Ironically the App Store only exists because of the ridicule Apple received when they announced their new smartphone which then only supported 3rd party applications as web apps. Back then, native apps were considered a “must have” feature for smartphones.
What!? Yikes that’s an overstatement. I prefer to use web apps over downloading an app to do a single action and then deleting.
There are lots of good web apps. The problem is that companies more often than not prioritize native (let’s be real, react native) apps over web. And not mobile web, desktop web. So you have a second thought of a second thought when designing and building a mobile friendly web app.
I build most of my clients’ apps as web apps. I target their main platform of choice first and branch out from there. But if I start with desktop, I pre-plan for mobile as well.
You can have high performing web apps if you continually optimize for state and rendering performance.
> Bloated and overcomplicated are design issues, not technology issues.
No, it's very much a technology issue. The overhead just for shipping an entire webbrowser with your app is insane. Building a decent UI in HTML/CSS which were never designed for that purpose, is an absolute disaster. HTML and CSS are for formatting text documents, not for designing user interfaces. There is a reason that there is a framework-of-the-week for webapps.
So now you have this massive webbrowser footprint, with the framework-of-the-week on top and then you have to write your app on top of this abomination in one of the most terrible languages ever invented.
The whole 'webapp' thing exists solely on the false promise of cost savings. Every kid who made a webpage for their aunt's Etsy business calls themselves a 'web designer', which has resulted in a race to the bottom. Web designer are a dime a dozen (sure, a good one may cost a pretty penny, but that's not what management sees). Now you can hire that cheap 'web designer' and they can build apps too, since that's just web tech, right? And since it all works cross-platform, you only need to build it once. What a cost savings!
They will even get an initial version out the door quickly. Look, everything worked out as expected. The problem is that it's quicksand. Your app grows and it gets harder and harder to fix issues and add features, as it's all build on shaky foundations. The more you move, the more difficult it becomes. Soon, you find yourself writing platform-specific code as the cross-platform promise doesn't hold for anything but the simplest functionality. Before you know it, you have this bloated, unmaintainable mess.
At the end of the day, it's easier and cheaper to just develop 2 native apps for iOS/Android than it is to build a 'webapp'. You can use nice, modern programming languages with very few footguns (Swift/Kotlin), good tooling, a UI toolkit designed to actually build UIs with, a set of well designed platform APIs. The whole cross-platform web-app thing sounds nice in theory, but it never delivers on its promises.
You're mixing things up. A web app does not ship a web browser, the user brings their own. You're thinking of electron apps.
When using web apps, the browser you bring is no different than, say, having to install Qt. It's a static entity shared by all apps, with each app "just" being anywhere between kilobytes and tens of megabytes.
Electron brings a browser, but even then what makes the app bloated is still design Theres a baseline amount of bulk included, but it's mostly inconsequential to the actual app behavior - similar to how a standard system has god knows how many libraries and functions available but mostly unusued.
You could easily have an app written with PyQt that's way more sluggish, bloated and complicated despite using a fraction of the disk space. Shitty apps, that's the issue.
> The whole 'webapp' thing exists solely on the false promise of cost savings
Tell me you know nothing about security without tell me you know nothing about security. Desktop software is a nightmare... and they can still be as bloated as the most bloated webapp.
The App store and native apps are not one and the same.
OP didnt say that native apps need to die, only the app store.
Android ecosystem deals just fine with native apps being distributed in .apk format which can just easily be installed by the user clicking on the file. Why cant this happen on Apple devices too?
I didn’t say they are. I implied a connection though. And the reason for that should be obvious: if native apps hadn’t existed then we’d have never travelled down this road with an App Store
If you think the android ecosystem is just fine as it is, why don’t you just use it instead of trying to change one that many other people are happy with?
I think you've been hit with what I call the "hidden agenda" fallacy, which is something many people seem to commit routinely (or almost non-stop on reddit). It's closely related to (and involves) the Strawman fallacy, but includes some specific flawed reasoning. It basically goes like this:
1. Read the argument
2. Disregard argument and instead try to read the person's mind or guess "what they really meant" to uncover some hidden agenda that you think must exist since it's simply not possible that somebody has a good argument against your pre-supposed belief.
3. Attack what you think they must actually believe rather than what they actually said.
You can also gas it up with some emotion too, especially if it's something deeply enmeshed in your identity like religion, politics, or Apple.
There are many ways to interpret that question - a hypothetical pondering, or a "why doesn't it work this way?" in the most direct sense. I interpreted it as the latter.
> I think you've been hit with what I call the "hidden agenda" fallacy, which is something many people seem to commit routinely (or almost non-stop on reddit). It's closely related to (and involves) the Strawman fallacy, but includes some specific flawed reasoning.
Isn't this exactly what you've done to my comment?
> There are many ways to interpret that question - a hypothetical pondering, or a "why doesn't it work this way?" in the most direct sense. I interpreted it as the latter.
Yes, this is actually my point. That question isn't clearly saying, "you should do this on Apple devices too" it's asking, "why not?" The answer to that question could be anything like, "Because Apple and they're users believe it's better this way" or something more technical like, "software architecture limitations in <component>" or anything like that. You broadened your interpretation to assume that OP was advocating for Apple to make the change, but I don't see anything in their statement that would suggest that they are. You could maybe say, "well they should have clarified in the original" but then every comment would have to turn into a long list of what the person isn't saying, which could go on indefinitely. If you're really not sure what they meant, you could also practice the time-honored tradition of asking them and then dealing with their actual position, instead of assuming and addressing a strawman.
> > I think you've been hit with what I call the "hidden agenda" fallacy, which is something many people seem to commit routinely (or almost non-stop on reddit). It's closely related to (and involves) the Strawman fallacy, but includes some specific flawed reasoning.
> Isn't this exactly what you've done to my comment?
Hmm, possibly, I don't believe that I have based on what I wrote above in this comment above, but I will definitely consider deeper whether I've committed the same fallacy.
Btw, FWIW I don't mean anything personal by it. Nearly everyone does this to some extent (including me I'm sure), especially when it's a subject that we've been around repeatedly with lots of different people. There definitely are people taht post with hidden agendas and ask questions that aren't in good faith, so I'm not even saying we're always wrong when we do this. However, I do think it's important for discussion/conversation to strive not to make assumptions about somebody that we don't know. Honest questions can frequently sound the same as the bad faith questions, but assuming bad faith is an instant conversation killer.
The itunes store predates the iphone. The lack of native apps was resolved within a year of the iphone launch with the second generation. Probably they weren't ready for native developers and freezing APIs.
And in fairness, Safari was pretty capable on iphone. I remember regularly using the iphone optimized version of Google Reader on Symbian, which of course had its own webkit based browser. Worked pretty well in 2008. I was working in Nokia Research then. Lots of people experimenting with browser based UIs there at there. Also the S60 webkit port came out of one of the teams there around 2005 or so. Nokia had a full blown browser running on smart phones years before the iphone launched. Incredible how they dropped the ball. I'm pretty sure that influenced the thinking in Apple when they were designing the iphone. Because Webkit of course was their project.
As does thousands of other online stores but that doesn’t mean they are App Stores too.
> The lack of native apps was resolved within a year of the iphone launch with the second generation. Probably they weren't ready for native developers and freezing APIs.
You’re basically just reiterating what I said here but in more favourable language.
At the end of the day, public demand was for native apps and the App Store was born from that. So all I’m doing is making a throw away comment about how times have changed.
> And in fairness, Safari was pretty capable on iphone.
Oh it really was. At the time it was heads and shoulders above anything else’s available for portable devices.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. More and more services have adopted a web-first interface. So the benefits of native applications have dwindled when you’re basically just using web technologies regardless.
And then there is the massive abuse of spyware in mobile apps. For that reason alone, I rarely bother with native apps if I can help it.
I’m neither defending nor explaining Apples actions. Just adding commentary on why the App Store exists.
Also you’re getting cause and effect the wrong way around. Plenty of businesses have made 10s of billions based on happy accidents. Just because Apple now makes a mint from the App Store, it doesn’t mean it was part of their original vision for the iPhone.
How times have changed.