Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Is the App Boom Over?
Quartz did a story in 2014 in which, citing comScore's data, it noted that most smartphones users download zero apps per month. Two years later, the data from Nomura reveals that the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20% in the United States. While there are exceptions -- Uber and Snapchat continue to attract new users worldwide -- it appears that developers are finding it increasingly difficult to get new people to download and try their apps. Recode reports: But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones.What's your take on this?
Get an iphone. All permissions are off by default and are only enabled at the time of request. You can grant or revoke permissions at any time.
Like that fucking facebook app. No, I will not let you have my fucking phone contacts. Ever. Stop asking.
HTML5 and its APIs make apps obsolete
They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
So far every major phone platform has gone through this cycle. First: native apps are obsolete! Then it turns out that no actually they aren't obsolete because nothing has the performance of C++. Then they allow native apps.
I can deliver a wonderful interactive user experience with HTML5
Depends on the experience. Some you can, but it simply doesn't have the performance for others.
but they are well-optimized and they work across three widely-available browsers.
No they ain't. If you don't believe me, go and grab an old PC (say an eee 900) and try web apps versus real native code. The web apps, like google docs, you tube and so on are hilariously bad, basically unusable now compared to say libreoffice which is still snappy and any native video player which can happily play 720p video, compared to a browser which can barely manage 320p now.
Fortunately new machines are much faster, but the performance gap still exists and is the same magnitude.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
2) charge me reasonably -- I'll pay up to $10 without flinching if it's actually useful. More if it's fabulous
For every one of the "pay up front" customers, there's literally a dozen who will prefer to be nickeled and dimed. This probably goes double for games.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
There's something called a media query, which allows you to style your site differently based on the screen resolution. This concept is how sites are (easily) responsive to different size screens. Additionally, developers SHOULD check to see if the browser + hardware supports the call being made, before calling it. For GPS, that would be to use the GPS coordinates, only if GPS exists. Otherwise, make them fill out a form.
That would be a well designed, responsive, website. There is no technical reason that would be impossible. It would be cheaper to build that than to build a website, and an Android app, and an iOS app.