the first law of IT: Toys win.
When the PC came out it was a toy. Litterally.
3 decades later its the only computer architecture worth talking about.
Why? Its open and there is no single entity controlling it.
Linux was a toy back then. Now it owns everything in computing that isn't controlled by marketing.
And it secretly owns those rebranded platforms like android, which is Linux in disguise.
LAMP is a toy. A toy everyone can use. Now it runs 70% of the web.
WordPress is a toy. A toy everyone can use and tinker with. It runs 25% of the web.
Technolog wise the web stack is a silly joke. But it just killed a technology dead that was something like 15-20 years ahead and orders of magnitude less shittier: Flash. Why? Proprietary and controlled by Adobe, a company interested in profit, not technology. If Adobe would've FOSSed Flash at the beginning of the touch revolution, it would've stood a chance. Now it's dead.
What's remaining of the web is technology that was hip 20 years ago - you know, that time when XML was better than anything else, because at least it was a standard. ... Until HTML came along that is.
The Web is a toy. But it runs everywhere and my grandma can learn to write for it in 10 minutes. Its a slow-as-hell buggy meta-plattform - but its the only one we've got in a time where fragmentation - especially in the mobile space - is rampant.
My Website from 15 years ago will still render on todays browsers, even on mobile. On screens and platforms we didn't even dream of back then. Try that with a windows or mac app.
The Web is a toy that is laughed out of the room, especially here on slashdot. It's laughed out of the room like the PC was in the early 80ies.But
, as a toy, it's open and everyone can tinker with it. That's why it will win.
So yes, native mobile apps will most probably become a specialty and web-tech-based apps the norm.
Toys win.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Most mobile apps... Actually most apps, are a basic CRUD based system (Create Read Update Delete). Apps are really only really needed for the following.
1. Interface Performance Matters: This includes games, graphics edits, sound editing, CAD. This is where the UI will be doing a lot of work to provide a rich experience... Most Apps give you data and sit there awaiting input. Web Standards may be implemented well, however sometimes you just need the low level.
2. Additional User Input/Output. Needing that new device camera, motion detector, special screen that takes different input Or outputting to a specialized device. Web Standards cannot be adapted to handle new technologies.
3. Non-Default security. Sometimes those security warnings will get in the way and those apps can bypass them.
However that is only a small portion of the apps.
Most mobile apps are just a wrapper to a web site, or send XML, JSON to a server and work just like a browser. So with proper web standards implemented and optimized for the devices they are installed on most of your apps can be useless.
Web Standards is the reason why we can function very well with Linux, Macs, iOS, Android... Comparing say 20 years ago (1996) where most applications were Installed on the PC, and these apps were for trivial things, that have been moved to web sites. So we can function rather well in 2016 with just an web browser as the only application.
We would only need applications for high end work.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.